Journey to an Illusion

"Donald Hinds’s Journey to an Illusion: The West Indian in Britain . It’s one of the great books to have come out of the British-Jamaican experience. Hinds worked on the London buses in the 1950s as a ‘clippie’; his job was to clip tickets. The book is a memoir made up of a series of interviews that he conducted with West Indians in between hours on the buses. He then made of this mesh of interviews something rather special. One thing that makes this book so interesting is the fact that Jamaicans, when Donald Hinds was in London in the 50s, were not numerous. An entire day – an entire week – could go by on a double-decker without him seeing another black face. Well, just as Nugent had expressed disgust at the behaviour of British white planters in Jamaica, so Donald Hinds, coming to the so-called ‘mother country’, found himself disillusioned. A recurring theme in the book is Hinds’s discovery that Britain was not only unmindful of the Commonwealth but disinclined to help Jamaicans. Italians in Britain after the war, selling ice cream and confectionery, were made to feel more welcome, despite having fought on Hitler’s side in the conflict. And here he was a British subject and yet was not treated as such. Before he came to London, Hinds had been a teacher in Jamaica and had read Dickens and Wordsworth, and watched endless genteel films – ‘tea party movies’ from Gainsborough Studios and the like. The racial antipathy he found in England was especially galling for him on that account. I think what happened with Hinds was that he was favourably disposed toward the British public and the idea, even, of Empire, until the race disturbances happened in 1958, which dramatically altered the way he looked at Britain. Yes. But I think it’s interesting to see the way the Jamaicanisation of London that Hinds foresees in this book quickened after independence in 1962, when more Jamaicans came to Britain. London was then poised to become the most Jamaican city in Europe. The dynamics that Hinds witnessed in the 50s – all that has changed now. Britain’s indigenous culture is now so influenced by Jamaica that a Jamaican inflection is hip among white British teenagers. Black Jamaican culture is youth culture in London; Hinds to a certain extent had foreseen this."