Without Warning & Only Sometimes by Kit de Waal

I am very pleased and proud that our white family has been blessed with new members from Nigeria and India. Unfortunately, I also remember from my days growing up in the 1960s and 1970s how pleasure was more likely to have been pain and prejudice substituted for pride. In post-war Birmingham and other inner cities around the UK immigration from other countries was not welcomed, rather ridiculed, feared and hated.

It is against this background that Kit de Waal has written a memoir of her childhood: Without Warning & Only Sometimes. In her family, immigration was not just about the colour of skin, but geographical, social, and religious contempt for the country’s nearest neighbours. Kit’s mother was white and from Wexford in Ireland. Her father was black and from St Kitts. She and her brothers and sisters were, therefore, not only of mixed-race appearance for the general public to judge and dismiss, but also held in contempt by the wider family members on either side. Her mother would talk to the ‘white’ in them and her father, the ‘black.’

Throw into this mix Kit’s mentally disturbed mother being persuaded to join and then becoming the strongest advocate of a message of salvation from Jehovah’s Witnesses, and you can only imagine from a safe distance the fault line over which these children had to jump daily, never quite knowing when or where it might appear, hence the title of the book.

Though they worked hard at menial jobs, the children were born of poor parents and poor parenting. I remember well those signs outside of boarding houses and ‘hotels’ promising paradise but not for ‘blacks, Irish or dogs.’ Later, Kit turns up for job interviews via her mother’s Irish surname and is turned away immediately because of the colour of her father’s skin.

The tale is beautifully written and, as one also born in 1960, memories of the corner shops with their stern, prescriptive shopkeepers and quiet, boring Sundays which were only ‘special’ in their dullness, were refreshingly evocative. It is a world that has all but disappeared now; its idiosyncrasies reduced to details in a book which new generations of readers will be unable to relate to - barely even believe.

She also manages to describe these memories so convincingly from the viewpoint of a child from an early age through to her early ‘twenties. This isn’t a ‘look back in anger’ memoir as much as a transport yourself back and see the world through the lens of a child all over again.

I suppose there is always the temptation to believe that things could not have been quite so bad as this; that the horror of uncertainty must have been embellished if only a little, for dramatic (and commercial) effect. I was lucky enough to hear Kit speaking at a literary event recently and my opinion now is that things were probably even worse. Her brother, especially, found it hard to even think about his childhood beyond two pages of Kit’s draft, let alone allow himself to be taken back to such dark days.
​
Kit herself was friendly and down to earth and authentic, as this memoir undoubtedly is. Though still suffering from occasional anxiety (and who, after reading this, could fail to understand why) she is refreshingly upbeat and positive: a survivor. Having witnessed the results of a TV production team completely butchering her breakthrough novel – My Name is Leon – I hadn’t felt compelled to read the book itself. But I shall now.

---