It was instilled into Tio from an early age - and to all of the Mourillons - by their father, Ton Ton Pierre, that it was acceptable to be poor, but never to be dirty. Perhaps that was just as well, because the family is far from rich, but are always well turned out.
"Your mother," Pierre had said often, "she was a clean woman."
Tio, unlike his charismatic father, is one of the more serious Mourillon siblings. He wants to establish himself in the world, return and marry. In early 1956, perhaps the only way of him doing so is to travel overseas. Despite his fiancée's forebodings, he has been planning to join his brothers and work in the industrial north of England for some time. After all, how bad can it be?
Hailing from a region of Dominica where inhabitants are known for their single-mindedness, Tio eventually adapts to the cold, sometimes hostile environment in which he finds himself. He marries a local girl and starts a family. He seeks to move to the English country, somewhere he is assured by pretty much everyone is no place for black man.
Convinced that he has found the place that he can finally call home for the first time since leaving the Caribbean eight years ago, he set about trying to make that place his own.
Others, however, have quite different ideas.
