Single Mum – Lucy Berry
‘Frogs jump around blithely, hopeful and unaware of death at their green heels’
‘So here we are, with Sav now 16, obviously heterosexual, with no straight men nearby to watch as he grows’
‘As long as she is quiet and peaceful and still in touch with a certainty of being loved, why should I fret that her wider world has lost all significance?’
‘There are some basic rules, which help keep us in community’
‘It’s exciting that children develop language which allows them to enjoy and communicate their culture and selfhood’
‘Now and then, at incredibly short notice, I suddenly feel the need to have very different hair’
‘For numberless sad reasons, very many mothers have learned – or decided – to manage without’
‘I have always told Sav, at every stage of his life, more than many mothers probably would’
And what does it mean to be “Jamaican”? Difficult to sort out if you take it seriously, as Saville does
‘The whole decision became suddenly a paper one, about an illness which, for me, was finished; and for them was not. So Sav never had a sibling’
