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Eunice, played by Danielle Vitalis, in the first instalment of Soon Gone: A Windrush Chronicle.
Eunice, played by Danielle Vitalis, in the first instalment of Soon Gone: A Windrush Chronicle. Photograph: BBC/Douglas Road Productions/Carlton Dixon
Eunice, played by Danielle Vitalis, in the first instalment of Soon Gone: A Windrush Chronicle. Photograph: BBC/Douglas Road Productions/Carlton Dixon

Soon Gone: A Windrush Chronicle review – beautiful and epic family drama

This article is more than 5 years old

Kwame Kwei-Armah’s self-contained stories shift through the decades to movingly explore the experience of migration. If only they made more of them

Full of misplaced optimism, Eunice packed a white straw hat decorated with ribbons, white church gloves and a silk scarf before leaving Jamaica in 1948 for her new life in England.

A year later, she looks at them, still unworn, still folded in her suitcase, and laughs sadly. “Which film did you think you were coming to star in? Well now you know.” Life in England hasn’t exactly turned out how she expected. She’s living in a damp room in a shared house, barely any furniture, a new baby sleeping in a cardboard box; the father, a white English doctor, nowhere to be seen.

We’re familiar with the Pathe images of smartly dressed people from the West Indies disembarking from the Empire Windrush in 1948, hopeful and expectant, happily unaware of the frosty reception they were about to receive.

The eight 15-minute monologues that make up Soon Gone: A Windrush Chronicle look at what happened next, tracing Eunice’s family for the next 70 years, over four generations. These are beautiful self-contained stories, but together they explore the experience of migration, each generation examining their identity in a country that has been less than welcoming.

It starts with Eunice, so confident when she arrived to work as a nurse in London, but quickly left contemplating the mismatch between the England she had imagined when she left her family and the vastly inferior reality.

Jumping through the decades, each episode is set against the backdrop of key moments in the history of British race relations – the 1981 New Cross fire, where 13 black teenagers were killed in an apparent arson attack and no one was ever prosecuted, Stephen Lawrence’s murder in 1993, the 2011 riots, and last year’s Home Office scandal. But Kwame Kwei-Armah’s series addresses bigger issues of love and family, belonging and home, what it means to be an immigrant or the grandchild of an immigrant, what it costs to become British, the struggle for acceptance and the parallel struggle to hold on to your past.

The price of acceptance shifts from generation to generation. Eunice’s husband, hospital porter Cyrus, thinks the way to survive is to: “Work hard, keep your head down, stay out of trouble.” It’s a mantra adopted by his son, Kevin, the only black employee in a garage owned by a white man, who tells himself in the third monologue set in 1968, to ignore the daily abuse he’s getting from colleagues (“rubber lips”, “smile or we can’t see you”) and from pretty much everyone else he encounters.

“I don’t want confrontation. I don’t want to cause a fuss. Just keep my head down. You’ve got the rozzers stopping you, geezers want to fight you, women crossing the street from you, children calling you names, teachers berating you, security guards staring at you, no one praising you, bus drivers blocking you, pubs not serving you, no one liking you, people just lying about you … no one liking you.”

Jonathan Jules, as Kevin, painfully captures the confusion of a man teetering on the brink of happiness, but badly wounded by the constant slights he knows he is meant to laugh off. He’s so embarrassed to have even mentioned them that he abruptly switches to explaining how to clean grit from car engines.

In the next monologue, his sister, Yvonne, refuses to avoid confrontation, and is burning with anger, furiously banging nails into placards she is making for a protest at the police’s failure to investigate the New Cross fire. She just wants to keep her own son safe, she says. Later we see that she hasn’t managed to keep him safe at all, and he’s on probation after fighting a new generation of racist bullies.

Some things change over the decades. The older family members are beaten by teddy boys, harassed at school and work for being black. Adaptation to hostile environments becomes second nature, a third-generation Windrush child says.

But by 2019, Eunice’s great-granddaughter, mixed race and light skinned, is bullied at school for daring to describe herself as black. She’s devastated to be branded a “Rachel Dolezal” by classmates, worried by the invisibility of her connection to her Caribbean family, asking herself: “What is blackness, and have I got it?”

Other things do not change at all. The series ends with Cyrus (movingly played as an older man by Sir Lenny Henry), still struggling to be accepted after 70 years in Britain, a victim of the Home Office’s Windrush scandal, facing deportation threats, the council refusing to pay for his care. “How dare they, after all these years, ask me – ask us – if we have the right to live here?” he says. “This is my home.”

So much is packed into each tight episode; these complex stories of intertwined lives offer tantalising snapshots of an epic family drama. The characters are so brilliant, the writing so good, these brief segments are not enough; I was left wanting to watch more. The BBC should commission the writers to develop this into a full-length series.

From Sunday to Wednesday on BBC Four at 10pm

More on this story

More on this story

  • Windrush service celebrates generation's contribution to Britain

  • Windrush anniversary service at Westminster Abbey – in pictures

  • A Windrush passenger 70 years on: 'I have no regrets about anything'

  • Alford Gardner: 'I came to the UK on Windrush and I wouldn't change a thing' – video

  • ‘They have traumatised our lives’: the retired NHS nurse too scared to visit family in Britain

  • Why I’m turning down Theresa May’s invitation to celebrate Windrush

  • The Guardian view on the Windrush anniversary: more bitter than sweet

  • The NHS, Windrush and the debt we owe to immigration

  • Anger over Windrush scandal overshadows anniversary plans

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