Caribbean writing took a giant leap forward in 1948. The passengers disembarking from the Empire Windrush that year, recorded by British Pathé newsreel, signalled their metropolitan ambitions in stylish zoot suits with double-breasted jackets and fedora hats, rarely worn in Jamaica or Trinidad. Some of those pioneering émigrés found their way to the BBC World Service. There were few outlets for creative writing in the colonial West Indies; and the far-sighted BBC radio programme Caribbean Voices provided a platform, financial reward and critical appraisal for poems and short stories set in the region, boosting the fledgling careers of writers including George Lamming, VS Naipaul and Sam Selvon.
In between “swabbing out the shithouse” of various private clubs, Selvon penned The Lonely Londoners, a gold standard of wry, empathetic writing. His characters navigate the forbidding landscape of penury, piecemeal work and estrangement with mordant wit and comic pragmatism. The Lonely Londoners is one of the first Caribbean novels to consistently use dialect. Selvon’s daring is evident throughout, but never more so than when an impoverished migrant kidnaps a gull from Trafalgar Square and prepares it for his cooking pot.
Selvon’s Trinidad-born compatriot Naipaul also possessed rich comic writing potential but in A Way in the World – an autobiographical work with composite characters – he sneers at these Caribbean voyagers who he imagines are pitiful “shipwrecked men”. Naipaul’s proxy narrator strikes an unsettling chord as he recalls the black men on the streets of 50s London “in pin-stripe suits and bowler hats, with absurd accents”.
There’s a tendency as we age to tidy up anecdotes and cloak ourselves in a veil of respectability. But Wallace Collins’s Jamaican Migrant is the raw, unvarnished testimony of a West Indian abroad. At times Collins appears to step from the pages of Lonely Londoners in his depiction of postwar squalor – a world of fetid fumes from paraffin heaters, crammed tenements and basement shebeens. Ultimately he celebrates West Indians whose vitality is a threat to the host population – to starched lives yet to recover from the indignities of rationing.
George Lamming’s high-minded and experimental critique The Pleasures of Exile casts West Indians as latter-day Calibans at sea in a tempestuous Albion, and reflects on migrants’ “changing relation with the idea of England”. Lamming reveals how the regard with which the West Indians held the motherland is complicated by the unexpected antipathy towards the newcomers. The first migrant generation, he argues, offered British people a new, unflattering way of seeing themselves. In doing so he invokes Kipling’s “And what should they know of England who only England know?”
The Windrush story has become a foundation myth, but in Ormonde, Hannah Lowe reminds us that there were other ships too – one of which, the SS Ormonde, ferried her father, Ralph (aka Chick) to England in 1947. Her tender collection of poems conjures some of those on board the ship (boxer, chef, Chick). Taking the passenger list as a starting point, she reimagines their journeys and the inner voices of hope and anxiety that accompanied them. It is a feat of extraordinarily loving creativity.
• Colin Grant is writing a book about Caribbean migration to Britain to be published in 2019.
