Tag Archives: Book review

Books, Britain, History, Immigration

Book Reviews: The Windrush Betrayal & Homecoming

WINDRUSH

FROM a ship to a scandal, from Commonwealth immigrants full of hope to elderly people shamefully traduced by the system, the name Windrush resonates through decades of history.

Both these valuable books give great voice to the families of those who travelled to Great Britain from the West Indies in search of a better life in the chilly place they had always been told was the “mother country” and which actually needed them.

Drawing on scores of first-hand accounts, Colin Grant (born in Britain of Jamaican parents) offers historical testimony at its finest, while Amelia Gentleman’s very different book is a chronicle to the dogged energy of one of Britain’s best investigative journalists whose anger at injustice spills on to the page.

We should all be familiar with those iconic pictures of serious, well-dressed black men in trilby hats, suits and ties, disembarking from the Empire Windrush at Tilbury Dock in 1948. But Colin Grant also remind us that “the popular image . . . has also reduced the story – not least because it excludes over 200 women who were also passengers.”

Significantly, he points out that it can get in the way of “the bigger picture of the impact of mass migration”, as “some 300,000 adventurers made their way to Britain” from all the West Indian islands over the next 15 years. Grant was spurred to record people “before their stories disappeared”.

His interviews reveal natural courage and style enough to face down even the vile racism encountered on the streets of Notting Hill in the 1950s and afterwards.

Soon after he began recording, “the British government gave a new twist to the story ensuring that the name ‘Windrush’ will now also forever be associated with scandal.”

Coincidentally, at the same time, prize-winning British journalist Amelia Gentleman was revealing the scandal of how the government’s “hostile environment” policy for illegal immigrants led to thousands of Windrush descendants being wrongly classified as living here illegally.

Many lost their jobs, some were deported, all were hurt and enraged by their appalling treatment at “the mother country”. One quotation encapsulates a bewilderment that can never be assuaged. “How do you pack for a one-way journey to a country you left when you were 11 and have not visited for 50 years?”

Whose fault was it? Gentleman paints a searing picture of a Home Office not fit for purpose and politicians who exist with a self-centred Westminster bubble of partisan party politics. It’s impossible to read her account of the step-by-step betrayal without feeling ashamed that it was done in your name.

But despite real admiration for this literary work, she and some readers are likely to part company on some of the broad strokes of her postscript. For example, she seems determined to see the scandal as symptomatic of widespread endemic racism rather than shocking bureaucratic bungling and negligence.

She does assert, however, that it suits the government to present what took place as “a small predicament affecting a niche-group of retirement-age Caribbean people who had no papers.”

Gentleman quotes a fellow journalist colleague: “It has yet to fully sink in that what was wrong for the Windrush generation is wrong for all immigrants.” Is it? All? Should peoples be lumped together in this way?

There were and are very real public concerns about the true extent of immigration to these shores – the latest projections suggest the population will hit 70 million by 2031 – and its effect on infrastructure.

These cannot be dismissed as “xenophobic, anti-immigrant conviction” and “a gradual withering of empathy.” Yes, the Home office was wrong, very wrong.

But what the Windrush generation should have taught us is that they shouldn’t be shoehorned into any wider debate on immigration that would arguably chip away at their very special status.

– The Windrush Betrayal by Amelia Gentleman is published by Faber, 336pp

– Homecoming by Colin Grant is published by Cape, 320pp

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Arts, Books, History, Second World War

Book Review – Normandy ’44: D-Day And The Battle For France

REVIEW

Intro: Astonishingly, the casualty rate of D-Day was even higher than the Somme – just one of the insights in a devastating new account of the horror of the Normandy campaign 75 years ago.

THE D-Day landings 75 years ago spark a concoction of emotions – pride and awe at the courage and heroism; despair and grief at the sacrifice of so many young lives; and, incomprehension.

What was it really like to step out on to those deadly beaches on June 6? The tale is best told by those who lived to tell it.

The aptly named Sergeant Bob Slaughter leapt from a landing craft into 6ft of water as a hail of German artillery and gunfire from the clifftop above tore into his platoon.

“Good men screamed as bullets ripped into soft flesh and others screamed as the fierce, flooding tide dragged the non-swimmers under.”

As he struggled to the beach, a body floated by, the face already of a deep purple colour.

Corporal Walter Halloran managed to reach dry land and simply ran for his life, ducking and weaving to minimise the risk of being killed.

“If you stopped to help someone who’d been hit, then there were two casualties, not one, because the moment you stopped moving you got shot,” he said.

American war correspondent Ernie Pyle witnessed the terrible aftermath when he landed the next day and waded ashore, amid shattered corpses floating in the water. His powerful description echoes down the years.

“Strewn all over those bitter sands,” he wrote, “were submerged tanks and overturned boats, burned trucks and shell-shattered Jeeps and sad little personal belongings” – toothbrushes, a pocket Bible with a soldier’s name in it and even a tennis racket.

“Lying in rows were the bodies of soldiers, covered with blankets, the toes of their shoes sticking up in a line as though on drill.”

Here was “a shoreline museum of carnage” and the waste of it all appalled him, even though, after nearly five years of war, it was the necessary first step in liberating Europe from the grip of the Nazis.

Voices such as these are one of the standout strengths of James Holland’s impressive new account of D-Day and the Allies’ subsequent, long drawn-out battle to secure a foothold in Normandy.

Not that he stints on the bigger picture. Seasoned World War II historian that he is, Holland is extremely knowledgeable when it comes to military matters.

The reader is in safe hands navigating each aspect of this complex campaign – from the glider and parachute drops inland with which it began, to the bloody struggles on Omaha, Utah, Sword, Juno and Gold (the five beaches) and beyond.

He reads the minds of the generals, their tactics, their blunders – on both sides.

 

AND he examines the strategic context – the importance of air power in softening up the enemy and destroying vital infrastructures such as the roads and railways that might otherwise have rushed reinforcements to the front line; the Navy’s role in making the invasion possible in the first place.

He praises the enormous achievement of getting 132,000 men over the Channel on that first day alone, then topping up their numbers to a staggering two million in the coming weeks, providing the weight of manpower to make victory certain, however great the human cost.

He approves of the methodical way in which the British, American and Canadian Allies went about their business – building up their strength of men and arms to the point where defeat was virtually impossible, consolidating their gains, rather than rushing ahead, ensuring supply lines of weapons, fuel and food were in place.

It may have been a much less dashing form of warfare than the gung-ho Blitzkrieg mentality of the Germans, but, in the conditions of 1944 (as opposed to 1940, when Hitler’s armies overran large swathes of Europe), was so much more effective.

But what drives Holland’s narrative – and puts his account of the Normandy campaign at least on a par with doyens in the field such as Antony Beevor and Max Hastings – are the memories, in their own words, of scores of those at the sharp end.

Their individual stories, seamlessly woven in, makes this a Bayeux Tapestry of a book. All human life – and, more pointedly, death – is there.

“Bugger!” yelled the gentlemanly paratrooper Lieutenant Richard Todd, in pain as his canopy opened and a rope cut into his hand on the very first drop into France at 2am on D-Day to seize a strategic canal bridge.

Undaunted, he sneaked up on an enemy machine gun nest with his commanding officer and wiped it out.

There are men like gunner Lance Corporal Ken Tout in his tank, toe-to-toe with 20 camouflaged German Panzers in a grim firefight outside the town of Saint-Aignan as the Allies fought their way through the impenetrable bocage, the high hedges, small fields and narrow lanes of Normandy. Inside the belly of the tank, he desperately traversed the turret, trying to arrow in on the enemy, and “the day degenerates into chaos, noise, flame, smoke, grilling sunshine, stinking sweat, searing fear, billowing blast, and our tank shuddering and juddering even as it stands still on the exposed, so exposed crest of a ridge”.

A German shell flashed past. Missed by inches!

Tout returned fire: there was a puff of smoke, a shape jerking backwards among the trees, then thick black smoke tinged with flame. “The Panzer was dead.”

When he got to the crumpled German tank, he saw the commander leaning out of the turret – just the top half of him, it turned out. His entire bottom half had been eviscerated.

Earlier in the campaign, as they advanced towards Caen, he and his colleagues had, out of curiosity, clambered on the burnt-out wreck of a German tank and peeked inside, where what remained of the crew still sat, blackened and wizened.

“The roasting of human flesh and the combustion of ammunition and the defecation of a million voracious flies,” he recalled, “created an aura of such sense-assaulting horror that we recoiled.”

It could just as easily have been their tank that “brewed up”, such was the haphazard nature of the vicious conflict in which they were engaged – and that realisation only added to the horror.

 

HOLLAND counts the grim cost of D-Day and the Normandy campaign – 209,000 Allied casualties out of two million who crossed the Channel; up to 20,000 French dead, mainly from Allied bombing; 300,000 German soldiers killed, wounded, missing or captured – more than half of those who fought.

Over the 76 days of the battle, the daily casualty rate averaged out at 6,870, making it worse, he notes, than the Somme, Passchendaele and Ypres in World War I, which are usually cited as benchmarks for wanton slaughter.

Holland concludes: “It was a terrible battle, and what followed until the final surrender in May 1945 was every bit as horrific.

“Yet out of this tragedy, a better world did emerge. We must look after it and remember how easily we can throw this haven back into turmoil.”

– Normandy ’44: D-Day And The Battle For France by James Holland is published by Bantam Press/Penguin Books for £25, 720pp

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Arts, Books

Book Review: The Sun Does Shine

MEMOIR

Intro: Anthony Hinton tells of his thirty years on death row for a crime he didn’t commit

AROUND midnight on July 25/26, 1985, two things happened 15 miles away from each other in Birmingham, Alabama. At 11.57pm, Anthony Ray Hinton, 29, clocked in for his night shift at Bruno’s supermarket warehouse. He worked in the locked warehouse until 4am.

. See also Book Review: ‘The Innocent Man’…

In another area of the city, the manager of Quincy’s steak house, Sidney Smotherman, was driving home at 12.30am, when he was bumped from the rear and forced at gunpoint to drive back to the restaurant where he was shot in the head but not killed.

Later shown a selection of photographs of suspects, Smotherman identified Anthony Ray Hinton as the gunman who had shot him. As it happened, there had been two murders of restaurant managers in Birmingham in similar circumstances in that same year.

A week later Hinton was mowing the lawn at home, where he lived with his beloved mother – both were regular churchgoers – when two policemen came to arrest him.

After entering the house, the police officers removed his mother’s .38 calibre pistol, which they would wrongly identify as the weapon used in all three crimes.

The nightmare then begun in earnest. Everything would surely be cleared up in a couple of hours, Hinton thought, as he climbed into the police car, hands cuffed behind his back. In fact, he would not see freedom again for 30 years. His home, until he was grey-haired, would be a five-by-seven-foot prison cell on death row in the Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore.

Many readers of Hinton’s astonishingly moving memoir are likely to be devoured with a state of open-mouthed incredulity mingled with rage. His utter powerlessness in the face of State-sponsored racism was pitiful.

“The good old boys had traded in their white robes for black ones,” he writes, “but it was still a lynching.”

It was. Black, poor and unable to afford a private attorney, he was given a State attorney called Perhacs, who appointed a ballistics expert who only had one working eye. The expert pronounced that the bullets in the three crimes did not match Hinton’s mother’s gun, but his testimony was torn apart in court, due to his poor eyesight.

There was another horrible twist. A few years earlier, Hinton had made an enemy of a man called Reggie when he dated a girl who had turned Reggie down. Reggie was jealous and bent on revenge. He happened to work at Quincy’s steak house, and he helped to frame Hinton, telling Smotherman he knew a man who fitted the description of his assailant.

 

YET, it would have been impossible for Hinton to get out of the locked warehouse and drive 15 miles and back to commit the crime. Never mind, either, that he passed the lie-detection polygraph test.

“Anything that didn’t make me look like a killer was left out or plain lied about,” Hinton writes. Shackled in court, he had his final say, protesting his innocence to the all-white jury, but to no avail. The death sentence was pronounced and sanctioned on 15 December 1986.

Welcome to death row: the days before the method of killing changed (in 2002) from electric chair to lethal injection.

The prison guards who fed the inmates and who escorted them to the bathroom six days a week were also the ones who killed them on Thursdays.

In his time on death row, Hinton would hear 54 deaths going on down the corridor. When the death-inducing generator was switched on, the lights flickered; all the inmates would then bang their fists against the cell bars to show solidarity with the person being killed, to make them know they were not dying alone.

The most haunting aspects of this book are the small details of life on death row. It might seem a trivial thing, but because there were so many to feed in the vast prison, the death-row inmates got the worst deal when it came to mealtimes.

For 30 years, Hinton was served breakfast at 3am, lunch at 10am and supper at 2pm. All meals were covered in the dust of death, combined with rat hair and cockroach skin.

Wryly, Hinton notes, there’s no “Welcome to your appeal” brochure waiting for you when you first arrive in your cell. Once you’re in, it’s very hard indeed to get out. The State of Alabama had no intention of admitting it had ever made a mistake.

For the first three years, Hinton was in such a state of rage that he refused to speak, except to his mother and best friend Lester on the monthly visiting day.

His mother, bewildered by the events, would dress in her Sunday best for visits: ivory gloves, flowery dress and wide blue hat rimmed with lace. “Are you coming home soon, baby?” she would ask him, again and again.

The steadfastness of those two kept him going through the dark decades. It was a seven-hour roundtrip for them to visit. As his mother became older and ill from stress, she could no longer do the journey. But Lester always turned up.

One night, after three years of silence, Hinton heard the man in the next-door cell sobbing. He broke his silence. “Hey! Are you all right over there?”

The man told him that his mother had just died. “And my heart broke,” Hinton writes. From that moment, he began to come back to life and started to engage with others. He requested to the warden that he and some other inmates might be allowed to start a book club, and this was granted.

They sat round discussing Uncle Tom’s Cabin: “The point,” Hinton writes, “was to get them thinking about anything but the dark, grimy, hot hell of the row.” And by hot, he meant it: it was 110f in the summer in the cells. No cooling fans were allowed for fear of the blades being refashioned into weapons.

 

ONE by one members of the club disappeared. Their death-dates were announced, giving them a month’s notice.

In one particular moving section, Hinton makes friends with a fellow inmate and book club member, a white man called Henry. He finds out a few weeks into their friendship that Henry is in fact the murderer Henry Hays, who was on death row for kidnapping and stringing up a black boy.

When Henry is killed in the normal way – bag over his head, generator switched on – everyone bangs their fists on the bars in solidarity, just as they would for a black man.

Death row is a great leveller. “Henry was my friend,” Hinton writes. “I had shown him compassion because that was how I’d been raised.”

After 15 years of hopelessness, with appeals rumbling on but never amounting to a retrial, Hinton at last acquired an attorney called Bryan Stevenson, who meant business.

Stevenson turned out to be a sort of Oskar Schindler of death row. He fought Hinton’s case in the courts, refusing to give up, for 15 years. At last in 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the lower court had made an error all those years ago. “You’re going home, my friend,” Stevenson wrote to him. “You’re finally going home.”

Now living quietly in his original hometown of Praco, near Birmingham, Hinton makes sure he has an alibi for every day of his life. He has filed a compensation claim for $1.5million, but the State has denied it, saying he has not proved his innocence.

As for the State prosecutor, Robert McGregor, he died in 2010. Hinton was just one of scores of people he sent to death row in his career, feeling no stain on his conscience.

At the end of the book, Hinton lists the 1,200 people currently on death row in the U.S. Statistically, it is reckoned ten per cent of them are innocent.

In one of the many cruel injustices of this story, Hinton’s release came far too late to be reunited with his mother: she had died 13 years earlier.

Yet when Hinton walked out into freedom, cameras flashing, he was asked to say a few words. “The sun does shine,” he said. That’s the title of this unforgettable book.

– The Sun Does Shine by Anthony Ray Hinton is published by Rider for £8.99, 368pp

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