Racism and class in 1980s Britain

Racism reaches inside the family

In Leave Taking, first performed in 1987, Winsome Pinnock presents a Black family’s life in London. Enid migrated from Jamaica and has raised Del and Viv largely alone. Their arguments concern work, education and behaviour, but pressures outside the home help shape those conflicts. Employers, police and immigration authorities affect whether the characters feel respected, safe and entitled to belong.

Racism and class overlap without being identical. Class shapes the characters’ low-paid work and limited resources; racism shapes the treatment they receive as Black people. Pinnock shows how these pressures can restrict opportunity and damage relationships. Yet the characters respond differently: Enid stresses endurance and following rules, Del openly challenges mistreatment, and Brod questions the country to which he once felt loyal.

Early in the play: belonging becomes conditional

In Scene 2, Brod recalls thinking of himself as a ‘British subject’. His respect for Britain included celebrating Empire Day and showing respect towards the queen. These habits connect his personal identity with Britain’s colonial influence in Jamaica: he believed he already belonged.

The nationality letter overturns that confidence. Brod’s account includes the threat to ‘kick me outta the country’. The physical violence suggested by ‘kick’ makes an administrative demand sound like an assault. His reference to the authorities as ‘them’ separates those exercising power from the people whose lives they control.

Enid replies in Scene 2, ‘So, we pay the fifty pound and now we nationality secure’. The fee is £50. Her practical response treats payment and paperwork as a route to safety. Brod counters with ‘Secure what?’ His rhetorical question challenges the idea that compliance guarantees acceptance.

Brod acts as a foil to Enid here. One reading is that she trusts official procedures while he recognises their instability. Another is that Enid’s response represents a survival strategy: resolving the immediate problem may seem more useful than expressing anger. Brod’s experience makes his distrust persuasive, but Enid’s responsibilities help explain her pragmatism.

The later Windrush scandal gives this exchange additional significance for modern audiences. In 2018, the mistreatment of people legally entitled to remain in Britain became widely exposed. Problems with records and proof of status led to losses of work, housing and healthcare, and wrongful deportations. The play predates these events: Pinnock dramatises an existing insecurity, rather than writing about the later scandal.

Del’s work and the police: opportunity without dignity

Del has lost her job and conceals parts of her life from Enid. Her complaints about employment nevertheless deserve attention. During the early confrontation with her mother, she describes a ‘greasy job in a greasy café’, where she is treated as a ‘dum dum’. Repetition makes the workplace seem unpleasant and inescapable, while the insulting label suggests that her employers deny her intelligence and worth.

Her accusation that managers treat young Black people as ‘the lowest of the low’ turns social hierarchy into an image of extreme inferiority. This is not simply dissatisfaction with wages: Del resents being placed beneath others in dignity as well as income.

The phrase ‘the police vans hunting us down’ extends that hostility into the street. ‘Hunting’ presents young people as prey and the police as threatening pursuers rather than protectors. The collective ‘us’ makes Del’s complaint larger than an individual grievance.

Her sacking adds to the insecurity of her working life. Her anger at degrading treatment can be read as justified resistance; her use of that anger against Enid also exposes how external hostility can be redirected towards someone close to her.

The hospital party: a guest reduced to a cleaner

During the same confrontation, Del recalls a hospital staff Christmas party. Enid attends dressed for a celebration, but a nurse vomits and the matron orders Enid to clean it up in front of everyone.

Del begins with ‘You’re all dressed up and you look beautiful’. The description grants Enid individuality and dignity. It makes the sudden command, ‘matron tells you to clean it up’, especially humiliating: a guest is abruptly returned to her subordinate working role.

The sequence ends with ‘you get a mop and bucket and clean it up’. The ordinary objects make the humiliation concrete. Repeating the action of cleaning emphasises how quickly the celebration becomes labour for Enid. The matron’s authority and the nurse’s freedom to create the mess reveal an unequal workplace hierarchy. Within the play’s wider presentation of racism, that hierarchy also exposes the vulnerability of a Black working-class woman.

Pinnock uses realist prose dialogue, not a detached narrator. Del tells the story directly to the person who endured it, repeatedly addressing her as ‘you’. The party is recalled rather than staged, so the audience encounters both the original humiliation and Del’s painful use of it in a present argument. Del may be trying to make Enid acknowledge injustice, but she also wounds her mother by turning a humiliating memory into a weapon.

The argument escalates into physical action when Enid slaps Del. Dialogue gives way to a pause and Del’s departure, making the damage to their relationship visible on stage. Public inequality has helped fuel a private rupture.

Poverty means more than lacking money

Enid’s hospital cleaning, demanding workload and flat on an estate give material substance to the family’s circumstances. She works two jobs, seven days a week, and sacrifices her own clothes and comfort to provide for her daughters. Her hard work challenges any assumption that poverty results from laziness. It also explains why she places such hope in Viv’s education: she wants her daughters to have opportunities that cannot easily be taken from them.

As the play develops, Enid reveals the poverty of her Jamaican childhood and her determination to shield her daughters from its shame. However, financial struggle in London also involves isolation. Her contrast between sharing food in Jamaica and struggling alone in Britain shows that material opportunity is not the same as social support.

This complicates the disagreement with Del. Enid measures progress against the deprivation she remembers; Del measures her life against the dignity and opportunities she believes she should have in the country where she was born. Both perspectives have evidence behind them.

These experiences connect with the barriers faced by Caribbean migrants who came to Britain to work after the Second World War. Discrimination restricted access to housing and employment, and some migrants took jobs below their skills and qualifications. Their British-born children continued to face discrimination in the job market during the 1970s and 1980s. Pinnock makes these inequalities personal through work, wages and family arguments rather than presenting them as abstract statistics.

Scene 7: workplace racism enters the home

Late in the play, Brod tells Del about her father’s racial abuse at Smithfield meat market and his subsequent violence towards Enid. His account includes ‘If they won’t treat him like a human being outside’. The phrase identifies dehumanisation: the father is denied ordinary human dignity at work.

Brod contrasts that treatment with the father’s demand to be treated ‘like a king’ at home. The movement from ‘outside’ to the house shows how humiliation can be displaced into domination of someone more vulnerable. However, Brod’s explanation is a character’s account, not an instruction to excuse the father. A person can suffer racism and remain responsible for abusing another person.

Brod’s statement in Scene 7 that ‘no one care what he want to do to a black woman’ directs attention towards Enid’s lack of protection. Racism and male power intersect: she bears the consequences of her husband’s humiliation while her own suffering is disregarded.

Structurally, this revelation arrives late. The audience has already seen Del criticise her mother before learning more about what Enid survived. Pinnock therefore invites us to reconsider earlier judgements. Brod can be read as exposing the destructive reach of racism; his emphasis on the father’s suffering can also be questioned for shifting attention away from Enid. The most convincing interpretation recognises both the social pressure and the father’s responsibility.

Scene 8: Enid’s endurance is not indifference

At the end, Enid tells Del, ‘I see it. I see it’, referring to the mistreatment her daughter faces. Repetition gives her acknowledgement force. Her wish to ‘tear the place down’ reveals anger beneath the outward discipline that Del has mistaken for acceptance.

The ending changes our understanding of their conflict. Enid and Del are not simply a compliant mother and a rebellious daughter: both recognise injustice, but have different ways of surviving it. Their greater understanding does not remove racist institutions or poverty. It offers a more hopeful possibility within those conditions—honesty and recognition between mother and daughter.

Part (b): turning evidence into an argument

A useful paragraph moves from a claim to a short quotation, analyses Pinnock’s choices, and explains their significance for the question. For a question about another moment of exclusion, Scene 7 allows you to connect language with the late revelation of Enid’s past.

Worked paragraph — Part (b)

Pinnock presents racism as destructive beyond the workplace through Brod’s account of Del’s father in Scene 7. The phrase ‘like a human being’ suggests that racial abuse has denied him basic dignity, while his demand to be treated ‘like a king’ at home shows his attempt to replace humiliation with power over Enid. The contrast between these descriptions exposes the unequal treatment he suffers and the domination he then imposes. However, Brod’s explanation does not remove the father’s responsibility: Enid becomes the victim of his response to racism. By delaying this revelation until late in the play, Pinnock also makes the audience reconsider Del’s earlier accusations against her mother and recognise the suffering behind Enid’s apparent toughness.

Central argument

Racism and class restrict dignity, opportunity and security. Their effects reach into family relationships, but the characters respond differently.

Moments to recall

• Early, Scene 2: Brod’s nationality letter threatens his sense of belonging. Enid trusts payment and paperwork; ‘Secure what?’ challenges her confidence.
• Early confrontation: Del describes degrading café work, hostile managers and police pursuit. The hospital-party memory turns public humiliation into a family weapon.
• Middle: Enid’s account of poverty explains her hard work and hope in education. Material improvement does not prevent loneliness.
• Late, Scene 7: Brod reveals racism at Smithfield and the father’s domestic abuse. Explanation is not justification; the delayed revelation changes our view of Enid.