The Lonely Londoners

"He came over to London from Trinidad in the 1950s, part of the Windrush immigration. He was among the first black, immigrant writers to be published in this country. The Lonely Londoners was published in 1956. He sees the fog as yet another reason why someone from the West Indies would feel this was an isolating place. Not only are they experiencing the coldness of the British people, who they’d been led to expect would welcome them—all they’re getting from these people is discrimination and suspicion—but also they’re in an environment where the fog settles on the day and you can’t even see the sun. The opening sequence of The Lonely Londoners shows our main guide—called Moses, probably based on Selvon himself—having to get on a double-decker bus to go and meet a new arrival at Waterloo Station. He’s very reluctant to do this, but people write to him and ask him to meet people, and he feels that he’s got to do it. He’s really annoyed about it because he’s had to get out of his nice, warm bed, and the fog is delaying his journeys. Buses were as hampered by fog as any body else, often conductors would have to walk in front of the bus with a torch or handkerchief and guide it along the road because the driver simply couldn’t see in front of him. Moses blows his nose and on this white handkerchief you get these black particles that have filled up his nose. For me, that’s a sign of the way he has been made to feel that he’s contaminating this white society. Selvon is not easy to read. He quite often dips into creolised English, but it creates a lot of atmosphere. Although these people are very miserable, they create a society amongst themselves. There are some parts of the book that are very funny. One of the immigrants goes to meet a cousin. Only the cousin in meant to have come, but in fact he has bought his aunt, his mother. At one point the aunt is chucking coal on the fire because she’s so cold, and another character says, “Why are you putting all that coal on the fire? You’re creating more of this fog!” She says, “What else am I meant to do to keep warm?” And of course, she’s showing the dilemma that many people in London experienced. You keep warm by putting coal on the fire, but by doing that you create more fog. It’s cyclical. Yes, when the tourist board was trying to promote London as a place to visit they slightly cursed the fact they had this fog. But then when London’s air was cleaned up, tourists would come over and say, “Where’s the fog? I’d expected to see one and I’m very disappointed.” Nathaniel Hawthorne writes about the fog, in the later nineteenth century Chinese visitors are rather frightened by the fog when they’re part of it, but they also see it as rather beautiful, as rather mysterious. Because they don’t have to get to work every day, because they’re on holiday, they can just enjoy it through their hotel windows. People still expect London to be wreathed in fog, tourists still complain about it. After the Second World War one of the reasons the Clean Air Act came into existence was because people wanted to see some kind of benefit from having fought a major war. There was a major fog in 1948, ’52, ’62. Suddenly people were saying, “This isn’t what we fought a war for. We want to have a cleaner environment, we don’t want to have to wash our net curtains every week because they’re getting filthy from fog. We actually want to see an improved London society.” In The L-Shaped Room , Lynn Reid Banks shows us her main character, Jane—who’s pregnant, alone, and poor—at one of her lowest moments when she thinks she’s having a miscarriage and she’s coming home from a heavy meal and gets completely lost in a fog. She has to hold lampposts to get from one point of the street to the next. She grabs a lamppost and is feeling so unwell she starts to fall down, clinging on for dear life, and she smells the urine from the dogs. There is a feeling that Londoners should want better than this, they should want a better environment for their children, and I think that’s why the 1956 clean Air Act came into being."