‘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 other 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.
