'Writing the book was a huge feat': Lenny Henry releases candid autobiography

In Who Am I, Again? the comic talks for the first time about defining moments in his childhood and how they helped inspire a comedy career that would go on to span four decades.

The book, published by Faber & Faber today, covers his early childhood growing up on Dudley's Buffery estate.

Henry, aged 61, speaks openly about the racist abuse he suffered while at Dudley's Blue Coat secondary modern on Bean Road.

But he also revealed his unique way of standing up to the bullies, laying the foundations for his future career.

"For a brief period, I’d had a fight every single day with this kid, let’s call him Danny Waverly. He clearly didn’t like the way I looked.," he writes. "Every day, the same greeting as usual. There he was, as soon as I walked through the school gates, with his fists up. A racist slur and then a fighting blur," Henry explains.

"Now, one thing everybody knows about me is that I cannot fight. If you asked my sister Kay whether I can handle myself in a scrap, she would throw back her head and cackle like a witch.

"I was hopeless. But every day I’d be rolling around on the ground with Danny Waverly, who hated me for the sole reason that I was black. I was tired of the constant scrapping. I needed to think my way out of this.

"The particular escape route I chose that morning would lay the foundation for my future career.

"I said something like: ‘Not this again Waverly. Ya must really fancy me, ’cos you’re always tryin’ to get me to roll around on the ground with ya.’

"‘Here we go,’ I carried on. ‘You hit me, I hit you, we fall on the ground and hug. Why don’t we go and have dinner and a movie first?’ ‘You could buy me a ring – mek it official?’

"Now, normally, whenever these situations would occur at the school gates, other kids would gather in a circle and yell, ‘fight, fight, fight!’.

"This time, these kids did me the huge favour of actually laughing at my attempts at humour.

"Waverly still gave me one or two pops to the head, but the laughter made me feel immune. I kept on making the funnies even as he continued to kick and punch.

"Eventually, someone in the crowd said, ‘Jesus, leave him alone, man.’ The rest of the crowd joined in, and soon he simply stopped and walked away. I had a handle on what to do now. I had a weapon – humour. Result.

"By the time I was 12 or 13, I’d had an epiphany. I knew I could make people laugh with the things I said, but now I was doing something else: I’d begun to impersonate voices, people, things, all the time," writes Henry.

Henry talks openly about finding out that Bertie, the man he had been told was his uncle, was actually his father and how his 'world had been flipped by a cosmic spatula".

He had been conceived after his mother Winifred has come to the UK from Jamaica in the 1950s ahead of her husband and children to find work.

She met Bertie while living in lodgings in Dudley and he helped her when she got pneumonia and with finding work. Then she became pregnant and when Winston arrived in 1959, Henry had already been born.

At the age of 10, he was introduced to Bertie and told: "He's your uncle and you should know him." Henry thought it was strange but did as he was told. Then when he was 18, the truth was finally revealed to him by Bertie's son Lloyd.

"The secret of my real birth father was finally revealed to me as adolescence dawned, triggering great guilt and shame on my part. I was horribly embarrassed whenever I clocked Bertie around Dudley.

"Sometimes I’d see him when I was in the park with my friends. He might amble out of some pub, see me across the street and yell at the top of his voice, ‘Len!’ and I’d have to cross the road and say hello to him. He might give me some pocket money in front of people. I would die.

"Clearly, he wanted to bond, but to me it felt too late, " he writes.

"The main feeling I had about the whole ‘new dad’ situation was that although Bertie was my father by blood, Winston – whether he liked it or not – was the guy who had raised me. This new situation was interesting, but it didn’t change the infrastructure," adds Henry

The book continues from his school days to his early career after he won New Faces at the age of 16, becoming a TV star on shows such as Tiswas and The Lenny Henry Show.

"In 2016, one of the producers of New Faces called me and asked if I wanted to see my first performance. Watching all those years later, I saw in my youthful eyes the commitment to this new life.

"It took huge chutzpah to stand there, aged 16, and go, ‘Here I am, have this.’ I sat there in tears, watching that kid and thinking, ‘Where did that come from?," he writes.

It ends before he meets comedian and actress Dawn French to whom he was married to for 25 years and with whom he has a daughter, Billie, aged 28.

The comic will soon start a 34-date tour of Britain which opens at Birmingham Hippodrome on October 20.

It will include a show in his home town of Dudley on November 22 and Wolverhampton Grand Theatre on November 27.

In part one of the show, Lenny will recall stories from life growing up in the Black Country.

After an interval, he will be interviewed by broadcaster and author Jon Canter before taking questions from the audience.

Speaking about the tour, he said: "Writing the book was a huge feat and I’m very proud of it. The show promises to be an evening of memories, laughter and fun – I can’t wait to get started.”