‘I remember growing up and smelling lanolin everywhere and the wisps of wool just floating around,” debut novelist Marcia Hutchinson has said of her home city of Bradford, then a traditional Yorkshire mill town, where she was born to Jamaican parents in late 1962. From 1948, Bradford became a destination for several thousand Windrush migrants from the Caribbean, encouraged to come to the UK as part of postwar reconstruction. What they found was frequent racism and hostility as well as cold, damp weather and inadequate housing. Hutchinson has been open about using her own difficult childhood as the inspiration for The Mercy Step, a novel that does not stint on accounts of poverty, systemic abuse and violence, yet is pungent with wit and colour. For sheer vivacity and determination, it deserves its place on the shortlist of this year’s Women’s prize for fiction.
Hutchinson’s alter ego, Mercy Hanson, makes her stubborn, lively presence known “during the coldest winter of the 20th century”, speaking to us directly from her mother’s womb. “Mummy” is a God-fearing and often terrifyingly God-invoking character, “five foot nothing” with a tiny waist despite her many pregnancies. Four older children have been left “Back Home”, some adopted by white families. Mercy is the third girl to be born to Mummy and Daddy in England; another daughter and a longed for, spoiled only son soon follow.
Mercy is born prematurely, at home; Mummy cuts the umbilical cord herself. The light of that first winter is “cold and anaemic”, the paraffin heater disperses fumes; before long Mercy is admitted to hospital with pneumonia, referred to as “New Monya”. Hutchinson blends beautifully a mix of Jamaican patois and Yorkshire dialect throughout, as well as the “Speaky-Spokey” RP that her mother adopts when talking to the “Hinglish”.
Mercy spends her first year away from the family in hospital, and ever after feels apart from her siblings, a separateness emphasised by her habit of sitting on the hall stairs observing daily goings-on from her “Mercy Step”. She is mischievous and bold, jealous of her mother’s time and attention. Daddy is “tall, very tall, a proper giant” puffing on Capstan Full Strength, watching horse racing on the “Tee Vee”, rarely without a hat: “the Trilby makes him go on for ever”. The red glow of his cigarettes increasingly seem to Mercy a sign of “the Devil” and he is a threat to her from the off, even knocking the tiny baby about in her crib. “This isn’t right,” the infant consciousness informs us. Beatings are dispensed casually on the children by both parents, but the domestic abuse and coercive control wielded by Daddy over Mummy is complete.
Hutchinson depicts Mercy’s reaction to sustained abuse as akin to entering a dissociative fugue state; but despite the home horrors the novel is by no means depressing. For every dodgy pastor or unsympathetic teacher there is encouragement – from a kindly librarian or from Mona, Mercy’s big sister, an afro-sporting free spirit.
The novel ends with Mercy’s acceptance to grammar school aged 11. Though it drifts dangerously into vignette in places and there are some odd similes – a family dog is compared to both a cat and a rabbit, for instance – keeping to a tight timeframe smooths out some rookie errors of composition. It is through reading and sport that Mercy strives to get on and out. There is a wonderful moment of early political consciousness when she and her classmates inform their PE teacher that they are not “coloured” but “Black”, inspired by the recent 1968 Olympics black power salute undertaken on the podium by three athletes. As it concludes, The Mercy Step echoes and amplifies that moment of empowerment.
