In Conversation With Kit De Waal

The prize-winning novelist talks about her new novels Six Foot Six and The Trick to Time, her journey to becoming a writer and adopting her children

Kit lives in Leamington Spa with her son Luke, 18. Her daughter, Bethany, 23, lives in Stratford-upon-Avon, where she’s a groom at a racing stables.

My father came to this country from St Kitts in 1957.

My mother’s from Wexford, Ireland, and met my father in Birmingham. My three sisters, brother and I were brought up on the edge of Moseley.

Back in the 50s and 60s being mixed race was very unusual.

My mother was regularly spat at. We weren’t part of the Irish community nor part of the black community so we made our own tribe.

We had no books at home except for the Bible and some Jehovah’s Witnesses publications of my mother’s.

I’ve probably read the Bible from cover to cover seven or eight times at least. My father read the News of the World, and that was all the reading material we had.

My teacher dissuaded me from being a journalist or English teacher.

She said, “I think people like you (meaning black children) should be secretaries.” We were the only black children in the school so I just accepted it and left school at 15 to go to secretarial college.

I worked as a secretary until I was 23, then went to work as a paralegal at a criminal defence firm.