Yvonne Bailey-Smith: ‘I can’t believe the things that Priti Patel is coming out with’

As she joins the family business, Zadie Smith’s mother talks about showing her ‘powerhouse’ daughter her manuscript and how her own experiences of coming here from Jamaica in the 1960s informed her debut novel
Yvonne Bailey-Smith, author of The Day I Fell Off My Island
Matt Writtle

Yvonne Bailey-Smith had a phone call last week from the former deputy head of her daughter Zadie Smith’s school. The deputy head didn’t want to talk about Zadie or her bestselling novels; she wanted to congratulate Yvonne, who at 67 years old has just joined the family business and become a published author.

“She told me the story spoke to the lost voices and trauma of immigrant children like us,” says Bailey-Smith. “We both know people who have become unwell physically because of it. The body keeps the score.”

Bailey-Smith’s debut novel, The Day I Fell Off My Island, is about a 14-year-old girl called Erna whose life is turned upside down when she leaves her grandparents and her home in Jamaica and moves to England where her mother and younger siblings have already gone to build a better life. While it is not autobiographical, it is informed by Bailey-Smith’s experience. Like Erna, she left Jamaica for London in the Sixties.

We meet in Queen’s Park, where Bailey-Smith used to bring her children, Zadie, author, comedian and actor Ben and rapper and filmmaker Luc.

“One day Zadie fell in that paddling pool,” says Bailey-Smith, pointing at it. “I couldn’t swim so I didn’t know what to do and I was worried but she just floated up and said, ‘mummy I’ve ruined my hair!’ ” She laughs. Bailey-Smith’s own hair is dreadlocked, with silver charms at the end of each strand — “you can hear me coming,” she says. She warns me that she is “a verbose person”, talking warmly about her children, grandchildren and how she is getting used to “calling myself an author”.

For most of her life, she worked in the NHS, as a social worker and then a psychotherapist, becoming interested in “why there were so many cross young black people, I wanted to understand them better. Then I began to think about my own experience.” Like Erna, Bailey-Smith found it painful leaving Jamaica and all its mango trees for London, where people didn’t smile at you in the street. “It was really hard to leave,” she says. “To come to this place where suddenly I was being othered. I was the wrong colour; I didn’t know people could be the wrong colour. I was called names. Some of it was physical, people used to spit at me in the street and I was pushed on pavements. You went into shops and were treated like a thief and the name-calling was awful. You felt horrific.”

The South Bank Sky Arts Awards - Drinks Reception
Dave Benett

When she married Harvey Smith, who was white, she “felt sort of protected in certain situations” (they divorced after having three children and he died in 2006). But being a mother of mixed race children meant she “worried even more”. “Not so much about Zadie because the narrative around girls and women was different,” she explains. “But the narrative around black boys was they are dangerous. Colin Roach had died and these incidents were happening more and more with young men getting into a dangerous state and I was terrified.” Roach died aged 21 from a gunshot wound, at Stoke Newington police station. “I taught my children if the police ever stopped them, not to argue back.”

When her son Ben was 15, he was arrested while waiting to pick up his brother, then nine, from school. “The police said he looked like he had just robbed somebody and took him to the police station. Ben wouldn’t take a slice of bread without asking. I was incandescent with rage, so livid I was out of control. I said I didn’t bring my children up to be manhandled. I brought them up to be respectful human beings and I always told them they were in the normal sphere, inside the circle, not to be stopped on the street and treated like criminals.

“They apologised in the end and it didn’t happen again but it was years of worrying that they were vulnerable. Knife crime was also rising and this was happening with the people who should be protecting them. You want your children to believe that they live in a perfectly normal society and that they are not unusual in any way and that the police are doing their job, but I couldn’t relax. I envied white mothers not having to worry about this.”

I worried about my sons because of the narrative around young black men and I envied white mothers not having to think about this

Black Lives Matter last year was a turning point, Bailey-Smith went on the marches and says she has never seen such a large and unified show of solidarity. But since the Windrush scandal in 2017 she has felt like we can’t take any progress for granted. “Everything is wrong with the Home Office,” she says. “I can’t believe the things that Priti Patel is coming out with. Her parents are migrants but it is like, now I am here let’s just pull up the ladder. I feel like her behaviour is vindictive and gives permission for the people who are still out there thinking they can do racist things to carry on.

“There is a rise in racist behaviours. The Government needs to start showing respect and leading by example. We are here to live and work and we have a human right to dignity. I am so cross about the whole thing.”

Bailey-Smith has her own experience of having her right to live and work here questioned — having to go through elaborate checks to prove her eligibility to work three years ago. She also had an experience at hospital where she had to wait four hours to prove she had the right to treatment, having injured her thumb, and felt “very discriminated against”. Above all, she wants the book to show human resilience in the face of discrimination and for it to have a broad appeal — an Irish friend recently told her it speaks to his family’s experience.

Bailey-Smith always wanted to write. She comes from a family of artists and writers and enjoyed seeing Zadie growing up, “wanting to read everything”, and keeping all the newspapers for her.

Zadie “had different opportunities” to her. “This is why we can never diss the generation that came before. My mother’s generation did a lot for us. None of them were doing things they trained to do but they saved like crazy.”

“Zadie is a little powerhouse,” Bailey-Smith continues. “When she found out about Cambridge [University], that was where she was going and wild horses would not have prevented her. We were gobsmacked and desperately supportive. My brother gave her an enormous sum of money, £250. Zadie had never seen that much money in her life. She would say she didn’t work hard but I know Zadie, she did. I think she has a photographic memory, she never used to take notes, she just observes. My mother also has a memory like an elephant. When she wrote White Teeth I thought, I can’t believe this is written by a 21 year old.” Zadie is “too cool for Twitter” but her mother is enjoying learning about it, “twittering away”.

Bailey-Smith read all of Zadie’s books when they were drafts but she was nervous when the tables turned and her daughter read her work. Zadie was kind, if she thought a section didn’t work, she gently suggested he mother do more work on it. Bailey-Smith started writing The Day I Fell Off My Island eight years ago. “I rattled off something of Hilary Mantel proportions, it was so long,” she says. But then she put it in a drawer and forgot about it. Then, two years ago when she retired, she decided to give it another go, showing it to people at a writing class who supported her all the way. The first half of the novel has dialogue in Jamaican patois, which conveys the culture; lively and colourful but also governed by strict social rules. Bailey-Smith checked it all with experts and called back copies of the book when a professor saw some spelling mistakes. She is writing a sequel, “with a nice title, The Freedom of Birds; I think there are about three books in there” and working on a book of short stories too. That’s in between her other commitments, singing in a reggae choir and spending time with her family. She is thrilled that all her children are back living in North West London. “Zadie used to say she wanted to live as far away as possible and she did try, living in New York, but it is so lovely to have her and the grandchildren back.”

The Day I Fell Off My Island is out now, £12.99, Myriad

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