ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on writers who directly experienced the cold reality of discrimination or, like Colin MacInnes, were politically committed to opposing racism or simply disillusioned with English society. While Jane’s journey towards self-knowledge was organized by means of the spaces of this particular room and its dilapidated surroundings, Doris Lessing’s entry into London life and her evolution as a novelist were shaped by her trajectory through the closely observed streets of Notting Hill and her almost ethnographic immersion into rooms and lives of the house on Denbigh Road. While MacInnes sought to capture the speech and patois of the ‘spades’, Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners achieved renown as the first novel narrated entirely in Trinidadian patois through the voice of Moses Aloetta, ‘among the first set of spades what come to Brit’n’, and who serves as the consciousness of the West Indian diaspora.
