She told us: You have to ‘hintegrate’
Lenny describes his mother Winifred Henry, a seamstress and factory worker who died in 1998, as a “warrior” who had a huge influence on his life.
“She had our backs. She was at work all day so she did rule by fear. She was tough because she needed to be,” he says.
Lenny has Sir Trevor giggling as he launches into an impression of his mum, who had lined his Jamaican family in the hallway of their Midlands home as kids and warned: “You have to ‘hintegrate’ with the people of Dudley, or you won’t fit in.”
Winifred once stormed into Lenny’s school “like Godzilla with a handbag” to yell at a teacher who had kicked him up the backside for throwing paint in art class. Just a couple of weeks later, Lenny recalls, he nearly drowned in a swimming pool and it was that teacher who jumped in fully clothed to save him.
“She was nice as pie to him then!” says Lenny, of his mum. “Britain in 1957 when she came over was different to what she thought it was going to be like. She thought it was going to be milk and honey and it wasn’t. It was no blacks, no Irish, no dogs, in every single place that you went.”