Page 133: The Lonely Londoners
I remember first coming to London in 2018. I wanted to arrive and be changed by the city, in what way I didn’t know, and I still don’t know, but I had expectations of it and I was certain it would rise up to meet them. Instead, I remember, quite vividly, feeling utterly out of my depth by my second day. It was 8 o'clock on a Tuesday morning, and I hadn’t even started my commute yet.
I thought I’d forgotten my oyster card, I struggled to get on the bus, and I almost got on the wrong one (I still get on the wrong trains today). I suddenly felt completely discombobulated by the city. I thought, how on earth could this be happening on my second day? There was a distinct loneliness to the feeling, with so many people everywhere I looked, that I felt silly and suddenly too eager, and all my bright-eyed-bushy-tailed enthusiasm started to wilt.
By the afternoon I was hopeful again, but the feeling of unease had stuck with me and lodged itself somewhere, it seems, for good. London felt like too much. Too fast, too cold, too bristly. The sky was too grey and the buses too red. Everything was too noisy and there were too many people; too much ground to cover—why was everything so far away anyway? It was as if everything I’d been told about the city, by films and literature and TV, was a figment of the global imagination. Truly, I felt like I’d been a little conned. But over time, this feeling gave way to a sort of love for the city, one that too, has lodged itself somewhere for good.
I tapped my oyster card onto the brilliantly red bus, found the last available seat on the jam-packed double-decker, and by the following year, I’d moved there. Now, in 2025, I’m still here.
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Page 133 of The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon:
‘The changing of the seasons, the cold slicing winds, the falling leaves, sunlight on green grass, snow on the land, London particular. Oh what it is and where it is and why it is, no one knows, but to have said: ‘I walked on Waterloo Bridge,’ ‘I rendezvoused at Charing Cross,’ ‘Piccadilly Gardens is my playground,’ to say these things, to have lived these things, to have lived in the great city of London, centre of the world. To one day lean against the wind walking up the Bayswater Road (destination unknown), to see the leaves swirl and dance and spin on the pavement (sight unseeing), to write a casual letter home beginning: ‘Last night, in Trafalgar Square…’
Here, repetition sets the pace. A rhythm is established, and we almost nod along with the description and the features of London listed by its actions: changing, slicing, falling. It’s interesting to note how these verbs that, on their own, could be seen as harmful, dangerous, unpredictable even, are paired with the nouns: seasons, winds, leaves. These things all carry an intrinsic beauty to them, an assumed harmlessness; we are, ultimately, romantic about change, about the wind, about leaves, and the writing here is romantic about London.
We then have the idyllic, what to a British reader, would be stock-like images of ‘sunlight on green grass’ and, ‘snow on the land’. They’re very simple and very effective. To Trinidadian-born Selvon, born so close to the equator, snow is not a generic, stock-like image. For me, it’s this wonder towards the simplicity of London’s beauty that adds to the magnification of it. That final ‘London particular’ only specifies this further. Make no mistake, it says—this could only ever be London.
Through the opening repetition and simplistic imagery, a sense of comfort is found in the familiar, and perhaps a belonging too. The Lonely Londoners is a novel that looks deeply and intimately at the shattering of the illusion of belonging. The illusion of being English and illusions about who the English are. Written in a stream-of-consciousness mode, the narrative voice mimics the rhythm of oral storytelling, and there’s a poeticism to the sounds, along with the creolised language Selvon adopted, that lifts the writing from the pages and slips with a certain ease into the ear.
Selvon’s ear for words doesn’t surprise me. Before writing his first book, A Brighter Sun (1952), he wrote short stories and poems under a pseudonym. In his poem, Fear (1947), he writes:
I am afraid
That love might be insufficient
That life might not be full enough
So I build little vague gods
Little vague gods in the deep night
And in the shallow day
And they all come tumbling down
A lot could be said about Selvon’s poetry, about the pain and discomfort that lurks beneath his words. That the speaker in this poem is ‘afraid’ of insufficiency, of life not being ‘full enough’, reveals a sort of shattered illusion here too, and a fear of the totality of that. The speaker builds ‘little vague gods’ and what they represent exactly, we don’t quite know. Both Selvon’s parents were Christian, his Tamil-Indian father and Anglo-Indian mother. So if we consider what these ‘vague gods’ might be in a religious sense, we’d be thinking about money, power, reputation, sex, appearance, and knowledge, to name a few. These ‘little gods’ are built ‘in the deep night’ only to come ‘tumbling down’ in ‘the shallow day’, which makes me think of the assurance of nighttime and the expectations I had that day in 2018, and many days since, that have often come tumbling down in the quiet reality of the next morning. The power of those feelings, like ‘little gods’, grow something inside of you, only to be cast as illusions of grandeur by the following day.
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The Lonely Londoners is full of illusions. A material dream about the wealth of England – the streets that are meant to be ‘paved with gold’, the ‘sunlight on green grass’, that’s simply grass once the sun goes down. In there too, is an illusion about the hospitality and warmth of the English. The protagonist Moses Aloetta hosts many men coming from the Caribbean because white landlords in the UK would often refuse to have black people as tenants. But there’s also the illusion of England and a romantic sense of English history, reinforced by the landmark names, ‘Waterloo Bridge’, ‘Charing Cross’, and ‘Piccadilly Gardens’. The alluring nature of the London streets is an illusion, and part of the illusion is Moses's feeling that, being able to say he ‘walked’ along the bridge, that he ‘rendezvoused’ at the famous station, that Piccadilly Gardens became his ‘playground’, through being able to say these things he can stitch himself into the fabric of London, the tapestry of British history, and prove his right to belong. The cutting irony at the heart of the novel is that men like Moses had the right to be exactly where they were. After the British Nationality Act of 1948 was passed, granted because of the Commonwealth country's indispensable role in fighting against the Axis powers, individuals were given the right to work and live in the UK without special visas or permissions. And yet, as Selvon depicts in the novel, the reality of their day-to-day was a divided, fractured, labyrinthine city.
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The actions in the verbs of the second clause seem to swell with a kind of yearning. We go from walking, to a secret meeting, to an all-out playground. The verbs build successively and expansively to encapsulate freer, more expansive choices of action, and a desire to belong with such ease to a place that one can view it as their ‘playground’. It makes me think of the ease that we all feel when we’re home, whether our home cities or towns or villages, play only comes about in environments where we feel at ease. Because of that, perhpahs London can only be a dreamlike fantasy for those not from there.
'Rendezvous' originates from the French, a language with a long-held reputation for being the language of love since the 18th century. Rendez-vous has the verb root ‘rendre’ (to meet) and vous (you), and it’s an expression commonly used when two parties plan to meet secretly, usually lovers. I think there’s a desire for passion and love in these lines, and a desire to be able to desire. And later in this sentence, with ‘casual letter home’, I am eager for the rest of it — I want to know, what was it? What happened ‘Last night, in Trafalgar Square…’? Did he fall in love? With a person? With the city? Did he go to the Trafalgar theatre? Another rendezvous? I’ll never know, because Moses is only hoping to one day write this casual letter, so the possibility of it and its contents remain outside of our grasp.
To one day lean against the wind walking up the Bayswater Road (destination unknown), to see the leaves swirl and dance and spin on the pavement (sight unseeing), to write a casual letter home beginning: ‘Last night, in Trafalgar Square…’
As we read on, we have three verbs again, to one day ‘lean’, to ‘see’, and to 'write’. All of these suggest a desire for action. What I think The Lonely Londoners explores so well is these migrant's inability to truly act, work, live, eat, and love, in the way that they please, which leaves a palpable longing for simple activities. The leaning of the body, the easy roam of the eyes, the authority to write down all that you see, feel, and are experiencing. When read this way it makes me think that perhaps the leaves, that ‘swirl and dance and spin on the pavement (sight unseeing)’ seem to contain a physical and psychological freedom to move about the city that is almost envied by the narrator. Or, instead, perhaps the memories of dance and rhythm and the swirl of the leaves remind the narrator of Trinidad, of the island's inhabitants and the Calypso dance. I think that that desire to belong rears its head again here, the ‘(sight unseeing)’ which means without seeing something first, suggesting a longing to be so familiar with a place, or so sure of it, that one doesn’t have to confirm it with the eyes, one can just know, can just feel, and perhaps the narrator can feel home, can see home, as most of us can, without having to look.
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Earlier this month I went to see the adaptation by Roy Williams at the Kiln Theatre in North West London. It was a brilliantly directed show, with an equally brilliant cast. I’d wrongfully arrived at the theatre the day before, (I’d got my days mixed up, wrong train, wrong day, etc., a common pattern with me) so I was looking forward to it once I finally sat down in my seat. The stage opened up in a glare of bright lights that were used throughout the play to intensify the psychological undercurrents of the characters. The actress playing Agnes had to be replaced by the assistant director due to an injury, and so I watched as the play took shape and her floating voice punctuated the scenes with a crisp, British accent. Incidentally, this perfectly contrasted the Caribbean accents being used by the rest of the cast, and it worked to reinforce the illusionary nature of the British and the overall message of the novel, one that is constantly grasping for both reality and the illusionary. The show was hypnotic, and dealt well with the illusions, hopes, and dreams of so many of the lonely Londoners at that time.
Just two years after its publication in 1956, racial tensions erupted into violence in London, and Nottingham, and to this day, persecution in varying degrees has continued towards immigrant communities; the rise of far-right racist parties in the 1970s, the British National Party in the early twenty-first century, and the brutal murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993. And in more recent years, the Windrush scandal that began in 2018. And yet, against this background of racial tensions and hostility, black British literature has continued to assert itself as a witness, commentator, and critique of the times.
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It’s the end of February in London, where things can feel particularly bleak as the grey days outweigh the blue, and the cold feels unbearably cutting. But February is also an incredibly honest month, that strips the trees down to their bare bones, and us along with it. And if you can bear it, you’ll remember that it holds the promise of spring, and as a succession of grey days gives way to more blue skies, we can all start to feel a little less lonely. For me, London is a cold, wet, frustrating, toiling, energetic, beautiful burst of feeling. And even now, seven years later, I want it to reveal itself to me, and be revealed in turn by it.
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This passage comes from page 133 of The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon, first published in 1956 by Allan Wingate (UK) and St Martin’s Press (US). The novel was generally considered groundbreaking and an important piece of literature for its depiction and representation of the British immigrant experience, and it’s use of the Creole dialect that gave a unique voice to both the characters and the narration. Samuel Dickson Selvon was a writer of fiction and non-fiction, and he died in 1994 on a return trip to Trinidad.