Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
What’s next?
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.
So whereas Maria Nugent talks about the impact of colonialism on Jamaica, Hinds gives us the flip-side of that in these interviews with West Indians in London. And what’s his view?
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.
It must be painful to buy into the aesthetic of the class system and discover, when you arrive, that you’re at the bottom of it.
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.
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Ian Thomson is a writer, critic and journalist. He is the author of Primo Levi: A Life (Hutchinson, 2002), which won the Royal Society of Literature’s W H Heinemann Award in 2003. His account of contemporary Jamaica, The Dead Yard, was published by Faber in 2009. ‘I think we have a view of Jamaica as being a rather laid-back place where there are no problems,’ he says. ‘Although, in my experience, in Jamaica when they say “no problem” there is one. The other side of all of this is that it is quite an uptight culture in many ways, and there’s a lot of Victorian morality, particularly with the churchgoing population, which is massive in Jamaica. There is a lot of what they call a “fenky-fenky” attitude towards sex, which is actually quite prudish.’ He says 1950s Britain was unmindful of the Commonwealth and 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 yet Jamaicans, British subjects, were not treated as such.
