Andrea Levy is my fairy godmother
true story
Andrea Levy is my fairy godmother.
It’s true, so it’s only right that this week, the week that would have her celebrating her 65th birthday if cancer hadn’t taken her, that this newsletter is a thank you and celebration.
In reading Andrea Levy’s books and essays she told me there was authentic space for Caribbean diaspora women to write about the post war British Caribbean experience. She inspired me to write, to recognise that not enough working class black and brown women were telling the stories of the Windrush generation or the stories of their British children.
Andrea Levy talked about colourism and her own complicated experience of it from the start of her literary success, she also talked about the informal adoptions that were common between Caribbean families, she wrote how Jamaican people speak and she told stories of everyday life and stories that were not connected to pain. It’s fair to say that I loved everything she wrote and how she approached her work.
I took every opportunity I could to hear Andrea Levy read, if she was reading in London I went, fangirl style and I’m so happy I made the effort. When she read from Small Island back in 2004 at the Festival Hall (I think, but it might have been the Southbank Centre), I was there. The book reading was sold out but I worked in a press office and begged the event organisers for a returned press pass. I worked for a government press office, there was absolutely no link whatsoever to my job and the arts but they generously gave me a ticket anyway. On the night of the reading I was full of flu. It was freezing cold and pouring with rain, I spent the day in bed gorging on Lemsip so that I could take myself to my car and drive into town because I was too sick to take public transport. Missing the reading because I was snotty was not an option. I parked in the National Theatre’s car park and dragged myself into the auditorium, absorbed it all and put all my nasty tissues in a plastic bag so I could throw them away at home, in my own bin. I can’t imagine ever going out with the flu now though - I’d be locked up and rightly so.
There were lots of other moments over the years when I would see Andrea and her husband at some bookish event or another, she was quiet and introverted, and I liked that. Although she was a glorious author she wasn’t a rockstar writer who wanted lots of fame and to appear on Jonathan Ross. Her quietness inspired me and reassured me in equal measures.
She made me think maybe my writing is good enough, maybe the people I want to share stories about are of interest and maybe a kid who didn’t go to a private school and intern at a publishing house before getting a book deal could be a writer on their own simple terms. It was with this self-confidence, and still a little doubt that I applied for Spread the Words London Writers Development programme, and got a place. When I finished the programme I knew I needed to move on from freelancing and find myself a job in a creative environment where I could watch and learn from people who told stories for a living. When I saw my job at the National Theatre advertised I knew I could tick all the essential experience asks, but I didn’t think my background matched what they were looking for – not that I knew what they were looking for but I didn’t think it would be me. Then I thought about sitting in the Olivier on the opening night of Small Island, I’d brought the very last ticket, and I decided if Andrea Levy let these people turn her book into a play she must trust them and maybe I should trust them too? Turns out she was right and that I was the person the National Theatre was looking for at that moment in time.
The play was glorious but I’m still upset it opened and closed without a mention that Andrea hadn’t lived to see opening night. I must remember to ask why that was, I’ve assumed it was what she wanted but I don’t know that for a fact and assumptions are never a good starting point.
Andrea Levy also gave me the confidence to write what you know and that for her much of her writing came from not really belonging to the country in which she lived. She talked of her need to “express the things I’d gone through, and my family had gone through” that was all the permission I needed to write, if she could write about the black British experience, being an outsider at home and the legacy of ‘Empire’ so could I.
When I saw the news she had died I was on a train on the way to work. I sat on in that sandwiched in middle seat in tears, a man opposite me gave me a tissue and asked if I was ok, which was nice. I was OK, I knew we’d lost a great writer whose impact on the literary world wasn’t yet fully appreciated. But mostly I felt blessed that I had found someone who inspired me to to write my way and that my stories were mine to tell.
“I am the bastard child of Empire and I will have my day.”
Andrea Levy 7 March 1956 – 14 February 2019