My accent killed a childhood dream. The Cockney of my youth followed me to a Cambridge University admissions interview, where the snobby professor saw red. Literally.

I was wearing a vivid red suit jacket, which was fashionable for about a week in the summer of 1992. I was going for The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. I looked like a British post box. The red jacket was cheap, loud and obvious, rather like my accent. The Cambridge professor thought he was interviewing not a potential undergraduate, but a young Michael Caine disguised as a pimp.

Until that interview, the accent hadn’t been a barrier to one’s ambition or social acceptance. Growing up in East London, Cockney was the mother tongue. We all sounded like a Guy Ritchie movie.

Our vowels stretched like a tarpaulin across a caravan. Medial consonants were like condoms on a first date. We knew they existed, but never used them half as much as we should have done.

When we replaced the hard ‘t’ in “butter” with an aggressive glottal stop, we displayed the facial tics of a stroke victim.

But we all sounded alike. There was safety in numbers. In that stuffy Cambridge office, however, I envied my inability to do posh and squeeze my vowels until they earned membership to a polo club.

The Cockney patter betrayed my working class roots. The professor’s sneer betrayed decades of an unswerving, elitist belief in eugenics. My voice didn’t fit at Cambridge. Nor did my red jacket.