Summary
A Cold Welcome
Excitement breaks out on the ship and Adah learns that they have arrived in Liverpool. Her heart sings, but it is short-lived, for England gives her a cold welcome. The city is gray and ugly, and Francis himself seems changed, as he kisses her publicly, makes jokes, and speaks to her sharply at one point. She hopes that their relationship will survive this new “civilization” (37).
Francis takes her to where they will live, and it shocks her in how different it is. All the houses are attached and the inside is narrow, small, and dark. The toilet is outside and there is no bath or kitchen. She has to share the house with Nigerians who would have been her inferiors at home. She complains and Francis tells her she has to face reality. He almost considers slapping her but does not, and spits out that here in England she is a second-class citizen and cannot discriminate against her own people. He laughs joylessly at his words. Adah is shocked, wondering if he hates her, but is still happy he gave her children and helped make it possible for her to come to London.
That evening they make love, but Francis complains about her “frigidity.” He also tells her she has to get a job in a shirt factory but she refuses. Thankfully, she is accepted as a senior library assistant at North Finchley Library, but that elation is short-lived when she discovers she is pregnant. Ironically, the doctor whom Francis sent her to gave her things to prevent a pregnancy that was already there. She worries what Francis will say. He starts consorting with other women but Adah is fine with it since she “would have some peaceful nights” (41).
Adah shows up for her new job, worried they will let her go because of the pregnancy. Thankfully, there is an older gentleman there whom she flirts with and he does not notice the bulge in her stomach. She gets the job, and she is certain that if she had not, her marriage would have broken up. Francis still wants to be with her since she brings in money, and for her part she still cares for him and does not want to disappoint him.
The Daily Minders
Adah starts work in June and is happy and proud of herself. Mrs. Konrad, a Czech woman, is the head librarian and takes Adah under her wing. There are many other young women there who are very fashionable and talk about boyfriends, and Adah feels like she does not fit in. She settles into her work, though, and enjoys it immensely. It is a “first-class” (45) job, she likes her colleagues, and she loves the work itself.
At home, though, things are hard. Francis resents that they have children and asks her who is going to take care of them. The landlord and landlady do not want the children there. Most Nigerians who come send their children to foster-parents, who almost become like real parents. They are proud that the foster mothers are white, as “the concept of ‘whiteness’ could cover a multitude of sins” (46). There is no extended family for Nigerians in England, so there is no help except outside help.
The pressure builds on Adah to find somewhere for the children. Some Nigerians say she should send them home, and criticize Adah for trying to “win.” Francis is no help, disappearing almost all the time he is home.
Adah makes friends with Janet, a Cockney girl and wife to Mr. Babaola. He is a rich Nigerian student who met Janet, a white woman pregnant with some man’s baby. He felt a sense of charity awaken in him, and took her in even though she slept with lots of men. He fell in love with her and then she had his child as well. Adah does not care about Janet’s reputation, and finds her intelligent and kind.
Janet suggests she find a person to watch her children, especially as Francis fails his summer examinations (he blames it on her, but in actuality he is lazy and thinks he does not need to attend lectures). Babaola tells Adah of Trudy, a white woman who watches children. She and Francis are duly impressed, though only Francis meets her at first, and the children begin staying with her.
However, Titi soon stops talking, so Adah goes to the house to see what is going on. She is horrified; it is a dirty slum, Trudy is slovenly, and Trudy’s own children are playing with the toys Adah bought for hers. Trudy is surprised to see her there, and Adah cannot control her rage. She screams and rushes to her children. Vicky is pulling trash out of a bin and Titi is washing her face with toilet water. Adah takes the children away immediately and reports Trudy to the children’s officer at Malden Road.
Trudy arrives soon after Adah, full of crocodile tears and protestations that she is not doing anything wrong. Adah realizes that Trudy has just destroyed the myth she always believed—the white man never lied.
Miss Stirling, the children’s officer, reprimands Trudy and tells her to change her ways. Trudy promises to never let the children out of her sight again. From then on, Adah does not trust her, even though Francis still does. She does not understand why Titi does not talk, but soon learns that Francis has told her not to speak Yoruba, only English. This confusion slows her language development for a time, but thankfully not permanently. Adah rues that speaking English is seen as crucial, but the English in Nigeria take no care to do the reverse.
Adah nags Miss Stirling to find a better place for her children, but in the meantime she has to make do with Trudy. She prays that nothing bad will happen, but God does not seem interested in listening to her. In fact, something bad happens to Vicky.
An Expensive Lesson
Adah is constantly worried and losing faith in herself; she wishes the Presence was still with her, but it seems to have been left behind in Nigeria. She is exhausted all the time and Francis does not care. She asks him to take the children to Trudy one day, and he grumbles angrily but agrees. If only he loved her and wanted to take care of her, she thinks. She feels vengeful towards him, so she leaves the kitchen a mess.
Vicky does not want her to go and holds onto her tightly, which is odd. She heads to work. The girls there talk of their conquests and she begins to think that maybe there are some happy marriages, just not hers. Work is also troubling since she is often so hungry and her stomach rumbles loudly. She used to think Francis would take her to nice restaurants once she became a librarian and he passed his exams, but this now seems an empty dream.
Something begins nagging her and she does not know what, so after her walk she hurries back to the library. Another employee, Cynthia, says thank goodness she is back, and is surprised when Adah seems to know something was wrong with her children. She learns Vicky is very ill and Trudy is waiting for her and cannot take him to a hospital without her.
Mrs. Konrad drives her to Trudy’s. An ambulance is waiting there, as well as a big, bald doctor. Vicky is sick but Adah can tell he is not seriously ill. He has a temperature, which makes her think of malaria. This seems like a lot of panic for something not very serious, but she has to go along with the process. She tells the doctor what she thinks it is and he cautions her it might not be malaria.
In the ambulance, her thoughts bounce around. Is Vicky really sick enough to warrant a doctor and an ambulance? In Nigeria, someone would have to be a millionaire or the doctor's relative to warrant such treatment. Then the fear sets in; was Vicky being sent to the free hospital because it was second-tier? She regards free things with suspicion.
When they arrive, her mind is consumed by these thoughts and she will not let Vicky go. She also thinks she ought to let Francis know but has no idea where he is; he does not even attend school regularly. The nurse and doctors tell her that Vicky is very ill and they are running tests. Adah associates the hospital with being born and dying, nothing else. Yet she seems to have little choice in the matter, and they are given a room.
Adah is told she cannot stay with Vicky, which bothers her. She also does not understand why treatments are not given while they are diagnosing symptoms; what if something happens? She dozes off on a bench and a nurse comes by to chat with her. She is surprised to hear Adah’s insinuations that having a boy is more valuable.
Francis comes that night, having left Titi with Trudy. He cries with Adah, and for a time it seems like this might bring the two together.
They learn that Vicky has viral meningitis, and she cannot fathom how he got it. She reads in medical encyclopedias that his chance of survival is slim, and that he must have gotten it from the mouth. She wants to confront Trudy. Francis is dismissive of the idea, but she turns to him and tells him in a fiery tone that the only thing she got from this marriage is the children and she is warning him that they must be perfect children. Francis is shocked and wonders if everyone at home was right about the dangers of bringing an educated girl to London; Adah is too forthright now. He decides he cannot be tied only to her because he likes his variety and she is too cold in bed. Adah continues to threaten him, saying she knows he sleeps with Trudy and if she goes there and Trudy does not give her a good answer about what happened with Vicky, she will take Titi away and Francis will have to watch the children or she will leave her job until they get a nursery spot. Francis retorts that she is just like her quarrelsome, troublemaking mother. Adah does not care, and leaves.
When Adah tells Trudy what happened, Trudy suggests Adah gave it to him back home. Adah is incredulous—she, who had the best gynecologist, the best treatment? She blindly swings a carpet sweeper at Trudy’s head. Trudy ducks and another neighbor tries to calm her. Adah spits, foaming at the mouth like the women would at home. She cannot believe she does not even have the “joy of knocking senseless the fat, loose-fleshed woman with dyed hair and pussy-cat eyes” (66). Instead, she tells Trudy that if anything happens to her child she will come to her and kill her in her sleep, or pay people to do it for her. Then she cries, and all the shocked white women look on.
Adah herself is somewhat shocked, for clearly she has a lot bottled up in her. There is no one for her to talk to here, and people are not supposed to say certain things aloud.
Thankfully, when this is taken to Miss Stirling, she listens and says there is a place for the children at the nursery. Adah cannot believe everything that a “second-class citizen” has to go through to keep their children with them.
Adah refuses to apologize to Trudy, who is taken off the list of approved child-minders and eventually moves elsewhere. She cries with relief when she walks home.
Analysis
Although the term can be reductive, “culture clash” is a useful way to view Adah’s arrival and early days in England. Her first inkling of the difficulties that face her is Francis’s changed personality—he jokes with her, kisses her publicly, and then cruelly snaps at her and considers hitting her. She wonders how their marriage will survive this “civilization” (37). He is the first to inform her of their new status: “in Lagos… you may be living like an elite, but the day you land in England, you are a second-class citizen” (39).
Francis’s conclusion/warning is borne out by the family’s accommodations, which Adah “swallowed… like a nasty pill” (38), and the collapse of the social hierarchy she was used to in Lagos, for “she had to share the house with such Nigerians who called her madam at home; some of them were of the same educational background as her paid servants” (38). Adah’s snobbishness manifests itself several times throughout the text, and while sometimes the reader’s sympathy lies with her, other times it makes sense why other Nigerians without her privileges might resent her.
Adah is also disabused of a notion she has had ever since she was young: “she listened to Trudy destroying forever one of the myths she had been brought up to believe: that the white man never lied” (52). This is due to Trudy, and Adah “had never met the like of Trudy before” (53). Adah realizes “There were bad whites and good whites, just as there were bad blacks and good blacks! Why, then did they claim to be superior?” (53). The missionary and colonial presence in Africa instilled insidious ideas of white superiority and Black inferiority, internalized by whites and Blacks alike; Adah now understands that there is nothing special about white people, and that there are as many different types of them. Trudy and others like her are, in Adah’s opinion, trashy and ignorant, and she should not be considered their equal or their inferior.
Another complicated example of culture clash is the incident with Vicky’s illness. Adah’s motherly intuition is spot-on when she realizes something is wrong with one of her children, and it is accurate when assessing its severity. But she is wrong in her diagnosis, and wrong in her opinion of the free hospital’s purpose. It bothers her that she cannot stay with Vicky, which makes sense, but it makes less sense to Western readers why she thinks he should be treated before he is diagnosed. Adah’s confusion and fear are palpable, and Emecheta creates sympathy for her heroine and all immigrants trying to navigate a system that is unfamiliar and sometimes hostile to them. Kasim Husain explains that this situation “demonstrates the extent to which access to state aid presupposes a level of cultural knowledge that Nigerian migrants like the Obis cannot reasonably be expected to have. The rules of Britain’s National Health Service remain arcane to them,” and praises how “Emecheta depicts the endemic insecurity that results from the unreasonable expectation that all citizens, no matter how recent their arrival, will somehow intuit both what rights they have and how to access them in a statist social welfare regime.”
Adah cannot handle Trudy’s suggestion that Adah caused the meningitis, especially as it is clear that Trudy’s squalid living conditions were almost certainly responsible. This entire incident is not really about Trudy but about the problematic nature of the welfare state for immigrants and people of color. As Husain notes, “The one person who intervenes on her behalf is Stirling, who only dispenses relief once Vicky’s life is threatened, and whose detached and bureaucratic manner of describing Adah’s life as a ‘case’ could be said to echo the very insensitivity to cultural difference that guided the development of colonial anthropological logic itself, not to mention its subsequent re-application in British governance. This coldly classificatory diction tempts Adah to speculate that racist prejudice played a part in her concerns about Trudy not being taken more seriously when they were first reported.”
