I Kept My Father's Accent Out of My Novel. I Have Regretted It Ever Since

My father speaks a English that took him fifty-eight years to build. It carries Warri and Benin City and a night school in Peckham and a decade of driving minicabs across a city that never quite learned his name. It is grammatical in ways the grammar books do not recognise. It is the most beautiful English I know. In my first novel, I erased it. I want to be honest about how it happened, because I do not think I am unusual, and because I think the small, well-meant erasures are the ones that do the most quiet damage. The kindness that wasn't The character was based on him. Not exactly — I gave…