AS TOLD TO BC PIRES
My name is Amanda Smyth and my third novel, Fortune, will be published on July 1.
I come from Pointe-a-Pierre. My family were in South. And then Valsayn North, where my mother now lives.
But my longing for Tobago, where my grandmother lived, doesn’t go away.
My dad died in 1999. My mother, uncle, cousins, people I love and hold close, still live in Trinidad.
I’m half-Irish, and also feel close to family over the Irish Sea, in Sligo, Yeats’s country.
My husband Lee Thomas, our daughter Amelie and I live now in Leamington Spa, an hour from London, half an hour from Birmingham, the Cotswolds on our doorstep.
It’s a pretty Georgian town with lots of green spaces.
My brother and an aunt live in London.
I’d never wanted children until I was 40. And I found myself staring at babies in prams.
I met Lee when I was 25 (but) lost touch. Ten years later, we met by chance on the Jubilee Line at Bond Street. I was wearing a velvet green coat and a hat with a question mark on it. I heard him say, “Amand-ah!”
We went out that night and that was it.
At my lovely little primary school in South Milford, a little village between Leeds and York, I felt nurtured and supported.
My secondary school, a huge comprehensive school, was rough. I remember kids making snowballs by packing fistfuls of snow around stones and lobbing them at teachers.
I didn’t do well there.
I’d come back from long summers in Trinidad with a suntan. My spiky comprehensive schoolteacher told my mother, “Not everyone can afford Caribbean holidays.”
I remember saying to my mother, Why can’t we just go on holiday to Bridlington or Scarborough, like everyone else?
No, BC Pires, I didn’t really want to go to Bognor Regis instead of Maracas Bay. But I wanted desperately to belong!
[caption id="attachment_897575" align="alignnone" width="640"] Amanda Smyth: "My longing for Tobago, where my grandmother lived, doesn’t go away." - Courtesy Lee Thomas[/caption]
In Trinidad, my mother was much happier than in Yorkshire. (She went) to a woman in Leeds who read your fortune by your handwriting.
The woman said she couldn’t get anything from my mother’s scrawl, “apart from this.” And she drew an apple core.
My mother said, “Ah, that’s not an apple core, that’s a map of Trinidad.” It was in my mother’s bones and blood, so it makes sense it was in mine, too.
I used that story in Fortune, in Tito’s chapter, and it works.
Trinidad teenage summers were the best. I loved the Pelican, JB’s, Jolly Roger.
In my late teens as I began to find my tribe (at) a higher-ed college in Leeds, I started to feel more connected to England. I had super-cool arty friends who wore black and listened to Joy Division, Sisters of Mercy. Those parties were fun, too. But more grimy, boozy.
Ireland wasn’t imprinted on my being until I was older. My Irish family offered a different kind of restoring belonging. Acceptance, love. They were able to fill in the gaps (left by) my pretty absent father.
When my brother was married in Tobago, (I s
