This is not really a book review, although I did re-read, and enjoy The Lonely Londoners as part of the #1956club. It is rather an excuse to pull out some quotations, share some research and images, and post a quite remarkable documentary.

Along the way my journey took me deep into the North Kensington of the novel – a part of London I once knew well – and into the experience of those who came to the UK from the Caribbean during WW2, the Empire Windrush, and the post-Windrush years. Not to mention the Caribbean contribution to WW2, the politics of the 1950s, and calypso

One grim winter evening, when it had a kind of unrealness about London, with a fog sleeping restlessly over the city and the lights showing in the blur as if is not London at all but some strange place on another planet, Moses Aloetta hop on a number 46 bus at the corner of Chepstow Road and Westbourne Grove to go to Waterloo to meet a fellar who was coming from Trinidad on the boat train.

This is the same foggy unreal London of Dickens and Eliot but now in a new vernacular and seen through a different lens. 

As he waits at the station Moses runs into Tolroy, a Jamaican friend, who is there to meet his mother: 

‘Boy, I expect my mother to come,’ Tolroy say, in a nervous way, as if he frighten at the idea.
‘You send for she?’ Moses say.
‘Yes,’ Tolroy say.
‘Ah, I wish I was like allyou Jamaican,’ Moses say, ‘Allyou could live on
two-three pound a week, and save up money in a suitcase under the bed, then
when you have enough you sending for the family. I can’t save a cent out of my
pay.’

When the train arrives, Tolroy is in for a surprise:

A old woman who look like she would dead any minute come out of a
carriage, carrying a cardboard box and a paperbag. When she get out the train
she stand up there on the platform as if she confuse. Then after she a young girl
come, carrying a flourbag filled up with things. Then a young man wearing a
widebrim hat and a jacket falling below the knees. Then a little boy and a little
girl, then another old woman, tottering so much a guard had was to help she get
out of the train.
‘Oh Jesus Christ,’ Tolroy say, ‘what is this at all?’
‘Tolroy,’ the first woman say, ‘you don’t know your own mother?’
Tolroy hug his mother like a man in a daze, then he say: ‘But what Tanty
Bessy doing here, ma? and Agnes and Lewis and the two children?’
‘All of we come, Tolroy,’ Ma say. ‘This is how it happen: when you write
home to say you getting five pounds a week Lewis say, “Oh God, I going
England tomorrow.” Well Agnes say that she not staying at home alone with the
children, so all of we come.’
‘And what about Tanty?’
‘Well you know how old your Tanty getting, Tolroy, is a shame to leave she
alone to dead in Kingston with nobody to look after she.’
‘Oh God ma, why you bring all these people with you?’ Tolroy start to
shiver with a kind of fright.

Tolroy lives in one room on the Harrow Road.

Arrival

These are beautiful photographs but when you read the descriptions and the news stories they accompanied you can hear the rising panic as the immigrants arrive through the 1950s. These British citizens are usually described as Jamaicans, but of course, they came from across the Caribbean islands and mainland. In the novel, Moses is well aware of the native unease. 

Moses is at Waterloo to meet Henry Oliver known as Galahad. It’s winter and Moses is wearing woolen underwear and an overcoat he bought on Portobello Road. Galahad arrives in a tropical suit with no luggage and, worse still, no duty-free cigarettes or rum. 

Galahad has a lot to learn and Moses takes him under his wing. There’s the weather, and racism, and how to find your way around, and find employment and a place to live. 

The first priority is a job and in the morning confident, optimistic full of bravado Galahad sets off to find the Labour Exchange in Paddington. 

Galahad make for the tube station when he left Moses, and he stand up there on Queensway watching everybody going about their business, and a feeling of loneliness and fright come on him all of a sudden…

On top of that, is one of those winter mornings when a kind of fog hovering around. The sun shining, but Galahad never see the sun look like how it looking now. No heat from it, it just there in the sky like a force-ripe orange. When he look up, the colour of the sky so desolate it make him more frighten. It have a kind of melancholy aspect about the morning that making him shiver. He have a feeling is about seven o’clock in the evening: when he look at a clock on top a building he see is only half-past ten in the morning. By and by he drift down to Whiteleys. Suddenly he stand up and look back. He wonder if he could find his way back to Moses room! Jesus Christ, suppose he get lost? He ain’t even remember the name of the street where Moses living. In the panic he start to pat pocket to make sure he have money on him, and he begin to search for passport and some other papers he had. A feeling come over him as if he lost everything he have – clothes, shoes, hat – and he start to touch himself here and there as if he in a daze.

An exasperated Moses turns up and helps Galahad find the bus, pay the fare and sign on at the Labour Exchange. 

The Mother Country and the Old Diplomacy

Moses gives Galahad some advice and explains the “old diplomacy” aka racism.

‘All right mister London,’ Galahad say, ‘you been here for a long time, what you would advice me as a newcomer to do?’ ‘I would advice you to hustle a passage back home to Trinidad today,’ Moses say, ‘but I know you would never want to do that. So what I will tell you is this: take it easy. It had a time when I was first here, when it only had a few West Indians in London, and things used to go good enough. These days, spades all over the place, and every shipload is big news, and the English people don’t like the boys coming to England to work and live.’

‘Why is that?’ Galahad ask.

‘Well, as far as I could figure, they frighten that we get job in front of them, though that does never happen. The other thing is that they just don’t like black people, and don’t ask me why, because that is a question that bigger brains than mine trying to find out from way back.’

‘Things as bad over here as in America?’ Galahad ask.

‘That is a point the boys always debating,’ Moses say. ‘Some say yes, and some say no. The thing is, in America they don’t like you, and they tell you so straight, so that you know how you stand. Over here is the old English diplomacy: “thank you sir,” and “how do you do” and that sort of thing. In America you see a sign telling you to keep off, but over here you don’t see any, but when you go in the hotel or the restaurant they will politely tell you to haul – or else give you the cold treatment.’

The novel has no real plot as such but it is rather a series of loosely connected scenes and vignettes that tell the stories of Moses’ friends – the “boys” who gather in his room on Sunday mornings for mutual support and “oldtalk” – nostalgia about home. As Moses says, “This is a lonely miserable city, if it was that we didn’t get together now and then to talk about things back home, we would suffer like hell.”

The Romance of the Big City

The changing of the seasons, the cold slicing winds, the falling leaves, sunlight on green grass, snow on the land, London particular. Oh what it is and where it is and why it is, no one knows, but to have said: ‘I walked on Waterloo Bridge,’ ‘I rendezvoused at Charing Cross,’ ‘Piccadilly Circus is my playground,’ to say these things, to have lived these things, to have lived in the great city of London, centre of the world. To one day lean against the wind walking up the Bayswater Road (destination unknown), to see the leaves swirl and dance and spin on the pavement (sight unseeing), to write a casual letter home beginning: ‘Last night, in Trafalgar Square …’

Moses is the world -weary veteran of the city who has been in London for almost a decade. he has seen it all and known it all. Galahad is the newcomer, full of optimism and excited by being in the places he has always heard so much about. 

“Always, from the first time he went there to see Eros and the lights, that circus have a magnet for him, that circus represent life, that circus is the beginning and the ending of the world. Every time he go there, he have the same feeling like when he see it the first night, drink coca-cola, any time is guinness time, bovril and the fireworks, a million flashing lights, gay laughter, the wide doors of theatres, the huge posters, everready batteries, rich people going into tall hotels, people going to the theatre, people sitting and standing and walking and talking and laughing and buses and cars and Galahad Esquire, in all this, standing there in the big city, in London. Oh Lord.”

“Piccadilly Circus- that circus have a magnet for him, that circus represent life, that circus is the beginning and the ending of the world.”

 “Take it easy,” Moses warns, knowing that the harsh reality will do for Galahad too.

Galahad relishes the allure of the big city and when he’s not working he likes to dress well and live large. 

This is London, this is life oh lord, to walk like a king with money in your pocket, not a worry in the world.

Moses knows that dreams have a way of shriveling in the harsh reality of life in London and the novel is about the shattering of those illusions.

Moses has many observations about the separate worlds of rich and poor in the city and the alienation that can come with living in a big city where the only way you know someone has died is when the milk bottles start to accumulate on the doorstep.

Change

London is also a city in transition. Shops and food for example: 

The grocery it had at the bottom of the street was like a shop in the West Indies. It had Brasso to shine brass, and you could get Blue for when you washing clothes, and the fellar selling pitchoil. He have the pitchoil in some big drum in the back of the shop in the yard, and you carry your tin and ask for a gallon, to put in the cheap oil burner. The shop also have wick, in case the wick in your burner go bad, and it have wood cut up in little bundles to start coal fire. Before Jamaicans start to invade Brit’n, it was a hell of a thing to pick up a piece of saltfish anywhere, or to get thing like pepper sauce or dasheen or even garlic. It had a continental shop in one of the back streets in Soho, and that was the only place in the whole of London that you could have pick up a piece of fish. But now, papa! Shop all about start to take in stocks of foodstuffs what West Indians like, and today is no trouble at all to get saltfish and rice. This test who had the grocery, from the time spades start to settle in the district, he find out what sort of things they like to eat, and he stock up with a lot of things like blackeye peas and red beans and pepper sauce, and tinned breadfruit and ochro and smoke herring, and as long as the spades spending money he don’t care, in fact is big encouragement, ‘Good morning sir,’ and ‘What can I do for you today, sir,’ and ‘Do come again.’

Tante Bessy

There are many tragic and comic vignettes about the life of the ‘boys’ but for me, it’s Tante Bessy – who we first meet embarrassing Tolroy at Waterloo – who steals the show.

Tante knows how to shop (and gossip) and she is fearless in dealing with the shopkeeper:

Well Tanty used to shop in this grocery every Saturday morning. It does be like a jam-session there when all the spade housewives go to buy, and Tanty in the lead. They getting on just as if they in the market-place back home: ‘Yes child, as I was telling you, she did lose the baby … half-pound saltfish please, the dry codfish … yes, as I was telling you … and two pounds rice, please, and half-pound red beans, no, not that one, that one in the bag in the corner …’

Tante even gets the shopkeeper to change his credit policy. 

Like how some people live in small village and never go to the city, so Tanty settle down in the Harrow Road in the Working Class area. When Ma come home from work she used to ask about the outside world and Ma would tell she about tube train and Piccadilly Circus, and how the life so busy that if you don’t watch out a car knock you down and you dead in the road.

‘Why you don’t take a tube and go and see the big stores it have in Oxford Street,’ Ma say, but Tanty shake her head. ‘I too old for that now,’she say, ‘it don’t matter to me, I will stay here by the Harrow Road.’

But all the same it rankle Tanty that she never travel in tube or bus in London, and she make up she mind secretly to go if she get the chance and she have a good reason.

Finding the key to the food cupboard gone, Tante – who has hardly ventured beyond a small patch of the Harrow Road – takes off to retrieve the key from Ma. This means a first time trip on the tube and the bus to venture into the West End where Ma washes dishes at a Lyons Corner house. 

She put on the old fireman coat that Tolroy did get for her, and she tie a piece of coloured cloth on her head, and she went out to the Harrow Road. Tanty did hear how everybody saying that if you want to find out something you must ask a policeman, so though she see plenty people that she could ask she ignore them and look for a policeman. She didn’t see one till she reach by the Prince of Wales. ‘You could tell me where Greatport Street is, please,’ Tanty say. The policeman look at her close and say: ‘Where?’ ‘Greatport Street,’ Tanty say. The policeman scratch his head. ‘Are you sure of the name?’ ‘Something like that,’ Tanty say, sure that the policeman would know. ‘You don’t mean Great Portland Street?’ he say. ‘Yes, that is it!’ Tanty say. ‘I thought it had a “land” in it.’

The policeman sets her in the direction of Westbourne Park station and off she sails:

Though Tanty never went on the tube, she was like those people who feel familiar with a thing just by reading about it and hearing about it. Everybody does talk about the tubes and take them for granted, and even Tanty with she big mouth does have something to say: ‘How you come? By tube? You travel on the Bakerloo Line? And you change to the Central at Tottenham Court Road? But I thought it was the Metropolitan Line that does pass there!’ But was plenty different when she find sheself in the station, and the idea of going under the ground in this train nearly make she turn back. But the thought that she would never be able to say she went made her carry on.

She arrives at the Lyons and gets the key from Ma who asks her how she got there.

I come by tube,’ Tanty say cool, as if she travelling every day. ‘How else you think? But I going back by bus.’ ‘Stay and eat a food as you here already,’ Ma say. ‘What!’ Tanty say, ‘eat this English food when I have peas and rice waiting home to cook? You must be mad! But don’t let me keep you from your work.’

And the bus trip home completes the adventure

And Tanty went away, feeling good that she make the trip from Harrow Road at last.

‘I hope this bus don’t turn over,’she tell the conductor, because it didn’t have room below and she had to go upstairs.

She was so frighten that she didn’t bother to look out of the window and see anything, and when she get off at the Prince of Wales she feel relieved. Now nobody could tell she that she ain’t travel by bus and tube in London.

Tante at the Fete

One more Tante story. Moses’ friend – the ladedah Harris – has organized a dance with a bar and a steel band at St Pancras Town Hall.  All the boys are there – Five Past Twelve, Big City, Galahad, Daniel, Cap, Bart – plus Tolroy and his Ma and Tante. Harris is anxious that the “boys” behave, not show him up and not let down the side with all the important white people there.

Tante knows Harris from when he was a small boy from back home and she is having none of it:

‘My boy!’she say, putting she hand on his shoulder, ‘I been looking for you all over. What happening, you avoiding the old lady, eh? Too much young girl here to bother with Tanty, eh?’

Harris get so vex, but he know that if he talk rough to Tanty she might get on ignorant. Lucky for him he was dancing near the outside of the crowd, so he stop and draw aside. ‘Listen,’ he say to Tanty, ‘can’t you see I am dancing with this young lady?’

‘What happen for that?’ Tanty say, eyeing the white girl who look so embarrass. ‘You think I can’t dance too? I had a set already with Tolroy, ask him.’

‘Well,’ Harris say, trying hard to keep his temper, ‘will you kindly wait until I am finished? We shall dance the next set.’

‘You too smart, when the next set come I wouldn’t find you,’ Tanty say, taking a firm hold of Harris. ‘Tell this girl to unlace you: you know what they playing? “Fan Me Saga Boy Fan Me”, and that is my favourite calypso. These English girls don’t know how to dance calypso, man. Lady, excuse him,’ and before Harris know what happening Tanty swing him on the floor…

Needless to say, the boys take Harris’s admonitions to heart,  and make quite the scene. The rowdy ‘boys’ – high and drunk – are disruptive but it is Tante Bessy who provides the real subversion and carnival spirit. 

Waterloo and Nostalgia

Nostalgia and longing is a big theme in the novel. At the start of the novel Moses muses about the nostalgic pull of the station. 

When he get to Waterloo he hop off and went in the station, and right away in that big station he had a feeling of homesickness that he never felt in the nineten years he in this country. For the old Waterloo is a place of arrival and departure, is a place where you see people crying goodbye and kissing welcome, and he hardly have time to sit down on a bench before this feeling of nostalgia hit him and he was surprise. It have some fellars who in Brit’n long, and yet they can’t get away from the habit of going Waterloo whenever a boattrain coming in with passengers from the West Indies. They like to see the familiar faces, they like to watch their countrymen coming off the train, and sometimes they might spot somebody they know:

And the film? Well, it’s John Schlesinger’s quite wonderful day in the life of Waterloo Station – Terminus 1961. 

Beehives on the roof, a cat in the signal box and another in Lost Property, and all the comings and goings of a day in the life of a busy railway station. And yes – there is a scene where the boat train pulls in from Southampton 

North Kensington

In the 1950s millions of people in Britain lived in substandard housing many of them in cities still showing the bomb damage of WW2. There was an acute housing shortage. with families living in single rooms and all kinds of inadequate and over-crowded units. In rural areas, old army camps were pressed into service as temporary housing that lasted for years. In the cities, condemned buildings – which meant they were essentially uninhabitable – were still in use. Slum clearance and new housing were slow to happen. 

In areas of North Kensington whole areas that had been in decline for decades fell even further into disrepair.  Single-family houses had long been turned into boarding houses and broken up into many units.  Nine room houses could well serve nine families, with a single toilet out the back and a single source of water and, of course, no bath. When the immigrants arrived it was in parts of the city like this where they could find places they could afford to live. Moses lives in the Colville ward in North Kensington –  W11 – notorious for unscrupulous landlords, overcrowding and rotting houses. Tolroy lives just to the north – across the railway and now across the Westway – in the Golborne ward off the Harrow Road. 

This is how Moses describes the housing: 

The place where Tolroy and the family living was off the Harrow Road, and the people in that area call the Working Class. Wherever in London that it have Working Class, there you will find a lot of spades. This is the real world, where men know what it is to hustle a pound to pay the rent when Friday come. The houses around here old and grey and weatherbeaten, the walls cracking like the last days of Pompeii, it ain’t have no hot water, and in the whole street that Tolroy and them living in, none of the houses have bath. You had was to buy one of them big galvanise basin and boil the water and full it up, or else go to the public bath. Some of the houses still had gas light, which is to tell you how old they was. All the houses in a row in the street, on both sides, they build like one long house with walls separating them in parts, so your house jam-up between two neighbours: is so most of the houses is in London. The street does be always dirty except if rain fall. 

The children play in the street because there is nowhere else.

It always have little children playing in the road, because they ain’t have no other place to play. They does draw hopscotch blocks on the pavement, and other things, and some of the walls of the buildings have signs painted like Vote Labour and Down With the Tories. The bottom of the street, it had a sweet-shop, a bakery, a grocery, a butcher and a fish and chips. The top of the street, where it join the Harrow Road, it had all kind of thing – shop, store, butcher, greengrocer, trolley and bus stop. Up here on a Saturday plenty vendors used to be selling provisions near the pavements. It had a truck used to come one time with flowers to sell, and the fellars used to sell cheap, and the poor people buy tulip and daffodil to put in the dingy room they living in.

The isolation, alienation and the social class division of native London:

It have people living in London who don’t know what happening in the room next to them, far more the street, or how other people living. London is a place like that. It divide up in little worlds, and you stay in the world you belong to and you don’t know anything about what happening in the other ones except what you read in the papers. Them rich people who does live in Belgravia and Knightsbridge and up in Hampstead and them other plush places, they would never believe what it like in a grim place like Harrow Road or Notting Hill. Them people who have car, who going to theatre and ballet in the West End, who attending premiere with the royal family, they don’t know nothing about hustling two pound of brussel sprout and half-pound potato, or queuing up for fish and chips in the smog. People don’t talk about things like that again, they come to kind of accept that is so the world is, that it bound to have rich and poor, it bound to have some who live by the Grace and others who have plenty.

Moses notices the old people who potter about the area as if lost.

A lot of the men get kill in war and leave widow behind, and it have bags of these old geezers who does be pottering about the Harrow Road like if they lost, a look in their eye as if the war happen unexpected and they still can’t realise what happen to the old Brit’n. All over London you would see them, going shopping with a basket, or taking the dog for a walk in the park, where they will sit down on the bench in winter and summer. Or you might meet them hunch-up in a bus-queue, or waiting to get the fish and chips hot. On Friday or a Saturday night, they go in the pub and buy a big glass of mild and bitter, and sit down by a table near the fire and stay here coasting lime till the pub close. The old fellars do that too….

This is the turf Colin MacInnes wrote about in Absolute Beginners. It’s where they filmed The L-Shaped Room. The corner of Southam Street and Golborne road is where Kelso Cochran – a carpenter from Antigua – was stabbed to death in an unprovoked racist attack in 1959. 

It is the part of London Roger Mayne made famous, especially with his photographs of Southam Street. Take a look at these haunting photographs of an area in transition. It’s a dirt poor London of turf, street community, migrants, Teddy Boys, racial tension, desolation and change, And always the children – on the streets and on the bomb sites – finding places to play and imagine.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.