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Mark Hudson on Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners, Slightly Foxed 77

Sounds of the City

There are books that linger in the mind because of their stories, characters or settings. There are books of such tragic intensity you feel you’ll take certain incidents and phrases with you to the grave. And there are books so funny that the mention of them induces an involuntary chuckle. Then there are the books that stay with you through the sheer verve and musicality of their language. The Lonely Londoners (1956) is that kind of book.

I first encountered Sam Selvon’s masterpiece by chance when it was read on BBC Radio 4’s A Book at Bedtime by the great Trinidadian-British actor Rudolph Walker. I was immediately entranced by the tragi-comic misadventures of Moses, Captain, Sir Galahad and the book’s other fictional young West Indian immigrants, barely surviving in the bleak bedsits of post-war Notting Hill and Bayswater. But what captivated me most was the warmth, humour and gregarious energy of Selvon’s writing, with its unmistakable undertow of pathos and melancholy. Embodied in the sway and lilt of Walker’s voice, these were qualities I could sense resonating through the static of time, decades after the programme was broadcast.

The Lonely Londoners defines a pivotal moment in British social and cultural history: the arrival of what is now known as the Windrush Generation. The magnificent rhetorical roll of its language, couched in a subtly adapted Trinidadian dialect, makes it not just a vital snapshot of a place and time, but a universal masterpiece of the urban condition, a work that feels epic, though it is actually very short.

While I love the book’s humour, it is its sense of the pathos of the immigrant experience, a feeling of permanent displacement and nostalgic yearning, that lingers in the memory. That is certainly the quality most evident in the opening passages, when ‘on a grim winter�

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There are books that linger in the mind because of their stories, characters or settings. There are books of such tragic intensity you feel you’ll take certain incidents and phrases with you to the grave. And there are books so funny that the mention of them induces an involuntary chuckle. Then there are the books that stay with you through the sheer verve and musicality of their language. The Lonely Londoners (1956) is that kind of book.

I first encountered Sam Selvon’s masterpiece by chance when it was read on BBC Radio 4’s A Book at Bedtime by the great Trinidadian-British actor Rudolph Walker. I was immediately entranced by the tragi-comic misadventures of Moses, Captain, Sir Galahad and the book’s other fictional young West Indian immigrants, barely surviving in the bleak bedsits of post-war Notting Hill and Bayswater. But what captivated me most was the warmth, humour and gregarious energy of Selvon’s writing, with its unmistakable undertow of pathos and melancholy. Embodied in the sway and lilt of Walker’s voice, these were qualities I could sense resonating through the static of time, decades after the programme was broadcast. The Lonely Londoners defines a pivotal moment in British social and cultural history: the arrival of what is now known as the Windrush Generation. The magnificent rhetorical roll of its language, couched in a subtly adapted Trinidadian dialect, makes it not just a vital snapshot of a place and time, but a universal masterpiece of the urban condition, a work that feels epic, though it is actually very short. While I love the book’s humour, it is its sense of the pathos of the immigrant experience, a feeling of permanent displacement and nostalgic yearning, that lingers in the memory. That is certainly the quality most evident in the opening passages, when ‘on a grim winter’s evening, when it had a kind of unrealness about London, with a fog sleeping restlessly over the city’, the protagonist Moses Aloetta, an apparently grumpy but inwardly kind-hearted Trinidadian carpenter, gets himself out of his warm bed to head down to Waterloo ‘to meet a fella who was coming from Trinidad on the boat train’. This, you’re instantly persuaded, is the Windrush moment as it mostly actually happened. Rather than the crowds of smartly dressed West Indians packed on to ocean liners, depicted in contemporary newsreels, we’re shown a steady influx of shivering, bewildered individuals or small groups who are met by the watchful stares of compatriots they barely know. These are distant acquaintances of acquaintances who, if Moses is anything to go by, don’t welcome new rivals in the struggle for lodging and employment, when they themselves are ‘still catching their arse in Brit’n’. Moses, who has been in Britain for a decade, worries that the latest wave of incomers are, as he observes, ‘real hustlers, desperate’. Yet he feels obliged to help these ‘boys’ find work and places to stay, while making sure to scatter them around London: ‘for you didn’t want no concentrated areas in the Water [Bayswater, where he lives] – as it is, things bad enough already’. Yet for all that Moses prides himself on his hard-headed realism, he finds himself beset by a sense of indefinable nostalgia and regret as he enters Waterloo Station, a sense of how little he’s achieved in his time in London, and a yearning he never imagined he’d feel to be heading back towards the tropics. The notion of ‘blackness’ is frequently invoked: in a memorable moment one of the characters, Sir Galahad, addresses the colour, berating it for all the problems he’s facing. Yet ethnicity is only specified in relation to the few African characters. We’re left to assume that the other ‘boys’ are Afro-Caribbean. In fact, while Selvon appears intensely involved in their thought processes and quasi-familial social relationships – and gives a sense of the half-humorous ambivalence between Trinidadians and Jamaicans – he himself was of Trinidadian-Indian heritage. Born in 1923, he worked as a journalist before moving to London in 1950, where he took various menial jobs including a clerical position at the Indian High Commission, while writing his first novel and articles for the London Magazine and the New Statesman. The Lonely Londoners began as a collection of anecdotes, but it didn’t start to cohere until he shifted the literary frame from Standard English to what he called ‘dialect’. These anecdotes are framed as encounters with a cast of larger-than-life characters, as though we ourselves are moving through Moses’s social networks in the cramped rooms and grimy pavements of Bayswater and Notting Hill – then both painfully run-down areas – where ‘the boys’ chase ‘pieces of skin’ (mostly white) and endlessly tap each other for funds. Captain is a fly-by-night Nigerian law student, who has gone ‘stupid when he arrive in the big city’, abandoned his studies and had his allowance stopped by his father, a king no less. Dressed in a green-striped suit and a pair of suede shoes, Cap engages in a series of elaborate subterfuges designed to avoid his ever having to work and involving expensive possessions (other people’s watches and mohair coats), rented rooms (again other people’s), money (borrowed, but never repaid) and, of course, women. Of various European nationalities they all fall for his sweet and innocent smile. He even marries a French girl, who believes she’s heading for a privileged life in Nigeria, but he absconds immediately, heading for the ‘all night café in the Gate where Cap does always hang out, coasting lime over a cuppa or a cup of coffee, sitting there eyeing every woman and trying to make contact’. At the other end of the spectrum is Sir Galahad, the incorrigible romantic, a 25-year-old Trinidadian who mysteriously doesn’t feel the cold and arrives in midwinter London wearing a light tropical suit and carrying only a toothbrush. Like many of the characters he nurtures a mythic sense of the greatness of the metropolis, even as he struggles on its grimmer pavements. His ideal is to walk through the West End ‘cool as a lord’ and meet a ‘craft’ (a girl) at Piccadilly Circus, a place ‘that represent life, that circus the beginning and ending of the world’. Five Past Twelve, a weed-smoking van driver, so called because he’s ‘blacker than midnight’, delights in provoking the socially aspirant Harris, a sometime Port of Spain street urchin who wants to assimilate at the higher levels of British society. The latter’s attempt to stage a genteel steel band party in St Pancras Town Hall provides one of the book’s comic highpoints. With the observation that ‘wherever in London that it have working class, there you will find a lot of spades’ (a term used by the immigrants themselves), Selvon expands his view outward over the city with its contrasts between rich and poor and its divisions into self-contained worlds: ‘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’. Yet in this relatively innocent period before the 1958 Notting Hill riots there was still ‘a kind of communal feeling with the working class and the spades, because when you poor things does level out’. Observing the women who lost fiancés in the war and are now ‘pottering about the Harrow Road like if they lost, a look in their eye as if the war happened unexpected and they still can’t realize what happened to the old Brit’n’, Selvon goes on a magnificent imaginative roll, his eye scanning the city, homing in on the window of a ‘fully furnished flat (rent bout 10 or 15 guineas, Lord)’, where a woman sleeps late ‘after a night at the Savoy or Dorchester’. Hearing an old man in the street below singing ‘in a high falsetto’ she drops down a ‘tanner’ (six old pence). And whether she does that because the ‘sound of that voice quavering in the cold outside touch the old heart’ or as a mindless reflex makes no difference to the old man, Selvon observes. Here we’re given a more universal sense of a city in which everyone, whatever their ethnicity or economic status, seems fated to play a particular role, and where people give, whether to their friends or to the old fella playing the mouth organ beside the cinema queue, not out of generosity but from ‘a kind of shame’. With the arrival of summer Selvon’s prose acquires a marvellous rhapsodic uplift in the book’s climactic stream-of-consciousness. There’s something positively Chaucerian, not just in the sense of nature’s exuberant lustful profusion, but in the great, gulping phrases in which he evokes the girls promenading along Bayswater Road in their light summer frocks, the boys ‘coasting lime’ in the park with ‘all them pretty pieces of skin taking suntan . . . and everywhere you turn the English people smiling isn’t it a lovely day as if the sun burn away all the tightness and strain that was in their faces’. There isn’t a comma, let alone a full stop, for almost ten ecstatic pages. It’s only when he mentions the negotiating of ‘ten shillings or a pound’ that it occurs to the reader that all these light-limbed young women thronging Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens are prostitutes of varying degrees of professionalism. You’re left wondering if there was anyone in pre-permissive era London who wasn’t somehow on the game. The book ends on the same wistful note with which it began, as Moses stares into the Thames, wondering if all his experiences in London have taught him anything, and sensing beneath the boys’ endless banter and storytelling ‘a great aimlessness, a great restless swaying movement that leaving you standing in the same spot’. Yet he senses beneath these feelings ‘a greatness and a vastness . . . and though he ain’t getting no happiness out of the cogitations he still pondering’. While you may start The Lonely Londoners with the impression that you’re experiencing immigrant life told straight from the hip, you may conclude, as I did, that it is as much a work of observation and imagination as it is of personal experience. Selvon imbues his novel with the rhythms of the Caribbean marketplace, calypso and the church sermon. And taking wild liberties with literary form, darting in and out of Standard English with literary quotes and cultural references, he demonstrates the endless expansiveness and elasticity of those rhythms. That’s what makes this book not just a marvellously vivid record of a time and a place, but also a great work of modernist literature. The Lonely Londoners is both a snapshot of the painful birth pangs of multi-cultural Britain, and a formative element in the creation of that world. I wish it had been five times as long.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 77 ©  Mark Hudson 2023


About the contributor

Mark Hudson’s novel The Music in My Head, about a white British music entrepreneur stranded in a fictional African city, was praised by the Village Voice as offering ‘music from the inside and a mad sprawl of a book that evokes it every which way’. His other books include Our Grandmothers’ Drums, Coming Back Brockens and Titian, the Last Days. He is also the art critic of the Independent.

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