1950s

The 1950s are recalled as both the setting for Edwina’s first encounter with Ollie Treadaway and a stubborn inheritance of social attitudes that persists into later decades. The novel gives the period a sharply specific beginning in 1957, then revisits its legacy through Edwina’s memories of family life, care work and racial prejudice.

A meeting in 1957

Edwina remembers first seeing Ollie almost sixty years later, but the scene itself is precisely located: 1957, in the canteen at Goldsmiths’ art college. She wears a grey polo-neck jersey and black-and-white houndstooth pedal pushers; Ollie, a wiry nineteen-year-old from Ireland, is wrapped in a navy Guernsey. He explains that his mother knitted it and that it is uncomfortably hot. While the two wait in the queue for egg and chips, he pulls the jumper over his head. Edwina recalls the glimpse of his pale skin as the instant she fell in love.

The detail of the clothes makes the remembered meeting more than a date on a timeline. Ollie’s hand-knitted jumper carries his family and Irish origins into the college canteen, while Edwina’s precise outfit preserves her own younger self in the scene. Her later recollection turns an ordinary wait for lunch into the beginning of a life-changing attachment.

The decade as a social inheritance

The 1950s also function as Edwina’s shorthand for attitudes that she believes should have been left behind. During a later Saturday lunch, Dickie admits that Lucas has not had close contact with a Black person before. Edwina rebukes him for describing Alicia in racialized terms and insists that he catch up with the times. She remembers the episode with anger, concluding that Dickie remained stuck in the fifties.

Edwina connects that outlook to Wyebourne College, which she regards as rigidly conservative. In her account, the only Black people Dickie or Lucas encountered there were pupils of royal descent or staff cleaning the toilets. The contrast matters: Alicia is not an abstract figure in their household but a familiar presence whose work sustains it, while the boys’ schooling has offered them a narrow and hierarchical picture of race.

Alicia’s work and the household

The novel’s memories of Alicia complicate any simple picture of domestic service. When Edwina met her, Alicia was a part-time cleaner; her two sons were in Kingston, cared for by their grandmother, and Alicia lived off the Old Kent Road with her husband and some of his cousins. Edwina never visited Alicia’s home or met those family members. Alicia, however, came to Edwina’s house every day. She cared for the twins until they no longer needed a nanny, then remained to do the ironing and cleaning.

Alicia’s place in the household was intimate and indispensable, but the relationship existed within unequal boundaries: Edwina knew Alicia through the labor she performed in Edwina’s home, not through the home and family Alicia had left behind. The remembered racialized descriptions of her sit uneasily beside the practical closeness of daily care. The book thus places prejudice and dependence within the same domestic history rather than treating them as separate matters.

Memory across the decades

The 1957 meeting is presented retrospectively, while the novel’s other dated recollections establish how far the family’s story extends beyond that starting point. Edwina remembers March 1981, when the twins are turning twenty-one and coming home for a birthday lunch; in 2015, Lucas wakes in London, jet-lagged and anxious. His memories also reach back to 11 September 2001, when he watches the Twin Towers collapse and connects the weeks afterward with the possibility of recovery.

These later dates do not make the 1950s a complete explanation for what follows. Instead, the decade is both a concrete point of origin—the year Edwina first sees Ollie—and a contested reference point in her account of the past. Recollection preserves the clothes, food and gestures of a particular afternoon, while later experience changes how the family understands the attitudes that endured.