Joseph of Arimathea’, he says, like he’s giving his name to the dole office. ‘Yeah, yeah. Had to step in & help with the burial of Christ. It was a day like today, actually. Chilly.’ Just published with Tinder Press, Without Warning & Only Sometimes is an engaging and beautiful journey that gives an insight into the remarkable path taken by a curious little girl to become a reader and the writer we all are familiar with today. For the O’Loughlin children, becoming a Jehovah’s Witness family involves interminable hours spent at weekly meetings, inconveniently timed to clash with Top of the Pops, at which Mandy and her siblings nearly die with boredom and fail to have their various forms of hunger sated. Like their parents, they long for escape, but unlike them seek flight to better places that actually exist, through music and books and the teeming life of Moseley outside their unhappy, falling-down home. Without Warning and Only Sometimes is a beautiful memoir about growing up with too much and not enough. Kit de Waal navigates the intricacies of growing up Irish, Caribbean and British in 1960s Birmingham in a family home that struggles to contain 4 siblings, a perpetually working mother, a withdrawn and imposing father, and their collective memories, hopes and failed aspirations.

Kit de Waal was born in Birmingham in 1960 to an Irish mother & a Caribbean father. Throw in her mother’s (and, therefore, the children’s) conversion to the Jehovah’s Witnesses & it’s quite a mix. This is an astoundingly good memoir of an extraordinary childhood. Kit de Waal was born in 1960 in Birmingham to an Irish mother and a father from St Kitts in the Caribbean. Her parents’ marriage was not close, and money and food were in such short supply that all their five children were frequently hungry. Life got even worse for them when their mother became a Jehovah’s Witness; then Christmas, birthdays, singing hymns and having ungodly fun were all forbidden. Vivid and compelling and so moving… Kit’s depiction of her parents’ dynamic is both painful and comforting to read’ Marian Keyes

WITHOUT WARNING AND ONLY SOMETIMES is a story of an extraordinary childhood and how a girl who grew up in house where the Bible was the only book on offer went on to discover a love of reading that inspires her to this day. An interesting insight into a childhood, which occasionally resonated with me but also detailed the challenges of growing up in a discordant marriage, with the added dual heritage dynamic.

How could they do this? How could they semi-starve their children while hoarding treats and possessions for their own use? But it rings all too true. This memoir is an astonishingly good evocation of the dream and reality of migration to postwar Birmingham, a city that must have seemed flush with cash to anyone moving from elsewhere. It gave its migrant working class a promise of riches while delivering a life of hard work and exhaustion. Not fully accepted by either side of the family, by dint of being half, the children are aware of being treated differently to their cousins. Neither parent is accepted by the other’s community & their marriage is an imbalance between a mother who wants to be loved & a father who cannot fully commit. In all likelihood, the marriage probably wouldn’t have taken place had pregnancy not forced the issue. From the award-winning author of MY NAME IS LEON comes a childhood memoir set to become a classic: stinging, warm-hearted, and true. They just wanted to get out, and who can blame them? De Waal got out, and doesn’t judge: she understands because she watched and listened so closely. “When the other one is out,” she writes of her parents, “they tell us stories about their life before us. They both want us as their audience, for the depository of their dreams, for their excuses, justifications, explanations.” Another review, referred to Kit De Waal as a “born storyteller” & I go along with that, she could make the most mundane topic interesting.The vast majority of the memoir is about the author’s childhood and their relationship with their parents, but though the stories changed they were all very similar, and other moments like the author’s later life were examined superficially, brushed off mentions of death in exchange for a nester ending. Exploring the extraordinary years of her youth with a mother insisting she and her siblings attend regular Jehovah Witness assemblies and a flamboyant father with dreams of returning to his native St Kitts, Kit (Mandy Theresa O' Loughlin) made plans to escape from a young age.