Small island key quotes Flashcards
Hostility towards Gilbert in the cinema Chapter 17
•‘You’re nothing but trouble’
• ‘even in RAF blue my coloured skin can permit anyone to treat me less than a man’
• ‘’Enunciating as if talking to an imbecile’
Chapter 14 Gilbert in US Army base
‘All these words had been used to characterise me in the last few minutes. Insults every one’
Chapter 30 Gilbert working in the post office insults
•‘When are you going back to the jungle?’
• ‘We can’t use your sort’
• ‘Speak English’
• ‘There’s decent Englishmen that should be doing your job’
Chapter 30 Gilbert feeling ashamed after dealing with racism
•‘What a forlorn desire to seek indifference’
• ‘aching shame stooped me double’
Mr Todd/ British attitudes towards immigrants
• ‘this country no longer feels like his own’ Blanche Smith
• ‘Hitler invading couldn’t have been any worse’ Blanche Smith
• ‘We’ll have a devil of a time getting rid of them now’ Mr Todd
Hortense’s disillusionment chapter 2
• ‘You make me come here and live like an animal?’
• ‘her mouth gaping like a simpleton’s’
Hortense’s childish naïvety in chapter 1
‘ding a ling’ ‘But there was no answer’
Gilbert’s disillusionment about the Mother country chapter 12
‘how come England did not know me?’
‘Leave home, leave familiar, leave love’
‘Your finest, your best, everything you have that is worthy is sent to Mother’
Hortense gets rejected from teaching position chapter 50
Gilbert - ‘This is not the way that England work’
‘You’re not qualified to teach here in England’
‘Every organ I possessed screamed on this woman’
Chapter 51: Hortense’s realisation of the reality of England
‘Hortense reeling wounded after a sharp slap from the Mother Country’s hand’
‘I have found that this is a very cold country’
Hortense’s dialect, out with Queenie
•‘Tired of this silly dance of miscomprehension’
•‘At college my diction was admired by all’
•Wonders why the working clas speak so ‘coarse’
Chapter 59 confrontation between Gilbert and Bernard
(Gilbert about race) White. No better, no worse than me, just white
‘Am I to be the servant and you are the master for all time?’
Anecdotes chapter 12
• Curtis was told ‘his skin was too dark to worship there’
• Eugene was ‘taken away’ wrongly for ‘attacking an old lady’
• Louis believed ‘bloodyforeigner’ to be all one word
Chapter 12 Gilbert’s disillusionment
‘All us pitiful West Indian dreamers who sailed with heads bursting with foolishness were a joke’ (to his cousin)
Gilbert about taking the baby chapter 59
‘Leave that little coloured baby alone in this country, full of people like Mr Bligh. What sort of life would that little man have?’
Chapter 59 Hortense having hope
•Told she would have a ‘golden future’ with her ‘golden skin’
• Hortense then says ‘I intend to’
Choosing to stay and fight for their life together in the UK
Chapter 59 Celia Langley motif of disillusionment
‘Celia Langley’ would never have imagined something ‘so preposterous of this Mother Country’
Gilbert feeling angry chapter 30 after facing racism
I could have whacked his nose until it cracked and bled’
Chapter 32 Gilbert regaining hope after post office incident
• Englishwoman gives him a sweet - ‘it was a salvation to me’
‘I had become hungry for the good in people’
Mr Todd quote about NHS chapter 9
‘That National Health service - it’s pulling them in […] they were all cross eyed and goofy before they got here’
‘They would turn the area into a jungle’
Chapter 12 Gilbert orientalism
‘The entire village had come out to play dog with gecko’ (relating experience to home)
• ‘If any one of those people had a stick long enough, I swear they would have poked us with it’
Queenie white saviour complex chapter 17 at the cinema
‘I wanted to be so pleased this sweet Englishwoman was speaking up for me. But come, Queenie’s good intentions were entirely missing the point’
Chapter 22 Queenie infantilising Hortense
‘The impression I received was that she was talking to me as if I was an imbecile’
Chapter 22 confusion with language Hortense
Humour - ‘Cat got your tongue?’ ‘What cat was she talking of?’
