The Windrush years

11 April 2012

Andrea Levy has the edgy, excited air of a woman with a hunch that she might just have a hit on her hands. Levy, who is in her mid-forties, has been writing for a decade. Her novels, semi- autobiographical accounts of growing up black in a largely white Britain, have been well-received, but they have hardly set the world alight. Small Island, a brilliantly deft and humane account of two ordinary couples - one white, one black - in post-war London, looks set to change all that.

Joan Bakewell calls Small Island a "wonderful insight into a little understood period", while Linda Grant, a former winner of the Orange prize for fiction, has deemed it "a magnificent achievement". Her publisher, meanwhile, believes Levy will soon be as talked about as younger stars such as Zadie Smith or Monica Ali.

Not that Levy herself gives a fig about what other writers get up to. She is often asked what she thinks of her younger rivals, and she always gives the same response. "I'm thrilled by their success," she says, when we meet in a west London hotel with sweeping views of the city that has always been her literary backdrop. "The more the merrier. But it was inevitable that more people would start writing about multicultural Britain in an engaged, committed way. It's just a matter of simple demographics."

Small Island is the result of four and a half years of writing and research. It tells the story of Hortense and Gilbert Joseph, who arrive in London from Jamaica in 1948 hoping for a better way of life, for the golden opportunities they have heard so much about.

The city in which they pitch up, however, is in a parlous state: the streets destroyed by Hitler's bombs, its inhabitants still queuing for rations. The weather is cold, the housing damp. Worst of all is the casual racism they meet at almost every turn.

For haughty Hortense in particular, this is a blow. A teacher and a glovewearer, she cannot bear the slovenly, idle ways of the English lower middle-classes. Where, she wonders, are the beautiful gardens she has read about? And why will no one permit her to work, as she is trained to do, as a schoolteacher?

Mirroring the Josephs' story is that of Bernard Bligh and his wife, Queenie, their kind but steely landlady. Bernard spent the war in Burma, and is now, so far as his wife is concerned, missing presumed dead (in fact, he is alive and kicking, and soon to return).

In his absence, Queenie, like so many women of her generation, has simply got on with doing all the things that, before the war, were the province solely of her husband. Her Earl's Court home, therefore, is now a boarding house - one that, to the horror of her neighbours, is inhabited by black lodgers. But their disapproval is wasted on Queenie. For one thing, she must make a living. For another, she has learned to see far beyond the colour of a person's skin. Queenie, you see, has a secret, and it will change the course of all four of their lives.

Small Island bears traces of the lives of Levy's parents: her father came to Britain on the Empire Windrush in 1948 and, like Gilbert, worked at the post office, while her mother, like Hortense, was a teacher who followed her husband to London six months later. Still, she is wary of dishing up too many family anecdotes of her own, in part, she laughs, because her mother is so tired of her doing so.

"But they didn't tell me much as a girl," she says. "I talked to my mum while I was researching the book, but she wasn't terribly forthcoming. I think it was a difficult time." Her father is now dead; has her mother read her daughter's new novel? "I've read bits out to her. She laughed. But sometimes I think she wishes I'd just shut up."

Her parents were lured to Britain because, thanks to the war, they had a larger sense of the world. "There was limited opportunity in Jamaica, and then there was this body of 6,000 airmen who volunteered. At the end of those years, to come back to this small island ... well, a lot of men were thinking: there's a big, wide world out there. I think that was how my dad felt." And once he arrived - in Earl's Court, as it happens - did he feel he'd made the right decision? "Possibly he regretted it at first. It was grey, cold, unfriendly. But moving to another country is an enormous change; you have to commit to it. He didn't regret it in the long run. Besides, they didn't have the money to go back." Her mother, she adds, was happy to escape the island's debilitatingly fierce heat: "Jamaica is just too damned hot."

In Small Island, Levy contrives to show just how badly the Jamaican RAF men were treated, both during and after the war. Arriving in England, their colour was always far more visible to the people around them than their uniforms, and the word "nigger" was so much not a form of abuse as a simple description, even from the men's commanding officers. In the street, Gilbert finds, children call after him: "It speaks, mummy, it speaks!"

After the war, he seeks work as a factory storeman, only to be told that no job is on offer. "All hell would break loose if the men found you talking to their women," he is told. When he does find employment, at the post office, his colleagues are vile. "I'll have to wash my hands now I've touched you," says one. "There's decent Englishmen that should be doing your job."

Levy's parents, who went on to have four children, made their home on a council estate by the Arsenal football ground where they were the only black family. "I knew we were different," remembers Levy. "But most of the time we just got on with it. All the kids on the estate would play together. Our playground was Islington. We had a game called ' runouts'. It was hide and seek, but all over Highbury. It could last days."

Did she perceive the world to be racist as a child? She looks uncertain. "I don't know that you put a term to it. There was another game when I was a child: Odd One Out. You know you're different, you feel different and, occasionally, you are slightly wary of people. You weren't always sure of how people were going to take you when you met them. I'm still a bit like that today."

Levy loved school but she was lazy and, as a result, her teachers insisted that she was "good with her hands". So, after A-levels, she went to college to study textile design. Later, she became a weaver. "It sounds nice," she says. "But it was dreadfully boring, standing at a loom. I thought: 'This is so 19th century. What am I doing?' I did costumes at the BBC and the Royal Opera House, but I was increasingly frustrated."

When she met her partner, Bill, a graphic designer, she joined him in his business and, to this day, she still does his accounts. Even so, she longed to do something more creative. So, she joined a writing group. "I loved it. But, more than that, I realised I had a lot that I wanted to say. I found my own voice early on."

At first, she thought she'd write something for children (she has two step-daughters, now grown-up). Then, encouraged by Bill, she embarked on her first novel, Every Light in the House Burnin'.

"Oh, it was hard to get published," she recalls. "The books by black authors that were selling were about Yardies and guns, and mine was a family saga. I wanted to say: 'I've never sold crack in my life.' We were just a law-abiding family getting on with it. I wanted to show that, too. Publishers have a herd mentality. It was a case of: 'What are we going to do with her?'" But, just as she was about to give up, a publisher was found. "I was ecstatic. Wouldn't you be?"

She now begins work at two in the afternoon, once she has dealt with the "detritus of life". She loves every second, even when the going is painfully slow. "I feel that because I grew up black in a working-class area, I have a panoramic view of things. There's a bit of me that can stand back and see the whole picture. That's what I want to put on the page." As she is the first to admit, she can also get away with things no white writer could. In Small Island, for instance, Gilbert has a certain swagger - a distinctly leery West Indian bravado - that, in the hands of another, might seem uncomfortably stereotyped. He sucks his teeth, and he almost never gives poor, long-suffering Hortense a straight answer. "Yeah," she laughs. "Isn't it great?"

Levy's next novel, about which she is already thrumming with enthusiasm, will be set in Jamaica. She is, however, a passionate north Londoner who would like her ashes scattered along Upper Street. She has only visited Jamaica once, in 1989.

"When your parents are immigrants, you can feel that your history started then, in 1948. I was amazed to find out that I had a family. It was wonderful to see people who look like you, who remember your mum as a kid. It wasn't an alien place, but it's not my home by any stretch of the imagination. I'd never want to live in Jamaica. The mosquitos make me come out in red weals."

But she would rather talk about Small Island than her new book. Thinking about the war, she says, has made her reflect anew on the debt we owe a previous generation. "The men I interviewed who, like Bernard, had been out in Burma ... my admiration for them knows no bounds. I live in Crouch End and, in the course of my research, I learned that during the war, low-flying planes used to strafe Stroud Green Road. I thought to myself: 'Could I have lived with that fear, day after day?' I'm not sure that I'd have had the backbone.

"What I did realise, as the novel progressed, is what strength people took from their relationships. I have a great sense of optimism about humanity. When people are bad, they're truly horrible. But when they're good, they're so good. That's how people get through."
Small Island by Andrea Levy, Review, £14.99.

The Windrush years

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