Small Island - Andrea Levy

Small Island is a grim tale, full of grey rain filled skies and dirty London streets.  Even Jamaica seems grim and lonely with lost characters such as the Mr Philip the religious fanatic who lauds over his family meal times with talk of hell and damnation.  And then there is Mrs Ryder who with her Evangelist husband had sold up in America to come and set up a school for "poor black children".  Mrs Ryder, white, thin and nearly bald is a sad figure of loneliness. In Small Island, the margin begins it’s encounter with the center as Miss prim and proper teacher Hortense and her rough ex-airforce husband, Gilbert move to England.  There they meet Queenie, working class cockney landlady and Bernard her erstwhile almost forgotten husband.   The meeting of colony and coloniser is a huge disappointment for Hortense in particular with her airs and graces and self-importance.   Hortense has spent her early life in Jamaica learning to be and "English" lady.  She is shocked and feels betrayed both by her husband Gilbert who lives in a hovel with a piss pot under his bed and by the racism of the streets of London.    The two other main characters, Queenie and her husband Bernard are victims of the war as Queenie is left to fend for herself which is why she decides to let rooms in her home to black people despite opposition from her neighbours.   Bernard does not return until some three years after the end of the war only to find Queenie about to give birth to someone’s elses child.  Worse is to come as we discover the child is black and the empire turns on itself as Queenie begs on her knees for Gilbert and Hortense to take the child as their own "I never dreamed England would be like this.  Come, in what crazed reverie would a white Englishwoman be kneeling before me yearning for me to take her black child? There was no dream I could conceive so fanciful."