One of my amateur musician friends recommended this warm, compelling book while she and I were drinking tea and eating biscuits during a break on a recent course. I had read Mike Gayle before, with a lot of pleasure, but All The Lonely People, which first published in 2020, got right under my skin.
It tells the story of Hubert Bird who arrived in Britain from Jamaica in the 1960s full of enthusiasm and hope of a better life despite the grey climate. What he met, of course, was a wall of blind prejudice. I am white British but I remember those times with vivid horror. In 1963 one of the landlords in Forest Hill, where I then lived, announced that he’d have no “blacks” in his pub. I was appalled, aged 16, but most of the people I knew simply shrugged their shoulders. Signs saying “no coloureds” were common where rooms were offered for let or jobs advertised. And Mike Gayle whose own family probably experienced all this at first hand, obviously understands this better than I ever will. It is, thank goodness, one of the many things which has got better over the last 60 years.
Hubert, who is an eminently decent chap, eventually gets a job in the loading area of a department store where he is bullied and beaten up – until the rather more enlightened line manager intervenes and sacks a few people. And that’s how Hubert meets Joyce, a young white woman who works upstairs and who is asked to apply first aid to his injuries. She becomes the love of his life as a result of which she is rejected and ostracised by her own family.
The narrative unfolds over a split time frame. We first meet Hubert as an elderly widower, living in Bromley in the present day and very lonely. Something has happened to his son – it’s a long time before we discover what. Hubert’s daughter is an academic in Australia. She is due to visit soon so Hubert is desperate to make some friends so that she will not worry about him. Then a chatty, pushy young woman, a single mother with a young child, moves in next door and knocks to say hello … As Gayle hops adeptly from then until now we gradually learn the trajectory of Hubert’s life which has brought him to where he is now
There are some unexpected plot twists in this arresting novel. Things are not quite what they seem and it is in part a study of mental health and mechanisms the brain uses for dealing with grief. It’s also a glorious celebration of the power of friendship because Hubert does eventually meet new people and, together, they start something exponentially powerful which is going to help others in Bromley. And, incidentally, the Bromley background is another little bonus since it is just up the road from where I now live and every landmark is accurate and familiar. Gayle was born in Birmingham but now lives “in London”. I suspect that might mean Bromley. If not his research is meticulous.
His characters are richly convincing: Tony the lugubrious pessimist, Kayla the little girl Hubert eventually befriends, Joan who’s pretty lonely herself and with whom Hunbert feels real affinity. Then there’s Gus, the original friend who persuaded Hubert to come to Britain, and who has problems of his own in old age. And it’s all done with huge sensitivity, tempered with lightness of touch. There is, moreover, near the end, a lump-in-the-throat moment when an unknown young white woman approaches him and says she’s a relative.
If you don’t know Mike Gayle’s work in general or All The Lonely People in particular, then get to it. You’re in for a treat.
Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Prisoner of War and other stories by Guy for Maupassant.
