Where do you call home?

Windrush Child

Author: Benjamin Zephaniah @BZephaniah

Published by: Scholastic @scholasticuk

Published on: November 2020

Price: £6.99

First line: I didn’t just appear here.

Genre: Contemporary fiction/ autobiography

Age: 10+

What’s it all about? Leonard, a young boy, is ripped from his comfortable life living in a small village (Maroon Town) in Jamaica to living in cold, wet Manchester (Northern England), because his parents want to give him a better life, and England in the 1950s asked people to come and live in England and help to rebuild the country after the Second Worldd War. Initially, he misses his friends, the warm weather, his freedom and mostly his grandma, although now he is reunited with his dad (who has been living in England ever since he was small). Leonard experiences a whole new life with kind people and racist people, highs and lows, and his mother and father’s turbulent relationship. He learns to survive the loneliness of being very different to everyone else at his school and gradually makes England his home. The country around him is changing just like he is.

Why should I read it? This book sympathetically maps out the imagined life of one of the Windrush generation, even though Leonard didn’t come on the Empire Windrush (the famous ship that came from the Caribbean and has been in the news recently as many people were wrongly deported from England many years later even though they were initially welcomed), but his father did (even though the author does use some autobiographical moments within the story – such as when Leonard and his mother are racially abused in a local shop) and this explains their thoughts and feelings as they go through trying to settle into a new life. The family dynamic between the three of them is brilliantly portrayed and each character’s emotions, thoughts and feelings explained and analysed. I love the scene when the father tries to explain to Leonard why exactly they are there when so many people seem to hate them. As the author notes at the beginning there is some tough language used throughout the book, however this is for authenticity, not to provoke. You really connect with Leonard throughout the story and can therefore easily see how hurtful and disgraceful the attack on him at the end by the British government is.