Watching My Name is Leon, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the key element in bringing up a child in 1980s Britain was the Curly Wurly. There is some truth in that, actually, then and now. A plentiful supply of Cadbury’s confectionery is certainly how lovely professional foster mum Maureen (Monica Dolan) – getting on in years but with a surplus of maternal love – manages to get the best out of the emotionally battered nine-year-old Leon (Cole Martin). Leon is left with Maureen after social services rule that his single mum (Carol, played by Poppy Lee Friar) cannot look after him and his baby half-brother Jake. Leon’s mum disappears to deal with her descent into drink and depression, and, soon after the pair arrive Chez Maureen, a well-meaning but useless social worker (Shobna Gulati) tells Leon that his little baby brother, whom he dotes on and plays daddy to, is to be adopted and he won’t see him again “for a long time”. It’s hard to watch.
Poor little Leon is smart enough to wonder why they’re not being adopted together, and has the intuition to then realise that the real reason why the family is being torn apart, once again, is because he is mixed race and his half-brother is white, and a baby, and thus “easier to find a forever home for”. Leon is indeed made to feel “other” on an almost constant basis from what we nowadays call “micro-aggressions”. Even when Maureen’s sister Sylvia (Olivia Williams) turns up to make a fuss of the new boy, she declares: “Who’s this little monkey?”
