ABSTRACT
Malcolm Bradbury, in his novel Eating People is Wrong (1959), portrays Mr Eborebelosa, an African student studying at a British university, as a comic figure who ‘disliked meeting people and had been closeting himself in lavatories to avoid it’ (Bradbury 1959: 35). Treece, his tutor, says to him:
‘Life here may be difficult, but you can’t go on retiring into lavatories indefinitely. You must come out into the real world and face these problems sensibly and maturely.’
