There is a particular kind of British cruelty that thrives on politeness. The 2018 Windrush scandal exposed this in full: rather than chaos or spectacle, it revealed a machinery of clinical decisions that stripped Black and brown people of their belonging with bureaucratic precision. It is now part of our national story, often spoken of in the abstract or invoked as a cautionary tale. But what can be obscured, in this telling, is the texture of the harm, the way complicated lives were reduced to paperwork.
Smallie, Eden McKenzie-Goddard’s tender debut, insists on restoring the humanity of those Windrush-generation immigrants who were erased by official language. The story begins decades before, in 1961, when 19-year-old Lucinda Brown leaves Barbados for England, in search of Clarence Braithwaite, the jazz musician who fathered her child (who stays in the care of her family) and then disappeared into the promises of Britain. On the boat crossing she meets Raldo, a magnetic Trinidadian – “the type of man women slap each other to point out” – whose easy charm hints at a freer life.
When she arrives in London, though, rather than romance, she finds disillusionment. The England she has been promised is cold and indifferent – on her first day, she is beaten by the police, her body absorbing the force of a system she does not yet understand. She shares a cramped room in Hackney with three other recent Caribbean arrivals, and works long hours as a cleaner. The dream of Clarence, too, quickly calcifies into a jarring reality. Reshaped by the harsh reality of immigrant Britain, he is brittle, volatile and increasingly unfaithful. “This is not my Clarence,” Lucinda realises. “This is not the land I was promised.”
Running alongside is the present-day storyline, when Lucinda receives a terse letter from the Home Office informing her that she is an illegal immigrant, due for removal. “They have given me six weeks to prepare to leave a life of more than 50 years.” Her children – particularly Patrick, a recovering alcoholic barely holding himself together – must reconstruct her life in documented form, proving her right to remain by filling in the gaps of a past that was never recorded properly in the first place. Their search leads back to Raldo, the man who might hold the missing piece of evidence, and the ghost of an alternative life.
This dual structure allows McKenzie-Goddard to juxtapose the granular, intimate details of Lucinda’s life with the cold, abstract logic of the state. A woman who has spent decades working, raising children, building a home, can be reduced in an instant to an unwanted administrative error. “A grandmother. Seventy-five. A cage,” her son Mark says, referring to the removal van Lucinda is forced into. “Where is the justice?”
There are contemporary political echoes threaded throughout: one of Lucinda’s sons, Chris, is a Conservative MP with hardline views on immigration, a figure whose trajectory echoes several real-life politicians. McKenzie-Goddard pushes this to its logical, ironic extreme: what does it mean to participate in a system that could, quite literally, deport your own mother?
Later, a judge will describe Lucinda as having lived a life “so small she was invisible to records”. Lucinda did not change the world, or distinguish herself in ways that make for easy sympathy. She is not a model immigrant, nor always an especially “good” person. But Smallie insists that dignity should not depend on moral clarity or exceptional virtue.
Despite the heaviness of its subject matter, Smallie moves with a propulsive energy, structured around cliffhangers and withheld revelations. McKenzie-Goddard’s prose is lyrical without becoming overwrought, and strikingly assured for a debut. There are many moments of brilliance: on the night Lucinda goes dancing for the first time in Barbados, McKenzie-Goddard writes: “This is what freedom sounds like … the Bible got it wrong … at the end of days, when it is time to return to God, the angels will play the saxophone.” Much of the speech is rendered in Caribbean dialect, its cadences and prosody giving the novel a lived-in warmth. At just under 300 pages, Smallie is densely packed. Some relationships – Lucinda and Raldo, Patrick and his son, Jevan – feel slightly truncated, and could have benefited from a little more space. It does an enormous amount for a relatively slim novel, but at times one can’t help but wish it had allowed itself to do more.
As perhaps one of the first novels to grapple directly with the Windrush scandal, Smallie captures something that reportage alone cannot. In its mosaic of Caribbean immigrant life in London, it echoes the emotional reach of Andrea Levy’s Small Island, but reframed with the hindsight of just how fragile belonging is, and how easily it can be withdrawn. It feels like a novel that will come to sit among the defining literary accounts of this shameful period of British history.
• Smallie by Eden McKenzie-Goddard is published by Viking (£16.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
