Growing up in a predominantly white village in south-western England, Natasha Marshall realised early on that she was different. She would attend the same school as the other kids in the area, and lived in a neighbourhood which by no means was a ghetto. It was the '90s after all, and the colour of your skin had ceased to be of consequence. Or so one would think. A young girl of mixed race, Marshall would often encounter casual racism in the form of snide jokes at the local pub and even some blatantly spiteful remarks asking her to go back to her country. "People would call me a Paki [a colloquial term for Pakistani], when I wasn't even Asian!" recalls the 27-year-old.