Grade 9 Notes: Leave Taking

Enid Matthews

The mother who came for a better life and keeps her pain to herself

Enid is the centre of the play: a Jamaican-born woman of the Windrush generation, bringing up two daughters alone in North London after leaving her violent husband. She works two jobs, one of them as a cleaner, and has saved hard so that her clever younger daughter, Viv, can go to university. She is strict, proud and private. She insists that England has treated her well, prepares her flat for a visiting pastor as if her family's standing depends on it, and tells her daughters almost nothing about her past. Yet she still turns to Mai, the obeah woman, when she is afraid. The death of her mother in Jamaica breaks something open: alone and drinking, she tells Viv about her poor childhood and says that she wants to go home. Her quarrel with Del, which begins with a slap in Scene Two, is only resolved in the final scene, when Enid comes to Mai for a reading, finds Del there in Mai's place, and at last explains herself.

Loyal to England

In the early scenes Enid presents herself as a migrant who has made a success of England by following its rules. She cleans and cooks for the pastor's visit, she is proud of Viv's schoolwork, and when Brod complains about the way Britain has treated him, she answers that England has treated her well and that she is proud of her English daughters. Her loyalty is real, but the play shows how much it costs her to keep it up.

Key moment. Enid, preparing her flat for the pastor's visit, insisting to Brod that England has treated her well (Scene Two). Enid's loyalty to England is spoken in the middle of housework for a visitor she wants to impress. The setting makes her pride look like hard labour, and Brod's teasing and his own bitter story press against everything she says.

Her strictness belongs to the same strategy. She wants her daughters to work, keep out of trouble and be respectable, because she knows how quickly a young Black person in Britain can be judged. The daughters see only the rules; the audience gradually learns the fear behind them.

The slap and the silence

When Del comes home after a night out, the argument turns on Enid herself. Del throws at her the times she has been humiliated, such as the time she was made to clean up a colleague's vomit at a hospital party she had dressed up for. Del says her mother bows down to the people who treat her badly. Enid slaps her, and Del walks out.

Key moment. Enid striking Del after Del accuses her of accepting every insult England gives her (Scene Two). The slap is the one physical act of violence on stage, and it comes from the most controlled character. Pinnock makes it a sign of how close to the surface Enid's shame is: Del has said aloud what Enid will not.

Enid's silence about her past is the thing that keeps her daughters from understanding her. She has not told them why their father went out of their lives, or what her childhood was like. The play leaves that story to Brod and to Enid's own late confession.

Grief, and the wish to go home

At the end of Scene Three a phone call from her sister Cynthia tells Enid that their mother has died. Enid had suspected Cynthia of inventing their mother's illness to get money. The news makes that suspicion look cruel, and guilt runs through the rest of the play.

Key moment. Enid, alone with a drink, telling Viv about her childhood poverty and ending with the wish to go home (Scene Four). The most private scene in the play shows the strong mother undone. Enid speaks openly about her own past for the first time, and the scene ends on a longing she has spent the play denying. Home has moved from England back to Jamaica in a single night.

In Scene Six she comes back to Mai, not having seen Del for weeks, afraid that she has failed as a mother. Mai suggests a doctor; Enid refuses, saying that no doctor could understand what a Black woman like her is suffering. She brings her grief to the obeah woman because nowhere else in England seems to have room for it.

The final reading

In the last scene Enid arrives for a reading and finds Del, who has taken Mai's place. Asked why she never loved her, Enid at last speaks: her own mother disliked her, a coldness tied to the darkness of her skin; she knows exactly how her daughters are treated in England; she is tired; and her hardness was meant to prepare them for a harsh world.

Key moment. Enid, sitting for a reading with her own daughter, giving her hand to Del as the play ends (Scene Eight). The play ends with touch, not words. A mother who has kept her pain in her head lets her daughter read it in her palm, and the gesture answers the slap of Scene Two.

How Pinnock builds Enid on stage

Enid speaks in a Jamaican voice that marks her as the first generation, and her daughters answer her in London speech.

She is defined by actions: cleaning, cooking, saving, striking, sitting alone with a drink. Pinnock lets the actions show what she will not say.

Structurally she appears at both ends of the play as Mai's client, first asking about Del and finally being read by her.

Her one long confession comes after her mother's death, so the structure ties her openness to grief.

Enid in context

She belongs to the Windrush generation, raised to see Britain as the mother country and met with hostility when she arrived.

As a Black working mother bringing up two daughters alone, she carries the pressure of proving herself respectable.

Her mother's dislike of her dark skin shows that prejudice wounded her long before she reached England.

Relationships

• Del — The elder daughter she fights with, slaps, loses and finally lets in.
• Viv — The clever younger daughter whose education carries Enid's hopes.
• Mai — The obeah woman she turns to when she is afraid; the only place she can say what she feels.
• Brod — Her friend since childhood in Jamaica, who knows her past and tells it when she will not.
• Her mother, Mooma — The mother in Jamaica who was cold to her, whose death opens the play's wounds.

What Enid Matthews stands for

• The clean flat: Enid's respectability and her labour, scrubbed for a pastor who sees none of the cost.
• Her hand: struck out in the slap of Scene Two, given to Del to read at the end.
• The savings for university: a lifetime of work turned into a cheque for Viv's future.

Why Pinnock made Enid Matthews

• To put a Black working mother, a cleaner, at the centre of a play as its heroine.
• To show the cost of migration: what was given up, and what England gave back.
• To show that a parent's strictness can be a form of protection that children cannot see.

Other readings

• A loyal migrant whose faith in England is slowly broken by grief and by the treatment of her children.
• A mother whose silence about her past causes the very distance from her daughters she fears.
• A woman caught between two homes, belonging fully to neither, until she lets her daughter in.

Essay arguments

• Pinnock makes Enid's silence, not her strictness, the real barrier between her and her daughters, so the play's resolution is an act of telling.
• Enid's loyalty to England is staged as labour, scrubbing and cooking for respectability, so the audience sees the cost before she admits it.
• The death of Enid's mother is the play's hinge: from then on Enid is a daughter as well as a mother, and the final reading joins the two.

In theme essays

• Identity and belonging: loyal to England in Scene Two, longing for Jamaica in Scene Four.
• Generations: the slap, the silence and the final reading.
• Racism: the hospital party, the doctor who could not understand, the knowledge she hid from her daughters.

Questions that get asked

• How does Pinnock present Enid as a mother in Leave Taking?
• How does Pinnock use the character of Enid to explore the experience of migrants in Britain?

Think you understand Enid Matthews? Teach it, then defend it against Winsome Pinnock →

Del (Delores) Matthews

The rebellious daughter who walks out, and finds her way back through Mai

Del is Enid's elder daughter, born and raised in London. At the start she is angry, funny and restless: she stays out all night, mocks Mai's obeah as nonsense and tries to steal one of Mai's charms. She is pregnant, as her mother fears. Del feels the racism around her sharply, from the police to her boss, and she despises what she sees as her mother's meekness in the face of it. Her school did not help her when she struggled with reading. After Enid slaps her she leaves home and, surprisingly, moves in with Mai. In Mai's bedsit she grows curious about obeah, protects Viv's future more fiercely than Viv does, hears from Brod the truth about her father, and is recognised by Mai as having the gift. In the final scene she takes Mai's place and reads her own mother's palm.

The rebel at Mai's door

Del arrives in the play resenting everything about the visit to Mai. She mocks the obeah, laughs at Mai and her room, and refuses Mai's offer to talk. But the scene ends with a small, telling action: she tries to slip one of Mai's charms into her pocket, and Mai, without fuss, holds out her hand until Del gives it back.

Key moment. Del trying to steal a charm from Mai, and Mai simply holding out her hand for it (Scene One). Del's mockery says she wants nothing to do with obeah; the theft says she wants something from it. Pinnock plants the end of the play in its first scene, and Mai sees through Del at once.

Her anger is not aimless. In Scene Two she lists the ways Black people are treated in London: watched by the police, spoken to at work as if they could not speak English, and, in her mother's case, made to clean up after colleagues at a party. Her rebellion is a refusal to accept what her mother has accepted.

Leaving home

Key moment. Del walking out of the family home after Enid slaps her (Scene Two). Del's exit turns the family quarrel into a separation. From here she is only seen in Mai's bedsit, so the play's geography follows her choice.

When the play returns to her in Scene Five, weeks have passed and she is living with Mai, pregnant. The woman she mocked has given her a home. She is still sharp-tongued, but she is growing interested in Mai's practice.

Key moment. Del, furious that Viv has skipped an English exam, throwing her sister out of Mai's room and insisting she sit the rest (Scene Five). The daughter who rejected school fights hardest for her sister's education. Del knows what she was denied, and will not let Viv throw away what Enid has worked for.

The truth and the gift

In Scene Seven Brod, thrown out by Enid, wakes in Mai's bedsit and tells Del what her mother never has: that her father, treated with contempt at work every day, turned his violence on Enid, and that Enid left him to protect her daughters. Del does not want to hear it. She would rather keep her mother as the harsh one.

Key moment. Del refusing to listen as Brod explains what her father did to her mother (Scene Seven). Del has built her identity on resisting her mother. Brod's story takes that away, and her resistance to hearing it shows how much it costs to see a parent differently.

Mai, watching her, recognises that Del has the gift for obeah. By Scene Eight Del has cleaned the room, is trying out Mai's practice for herself, and passes Mai's test so well that she senses Mai's failing heart. Mai gives her the notebook of everything she knows and leaves her to see the next client.

Key moment. Del taking her mother's hand and beginning to read her palm as the play ends (Scene Eight). The rebel ends as the healer. Del inherits a tradition from Mai and uses it to understand her mother, so her growing up and the family's reconciliation happen in the same gesture.

How Pinnock builds Del on stage

Del's speech is quick, sarcastic and London, the voice of a second-generation daughter who will not be quiet.

Her actions speak before her words: she pockets a charm, walks out, cleans Mai's room and holds her mother's hand.

Structurally she leaves the family's space in Scene Two and the play follows her to Mai's for the rest of its length.

Del in context

Born and raised in London, she meets racism from the police and at work, and refuses her mother's way of enduring it.

Her school failed her when she struggled with reading, so her later learning from Mai is a different education.

Relationships

• Enid — The mother she defies, blames and finally reads with new understanding.
• Viv — The sister she protects, even from Viv herself.
• Mai — The obeah woman she mocks, lives with and succeeds.
• Brod — The family friend who tells her the truth about her father.

What Del (Delores) Matthews stands for

• The stolen charm: what Del wants from obeah before she can admit it.
• Mai's notebook: a tradition handed down outside the school system that failed her.
• The palm: the final image of a daughter learning to read her mother.

Why Pinnock made Del (Delores) Matthews

• To show a second-generation daughter who refuses to accept racism quietly.
• To suggest that heritage can be chosen and learned, not only inherited.
• To show a young woman failed by school finding a different kind of learning.

Other readings

• A rebel who learns that her mother's meekness was a strategy for survival.
• A daughter who finds belonging not in Britain or Jamaica but in a tradition she can practise.
• A young woman whose anger at racism is right, and whose anger at her mother is misplaced.

Essay arguments

• Pinnock frames Del's development between two acts with her hands: stealing Mai's charm in Scene One and holding her mother's palm in Scene Eight.
• Del's anger at racism is justified by the play, but her anger at Enid rests on not knowing her mother's story.
• Del's fierce defence of Viv's education shows the value she places on what she herself was denied.

In theme essays

• Identity: the charm, the gift, the palm.
• Generations: the slap and the final reading.
• Education: reading difficulties at school against Mai's notebook.

Questions that get asked

• How does Pinnock present Del's development in Leave Taking?
• How does Pinnock use Del to explore ideas about identity?

Think you understand Del (Delores) Matthews? Teach it, then defend it against Winsome Pinnock →

Viv Matthews

The clever daughter who cannot find herself in her books

Viv is Enid's younger daughter, studious and successful, the one on course for university. She is the peacemaker in the early scenes, trying to stop Del mocking Mai and to calm the quarrels at home. She is anxious about failing her exams, because so much of her mother's hope rests on them. Encouraged by Brod, who asks her what she knows of Jamaican history, she wants to go to Jamaica to understand who she is, rather than go straight to university; Enid opposes the idea and blames Brod. When her grandmother dies, Viv is the one who finds her mother drinking alone and hears her story, and Enid gives her the savings for university. But Viv is losing faith in an education in which she never finds anyone like herself. She skips an English exam and offers the university money to Del, who throws her out and insists she finish. Later Enid throws her out of the flat too. By the end Viv is going to university to study Black Studies.

The peacemaker

In Scene One Viv tries to keep the peace between her mother and her sister at Mai's, and in Scene Two she is studying while Enid prepares for the pastor. She is the daughter Enid can be proud of, and the one who listens when Brod talks about Jamaica.

Key moment. Viv, at her books while Enid prepares for the pastor, being asked by Brod what she knows of Nanny of the Maroons (Scene Two). The question exposes a gap in Viv's schooling: she knows English literature and little of Jamaican history. Brod's challenge starts her search for a history of her own.

She feels the pressure. Viv worries aloud about what would happen if she failed her exams, because she knows what her success means to her mother.

Searching for herself

Key moment. Viv telling Enid that she wants to go to Jamaica before university, and Enid blaming Brod for the idea (Scene Three). Viv's wish is a wish for roots; Enid hears it as a threat to everything she has saved for. The quarrel is about what education is for.

Across Scenes Four and Five Viv says what is wrong: however hard she searches for herself in the books she studies, she is never there, and she and her teachers seem not to speak the same language. She is successful in a system that does not see her.

Key moment. Viv offering Del the university money and admitting she has skipped an English exam (Scene Five). The good daughter rebels at last, against the education she has been so good at. Her gift of the money shows love for Del and a loss of faith in the future the money was for.

Black Studies

After Del throws her out to sit her exams, Viv is also thrown out of the flat by Enid. She is offstage for the rest of the play, but in the last scene Enid reports her news: Viv is going to university to study Black Studies.

Key moment. Enid telling Del, during the final reading, that Viv is going to university to study Black Studies (Scene Eight). Viv's ending reconciles the two things she was torn between. She will have the education her mother worked for, and it will be about people like her.

How Pinnock builds Viv on stage

Viv is first seen at her books, and her speech is careful and educated, the speech of a successful pupil.

Pinnock makes her the listener in Scene Four, so the audience hears Enid's past through her ears.

Her rebellion is quiet and offstage: a skipped exam, reported in Scene Five, and a future reported in Scene Eight.

Viv in context

She shows the pressure on the children of migrants to succeed in education for their parents' sake.

Her complaint that she never finds herself in her books reflects a school curriculum that left out Black British lives.

Relationships

• Enid — The mother whose hopes she carries and resists.
• Del — The sister she tries to protect, and who protects her in return.
• Brod — The family friend who teaches her about Jamaica.
• Mai — The obeah woman she first meets with curiosity rather than scorn.

What Viv Matthews stands for

• Her books: an English education that gives her success and no reflection of herself.
• The university money: Enid's hope, nearly given away.
• Black Studies: a future in which education and identity meet.

Why Pinnock made Viv Matthews

• To criticise an education that leaves Black British pupils out of what they study.
• To show the pressure on the children of migrants to succeed for their parents.
• To show identity as something searched for, not simply inherited.

Other readings

• A good daughter whose rebellion is a search for herself.
• A mirror to Del: the one who succeeds in the system and still feels excluded by it.
• A sign of hope: the generation that will study and tell its own history.

Essay arguments

• Pinnock makes Viv's success the sharpest criticism of the education system: the best pupil is the one who cannot find herself in it.
• Viv's journey moves from Brod's question about Nanny of the Maroons to Black Studies, so the play ends with the history she was missing.
• Viv and Del swap roles in Scene Five, the rebel defending education and the scholar rejecting it.

In theme essays

• Education: the books without her, the skipped exam, Black Studies.
• Identity: the wish to see Jamaica, Brod's history lesson.
• Generations: the money from Enid and what Viv does with it.

Questions that get asked

• How does Pinnock use the character of Viv to explore ideas about education?
• How does Pinnock present the relationship between Viv and Del?

Think you understand Viv Matthews? Teach it, then defend it against Winsome Pinnock →

Mai

The obeah woman who heals the family she was paid to advise

Mai is an obeah woman, a practitioner of a Caribbean tradition of healing, divination and advice, who came to England from Jamaica like Enid and Brod. Five of the play's eight scenes take place in her bedsit. Enid consults her three times: about Del and her sister in Scene One, about her grief and her lost daughter in Scene Six, and in Scene Eight, when she finds Del there instead. Mai sees through people quickly: she catches Del stealing a charm, advises Enid to send her sister the money whatever the truth, and lets Del, who mocked her, come to live with her. She has a son, born in England, who is estranged from her and never felt at home here. She has a serious heart condition that she avoids facing. In the last scene she tests Del, gives her the notebook of everything she knows and leaves her to see the next client, so the tradition passes to the next generation.

The reader of people

Mai's power in the play is less magic than attention. In Scene One she listens to Enid's worries about Del and about her sister in Jamaica, and her advice is practical: send the money. She notices everything, including the charm disappearing into Del's pocket.

Key moment. Mai offering to be someone Del can talk to, and Del turning her down (Scene One). Mai makes the first move towards Del while Del is still mocking her. The refused offer becomes the shape of the whole play: Del will come back to it.

When Enid's mother dies at the end of Scene Three, Mai's advice about the money takes on a terrible weight. The audience learns to trust Mai's reading of people even when the characters do not.

A refuge for the family

Mai's bedsit becomes the place where the family can say what it cannot say at home. Del lives there, pregnant, from Scene Five; Enid brings her grief there in Scene Six; Brod sleeps off his drinking there in Scene Seven.

Key moment. Mai suggesting a doctor to the grieving Enid, and Enid refusing because no doctor could understand what a Black woman like her is suffering (Scene Six). Enid trusts Mai with what she will not trust to English institutions. The bedsit is a space where her Jamaican self is understood.

Mai talks of her own son, born in England, who never felt at home there and who is estranged from her. She is a mother who has lost her child to the same dislocation that threatens Enid's family, which gives weight to her care for Del.

Passing it on

In Scene Seven Mai recognises that Del has the gift. In Scene Eight she tests her, and Del, reading Mai, senses that her heart is failing and tells her to see a doctor. Mai will not discuss it.

Key moment. Mai giving Del her notebook of everything she knows and leaving her alone to see the next client (Scene Eight). Mai hands on her knowledge as her own life runs out. The obeah tradition, which Del scorned in Scene One, now has an heir, and the first client to arrive is the person Del most needs to understand.

How Pinnock builds Mai on stage

Mai speaks with the authority of someone who sees through people, and she often answers with an action, like an open hand.

Her bedsit is the play's main setting, so she is present in five of the eight scenes, the still point of the family's storms.

Structurally she exits the action in Scene Eight, leaving Del to take her place, so her departure makes Del's arrival.

Mai in context

Obeah is a Caribbean tradition of healing and advice, and Mai keeps it alive in a London bedsit.

Her estranged son, born in England and never at home there, shows the dislocation of the second generation.

Relationships

• Enid — Her client and fellow migrant, who trusts her more than doctors or pastors.
• Del — The scornful girl she takes in, trains and makes her successor.
• Her son — Estranged, born in England, never at home there: the loss that shadows her care for Del.
• Brod — A fellow Jamaican who ends up sleeping in her bedsit after Enid throws him out.

What Mai stands for

• The charm: what Mai sees Del wanting before Del knows it.
• The notebook: knowledge passed on outside books and schools.
• Her failing heart: an older generation running out of time to hand on what it knows.

Why Pinnock made Mai

• To present obeah as a source of healing and wisdom rather than superstition.
• To show the community, not only the family, guiding the younger generation.
• To give the play a still centre where secrets can be spoken.

Other readings

• A healer whose real gift is listening, not magic.
• A substitute mother for Del, and a mirror for Enid, who has also nearly lost a child.
• The keeper of a tradition that survives only if the young choose it.

Essay arguments

• Pinnock makes Mai's bedsit the play's true home: the place where every member of the family eventually says what they could not say elsewhere.
• Mai's healing works through attention and honesty, so the play treats obeah as wisdom rather than superstition.
• Mai's estranged son explains her care for Del: she gives another mother's daughter what she could not give her own child.

In theme essays

• Identity: obeah as a living connection to the Caribbean.
• Generations: the notebook handed to Del.
• Education: a kind of learning the school never offered Del.

Questions that get asked

• How does Pinnock use the character of Mai in Leave Taking?
• How does Pinnock present Mai's influence on Del?

Think you understand Mai? Teach it, then defend it against Winsome Pinnock →

Brod (Broderick)

The family friend who carries the history Enid will not tell

Brod is Enid's friend from their childhood in Jamaica and the only man in the play. He appears in three scenes, two in Enid's flat and one in Mai's bedsit, but his effect is large. He is funny, teasing and a heavy drinker. He also voices the play's sharpest criticism of Britain: he grew up thinking of himself as a British subject, and now has a letter from the authorities saying that unless he gets his nationality papers in order he can be put out of the country, so he keeps his Jamaican passport up to date. He tells the story of Gullyman, a friend who tried to speak like the English and broke down after racist abuse. He blames colonialism for Jamaica's poverty and insists that Enid's daughters must know where they come from. In Scene Seven, thrown out by Enid, he tells Del the truth about her father.

The joker with a grievance

Brod arrives in Scene Two for the pastor's visit and immediately teases Enid, joking about her feet, which carry the marks of the hard labour of her childhood. His humour reminds her, and the audience, of the life she came from.

Key moment. Brod describing the letter that told him to get his nationality papers in order or be put out of the country (Scene Two). A man raised to think of himself as British is told by Britain that he may not belong. The letter turns Brod's loyalty into bitterness and is why he keeps his Jamaican passport ready.

Key moment. Brod telling the story of Gullyman, who tried to speak like the English and broke down after racist abuse (Scene Two). Gullyman is a warning told as a story: trying to become English did not protect him. Through an offstage character Pinnock shows the damage racism does to a mind.

The keeper of history

Brod argues with Enid about the girls. Where she is proud of her English daughters, he says that at heart they are Caribbean and that she is teaching them wrongly, letting them forget where they come from. He asks Viv about Nanny of the Maroons, the warrior leader of Jamaicans who resisted the British, and he puts Jamaica's poverty down to colonialism.

Key moment. Brod and Enid, after the pastor has gone, remembering church services back home in Jamaica (Scene Three). The memory shows what the two migrants share and what England's version of their faith lacks for Brod. It is a brief moment of home before the phone call that ends the scene.

His drinking is part of the same picture. Brod's jokes cover isolation and hurt, and the drink is one of the ways he copes with being rejected.

Telling Del the truth

In Scene Seven Brod wakes in Mai's bedsit after a night's drinking. Enid has thrown him out, as she has thrown out Viv. He is at his lowest.

Key moment. Brod telling Del that her father, treated with contempt at work, became violent towards Enid, and that Enid left to protect her girls (Scene Seven). Brod explains without excusing. He shows how racism damaged her father and how the damage was passed on to Enid, and he forces Del to see her mother as someone who protected her.

How Pinnock builds Brod on stage

Brod is the play's comic voice: teasing, boastful and fond of drink, with a broad Jamaican way of speaking.

He is a storyteller who brings offstage people onstage through anecdote: Gullyman, Enid's childhood, Del's father.

Structurally he appears in three scenes, and each time he reveals something Enid has kept hidden.

Brod in context

His letter from the authorities shows how the right of the Windrush generation to remain could be questioned.

His talk of colonialism and of Nanny of the Maroons brings Jamaica's history under British rule into the play.

Relationships

• Enid — His oldest friend, whose past he knows and whose loyalty to England he mocks.
• Viv — The daughter he teaches about Jamaica and its history.
• Del — The daughter he tells about her father.
• Gullyman — The friend whose breakdown is Brod's warning about trying to become English.

What Brod (Broderick) stands for

• The letter: the state's message that his belonging can be withdrawn.
• The Jamaican passport: a way out kept ready.
• His drink: the hurt behind the jokes.

Why Pinnock made Brod (Broderick)

• To voice the anger of a migrant generation that was told it belonged and then told it did not.
• To bring Jamaica's history, and the history of colonialism, into the play.
• To reveal Enid's past, which she will not tell herself.

Other readings

• A comic figure whose jokes carry the play's most serious political criticism.
• A substitute father to the girls, giving them the history their own father could not.
• A man broken by rejection, whose drinking shows what Enid's composure hides.

Essay arguments

• Pinnock gives Brod the role of witness: he carries Enid's history and Britain's colonial history into a flat where neither is spoken of.
• Brod's letter from the authorities makes the question of belonging legal as well as personal, which is why the play still speaks to later events.
• Brod is funny, and Pinnock uses his humour to make an audience listen to criticism it might otherwise resist.

In theme essays

• Racism: the letter, Gullyman, Del's father.
• Identity: the girls' Caribbean roots and the Jamaican passport.
• Generations: the history he gives to Viv and the truth he gives to Del.

Questions that get asked

• How does Pinnock use the character of Brod in Leave Taking?
• How does Pinnock use Brod to explore ideas about belonging?

Think you understand Brod (Broderick)? Teach it, then defend it against Winsome Pinnock →

Identity and belonging

Every character is asking where they belong: in England, in Jamaica, in the family, or in themselves.

The first generation, Enid, Brod and Mai, came from Jamaica believing in Britain as a mother country. The play shows each of them finding that belief tested. Enid insists England has treated her well; Brod has been told his place here depends on papers; Mai's son, born in England, never felt at home in it.

The second generation has the opposite problem. Del and Viv were born in London and speak like Londoners, but they are treated as outsiders, and they know little of the Jamaica their mother left. Brod tells Enid her daughters are Caribbean at heart; Viv wants to go to Jamaica to understand who she is; Del finds a connection through obeah.

Key moment. Enid, after her mother's death, saying that she wants to go home (Scene Four). The play's loudest defender of England changes her mind in one night. Belonging, for Enid, was held in place by a mother she had not spoken to in years.

Grade 9 insight. The title can be read in more than one way: leave taking as the migrant's farewell to home, as the daughters leaving their mother, and as the deaths that take a generation away. A strong essay uses the title to connect them.

By the end, belonging is found less in a place than in a relationship and a practice. Del takes up Mai's tradition, Viv chooses to study Black history, and Enid lets her daughter in. None of them has resolved Britain or Jamaica, but each has found something to belong to.

Avoid. Writing as if the daughters simply feel English and the mother simply feels Jamaican. The play shows all of them divided, and Enid most of all.

Think you understand identity and belonging in Leave Taking? Teach it, then defend it →

Mothers, daughters and generations

The play is a family drama about what one generation keeps from the next, and what it finally hands on.

Leave Taking stages two generations of women. Enid is strict and silent; Del is defiant; Viv is dutiful until she is not. The conflict is fierce, but it grows from love and fear: Enid's hardness is meant to protect her daughters in a hostile country, and her daughters cannot see it because she never explains.

Key moment. The slap: Enid striking Del when Del mocks her for accepting humiliation (Scene Two). The generational conflict reaches its peak early. The rest of the play works towards undoing it.

Behind Enid's relationship with her daughters stands her relationship with her own mother, Mooma, who was cold to her and would not part from her kindly when she left for England. Enid's grief at Mooma's death is mixed with guilt and with the pain of never being loved as she wanted. The play suggests that she has passed on some of that coldness without meaning to.

Family in the play is wider than blood. Brod is a substitute uncle and father, Mai a substitute mother for Del, and her bedsit a second home. When Enid throws Brod and Viv out, she is cutting herself off from the family she has built.

Key moment. Del reading her mother's palm in Mai's bedsit (Scene Eight). Two generations meet through a tradition from the generation before them. The daughter learns her mother's story; the mother lets herself be read.

Grade 9 insight. Note that the final scene does not resolve everything. It ends as the reading begins, so Pinnock shows a beginning of understanding rather than a neat happy ending.

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Racism and the Windrush generation

Racism is everywhere in the play, mostly offstage, and each character responds to it differently.

The play shows racism mainly through stories told on stage: Enid made to clean up vomit at a hospital party; Del spoken to at work as though she could not speak English and watched by the police; Gullyman abused until his mind broke; Brod told he may be put out of the country; Del's father treated with contempt at work every day.

Pinnock is interested in the different ways people respond. Enid keeps her head down, works and insists England has been good to her. Brod turns to anger, to Jamaica and to drink. Del fights back with her mouth and her refusal to conform. Viv turns her criticism on what she is taught.

Key moment. Brod telling Del that her father, humiliated at work, took his anger out on Enid (Scene Seven). The play traces how racism outside the home becomes violence inside it, without excusing the violence.

The play also shows prejudice within the Jamaican community: Enid's own mother disliked her, Enid believes, because her skin was dark. This colourism, a prejudice that favours lighter skin, wounds Enid long before she reaches England.

Colourism: Prejudice that treats people differently according to how light or dark their skin is, including within the same community.

Avoid. Never repeat the racist words the characters report. Describe them as racist and say what they do to the person they are aimed at.

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Education (minor)

School is the migrant family's ladder, and the play asks who it was built for.

For Enid, education is the reason for her sacrifice. She works two jobs and saves for Viv's university place, and she is proud of Viv's marks. For her daughters, education is more complicated.

Del struggled with reading at school and was never given the help she needed, so school taught her that she was a failure. Viv is a success at school but cannot find herself in the books she studies, and she skips an English exam.

Key moment. Del throwing Viv out of Mai's room until she agrees to sit her exams (Scene Five). The sister failed by school defends school most fiercely. Pinnock shows that the problem is the system, not the value of learning.

The play offers other kinds of learning. Brod teaches Viv about Nanny of the Maroons; Mai teaches Del through practice and hands her a notebook of knowledge; and Viv finally chooses Black Studies, an education that includes her.

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