Soon Gone: A Windrush Chronicle

It’s 1949, and a year after arriving on the Empire Windrush, Eunice Daley finds herself moving into a room in her uncle’s house, her belongings crammed into cardboard boxes. The year has not been easy, her aspirations and confidence battered by the reality of employment and living conditions in London for West Indians like herself. She dare not tell her family back home about her new existence. However, a surprise relationship with an Englishman that promised so much has had the greatest influence on her life so far, and forces her to reassess her image and expectations of the ‘mother country’.

Cyrus Williams believes that he’s found the love of his life in a young nurse, Eunice Daley. A chance meeting after a hospital appointment was all it took for him to want to spend the rest of his life with her. Like Eunice, Cyrus has recently arrived in London from the West Indies and is having to learn how to navigate all kinds of relationships in a strange new world. But the course of true love doesn’t run smoothly for Cyrus, and the constraints of starting out again in England, as well as the disapproval of friends, is as much of a challenge as Eunice herself.

It’s 1968, and while the world is exploding around him, racially and politically, 17 year-old Kev Williams keeps a low profile working as a mechanic, the only black man in a white-owned garage. He was keen to leave a school where he was an anomaly. A loyal son to Eunice and Cyrus, Kev knows his place in the family hierarchy and stays within it, despite the pain it causes him to see his half-sister, Yvonne, getting most of the attention. But times are changing for Kev too: he is not all he seems and has his own plans for moving on.

Yvonne has always been proud to call herself black, in spite of her mixed heritage. She’s ignored her West Indian parents’ natural inclination to keep a low profile in their adopted homeland and looks down on her brother Kev for it too. Inspired by the black activism that she’s seen around her since the 1960s, giving voice to injustice has been the driving force in her life. However, as she prepares to demonstrate for the young black victims of the tragic New Cross fire in 1981, she finds herself giving expression to a deeper, more personal loss for the very first time.

As the only white person in her husband’s large family, Samantha Williams has had to counter the racial assumptions from his family and from her own. It hasn’t been easy, but she gives as good as she gets and her father’s disapproval of casual Kev didn’t stop her getting married to him. In the wake of the Stephen Lawrence murder in 1993 she is heartbroken by the killing, worried for her own children and acutely aware of how her black relations are looking to her for answers. For once, she questions her ability to balance both sides of the family - and whether her love for Kev is enough.

At the start of a new century, 21 year-old cousins Malcolm and David reflect on their radically different upbringings and consider their current situations: Malcolm, black and in trouble with the police; David, never really thinking about his mixed-heritage and enjoying life at university. Malcolm is fiercely conscious of his colour, instilled in him by his activist mother, Yvonne. For David, life with his parents, Samantha and Kev, was much more relaxed. But Malcolm has a secret that David unwittingly unlocks when he invites him to a university event and the two young men reach for an understanding that will make them closer than ever.

It is 2011 and there are riots outside the house, but Cyrus confuses this uprising with previous ones where black youths have protested against government and the police. Dementia forces his memories to fragment, bringing back painful incidents from his early life in England, as well as reinforcing his feelings for his family and his love for Eunice; his relations with his son Kev still seem problematic. There is one shocking revelation that is too much for him however - and that he will do anything to avoid. As we come full circle from Cyrus’s arrival in London decades earlier, he balances sober reflection with his trademark humour as, in the midst of his confusion, he contemplates whether life in England has been worth everything.

Teenager Michaela Williams has always considered herself as black, but looks white. Fighting for her right to self-identify at school she was puzzled when, years earlier, her great-grandmother Eunice seemed to approve of the fact she looked like she did. She was close to Eunice, but went to her great-aunt Yvonne for answers. Now, the Windrush scandal of enforced repatriations, detentions and denial of healthcare and provisions has brought the question of heritage and belonging into sharp relief. A school project gives Michaela an opportunity to look at her own family, explore the wider implications for the Caribbean community in Britain, and consider how much longer the community can survive with a discrete identity.