1970s

The 1970s are presented through Edwina’s retrospective memories of marriage, pregnancy, childcare, and household life. Rather than offering a wide survey of the decade, the novel makes the period legible through intimate circumstances: a pregnancy planned with Dickie, Alicia’s daily labor in the family home, and Edwina’s resistance to the racialized language used about her friend and employee.

Marriage and Intimacy

A couple of years after marrying Dickie, Edwina planned another pregnancy. She stopped taking the pill, and Dickie approached conception with characteristic deliberateness, making love with particular thoroughness and sometimes asking her to stand on her head afterward. The effort succeeded: at thirty-six, Edwina became pregnant for the second time, with her third child. The episode places reproductive planning within the marriage while also showing how closely the couple’s private life was shaped by Dickie’s methodical manner.

Edwina’s later reflections distinguish her two husbands’ styles of intimacy. She remembers Ollie as energetic and enthusiastic, and Dickie as deliberate, almost ritualistic. She says she loved Ollie and was grateful to Dickie; with Dickie, sex could also be an obligation rooted in guilt. Having won him away from Barbara through her sensuality, Edwina felt it would be unfair to withdraw sex after he left his first wife. The contrast reveals how desire, gratitude, and marital duty could coexist without being the same feeling.

Childcare and Domestic Labor

Alicia entered the household when Rowena and Charlie were babies. She was a part-time cleaner with two sons living in Kingston under their grandmother’s care, a separation she described as customary. She lived near the Old Kent Road with her husband and some of his cousins. Edwina never visited Alicia’s home or met her family; instead, Alicia came to Edwina’s house every day, first caring for the twins and then staying on to do ironing and cleaning after they no longer needed a nanny.

The household depended on Alicia’s work. She did most of the cooking and laundry, although Dickie insisted that his work shirts be sent out for professional laundering. When Edwina told Alicia about this arrangement, Alicia reacted angrily, banging pans while Edwina hid in her studio. Alicia’s labor was extensive, but it did not make her responsible for every member of the household on equal terms: she disliked doing anything for Lucas, and his clothes were sent to matron when they needed mending. The daily arrangements reveal both the intimacy of domestic service and the class boundaries that persisted within the home.

Race and Household Conflict

The novel also locates the decade in the racial language and assumptions Edwina remembers encountering. Her mother had referred to Alicia with a racist slur, and Dickie once described Alicia in explicitly racialized terms. Edwina answered him sharply, objecting to the way he spoke about Alicia and insisting that he change his language. Her anger was directed not only at the word but at the assumptions it carried about Alicia’s status and humanity.

Edwina connects Dickie’s attitude to his education at Wyebourne College, which she remembers as an institution fixed in its ways. In her account, the only Black people Dickie and Lucas encountered there were pupils of royal descent or staff cleaning toilets. That remembered contrast helps explain why Edwina sees Dickie’s outlook as belonging to an older social order, even as she challenges it in the family’s breakfast room. The scene makes the decade’s setting visible through a domestic argument rather than through public events: the household is a place where racial hierarchy is repeated, resisted, and exposed.

The Decade in Retrospect

These recollections do not treat the 1970s as a single, uniform experience. They place a planned pregnancy and changing marital obligations beside Alicia’s separation from her sons, her work in another family’s home, and Edwina’s refusal to accept racist speech as ordinary. Years later, the period returns through memory as a record of relationships shaped by unequal responsibilities and competing forms of affection. Its significance lies in that close scale: the era is reconstructed in the household’s routines, its private negotiations, and the words Edwina still remembers.