I wanted to protest; as Dickens did against the evils of his day, and Thackeray, and George Eliot—so many great nineteenth-century novelists. It didn’t make them less literary. Many of my literary models are modernist—Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov—but for me the modernist aesthetic breaks down when it isolates the writer from the world. Like the modernists, I love pattern, and try to give each book an overall controlling form, but I also have one eye on reality. I want my books to express the whole of me, politics and jokes as well as love of beauty.
What kind of country, what kind of family, might produce racists like the five white thugs? This was what I needed to write about. What did it say about my city? For I had become a Londoner, and Stephen Lawrence was one of our own. But so were the thugs, the murderers.
In Kensal Rise, the subject was everywhere. I heard the things said by the white workmen who came to the flat; they weren’t middle-class, and hadn’t learned to hide it. They seemed to particularly hate Indians, who they were afraid were after their jobs, but they didn’t like Africans and Caribbeans either. The reasons were many: ‘they don’t pay’; ‘you can’t trust them’. Yet for the first time in my life I was living in a world where there were equal numbers of black and white, which in many ways stifled prejudice, for it was simply too tiring to keep noticing colour; there were many families with biracial children, often strikingly beautiful, especially when young, with wild blonde curls and deep cupid’s-bow lips, a new perfection born from difference. Clearly, in many cases, all around me sex and love were overcoming prejudice. But in other ways, there were still two parallel worlds. I saw how people tended not to see one another. How white people turned to white people to ask for directions, or information, and vice versa. How black people looked surprised to be talked to. As a person and as a novelist, it was impossible not to notice (I think we have come some way since then.) Then I made a friend, Hanna Sakyi, who rapidly became important to me. It began as a convenience relationship, for she started an after-school club at Rosa’s school, but I quickly saw how special Hanna was. Rosa loved her at once, and still does. She was Ghanaian, and very black, but then, everything about Hanna was ‘very’. She was very funny, and very sharp, and had a laugh that rolled around a room, and strong self-possession, a sense of herself that made people sit up and take notice; she was very big, and very beautiful, with soulful dark eyes, high cheekbones, dimples, full lips, a short curving upper lip that made her look youthful, and small snowy teeth with a kissing gap. She came to tea, she came to supper. We began talking, and never stopped. At first the one thing we didn’t mention was that she was black and I was white. These taboos are strong, and our fears are great. Then one day we started talking about it, and talked about it, for a while, a lot; after which we got over it, mostly forgot it, and went on with being friends as normal. When Rosa was baptised, aged ten, Hanna was one of her three godmothers, and Nick and I are godparents to her son Robbie. I have other black friends, some of them writers, but Hanna gave me courage to write the book.
I wanted to write about the Britain I loved, my sense of which stretched back to the ’50s. It was my parents’ country too, the place their generation had fought for in the war, the country my great-uncles had died for. They believed they had risked everything so life would be better, with a new, fairer deal for everyone. The Gees were Labour through and through, and the ideals I grew up with were co-operative, communal, although my father himself, of course, like his father, like so many old Labour patriarchs, was fiercely individualistic and territorial. My father, the bane and the lodestar of my life, who made me a member of the awkward squad, rebelling against him and everything else …
My aim was to write about a racial murder, yet I was being drawn back into confronting my father, without my knowledge, against my will. I started to create a character.
This was Alfred White, the park keeper, who ran his fiefdom for the public good, just as Dad believed in his job as a head teacher. I didn’t see Alfred was a version of my father, but looking back, it should have been obvious. Side by side with Alfred was his wife, May White, to whom I gave the name of my mother’s mother, who loved reading, as my own mother did, who wrote poems and had a secret life, like her, and whose favourite book was a copy of Tennyson that Mum had been given as a form prize. The actual copy! And she loved and feared Alfred, and hid things from her husband, as my mother did. And yet, in my head, I wasn’t actually writing about my parents, because if I had consciously told myself that, I would have drawn back, afraid. And so, in the shelter of a cloud of unknowing, I began to write my way into the book.