Racism
As one might expect in a story about West Indian immigrants in London in the fifties, racism is a major element. But the narrator doesn’t focus on it in polemical way. Like everything else, racism enters into the story filtered through the idiosyncrasies of the stylistic way the story is being told:
“To introduce you to all these characters would take you into different worlds, don’t mind all of them is the same colour! But if you want to start with Poor, he does traffic in dope cigarettes. Nobody don’t know which part he does get them from. He have a way of disappearing from the scene for days and weeks, then he reappear as if he was there all the time. And always, the same impression on his face, as if he is a walking statue or painting. Always cool, on top of the world, as if he have a Secret. To go into more detail—tell you where he come from originally, whether he six foot tall or five foot six, whether he have big eyes and a small nose—what difference it make to you? All you interested in is that he black—to English people, every black man look the same.”
Poverty
The men at the center of the story are not exactly what would you describe as sitting in butter when it comes to finances. They immigrants to London from a region of the world that is itself notoriously poverty-stricken and the move to England hardly results in an overnight windfall. The extremities of their financial indigence is put across with imagery:
“Well, one day Gallows lost this five pound. He went back down the road looking for it. He search his room. He stop people on the road asking them if they see his fiver anywhere? To lost a fiver like that was no joke. It hurtful enough when you have to pay income tax, or a landlord bleeding you for the rent, or the boss deducting money for club fund and pension and insurance and that sort of thing. But to have a fiver disappear just like that, as if it never exist, I mean, that really hurt Gallows. In his mind he already spend that five pounds—three for rent, two for rations. Imagine facing a whole week and not having to worry.”
Philosophy
For the most part, the narrator is not one to engage in long, extended philosophical flights of fancy. He is a thoughtful and philosophically complex figure, but this is not a story designed to give him opportunities to go off on tangents. But that doesn’t mean he can’t when he wants to:
“Of all living things, Man is the only one who does worry. From the minute he born he have to start hustling for food, clothes and shelter, and he hardly live a few years before he have to begin to worry about death. And in them few years, think of all the contention and bafflement and the fights and arguments and struggles and hardships and sorrows. So really speaking, if it have fellars who seem to be breezing through life without a care, you have to say good luck to them. If a fellar could afford to laugh skiff-skiff at something what making you cry, how you could blame him? You wish you could of laugh yourself!”
London Town
London is a metropolis viewed through the narrative perspective of West Indian eyes. The result is, perhaps surprisingly, not all that particularly different from what most Americans might themselves think of the city based on other media representations. What is interesting is the manner in which this commonality of view is presented:
“As he light up he wonder what London was like outside. Funny thing in this country, you could never tell what sort of day waiting to pounce on you. It might be raining, sleeting, snowing, shining, bright, dull—you could never tell. With the curtains drawn, is as if another world out there. Sometimes Battersby uses to speculate, like, Sun shining today, and go and pull the curtain to see. When he first come to Londontown, he uses to listen to the weather forecast on the radio. The radio was transi, by the side of the bed, he pay four pound ten for it second hand from the market, it only picking up the Light, the Home, and Luxembourg. But it didn’t take long for Bat to realise that when it come to weather forecasting, them fellars don’t know their arse from their elbow.”
