Without Warning and Only Sometimes by Kit De Waal

Without Warning and Only Sometimes by Kit De Waal
Buy Without Warning and Only Sometimes by Kit De Waal at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
Category: Autobiography
Reviewer: Alex Merrick
Summary: Everybody has two parents. No matter how much you may want to distance yourselves from them, they will always contribute to your decisions. Kit De Waal highlights the way our parents mould us and keep moulding us through our lives in her fantastic memoir "Without Warning and Only Sometimes".
Buy? Yes	Borrow? Yes
Pages: 304	Date: August 2022
Publisher: Tinder Press
External links: Author's website
ISBN: 978-1472296634
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As Philip Larkin so eloquently put it, “They f*** you up, your mum and dad/ They may not mean to, but they do” Without Warning and Only Sometimes by Kit De Waal focuses on this idea of parenthood and the bonds that bind family. This book is a memoir focussing on the author’s formative years as a teenager living in a lower class area of Birmingham. Her father is from St. Kitts in the Caribbean and her mother is an Irish woman ostracized by her family for becoming pregnant by and marrying a black man. This intersectionality plays a large role in the autobiography. Kit De Waal faces multiple hurdles due to her race, her class and her gender. Her parents loom large and are written with care, love, and the kind of anger only a child can express to their parents.

Sheila is Kit’s mother. As with all humans, she is filled with contradictions. She seems forgetful and uncaring towards her children sometimes forgetting to feed them and yet will take in a pregnant teenager she finds crying by a bus stop. She is constantly saving money whilst her husband spends it on extravagant items. As a family teetering on the edge of poverty, Kit illustrates the mental anguish and chaos lives can be thrown into when struggling to survive.

Towards the beginning of the memoir, Sheila joins the Jehovah’s Witnesses. She is attempting to gain a sense of order in her life. As she struggles to keep her marriage and her family together, this religion is a way to feel connected to something greater and create a safe place within the community and possibly become more important.

There is a latent anger within Sheila. Although she appears downtrodden and willing to make do, she knows she is trapped. Sheila destroys as an outlet. She saves up milk bottles and, once she reaches a certain threshold, she throws each milk bottle at the outhouse wall. Kit watches and comments that “it makes a kind of music, the bottles and the sound of her fury.” The rage of the working class woman is striking, and Sheila’s rage is emblematic of the rage of working class women up and down the country. By the Sixties and early Seventies, women were working as well as looking after their children, the home and balancing the family budget. Arthur, Sheila’s husband, comes home late, eats his dinner and watches TV.

Arthur arrived in Birmingham from St. Kitts with dreams of returning to the Caribbean island a conquering hero. He is a dreamer, but one who is too scared to do anything about it. Kit writes both her parents well, however, it is her father she seems to take the most care over. He is a prideful man who seems disappointed with himself when he is around his friends due to the fact he married a white woman. His friends mock Sheila whilst Arthur laughs along with them. As with Sheila, Kit draws Arthur as full of contradictions. He is proud yet he does not seem to care much for his family, his home or his wife.

The character whose eyes we see these two important characters through are Kit’s. Having grown up a product of her environment, it is the off-hand way that she describes her suffering that is so disarming. Through insightful writing, Kit De Waal illustrates the bond families share though. When a new member joins their family: a boy named Conrad. He seems like an interloper to begin with, just someone else that their mum has decided to bring into the fold. However, once Kit and her siblings find out Conrad is related to them he becomes “part of [them].”

What would normally be the crux of a memoir, Kit decides to renounce her Jehovah’s Witness upbringing is written as what it is, just another part of Kit’s struggle to escape the vortex of her parents. However, as the ending illustrates it is much harder than one would think to fully cut the cord from your parents. They will always be a part of you whether you want them to or not.

“Without Warning & Only Sometimes” by Kit De Waal is a brilliant book concerning the bonds and multiple small heartbreaks of family life. By using her parents, she highlights the struggles faced by multiple groups and multi-ethnic families in the UK. This hardship is something we should read as old-fashioned, as something that is in our past. Today, it would still appear that, with the rise of food banks, and racial and sexual violence, the UK still cannot remove itself from its colonial past that is obsessed with class.

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