Andrea Levy’s islands

Andrea Levy
SMALL ISLAND
Tenth anniversary edition
544pp. Paperback, £8.99.
978 1 4722 1106 4

SIX STORIES AND AN ESSAY
128pp. £12.99.
978 1 4722 2267 1
Tinder Press.

Published: 10 December 2014

Westbourne Grove, London, early 1950s Photograph: © Museum of London / Heritage-Images

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Andrea Levy was born in London in 1956 and grew up on a council estate in Highbury; she ate a lot of sweets, watched a lot of soap operas and “lived the life of an ordinary London working-class girl”. She discovered fiction in her twenties, and published her first novel in her thirties, Every Light in the House Burnin’ (1994), followed by Never Far from Nowhere (1996), Fruit of the Lemon (1999), Small Island (2004) and The Long Song (2010). “The fiction I have written has all been about my Caribbean heritage in some way or other.”

In “Back to My Own Country”, the opening essay to a new collection of her stories, Levy aligns herself with Toni Morrison’s response when asked if she felt constrained by being seen as a black writer: “being a black woman writer is not a shallow place but a rich place to write from. It doesn’t limit my imagination; it expands it”. Levy also quotes the cultural theorist Stuart Hall who died earlier this year:

“The very notion of Great Britain’s “greatness” is bound up with Empire. Euro-scepticism and little Englander nationalism could hardly survive if people understood whose sugar flowed through English blood, and rotted English teeth.”

Hall, like Levy’s parents, was born in Jamaica and migrated to England. Together with Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams at Birmingham University he established British Cultural Studies and was also a founder of the New Left Review. Inspired by Hall, Levy concludes that: “My heritage is Britain’s story too. It is time to put the Caribbean back where it belongs – in the main narrative of British history”.

Throughout her career, Levy has demonstrated how fiction, through its ability to humanize, can act as a corrective to the historical record

Throughout her career, Levy has demonstrated how fiction, through its ability to humanize, can act as a corrective to the historical record. The Long Song (2010), is set mainly in Jamaica and pivots on the slave rebellion, or Baptist War, of 1831. There are scenes of graphic horror, but Levy’s purpose is always to project convincing personal relationships onto the feral backdrop of the Jamaican plantations. “None of my books is just about race”, she has said. “They’re about people and history.”

It is now a decade since Small Island won the Whitbread Book of the Year and the Orange Prize for Fiction. In celebration, Tinder Press has reissued the novel, which has sold over a million copies worldwide. The book evokes the excitement of Jamaican migrants arriving in England in 1948, expecting a warm welcome from the Mother Country, which many of them had defended against Hitler. Instead they encounter prejudice and hostility. Gilbert, who has been in the RAF, says: “let me ask the Mother Country just this one simple question: how come England did not know me?” The novel is structured as a series of dramatic monologues, and Levy challenges racial prejudice by treating both her black and white characters with compassion. Ultimately, all are struggling to cope in the aftermath of war. Bernard Bligh, a middle-ranking bank clerk, remembers sailing off to fight in India:

“I’d watched on deck in the drenching rain as the coastline gradually slipped into the sea. I’d never left England before . . . . England disappeared so quickly. Soon there was nothing but sea. My legs wobbled. Couldn’t get my balance, find my grip. I sat down to watch the spot where my country dissolved. It was there, etched on to my eyes like an afterview of the sun.”

There are competing visions of England in Small Island; some overlap, some conflict. Levy does not set out to judge them, rather to show that they arise from the same underlying history, reaching right back to England’s colonization of Barbados in 1625.

The reissue of Small Island is accompanied by the new collection, Six Stories and an Essay, which spans Levy’s career so far, beginning with “The Diary”, which she read aloud to her writing class in 1989, and finishing with a new story, “Uriah’s War”, written to commemorate the centenary of the First World War. Levy has provided short introductions to each of the stories: she is a writer who believes fiction is embedded in social context and all the more valuable for it.

“Deborah” was originally commissioned by the British Council and it draws on Levy’s memories of the council estate:

“Deborah lived in my flats at number forty-six, on the ground floor next to the drying room. It was a long way from where I lived, which was on the same floor but round the bend in the balcony. If I looked out of my bedroom window I could see into Deborah’s.”

In three short sentences Levy summons a disquieting sense of claustrophobia and isolatation. Her story concerns child neglect and child cruelty, and humanely illustrates the point that “such simple notions as good and evil” cannot be applied to abused children who become violent.

“That Polite Way That English People Have” was written when Levy was beginning Small Island. It was the first appearance of the character Hortense, whose experience of migrating from Jamaica to England was based on that of Levy’s mother. Levy once read the story with a Jamaican accent at the Southbank Centre when her mother was in the audience. Afterwards her mother asked: “Where did you learn to speak like that?” Levy replied, “From you”, eliciting the response: “But I don’t speak like that”. She is wry about her mother’s lifelong attempt to lose her accent.

“The Empty Pram” has never previously been published. It was commissioned by a woman’s magazine wanting an easily accessible story of about a thousand words, but the editor judged Levy’s contribution too controversial. It is about a Jamaican woman, recently arrived in London, trying to return a baby to its mother after a small boy has stolen it. “You should have told us what happened”, the white woman says after threatening to call the police.

The final story, “Uriah’s War”, explores the patriotism and courage of the West Indian men who volunteered to fight for the British Empire in the First World War. It focuses on the soldiers of the 1st Battalion of the British West Indies Regiment who served in Palestine and Egypt: “Even boys whose chests bulged from years of cutting cane found gouging out trenches in that terrain devilish work”. At the Armistice, the surviving West Indian soldiers, decorated for bravery, “patted the backs of our imperial comrades – from Britain, New Zealand, Australia, India, Africa – and they patted ours”. But while the troops await a ship home at a camp in Italy, racial segregation destroys their camaraderie. The West Indians are barred from visiting the cinema, not given a pay rise in line with other soldiers, and expected to clean the latrines of the Italian labourers at the camp. The injustice breeds bitterness: “you have failed to recognize our contribution”.

Levy acknowledges Richard Smith’s Jamaican Volunteers in the First World War: Race, masculinity and the development of national consciousness (2004) as an important source for her story, together with Frank Cundall’s Jamaica’s Part in the Great War 1914–18 (1925), which was published for the Institute of Jamaica by the West Indian Committee and is now out of print. Levy’s consciousness of the neglected Caribbean contribution to British history is further heightened by her recent discovery that her grandfather was at the Somme with the British West Indies Regiment: “I couldn’t find any details of his service but he was probably on a labour battalion that supplied the front lines”. “Uriah’s War” weaves forgotten fragments of personal and public history into an emotive fictional whole. A decade on, the author of Small Island is still doing what she does best.

Ruth Scurr is a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. Her new book, John Aubrey: My own life, is forthcoming.