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HISTORICAL FICTION The Attic Child By Lola Jaye Macmillan, £14.99, hardback, 480 pages In 1907, 12-year-old Celestine finds himself spending most of his time locked in the attic of a large house by the sea. Treated as an unpaid servant, he is beginning to forget the family that he was taken from in Africa and struggles to remember his real name, Dikembe. Many decades later, orphan Lowra is banished to that very same attic. Buried under the floorboards she finds a porcelain doll, an unusual beaded claw necklace and a sentence written on the wall in a language she can’t understand. She soon realises she may not have been the first child to call this attic-prison home.
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ZEESHAN MALLICK
Dikembe, a young boy from the Congo, struggles to adapt to life in Britain after being taken from his family to serve as a ‘companion’ for an explorer named Sir Richard Babbington A name was called and my first response was to ignore it. After all, it wasn’t the name given to me by my parents, but one I’d first heard on the steamer and quickly put down to delirium. Now I had recovered and could ignore it no longer. ‘Celestine, are you awake?’ He peered from the side of the door with a large smile. ‘Yes, Mr Richard.’ I pulled the cover to my chin as he moved closer to the bed. ‘Splendid. Then we are making progress.’ I nodded my head slowly as he sat on the edge of the bed. ‘Mr Richard...’ I began. He placed his cold palm onto my forehead. ‘Your temperature does feel normal,’ he muttered. ‘My name, sir. It is Dikembe.’ I felt my own heartbeat stop, hoping I had not offended him. ‘Dear boy, of all the things you are on the verge of experiencing now you have arrived on these shores, of all the resources I have put in place, the English you are now starting to grasp more easily, is it not only fair I have one wish granted of my own?’ A wave of confusion confronted me. Was it during my delirium that I had asked for any of these things? Perhaps so. ‘My request is that you be called Celestine.’ I ran through the names of each of my brothers and how my own name fitted in at the very end of that line of children. Dikembe. A good and special child. Confusion mixed with sadness threatened me from within. My father calling me by my given name and Mama telling me to ‘do everything Mr Richard asks of you, my son.’ ‘Yes, Mr Richard,’ I said, failing to add that this would be a temporary measure, considering I’d soon be back home. Indeed, for now, I would simply be obeying my mother and not this white man. This was what I told myself. 86
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Q&A Lola Jaye
Lola Jaye is a British author, speaker and psychotherapist. Born and raised in London, she has also lived in Nigeria and the US. Lola is a member of the Black Writers’ Guild and has written five previous works of fiction, but The Attic Child is her first epic historical novel.
Where did the inspiration for the novel come from?
The Attic Child is partly based on the real-life story of Ndugu M’hali, a little boy born in 1865 who was taken from Africa by the British explorer Henry Morton Stanley. His death [in a canoeing accident] at the age of 12 can only be described as a tragedy, so I wanted to offer some type of hope to his story. Through my own character of Dikembe, I wanted to reimagine what Ndugu’s life could have been. What could he have achieved if he’d been allowed to live?
The story takes place across two timelines, several decades apart. Did this make it difficult to write?
I found it easier to write one timeline in one go and then tackle the other separately to avoid any confusion in my writing process. The 1990s was an era that I can recall, so it wasn’t hard to put myself in the space of Lowra, who, alongside Dikembe, is the book’s other protagonist. Writing about Dikembe should have proven tricky – his part of the novel takes place during the Edwardian period, and there’s just no way I could have experienced that era without a time machine! However, as a black woman, I could still recognise and empathise with his feelings of living in a society that doesn’t always accept him ‘as is’.
Did you develop a connection with your characters? I developed an emotional connection with Ndugu M’hali before I started work on this book. In 2016, I went to see an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery entitled Black Chronicles: Photographic Portraits 1862–1948, which had pictures of Ndugu. From the moment my eyes clocked his, I knew that I would one day write his story.
How important was it to you to honour the real history behind the story?
Very important. Over the past two years, the world has perhaps woken up to the work of so-called ‘explorers’ from history, but what occurred in the Congo a few years after Ndugu died is something that a lot of people still don’t know about. The fact that millions of innocent people were killed [by Belgian colonists] remains a hidden history to many. When I first saw Ndugu’s photographs, I was angered that there wasn’t much more on him other than his depiction as a ‘slave’, and not a boy who had a mum, dad and possibly siblings – a life. I wanted him to have a voice. A depiction of innocence, of which he was denied.
