But they had seemed to be enjoying themselves, I suggested.
This saddened him further. I must be careful not to give way to unwarranted cynicism. We had been exposed to the hooligan element, a tiny hard core of thugs, who were not representative of the great mass of ordinary, decent sports lovers. These sorts of people not only brought the national pastime into disrepute but dragged the country down to a level one was more accustomed to expecting from less civilized people. Still, we must look on the bright side. I had been taught several useful lessons about the patriotism of the young. Having seen what fate awaited the Pope, I could imagine the treatment I would receive if these young patriots took against me. My training in Little Musing had given me the outlines of the camouflage needed if ever I was to travel safely in England. Now the time had come to put a London gloss on the good work.
Shiva Naipaul
[1945–85]
Shiva Naipaul was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad. His childhood was spent with his mother and five sisters, as his father died when he was seven years old and his older brother, the writer V. S. Naipaul, was living in London. Like his brother before him, Shiva Naipaul won a scholarship to Oxford. The journey to England marked Naipaul’s first experience of physical dislocation. Later, he would call all travel ‘a form of gradual self-extinction’.
Naipaul studied Chinese at Oxford. In 1967 he married Jenny Stuart, with whom he later had a son, Tarun. He began to write his first novel in 1968, his final year at university. Three years later, his completed manuscript was published as Fireflies (1971), an accomplished debut that won the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize, the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize and the Jock Campbell New Statesman Award. Fireflies explores the plight of second- and third-generation Indian immigrants, and the loss of ethnic and cultural identity that characterizes their changing relationship with the Indian communities. Like his second novel, The Chip-Chip Gatherers (1973), for which Naipaul won the Whitbread Literary Award, Fireflies is set in Trinidad. In both works, Naipaul expresses ambivalent feelings towards his country of birth and the often rigid structure of the Indian family.
The books that followed cover similar themes of class structure, racial tension and physical and emotional dislocation. Both North of South: An African Journey (1978) and Black and White (1980; later published as Journey to Nowhere: A New World Tragedy) investigate the social and political situation of post-colonial Africa and Guyana. In the novel A Hot Country (1983; later published as Love and Death in a Hot Country) Naipaul creates the country of Cuyama, a fictional amalgam of his observations of Africa and Guyana.
In 1984 he published Beyond the Dragon’s Mouth. This book, like the posthumously published An Unfinished Journey (1986), is a collection of short stories and essays that reflects Naipaul’s career as a writer of fiction and a traveller. His career was cut tragically short when Naipaul died of a heart attack in 1985.
A generation after his brother’s arrival in London, Shiva Naipaul describes in the following extract from Beyond the Dragon’s Mouth the same district of London, Earls Court, this time through avowedly ‘post-colonial’ eyes. Unlike his older brother, who still clung to many of the romantic visions that condition the colonial’s point of view, Shiva Naipaul sees little beyond the filth and grime, and has a thinly disguised contempt for the multicultural plurality of London.
Living in Earls Court
I have had the dubious distinction of having lived in Earls Court twice: once (for which I should be excused) right at the beginning when I had only just arrived in England; then again right at the end (when I should have known better) just before I left for India. On both occasions departure was a cause for celebration. I was never happy in Earls Court. The account I shall give of it, therefore, cannot be free from the bias that unhappiness necessarily entails. I view Earls Court through the jaundiced eyes of an ingrained dislike; and where others might see a raffish charm I see only a kind of horror. However, my prejudice should not be interpreted as an implied distaste for London as a whole. That is not the case. I have also lived in Notting Hill Gate, Stockwell, Fulham and Ladbroke Grove. In none of these areas – including Earls Court – did I stay longer than a year. Thus the experience derived from each tend to fuse into a single, indivisible history. On their own they are disjointed fragments. Earls Court is merely an episode – or rather, two episodes.
I was nineteen years old when I left Trinidad to come as a student to England. Coming as I did from the far outside, it was natural that I should think of London as existing in the round. Discrimination did of course develop later on. Ladbroke Grove, Notting Hill Gate, Earls Court … I began to appreciate that they all harboured their own peculiar vibrations. But, at the time, London was simply London: the Big City of which I had always dreamt.
For a few days immediately after I arrived I stayed with my brother in a hotel in Blackheath. The hotel was inhabited chiefly by the middle-aged and solitary. Memories of Blackheath are tinged with the semi-magical quality which invests the week of my arrival: the impression of fantasy – of unreal things happening in an unreal world – was strong. There was a visit to the Observatory at Greenwich. A white line painted on the floor of a light-washed room: the meridian. I remember standing on a grassy hill and looking down at the silver sweep of the Thames knitted with a spidery fretwork of cranes and ships’ masts. In a restaurant I ate my first rum-baba.
But the magic soon faded. The polite rituals of the hotel functioned in a void. I began to feel isolated in Blackheath. It seemed an infinity away from what I fondly imagined to be the centre of things. Where that was I had no clear idea. Neither could I say with any certainty what I expected to find when I got there. The pink glow kindling the sky nightly promised adventure. I wished to draw closer to the fiery source producing it. The Big City was beckoning.
Finally I saw a room advertised at a price I could just afford. I rang the number supplied. It turned out to be an Accommodation Agency. Was the room they had advertised still available? Unfortunately no. However – the lady’s voice tinkled encouragingly at the other end of the line – they had several like it on their books. Why did I not come to their office?
The office, a cramped cubicle approached up a tortuous flight of stairs, was on the Earls Court Road. A wiry woman in a luminously red cardigan was in charge. I introduced myself.
‘Ah! So you are the foreign gentleman who rang earlier.’ Her voice had shed its telephonic twinkle. But it was not unfriendly. ‘Come in and have a seat and we shall see what we can do for you. We have managed to fix up quite a few coloured people in our time.’ She moved briskly to a paper-cluttered desk and sat down. ‘Now you say you can’t afford more than five pounds a week …’
‘Maximum,’ I said quickly.
‘Quite, quite … mmm …’ She thumbed through a box of index cards. ‘Student?’ she enquired absently after a while.
‘Yes.’
‘Studying what?’
I told her. The words sounded impossibly big and foolish.
‘Really!’ Extracting an index card she frowned thoughtfully at it. She reached for the telephone and dialled. ‘Some of these landladies are a bit fussy when it comes to …’ She reverted to her telephonic twinkle. ‘Hello. Is that Mrs–? This is the – Accommodation Agency here. I’ve got a young foreign student who is looking for a room. He seems a nice quiet fellow. What’s that? Yes, I’m afraid he is. But … no, no. Not at all. Of course I understand.’ The receiver clicked down. She considered me. ‘Next time I think we’ll say straight off that you come from India. It’s better not to beat around the bush, don’t you agree? Anyway some of them don’t mind Indians so much.’
‘But I don’t come from India.’
‘You don’t?’ She stared at me. ‘But you look Indian.’
‘Well, I am Indian. But I was born in the West Indies.’
‘The West Indies!’ She seemed vaguely aghast.
I understood. Sufficient unto any man the handicap of being straightforwardly Indian or straightforwardly West Indian. But to contrive somehow to combine the two was a challenge to reason. An Indian from the West Indies! I was guilty of a compound sin.
‘We’ll say you are Indian,’ she said firmly. ‘It’s better not to confuse the issue. Don’t you agree?’ She beamed at me.
‘Perhaps we’d better forget the whole thing,’ I said.
‘Don’t give up so easily. We have fixed up a lot of coloured people in our time. Why not you?’ She gazed defiantly at the box of index cards.
This was my initiation in the sub-world of ‘racial prejudice’. I had read and heard about it at home: nearly everyone who had been to England had his own cautionary tale to tell. Now it was happening to me and I could not quite bring myself to believe in it. Of course I had noticed the slogans daubed on the walls of the tube stations, and morbidly deciphered the illiteracies displayed in the windows of newsagents. ‘Room to Let: Regret no Kolored.’ ‘Room to Let: European Gent. Only.’ ‘Room to let: Kolored Pipple Need Not Apply.’ These signs depressed and amused. It seemed incredible that they should refer to me.
I was surprised to find myself categorized as ‘coloured’: in Trinidad the term is applied to people of mixed blood – usually black diluted with a dash of ‘European’. I have always thought it a detestable euphemism. Nevertheless, since it was one of the basic words in the vocabulary of the boarding-house culture, I had (albeit under protest) to learn to live with it.
I waited while the lady dialled number after number. ‘… I’ve got a young Indian student here who is looking for a room …’ Her eyes were clouding with exhaustion. I stopped listening. Then, out of the blue: ‘Yes. Yes. As I said, he seems a nice, quiet type. I shall send him around straight away. He’s right here with me in the office.’ She put the receiver down and regarded me with an air of triumph. ‘I told you we could fix you up. Didn’t I?’
The house to which I was directed was on one of those streets that lead off the Earls Court Road and blossom into the sudden respectability of a tree-shaded garden square. A roster of names, each with its attendant buzzer, festooned the door. This was bedsitter land with a vengeance. The entrance hall smelled dismally of a mixture of disinfectant and polish. Keys jangling from a giant ring at her waist, the housekeeper led me up several curving flights of red-carpeted stairs towards the twilit region of the top floor. With jailer-like neutrality, she ushered me into a charmless cell, obviously the product of sub-division of what must once have been an average-sized room. An insubstantial hardboard partition, plastered over with a flowery wallpaper, rose with grim commercial finality to the ceiling. The furnishing was spartan: a narrow bed; a dresser with a mirror; a solitary, soiled armchair; a coffee table emblematically ringed with the marks of countless hot cups. The floor was covered by a strip of grey, threadbare carpet. Daylight filtered through a small sash window. A gas fire, inserted into a scorched recess, completed the desolation. This was not how I imagined it would be. The harshness of that room repelled me. Was this the romance of the city? What kind of adventure could spring from a cell such as this? At five guineas a week (without breakfast) it was more than I could really afford. But the prospect of starting from scratch (‘… I’ve got a young Indian student here …’) was equally intimidating. Despairingly, I said I would take it. The Accommodation Agency duly extorted its tribute of a week’s rent, and I moved in.
It was an introduction – which could have been gentler – into a new mode of existence. Since then I have lost count of the number of rooms in which I have slept. In Trinidad my geography was stable: I can recall no more than two or three rooms in the course of my nineteen years there. That cell in Earls Court initiated a nomadism which has persisted into the present and which shows no signs of abating. It has become second nature to me. Today, my attachment to Trinidad is sentimental; a child’s attachment to the place where he grew up. It does not go beyond that because my real life lies elsewhere – though precisely where it is difficult to say. In London, the vestigial Trinidadian ‘roots’ I had arrived with underwent a gradual petrification. But the city, while exacting its price, did not confer a new identity: I do not consider myself a Londoner. On a conventional assessment this must be counted as a loss. Yet, on the other hand, it ought to be added that I am not bothered by it. I have no desire either to fabricate new ‘roots’ or rediscover old ones. Lack of acquaintance has diminished to vanishing point my knowledge of what it means and feels like to ‘belong’ to a community. This is why I regard with nervous suspicion all those who proclaim its virtues in poetry, prose and politics.
The three weeks I spent in that room are among the unhappiest I can remember. A dreadful anonymity descended. In the mornings I went to the nearby Wimpy Bar where I drank several cups of coffee and pretended to be absorbed in the newspaper. At midday I went to a dark, dingy pub frequented by elderly charladies who drank bottled Guinness. I would buy a pint of bitter and a plate of cheese and tomato sandwiches. In the evening I went to a coffee bar manned by Italians, where I bought more sandwiches and drank more coffee. Through the plate-glass windows I would watch the life of Earls Court stream past. Then I would return to my cell and crawl into my narrow bed. I hardly ever saw my fellow inmates whose names decorated the front door. Two girls shared the room across the corridor. They would come in late, creaking furtively up the stairs and laughing softly. As they prepared for bed I could hear the surreptitious sounds of pop music from their record player – the house forbade anything of the sort after eleven o’clock. Next door – behind the partition – was a man who coughed terribly. Some nights, when he was especially racked, he would get up and pace the room, muttering to himself in between his spasms. Once I met the girls in the corridor but we passed without acknowledgement. Amazingly enough, I never set eyes on my cough-stricken neighbour.
The days slipped by in a haze of coffee, stale sandwiches and sickly beer. The visits I had planned – to palaces, museums, art galleries – were never made. I had become frightened of the city and my fright expressed itself in dulled curiosity and inertia. The glow lighting the sky nightly was transformed from a promise into a threat. I lost the desire to seek out its hidden source. My family to whom I had bid goodbye not that long ago seemed to belong to another life which had been snatched away from me. Hourly, Trinidad receded. I was being emptied; reduced to nothing in that room. How easy it is to be swallowed by the city! The legacy left by that time has not entirely vanished. Even now, I occasionally experience a thrill of fear when I suddenly come upon one of the dizzying vistas of anonymous urban housing and have to walk along streets that are like mirror reflections of each other. Though it was not what my innocence had envisaged, those three weeks were an adventure. But the adventure exists only in retrospect: at the time I was not even fully conscious of my misery.
Six years later – and under very different circumstances – I returned to Earls Court. Much had happened to me in the intervening period: I had completed an undistinguished four years at Oxford; I had acquired a wife; I had written my first novel. My boyhood was over. Something else had happened: my attitude to the city had altered. I had lost the desire to lay bare its secrets. Perhaps I had stopped believing there were any secrets to be laid bare. When I arrived in Earls Court for the second time it was my fourth change of address in two years. By then nomadism had become a habit. Shifting restlessly from one set of furnished rooms to another, I was living, in a sense, like a vagrant. The city was merely a convenient backdrop for my activities. While being in it I was not truly of it. No doubt writing and the private world it entails assisted in the process of withdrawal and detachment. I was leading an artificial and protected existence. Matters might have been difficult if I had been forced to earn my living in the ordinary way. As it was, I had little direct contact with the life lived around me. I observed, as it were, through glass.
Whether by day or by night, Earls Court knows no stillness; no moments of tranquillity. The big lorries thunder ceaselessly. On the Earls Court Road noise acquires a demonic quality, endowing the constant flow with an autonomous, impersonal character. Step out of your front door and the reverberating thunder breaks loose like a dammed wall of water obtaining release. The air is a soup of diesel oil and petrol fumes, rank and acrid to the taste. Have a window cleaned and within hours a mildewed sediment will spread like mould across the glass. It is the industrial equivalent of the encroaching jungle. Puny men, trapped in this tide, can meet sudden death. The drama unfolds with the rigidity of a sacrificial ritual: a screech of brakes; the peculiar thud of unyielding metal on soft human flesh; a pool of blood staining the asphalt; the chorus wail of a police siren. Early the next morning a truck of the Royal borough will arrive and wash away the lingering traces of the sacrifice into the gutter. The God has been appeased.
