Smallie

Eden McKenzie-Goddard

Viking Penguin, 2026

This stimulating debut novel aches with the pain of the young Lucinda Brown’s transition from sunny Barbados to smoggy, hostile London in 1961. Things worsen as she commits to Clarence instead of Raldo, and her unhappiness spirals into humiliation when in 2017, in her later years, she is victimised as the British government’s ‘hostile environment’ comes into force. Smallie jumps between 1961 and 2017 in alternate short chapters, so the story of Lucinda’s early life in a cramped rooming house is deftly interwoven with references to her grown-up children’s lives in London.

Along the way, we get to know a bit about Lucinda’s harsh, patriarchal father, a ‘feared man’ who is the vicar in a village on the edge of Bridgetown. His vicious response when his 16-year-old daughter finds herself pregnant by Clarence, the saxophone star of a club in the capital, is no surprise. ‘Nanny’, who is brought in by Reverend Brown to look after Lucinda when his wife dies, is her only source of uncomplicated love. Lucinda’s enforced separation from baby Reggie is one of the drivers of this frequently moving novel.

Lucinda’s children come together as they frantically try to mobilise evidence to prove that Lucinda has been continuously and legally a resident in London since disembarking in Southampton. Her son Patrick, a recovering alcoholic, appears most often, while his sister Silvia sucks her teeth at the crisp, attractive, professional, Black lawyer they employ to conduct Lucinda’s appeal against removal. Jevan, Lucinda’s grandson, is endearingly portrayed in his creative writing class and in getting to know Clarence.

There are nice touches as McKenzie-Goddard gives us a glimpse of son Mark and his ever-helpful husband Tom. The consternation of Chris, another sibling, with his Union Jack cufflinks, as he realises that the prospective deportation of his mother might harm his prospects of promotion in the Conservative government, provides us with an enjoyable reminder that every family has its deviants.

The complexities of the plot are well crafted, and the story finally comes to life when Lucinda is incarcerated in Yarl’s Wood, pending deportation. After a very long absence, Clarence is back in the family’s life and his brooding presence – and Patrick’s distress at all the secrets in his parents’ lives – is highly effective. Raldo also reappears thanks to a Facebook post, and Lucinda says she’s never mentioned him before because he ‘wouldn’t be able to handle it.’ There is real tension in Lucinda’s appeal hearing, and the silver lining at the conclusion of the novel is finely rendered.

Lucinda’s skin is once referred to as ‘yellow’, and Sheila, who is her friend and fellow house cleaner, says that their employers think she’s white. Such intriguing moments are nicely resolved with reference to her ancestry among the ‘Redlegs’ of Barbados. Quite why that group is placed on slave ships, when they actually originated from the survivors of Cromwell’s Drogheda massacre, who were transported from Ireland to Barbados, is a puzzle, but this rare encounter with the despised white Bajans is another of this novel’s interesting features.

Understandably, McKenzie-Goddard does not delve into the disgraceful politics behind the 2010 Cameron/Clegg coalition government’s policy of deporting British citizens whom it decided to define as ‘illegal’. Exposing the long history of tightening immigration rules from the early 1960s and the racist partial clause in the 1971 Immigration Act would require another novel. At the Law Centre in Leeds, we effectively campaigned to naturalise all the city’s Caribbeans because we saw the even more dire consequences that would arise from the 1981 Nationality Act.

Amelia Gentleman’s The Windrush Betrayal: Exposing the Hostile Environment brilliantly sets out the consequences of the policies crafted by Baroness Theresa May and Lord David Cameron. Smallie provides an important fictional account of the enormous injustice those politicians inflicted on the UK as a whole and on our Caribbean citizens in particular.

There are several fine descriptive passages in the novel, but I stumbled over some sentences, for example: ‘I was his child, who needed to feel his heart pace, ribs crack and stretch him conscious’.

Anachronisms will trouble some readers. You wouldn’t have found styrofoam cups in a working-class house in multiple occupation in 1961. There weren’t any speed bumps on London’s roads. Bus doors weren’t pneumatically-powered, so they didn’t hiss. But these hiccups are less important than a curious decision about some dates. McKenzie-Goddard has a great idea in suggesting that Clarence’s experience in the British army in Kenya in 1958 had precipitated his alcoholism and abusive behaviour. Military records don’t give a precise number, but it is estimated that there were a few hundred Black and Asian soldiers in the British Army in the 1950s, so Clarence could well have been ordered to kill Kenyans rising up against colonial domination. He also might well have massaged his guilt with overproof moonshine. In his Histories of the Hanged (2005), Professor David Anderson argued that the Brits killed 25,000 Kenyans; there’s no doubt about the army’s extreme brutality. But that insurrection was pretty much over by 1956, so a little more explanation of Clarence’s plight would have helped.

Nevertheless, it’s significant that McKenzie-Goddard has mentioned that Black soldiers would have been engaged in trying to prop up this dying moment of the British Empire. During my childhood, the British press called the ‘Kenya Land and Freedom Army’ the ‘Mau Mau’. Its slanted reporting of news was my first introduction to the ‘less than human’ discourse that has so scarred British society. This novel will play an important part in stimulating readers to make the links between white people’s repeated efforts to re-ignite racist movements and the policies that successive British governments have introduced to appease them.

Despite some flaws, Smallie treats a deeply shaming period of recent British history with verve and imaginative flair. It will open the heart and mind of anyone who wants to understand the lives and hard times of three generations of citizens of Caribbean heritage.

Penguin Viking: Smallie

Max Farrar

Max Farrar is a writer, academic, photographer, and activist based in Leeds.