The Lonely Londoners is set in post war England in the 1950’s a time when England was faced with a change in its social environment when people from the (former) British colonies started to move in large numbers to Britain in the search of a better future. The story depicts the movement of the West-Indians in post-second world war London. Britain’s post-war condition, as evoked in Selvon’s opening paragraphs, starts almost like like a fairy tale—“One grim winter evening” (L 23)—Selvon’s London seems to stretch back into history, to the infancy of Empire and up to its post-war waning. London, an ominous fog “sleeping restlessly over the city” gives the sensation of a London under duress (23). The city’s lights no longer shine out against the night sky in celebration of its centrality but only “show in the blur as if it not London at all but some strange place on another planet” ( 23). London, no longer confident as the center of empire, is repositioned as an alterable and even transitory space. At the same time, Selvon’s plants his story specifically in London where Moses, is found, like a native, hopping on “a number 46 bus at the corner of Chepstow Road and Westbourne Grove”(23). Selvon thus points to London’s internal tensions and to its altered situation in the new world.

Moses and his fellow-migrants are confronted with how the English city and its social structures overwhelm them and contradict their initial assumption of finding financial success. Members of Moses’ (Caribbean) community are not welcomed, as they had anticipated, and encounter great difficulty because of their ethnic background to settle amongst the white English community in London. Moses and his peers are faced with the challenge that in order for them to become accepted in this new social structure they may lose part of their individuality. Moses feels isolated from his fellow West Indians, and he accordingly warns the newly arrived Galahad that “It ain’t have anything like ‘ease me up’ or ‘both of we is countrymen together’ in the old London” ( 28). Selvon’s migrants tend to become more inward-looking and less responsive to the needs of others as the daily struggle for self-preservation means that they always “have matters on the mind” (37). Nonetheless, Moses, a London “veteran” (33), does feel a strong connection to his fellow countrymen, and the arrival of large numbers of new immigrants provides an outlet for his compassion as he takes on an almost fatherly role for many newcomers. Occasionally, Moses is ambivalent about this position and is sometimes “vex with himself that his heart so soft that he always doing something for somebody and nobody ever doing anything for him” (23). And yet he helps others so often that he is like “some liaison officer” (24), “like a welfare officer” (25) to both recent and more established immigrants. Moses travels to Waterloo station in “nasty weather to go and meet a fellar that he didn’t even know” (23). In so doing, Moses reveals an empathetic nature through which he helps newcomers “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” (L 25). Moses’ interactions with individual immigrants give him connections to his homeland in the West Indies, and it is “for old time sake” that he goes to meet one of his fellow countrymen, as requested by a mutual acquaintance in Trinidad (23)

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Racial intermixing is rejected in The Lonely Londoners, when “The father want to throw Bart out the house because he don’t want no curly-hair children in the family” (65) but it is also celebrated, as Moses describes: “Thus it was that Henry Oliver Esquire, alias Sir Galahad, descend on London to swell the population by one, and eight and a half months later it had a Galahad junior in Ladbroke Grove and all

them English people stopping in the road and admiring the baby curly hair when the mother pushing it in the pram as she go shopping for rations” (35).

City Identity

Selvon repeatedly emphasizes how ‘the boys’ (3) live in a different ‘world’ from most Londoners: “It have people living in London who don’t know what happening in the room next to them, far more the street, or how other people living. London is a place like that. It divide up into little worlds, and you stay in the world you belong to and you don’t know anything about what happening in the other ones except what you read in the papers. Them rich people who does live in Belgravia and Knightsbridge and up in Hampstead … they would never believe what it like in a grim place like Harrow Road or Notting Hill” (60). This extract is interesting because it shows the insular mindset of most Londoners during that time.