how far urban spaces in the city were ‘classed’ as well as ‘raced’. Kelly
noted, for example,‘It’s like the city centre’s in the middle, then you’ve got
the north working-class, the south working-class, then you’ve got the
middle-class in the, you know, going towards Crosby.’23 Claire, a white
woman in her early thirties, suggested that the south-side was more of‘a
melting pot’ than Kelly’s initial analysis implied and she drew upon her
knowledge of local history to underline her own lived experience of a
racially mixed working-class neighbourhood:
people seem to accept each other. Of course there’s problems and [it] wasn’t always
peaceful, but it was almost like Iwmg in the 1950s, again -with that attitude as well, the,
the proper old, decent working-class kids out on the street, everybody takes care of
each other. ... You’ve got generations ... of black people - and not just black people,
Chinese, Liverpool’s the oldest Chinese community in Europe as well. So in, in terms
of that, the south end was. was where people, um, kind of settled as well. Sort of
through the ports system, they came through the sea ... so I suppose it’s, it’s much
more used to seeing different cultures as well over the, uh, you know the hundreds of
years.21’
These commentaries underline the fact that most people in this group
were already deeply engaged with issues of difference before they read
bevy’s novel.
In common with the (white) women’s reading group from Liverpool
(quoted earlier) who initially foregrounded class values before ‘race’
relations in their consideration of Hortense’s experiences, these focus
group members suggest that Small Island can be read ‘locally’. For some
of the Liverpudlian readers, the lens of class provides a point of entry into
the text’s representation of racial difference while, for others, class relations
are recognized as important со-vectors with ‘race’ (for example, Tracy’s
and Claire’s comments).These approaches indicate how local knowledge
about the intersection of class and ‘race’ within the city of Liverpool,
while it is differently inflected by an individual’s own experience and
community identifications, can produce a ‘local’ reading of an apparently
non-local story.
It is important to recognize, then, that readers engaged with Small Island
at different levels, in different ways, and to different ends. As Elizabeth
Long has noted within the context of North American book groups:
Literature does have the power to allow some white readers a quasi-experiential
expansion of empathy or identification across the racial divide, but it is a fragile power,
tor it rests on the reader’s desire and ability to make an intersubjective bridge as she
reads.2'
36
Region / Writing / Home
Thus, the type of site which the novel affords for an examination of racist
attitudes and structures is, like Gilroy’s sense of lived ιnulticulture,
contingent on a number of factors, including a reader’s own life
experiences. Even when white readers make the ‘intersubjective bridge’
with Hortense and Gilbert by, for example, relating poverty and class-
oppression during the 1940s and 1950s to racism, or by reflecting on the
parallels between gender and ‘race’ inequities, the identification may be
brief and does not necessarily lead to the development of more liberal
views about racial difference. On the contrary, in some instances,
unsettling thoughts about difference are ‘made safe’ by relocating them
within the mid-twentieth-century time-frame and social context of
Levy’s novel. As one reader put it in the Chepstow group’s discussion:
‘Well I mean men went out to work and women did the cooking you
know that’s how it was.’28
Other readers reported ways in which the act of reading and sharing
Levy’s novel had been a‘learning’ experience capable Oftransforrning the
reader’s internalized assumptions. Susan, a white focus group participant
in Liverpool, had lent the novel to her mother because she was concerned
that, as they grow older, her parents have ‘got a bit more prejudiced and
bigoted’. Susan’s other motive - ‘to [get] her off Dick Francis at last’-
suggests her understanding of a literary hierarchy within which Levy’s
novel ranks higher than genre fiction and is thus (implicitly) not only
better writing, but ‘better’ for the reader in a moral or educational sense:
It really hit home to ray mum that then when [Gilbert] came to this country and was
treated as though he wasn’t w — yeah he was, you know, uh, discriminated against -
urn and, and he thought that he was coming home to the Iiiotlierlaiid in a way to a,
a t - a country that would really look after him.That’s what struck home to my mum
and she talked about that a lot on the phone to me, and that’s why she gave the book
to her friends, because she, she couldn’t believe that bit. It, it was, it was, urn, it was an
education to her in a way. And she was very shocked about the whole education
system that was exported out to the colonies. And I think that’s why it - if it makes
- you know-, if it’s made one person sit up and actually address, you know, an innate
prejudice, or you know,‘People come here to take our jobs’, that sort of thing, 1 think
it’s, it’s been valuable.-9
As she describes her mother’s response to Small Island, Susan also
articulates another way in which the novel can be connective when the
experience of reading is shared, bridging intergeneratιonal difference.
During our research we heard about other kinds of‘connection’ around,
and through, the discussion and reading of Small Island, including the
sharing of painful personal stories of poverty and sexism. Within the
Liverpool group, where trust has been established among members, it
moving worlds 9.2 HHBI^HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHBHHHH 37