Part 3: The Riots & the Ending
Building Toward the Riots
Part 3 intensifies both the personal and political strands of the novel. Maureen is in hospital, so Leon is now living with her sister Sylvia, and he is consumed by his mission to find Jake. Meanwhile, the streets of Handsworth are crackling with tension. De Waal juxtaposes Leon’s private grief with the community’s collective anger, building toward the moment when both erupt simultaneously.
De Waal uses the riots as a structural parallel: just as the community has been pushed to breaking point by racism and poverty, Leon has been pushed to breaking point by the loss of his brother. Both erupt at the same moment — personal rage and political rage become one.
The build-up to the riots is woven through Part 3 in fragments: conversations Leon overhears between adults, a heightened police presence, neighbours boarding up windows. Leon doesn’t fully understand what is happening politically, but he absorbs the atmosphere of fear and anger. De Waal uses this technique to maintain the child’s-eye view while still communicating the historical context.
Leon’s Search for Jake
Leon’s attempts to find Jake intensify in Part 3. He becomes more resolute and resourceful, gathering information, memorising addresses, and planning how to reach his brother. This quest drives the plot forward and provides the novel with its momentum. It also highlights the absurdity of the situation: a nine-year-old is fighting an entire institutional system alone.
Dual timelines: The personal narrative (Leon searching for Jake) and the political narrative (community tension building toward riots) run in parallel, converging at the climax.
Shortened chapters: De Waal uses shorter, more urgent sections as the novel approaches its climax. Prose becomes punchier, sentences shorter.
Sensory escalation: Sound, heat, and smell intensify — sirens, burning, shouting. Leon’s inner world mirrors the external chaos.
Restricted information: Leon doesn’t understand everything happening around him, which creates tension for the reader who recognises the danger he is walking into.
The Riots: Climax
The climax arrives when the Handsworth riots explode. Leon is out on the streets during the violence. De Waal places him physically in the chaos — fire, breaking glass, running figures, police charges. This is both terrifying and liberating for Leon. The external destruction mirrors his internal world: everything he has suppressed finally detonates.
The riots function on two levels: literally, as a historical event Leon lives through; and symbolically, as the moment when suppressed rage — both personal and communal — breaks through the surface of everyday life.
During the riots, Leon experiences a moment of epiphany. Surrounded by destruction, he understands something about his own anger — that it is not just about Jake, but about a whole system that sees him as less valuable because of his skin colour. The personal and the political fuse. De Waal does not spell this out explicitly; instead, she shows Leon’s perception shifting through imagery and sensory detail.
The Ending: Resolution and Ambiguity
The novel’s ending is deliberately ambiguous. De Waal does not provide a neat, happy conclusion. Leon does not get Jake back in a simple reunion. Instead, the ending offers a more complex form of hope: Leon has survived, he has Maureen, he has a sense of identity, and there is the suggestion — but not the certainty — of future contact with Jake.
Optimistic reading: Leon has found stability with Maureen, developed a stronger sense of identity, and shown extraordinary resilience. The suggestion of future contact means hope is not dead.
Pessimistic reading: The system has won. Jake is permanently separated. Leon has had to accept an outcome he never chose. The damage is done — no amount of love from Maureen can replace a brother.
Critical reading: De Waal refuses a happy ending because real life doesn’t offer one for most care-experienced children. A neat reunion would be dishonest. The ambiguity is the point — it leaves the reader with the discomfort that the system leaves its children with.
De Waal’s choice of ending serves her political purpose. If Leon got Jake back easily, the novel would suggest the system is ultimately fair. By refusing neat resolution, De Waal forces the reader to sit with the injustice — to leave the novel angry, as Leon is angry, as the community is angry.
Structural Significance of the Ending
The novel’s structure is significant: it moves from domesticity (Part 1) through institutional separation (Part 2) to social explosion (Part 3). This mirrors the pattern of oppression itself — private suffering exists silently until it becomes impossible to contain, then erupts publicly. De Waal suggests that what happens to children in care is not separate from what happens on the streets during riots; they are connected expressions of the same systemic failures.