Haynes is a middle-class young man, who has to leave the house where he lived with his deceased mother for a cheaper place, and therefore arrives at No. 2 Minty Alley. The house is a world in itself, and Haynes gets to observe these lower-class people. Mrs Rouse, the lodger and Benoit, her companion for eighteen years, who will run away and marry one of the residents, Nurse Jackson. There is also Philomen, who works for Mrs Rouse, Maisie, her niece and Miss Atwell, another resident. Everybody is scrambling in his one way to make a living and gossiping about the other’s lives. The first novel by a black West Indian to be published in England, this story is the portrait of a single house in a small alley, but to be seen as a larger portrait of the Caribbean in the 1920s.
“It was a very simple affair after all. When Haynes thought of all his longings and doubts and hesitations, he was amazed that possessing Maisie was so easy a business. ‘Hold her and kiss her,’ Benoit had said. So he held her and kissed her, and then to his astonishment did what he liked with her. He could not look her in the eye the next morning, but gradually that awkwardness wore off. Maisie was the soul of discretion. ‘Mrs. Rouse must never, never know,’ she said, and as Haynes would also have been ashamed for Mrs. Rouse to know, they kept their secret. Maisie’s manner scarcely changed. She told him risqué jokes which formerly she had declined to do. They never made love except when they were about to go to bed together. The affair was not altogether what he had expected it would be, but as he wanted no more than Maisie gave, he missed nothing.”
Listened to as an audiobook