Reflecting on his childhood in the autobiographical novel In the Castle of My Skin, George Lamming wrote that it was “my mother who really fathered me”. Damningly, the Barbadian novelist asserted that his father “had only fathered the idea of me”. That notion of children being left mainly, if not solely, the liability of mothers still widely resonates in Caribbean households. In Kit de Waal’s tender novel, The Best of Everything, the protagonist Paulette, a single mother, embraces the role not just of mothering and largely fathering her son, but also selflessly acting as a proxy mother to a child who risks being abandoned.
De Waal, who edited the 2019 anthology Common People, has long championed working-class lives, “written in celebration and not apology”. In The Best of Everything Paulette is a migrant to Britain from St Kitts, an auxiliary nurse whose disdain for bedpans does not dampen the pleasure she takes from the thought that “it’s nice going home at night knowing you’ve helped people”.
