In 'Grandmother's Last Will and Testament', the wily, formidable, God-fearing grandmother tests the character of the child Pewter, who is feigning toothache, by egging him on to drink large quantities of brandy her last words to the boy before she dies are, 'Don't bring any more disgrace on your poor family.' In 'The Mosley Connection' the fascist leader Oswald Mosley himself comes calling on the Stapletons at their home in Ladbroke Grove, and very politely ('but that was only showing his class') tells them to go back to the sunny place they came from. In England, much to their consternation, the upper-class Caribbean family is lumped together with the black lower classes. Back in St Caesare, Mother Stapleton had status and servants now she feels like a barely tolerated tenant in her daughter's house and finds her son's adventurous life as an academic and inveterate traveller - 'living in a house and sharing a bath with strangers' - beyond her grasp.Ĭlass is a thread running throughout the book. The description of his vulnerable mother in the beautifully nuanced opening story, 'A Woman in her Daughter's House', is a tender evocation of an elderly woman who is slowly losing her marbles. Markham describes the women in Pewter's family, with whom he has complicated relationships, with wry humour and sensitivity. Pewter arrives in Britain in the 1950s with his mother, and eventually becomes an academic in Sheffield. Without making the annoying mistake of reading Markham's fiction as autobiography, many of the stories do work better structurally if read as memoir or travelogue, with the character of Pewter Stapleton (variously presented as the author, narrator or in the third person), who comes from the fictional Caribbean island of St Caesare, assembling a disparate collection of memories about his life. It spans the Caribbean, England, Europe, Africa and China, travels back well over half a century and reveals an erudite mind keen to discuss art, music, sport, politics, literature, theatre, history, racism and class. This collection has an impressively wide temporal, geographical and thematic spread.

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