The Lonely Londoners

by Sam Selvon

  The London these ‘boys’ survive in constantly changes its face as Selvon evokes a variety of moods ranging from desire, to exhilaration, despair and frustration. Sir Galahad is the prime vehicle for Selvon’s love of the city and it is he who presents the other side of the coin from that of the world-weary Moses. As alter-ego to Moses, it is Galahad’s voice that constantly expresses the optimism of the ‘summer is hearts’ lyricism and it is Galahad too, as cocky mock-epic hero, who is able to confidently walk the streets of the city, with a wardrobe to impress, feeling ‘like a king’. In spite of dire warnings from Moses, who ‘Lock up in that small room, with London and life on the outside’, Galahad’s sometimes naive exuberance nevertheless allows a different kind of London to emerge. Whereas Moses lives in a dark world of bleak interiors with ‘thoughts so heavy he unable to move his body’, Galahad’s ambitious perambulations in the wider world outside – ‘the centre of the world’ – reflect an element of utopianism, a faith that things will work out: ‘Always from the first time he went … to see Eros and the lights, that circus [Piccadilly] have a magnet for him, that circus represent life … is the beginning and ending of the world’. It is Galahad too in his humorous ‘ballad’ with the pigeon who has the resources for constant renewal as he adapts to finding cheap food on the London streets.

  In fact, one of the most uplifting moments in the book can be found in Selvon’s long prose poem to London (pp. 92–102), a painful and lyrical love song, dedicated to ‘liming’ in Hyde Park and delicately counterpointed between the déjà vu prophet voice of Moses and Galahad’s more youthful and innocent zest. Polyphonic like jazz, or the blues, it evokes the mood of a modernist epiphany as a more regenerative vision of the city struggles to the surface. Here Selvon as black modernist not only generates new and fresh perceptions of the city but its previously awesome spaces are also transformed and creolized:

  all these thing happen in the blazing summer under the trees in the park on the grass with the daffodils and tulips in full bloom and a sky so blue oh it does really be beautiful to hear the birds … and see the green leaves come back on the trees and in the night the world turn upside down and everyone hustling that is London oh Lord Galahad say when the sweetness of London get in him … and Moses sigh a long sigh like a man who live life and see nothing at all in it and who frighten as the years go by wondering what it is all about.

  This almost choric voice surfaces again towards the end of the novel as the ‘boys’ gather in Moses’s room as if it ‘confession’: ‘The changing of the seasons, the cold slicing winds … sunlight on green grass, snow on the land, London particular … in the grimness of winter, with your hand plying space like a blind man’s stick … the boys coming and going, working, eating, sleeping, going about the vast metropolis like veteran Londoners’.

  There is no beginning or end to the experiences of the boys in The Lonely Londoners. As Cap puts it at one point, voicing the seriousness of a philosophical coda that underpins the entire novel: ‘… is so things does happen in life. You work things out on your own mind to a kind of pattern, in a sort of sequence, and one day bam! something happen to throw everything out of gear …’. The surface fragmentation or conscious disorganization of the novel’s structure is thus part of its main direction, that, ‘Under the kiff kiff laughter, behind the ballad and the episode, the what-happening, the summer is hearts … is a great aimlessness, a great restless, swaying movement that leaving you standing in the same spot’. Only Moses, who has almost merged in consciousness by the close with the narrating voice, and regularly descends like Orpheus into the underworld, seems to perceive the need to forge a new language for existence. As the ‘boys’ congregate every Sunday morning, breathlessly swapping well-worn anecdotes, we witness Moses’s increasing detachment from the group. We leave him on a warm summer’s night, pensively looking down into the void of the River Thames, attempting to find words to express some meaning in his life: ‘When you go down a little, you bounce up a kind of misery and pathos and a frightening – what? He don’t know the right word, but he have the right feeling in his heart’. As Selvon ironically forewarns us, perhaps hinting at how his black Londoners might one day become immortalized by his art:

  Daniel was telling him how over in France all kinds of fellars writing books what turn out to be best-sellers. Taxi-driver, porter, road-sweeper – it didn’t matter. One day you sweating in the factory and the next day all the newspapers have your name and photo, saying you are a new literary giant.

  He watch tugboat on the Thames, wondering if he could ever write a book like that, what everybody would buy.

  Susheila Nasta, 2006

  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.

  When Moses sit down and pay his fare he take out a white handkerchief and blow his nose. The handkerchief turn black and Moses watch it and curse the fog. He wasn’t in a good mood and the fog wasn’t doing anything to help the situation. He had was to get up from a nice warm bed and dress and come out in this nasty weather to go and meet a fellar that he didn’t even know. That was the hurtful part of it – is not as if this fellar is his brother or cousin or even friend; he don’t know the man from Adam. But he get a letter from a friend in Trinidad who say that this fellar coming by the SS Hildebrand, and if he could please meet him at the station in London, and help him until he get settled. The fellar name Henry Oliver, but the friend tell Moses not to worry that he describe Moses to Henry, and all he have to do is to be in the station when the boat-train pull in and this fellar Henry would find him. So for old time sake Moses find himself on the bus going to Waterloo, vex with himself that his heart so soft that he always doing something for somebody and nobody ever doing anything for him.

  Because it look to Moses that he hardly have time to settle in the old Brit’n before all sorts of fellars start coming straight to his room in the Water when they land up in London from the West Indies, saying that so and so tell them that Moses is a good fellar to contact, that he would help them get place to stay and work to do.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ Moses tell Harris, a friend he have, ‘I never see thing so. I don’t know these people at all, yet they coming to me as if I is some liaison officer, and I catching my arse as it is, how I could help them out?’

  And this sort of thing was happening at a time when the English people starting to make rab about how too much West Indians coming to the country: this was a time, when any corner you turn, is ten to one you bound to bounce up a spade. In fact, the boys all over London, it ain’t have a place where you wouldn’t find them, and big discussion going on in parliament about the situation, though the old Brit’n too diplomatic to clamp down on the boys or to do anything drastic like stop them from coming to the Mother Country. But big headlines in the papers every day, and whatever the newspaper and the radio say in this country, that is the people Bible. Like one time when newspapers say that the West Indians think that the streets of London paved with gold a Jamaican fellar went to the income tax office to find out something and first thing the clerk tell him is, ‘You people think the streets of London are paved with gold?’ Newspaper and radio rule this country.

  Now the position have Moses uneasy, because to tell truth most of the fellars who coming now are real hustlers, desperate; it not like long time when forty or fifty straggling in, they invading the country by the hundreds. And when them fellars who here a long time see people running from the West Indies, is only logic for them to say it would be damn foolishness to go back. So what Moses could do when these fellars land up hopeless on the doorstep with one set of luggage, no place to sleep, no place to go?

  One day a set of fellars come.

  ‘
Who tell you my name and address?’ Moses ask them.

  ‘Oh, we get it from a fellar name Jackson who was up here last year.’

  ‘Jackson is a bitch,’ Moses say, ‘he know that I seeing hell myself.’

  ‘We have money,’ the fellars say, ‘we only want you to help we to get a place to stay and tell we how to get a work.’

  ‘That harder than money,’ Moses grunt. ‘I don’t know why the hell you come to me.’ But all the same he went out with them, because he used to remember how desperate he was when he was in London for the first time and didn’t know anybody or anything.

  Moses send the boys to different addresses. ‘Too much spades in the Water now,’ he tell them. ‘Try down by Clapham. You don’t know how to get there? They will tell you in the tube station. Also, three of you could go to King’s Cross station and ask for a fellar name Samson who working in the luggage department. He will help you out.’

  And so like a welfare officer Moses scattering the boys around London, for he don’t want no concentrated area in the Water – as it is, things bad enough already. And one or two that he take a fancy to, he take them around by houses he know it would be all right to go to, for at this stage Moses know which part they will slam door in your face and which part they will take in spades.

  And is the same soft heart that have him now on the bus going to Waterloo to meet a fellar name Henry Oliver. He don’t know how he always getting in position like this, helping people out. He sigh; the damn bus crawling in the fog, and the evening so melancholy that he wish he was back in bed.

  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 nine-ten 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 boat-train 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: ‘Aye Watson! What the hell you doing in Brit’n boy? Why you didn’t write me you was coming?’ And they would start big oldtalk with the travellers, finding out what happening in Trinidad, in Grenada, in Barbados, in Jamaica and Antigua, what is the latest calypso number, if anybody dead, and so on, and even asking strangers question they can’t answer, like if they know Tanty Simmons who living Labasse in Port of Spain, or a fellar name Harrison working in the Red House.

  But Moses, he never in this sort of slackness: the thought never occur to him to go to Waterloo just to see who coming up from the West Indies. Still, the station is that sort of place where you have a soft feeling. It was here that Moses did land when he come to London, and he have no doubt that when the time come, if it ever come, it would be here he would say goodbye to the big city. Perhaps he was thinking is time to go back to the tropics, that’s why he feeling sort of lonely and miserable.

  Moses was sitting there on a bench, smoking a Woods, when a Jamaican friend name Tolroy come up.

  ‘The boat-train come yet?’ Tolroy ask, though he know it ain’t come yet.

  ‘No,’ Moses say, though he know that Tolroy know.

  ‘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.’

  ‘What I do is my business,’ Tolroy say, taking offence.

  ‘Yes, I ain’t say is a bad thing, I trying to do the same thing ever since I come to this country. I was just thinking bout when you yourself did first come, how I help you to get a job in the factory, and how you have so much money save and I ain’t have cent. So it go, boy. You still living Harrow Road?’

  ‘Yes. But now the old lady coming I will have to look for a bigger place. You know about any?’

  ‘Not my way. But Big City was telling me yesterday it have a house down by the Grove what have some vacant rooms – why you don’t see him and find out?’

  ‘I will see him tomorrow. You have a cigarette?’

  ‘I just smoking the last.’

  Tolroy sit down on the bench with Moses, and the two of them watching Waterloo station, all the things that happening, all the people that coming and going.

  ‘Where the guitar?’ Moses ask.

  ‘I didn’t bring it, man,’ Tolroy say.

  When Tolroy did left Jamaica he bring a guitar with him to Brit’n, and he always have this guitar with him, playing it in the road and in the tube, and when he standing up in the queues.

  ‘We better get platform ticket,’ Moses say, and they was just in time, for the boat-train pull in and people start to come off the train. Moses stand up out of the way with his hands in his pocket, not interested in the passengers, only waiting for this fellar Henry to come so he could get back home out of the cold and the fog.

  It had a Jamaican fellar who living in Brixton, that come to the station to see what tenants he could pick up for the houses that he have in Brixton. This test when he did first come open up a club, and by and by he save up money and buy a house. The next thing you know, he buy out a whole street of houses in Brixton, and let out rooms to the boys, hitting them anything like three or four guineas for a double. When it come to making money, it ain’t have anything like ‘ease me up’ or ‘both of we is countrymen together’ in the old London. Sometimes he put bed and chair in two or three big room and tell the fellars they could live in there together, but each would have to pay a pound. So you could imagine – five-six fellars in one room and the test coining money for so. And whenever a boat-train come in, he hustling down to Waterloo to pick up them fellars who new to London and ain’t have place to stay, telling them how Brixton is a nice area, that it have plenty Jamaicans down there already, and they would feel at home in the district, because the Mayor on the boys’ side and it ain’t have plenty prejudice there.

  While Moses smiling to see the test hustling tenants, a newspaper fellar come up to him and say, ‘Excuse me sir, have you just arrived from Jamaica?’

  And Moses don’t know why but he tell the fellar yes.

  ‘Would you like to tell me what conditions there are like?’ The fellar take out notebook and pencil and look at Moses.

  Now Moses don’t know a damn thing about Jamaica – Moses come from Trinidad, which is a thousand miles from Jamaica, but the English people believe that everybody who come from the West Indies come from Jamaica.

  ‘The situation is desperate,’ Moses say, thinking fast, ‘you know the big hurricane it had two weeks ago?’

  ‘Yes?’ the reporter say, for in truth it did have a hurricane in Jamaica.

  ‘Well I was in that hurricane,’ Moses say. ‘Plenty people get kill. I was sitting down in my house and suddenly when I look up I see the sky. What you think happen?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The hurricane blow the roof off.’

  ‘But tell me, sir, why are so many Jamaicans immigrating to England?’

  ‘Ah,’ Moses say, ‘that is a question to limit, that is what everybody trying to find out. They can’t get work,’ Moses say, warming up. ‘And furthermore, let me give you my view of the situation in this country. We can’t get no place to live, and we only getting the worse jobs it have –’

  But by this time the infant feel that he get catch with Moses, and he say, ‘Thank you,’ and hurry off.

  Moses was sorry, it was the first time he ever really get a good chance to say his mind, and he had a lot of things to say. Though one time they wanted t
o take out his photo. It happen while he was working in a railway yard, and all the people in the place say they go strike unless the boss fire Moses. It was a big ballad in all the papers, they put it under a big headline, saying how the colour bar was causing trouble again, and a fellar come with a camera and wanted to take Moses photo, but Moses say no. A few days after that the boss call Moses and tell him that he sorry, but as they cutting down the staff and he was new, he would have to go.

  Meanwhile Tolroy gone down by the bottom of the train, stumbling over suitcase and baggage as he trying to see everybody what coming off the train at the same time.

  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.’