Caryl Phillips’s parents arrived in England from St Kitts in the summer of 1958, carrying, he wrote in the essay collection A New World Order (2001), ‘little luggage beyond me, their infant son’. Along with many thousands of West Indian migrants, Mr and Mrs Phillips accepted privation as they embarked on their new lives, putting their shoulders to the wheel to help rebuild the postwar ‘mother country’ – it was their mother country, given their British passports. ‘Isolated, lonely and vulnerable’, they tolerated daily humiliation with a civility which their son’s generation was to jettison. 

Phillips is celebrated for his magnificent exploration of the themes of origins, belonging and exclusion in his fiction, drama, essays and documentaries. In his new novel, Another Man in the Street, he once again gives voice to migrants journeying across troubled seas, ‘adrift’ even with solid earth under their feet. It opens in the early 1960s. Victor Johnson, a hopeful emigrant from St Kitts, is bound for the England of his dreams: ‘We were sitting out on deck listening to the sound of the sea. I say listening because it was so dark.’ Crossing the dark water from one world to an unknown other, the young man is abandoning a home and his former self. He aspires to find occupation and dignity as a journalist in the mother country. And why not? England wants promising, literate people with ideals, willing to work hard, doesn’t it? ‘I’m going to England’, he says, ‘and I won’t allow anything, or anybody, to get in the way of my making a success of my life.’

A young shipboard companion assures the arrogant, sneering English captain, ‘When he starts gabbing you’ll find that he knows some ruddy big words, he does.’ But when Victor does start ‘gabbing’, he does so with caution and reluctance and no big words are uttered. He keeps them to himself. We