Bageye at the Wheel
  • Published: 4 April 2013
  • ISBN: 9781448182626
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 288
Categories:

Bageye at the Wheel

A 1970s Childhood in Suburbia

Formats & editions
EBook
4 Apr 2013
Paperback
15 Apr 2013
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In the tradition of Sam Selvon’s Lonely Londoners and V.S.Naipaul’s Miguel Street, Grant's Bageye at the Wheel does for Luton and the UK what Miguel Street did for Naipaul, Port of Spain and Trinidad.


A powerful prescient memoir of life in 1970s Britain for a child of Windrush generation parents.

'This book is a classic' Sunday Telegraph

To his fellow West Indians who assemble every weekend for the all-night poker game at Mrs Knight's, he is always known as Bageye. There aren't very many black men in Luton in 1972 and most of them gather there: Summer Wear, Pioneer, Anxious, Tidy Boots - each has his nickname. Bageye already finds it a struggle to feed his family on his wage from Vauxhall Motors, but now his wife Blossom has set her heart on her sons going to private school and she will not settle for anything less.

This is the story of a father seen through the eyes of his ten-year-old son. It’s a wry and gentle comedy about unfulfilling day jobs and late night poker games, of illegal mini-cabs and small-scale drug-dealing.
And it is also about a family struggling to belong in post-Windrush Britain and growing up in a vanished world of 1970s suburbia.

LOOK OUT FOR COLIN GRANT'S NEW BOOK: Homecoming - the first oral history of the Windrush generation
  • Published: 4 April 2013
  • ISBN: 9781448182626
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 288
Categories:

About the author

Colin Grant

Colin Grant is a historian and author of four highly praised books: Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey (2008), I and I: The Natural Mystics Marley, Tosh and Wailer (2011), Bageye at the Wheel (2012), and A Smell of Burning (2016). He is an Associate Fellow in the Centre for Caribbean Studies, and teaches creative non-fiction writing, most recently for Arvon and Sierra Nevada College.

portrait photo of Colin Grant

Also by Colin Grant

I & I: The Natural Mystics
I'm Black So You Don't Have to Be
Homecoming
A Smell of Burning
Negro with a Hat: Marcus Garvey
See all

Praise for Bageye at the Wheel

[A] vivid and bittersweet window into a vanished world of 1970s suburbia

Metro

A classic

Spectator

A fabulous example of storytelling

Glasgow Herald

A quietly unforgettable book

Guardian

Colin Grant’s memoir focuses on his feckless father…but tells the wider story of growing up black in Luton in 1970s suburbia

Antonia Charlesworth, Big Issue in the North

I loved every word

Independent

Piquant memoir

Benjamin Evans, Sunday Telegraph