Book description
,i> You leave your mother and your brother too,
You leave the pretty wife you're never faithful to,
You cross the sea to find those streets that's paved with gold,
And all you find is Brixton cell that's oh! so cold.'
London, 1957. Victoria Station is awash with boat trains
discharging hopeful black immigrants into a cold and alien land.
Liberal England is about to discover the legacy of Empire. And when
Montgomery Pew, a newly appointed assistant welfare officer in the
Colonial Department, meets Johnny Fortune, recently arrived from
Lagos, the meeting of minds and races takes a surprising turn...
Colin MacInnes gives London back to the people who create its
exciting sub-culture. Hilarious, anti-conventional, blisteringly
honest and fully committed to youth and vitality, City of
Spades is a unique and inspiring tribute to a country on the
brink of change.
Colin MacInnes (1914-76), son of novelist Angela Thirkell, cousin of
Stanley Baldwin and Rudyard Kipling, grandson of Burne-Jones, was
brought up in Australia but lived most of his life in London about which
he wrote with a warts-and-all relish that earned him a reputation as the
literary Hogarth of his day. Bisexual, outsider, champion of youth,
'pale-pink' friend of Black Londoners and chronicler of English life,
MacInnes described himself as 'a very nosy person' who 'found adultery
in Hampstead indescribably dull' and was much more at home in the coffee
bars and jazz clubs of Soho and Notting Hill. A talented off-beat
journalist and social observer, he is best known for his three London
novels, City of Spades, Absolute Beginners and Mr Love and Justice. His
other books include To the Victor the Spoils, a disenchanted view of the
Allied occupation of Germany in the aftermath of the Second World War,
June in Her Spring and England, Half English. Colin MacInnes's essays
were published in Out of the Way in 1980 and a selection of the best of
his fiction and journalism is available in Absolute MacInnes, edited by
Tony Gould. MacInnes died of cancer in 1976.
