It comes as no surprise that Lenny Henry is the undisputed star of the first volume of his autobiography, Who Am I Again? but in the first half of the book, he’s in real danger of losing top billing to his indomitable mum, Winifred, known as Winnie, who passed away in 1998.
“My mum was an incredible woman,” he says. “She came to this country before I was born. She travelled from Jamaica on her own in 1957 – the post-Windrush generation – aiming to make a new life for herself. My dad, Winston, and four older siblings stayed in the Caribbean until she’d sorted things out.
“When my Uncle Clifton wrote to her from England, urging her to come over she was absolutely determined to do it. My uncle also asked her to bring him a wife – which she did! Somehow, she managed to save the £75 passage, arriving here in winter and it was freezing.”
It wasn’t just the cold weather that took some getting used to.
“Mum saw all the houses with smoking chimneys and thought they were factories,” Lenny goes on. “Then there was the prejudice – she’d get chased down the street and asked where her tail was, people would make monkey noises at her and she’d get asked if her colour washed off. She wanted to start a new life but there was a price she had to pay for it. She had to deal with oppression, racism and prejudice, and try to navigate it with wit and with good nature – and sometimes a strong right hook!”
We get the impression he’s not entirely joking.
“Mum was very tough,” he reveals. “She was about six feet tall, very broad and had arms like Popeye! She was very strong and wasn’t afraid of anyone. She was hardcore.”
Lenny has previously spoken about his mum dishing out physical punishment towards him and his siblings when they were kids.
“I lived in a house where ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’ was the rule,” he has said. “You got hit if you did something wrong. I mean, if you broke a vase, if you kept the money from the shop, if you backchatted, you got hit and that was that.
“The reason I wasn't a master criminal or going out doing loads of drugs was because I had a big picture of my mum in my head with a frying pan. That stopped me doing anything naughty or transgressive. This big cartoon of my mum with half a tree in her hand would come up in my head. But while there was poverty and very strict discipline, there was lots of love too. I was fed, I had clothes on my back and there were many, many laughs.”
Until he was 11 years old, Lenny believed that Winston, who’d arrived in the UK in 1959, was his father. But then he found out the truth.
“When she’d first come to England, Mum had contracted pneumonia from sleeping on Uncle Clifton’s floor. She moved into a bedsit and met a man called Bertie Green who lived two floors up. He saw she was sick and he made her soup and looked after her till she was better. Then he helped her find a job. They ended up falling in love – and I was born as a result.
“Apparently, she wrote Winston a letter before he came over. He knew I existed, reconciled himself to it and raised me as his own. I’d had no idea until – at Mum’s suggestion – I started going round to Bertie’s on a Friday evening when I was 11 or 12 and ran a few errands for him. I could never really work out why I was there but then Bertie’s son, who was about four years older than me and lived with him, told me that Bertie was my dad, too. Bertie confirmed this.
“I ran home and asked Mum and she said it was true and that they hadn’t wanted to bother me with it because I was young and it was big people’s business. I ran to my room and cried. I should have been told earlier but now I’m a big person, I understand why I wasn’t.”
Who Am I Again? ends in 1979, four years after Lenny appeared on TV talent show New Faces aged 16 and won. He’s currently writing the second volume of his autobiography, with a third planned.
“Why three books?” he muses. “I think three is about right. So far, my life has been rather like a three-act play. I do think it’s important to learn from the past. We stand on the shoulders of giants and we should always pass on what we’ve learned.”
Sir Lenny (62) will be doing that – and then some – with the six-part ITV series he’s writing. Three Little Birds is based on the stories his mother would relate about forging a new life in Britain, and follows three fictional Jamaican women who face racism and other obstacles in the Midlands of the late Fifties and Sixties.
“It’s a tribute to the giants who came before us and walked cold streets to create new lives,” he says. “The stories Mum told, and indeed the narratives my brothers and sisters beguiled me with over the dinner table, made me think about writing a fictional account of three Caribbean women – all with differing yet complementary attributes. A serious tenacious one, a quick-witted flibbertigibbet and one with a strong faith. They all get to the UK with one thing on their minds – a new life.
“Although these are fictional accounts, my mother's narrative will run throughout these stories and will trigger memories, smiles and tears, too.”
We’ll bet on that.
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