The Lonely Londoners: Section 11 Summary & Analysis

One winter, Galahad—along with many other immigrant workers—loses his job. Luckily for him, he doesn’t get cold and so doesn’t have to worry very much about finding a way to stay warm, but he does need to somehow feed himself. Realizing one day that London has an excess of pigeons, he decides to catch one for dinner. After frequenting the park on a regular basis to examine how pigeons move, he finally captures one by luring it to him with pieces of bread and then grabbing it by its legs. Unfortunately, a white woman sees him do this and yells out across the park, saying, “You cruel monster! You killer!” Quickly, Galahad stuffs the bird into his coat while the woman tries to find a police officer.

Having escaped the park with the pigeon, Galahad goes to Moses’s apartment and tells him he’s bought a bird and asks him to help him cook it. Excited, Moses wonders how Galahad was able to afford this kind of food, but he pushes the matter out of his mind because he’s hungry. Back in his own apartment, Galahad plucks the feathers and begins to feel guilty, but he tries to reason with himself, justifying that he only killed the pigeon because he was so hungry. “What the hell I care,” he mutters, “so much damn pigeon all about the place.” Still feeling guilty, though, he later tells Moses how he actually obtained the pigeon. “Boy, you take a big chance,” Moses says. “You think this is Trinidad? Them pigeons there to beautify the park, not to eat. The people over here will kill you if you touch a fly.”

Having eaten a good meal of pigeon and rice, Moses and Galahad speak nostalgically about Trinidad, sharing funny stories about people they both know. After some time, while Galahad is in the middle of a hearty laugh, Moses suddenly becomes sober, feeling guilty and thinking “it not right” to be enjoying himself so much “in these hard times.” Vocalizing his feelings, he expresses his discontent regarding the fact that he and Galahad—along with all their immigrant friends—have come to Britain “to make a living” only to find a sore lack of opportunity.

Galahad tries to lighten the mood, but Moses rejects his optimism, saying that he sometimes wakes up in the night and can’t go back to sleep because he’s worried about whether or not he’s making progress in London. “I just lay there on the bed thinking about my life, how after all these years I ain’t get no place at all, I still the same way, neither forward nor backward,” he says. He tells Galahad—who has now been in London for roughly four years—about his own experience as a new arrival, about how he used to want to go home but now can’t decide whether to stay or leave. “Ten years the old man in Brit’n,” he says, “and what to show for it?” He says he would save a little money and go back to Trinidad if he was Galahad.

Galahad insists that he doesn’t want to return to Trinidad. Moses, on the other hand, confesses that if he had enough money, he’d go home immediately to “live in Paradise.” In response, Galahad reminds his friend that there aren’t any “prospects” in Trinidad, but Moses ignores him, saying, “This is a lonely miserable city, if it was that we didn’t get together now and then to talk about things back home, we would suffer like hell. Here is not like home where you have friends all about.”

Continuing his critique of life in London, Moses says that—in addition to the fact that the city is “lonely” and “miserable”—white Britons don’t truly embrace black people in their community. “They tolerate you, yes,” he says, “but you can’t go in their house and eat or sit down and talk.” He then scoffs at the way English people party and celebrate holidays, and when Galahad says he likes when white women kiss him at the turn of the New Year—because they say it’s good luck to kiss black men—Moses berates him, saying, “Man, you really foolish, yes.” Going on, he says that he would return to Trinidad as soon as possible if he knew for sure he’d be able to get a good job. “But is no use talking to fellars like you,” he adds. “You hit two-three white women and like you gone mad.”