Book description
To his fellow West Indians who assemble every weekend for the
all-night poker game at Mrs Knight's, he is always known as Bageye.
There aren't very many black men in Luton in 1972 and most of them
gather at Mrs Knight's - Summer Wear, Pioneer, Anxious, Tidy Boots -
each has his nickname. Bageye already finds it a struggle to feed his
family on his wage from Vauxhall Motors, but now his wife Blossom has
set her heart on her sons going to private school and she will not
settle for anything less.
This is the story of a feckless father seen through the eyes of his
ten-year-old son. It's a wry and gently comedy about unfulfilling day
jobs and late night poker games, of illegal mini-cabs and small-scale
drug-dealing. And it is also about a family struggling to belong and a
vivid tale of growing up in a vanished world of 1970s suburbia.
Colin Grant is a historian and BBC radio producer. He is the author
of
Negro with a Hat
, a biography of Marcus Garvey and
I&I: The Natural Mystics
, a group biography of the original Wailers, Marley, Tosh and
Livingston. The son of Jamaican emigrants, he lives in Brighton.
