Marcia Hutchinson's Women's prize-nominated novel, The Mercy Step, is told from the perspective of Mercy Hanson, a girl born in Bradford in 1962 to a mother she adores and a father she fears. The story follows Mercy, the spirited fifth child, from birth through her toddler years to primary education, where she discovers books for the first time and finds delicious escape in them.
A teacher's kick and a mother's threat
In her first week at school, Mercy flees the classroom and runs all the way home after a teacher inadvertently kicks her in the forehead and then denies it. This prompts her God-fearing mother to march to school and into the classroom, where she threatens the teacher with hellfire if she touches her daughter again. But Mercy's mother is unable to protect herself or her children from her short-tempered husband, who is "very tall, a proper giant" and smokes Capstan Full Strength cigarettes. Mercy's father slaps her in her crib when she cries and viciously beats her mother.
Narration and tone
The narrator is Hutchinson, whose reading draws out the comic and the unhappy elements of Mercy's story and who moves seamlessly between her young protagonist's Yorkshire tones and her mother's Jamaican Patois. Tenderly written, with moments of sweetness and levity, the novel is named after the stair on which Mercy sits at home, clutching her beloved toy Dolly and surveying the goings on in the household. Her child's-eye view of the world is effective here not only in showing us the preoccupations that shape childhood but in revealing the cost of the cruelty inflicted by adults.
Available via Recorded Books, 9hr 3min.
