When Mandy O’Loughlin was little, she fell hard off a table at her home at 70 Springfield Road, Birmingham while singing along to (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction on the radio. After nearly biting her tongue in half, she lived off ice-cream and had a lisp for weeks. When she asked her baby sister to give her “a kith”, her siblings gave her a nickname that stuck: Kit.
If you want to find out how and why the sweet, clever, permanently uncertain Mandy grew up to be Kit de Waal – the bestselling author of My Name Is Leon, among others, and tireless amplifier of working-class voices in literature – then you must read this book. She grew up in 1960s Moseley, that unusual bohemian enclave of Brum where poor kids and posh kids played together and De Waal’s parents, “a little woman from Wexford” and a bus driver from St Kitts, raised five children without ever really growing up themselves.
