“I got into bed and lay there . . . thinking of that picture advertising the Biscuits Like Mother Makes, as Fresh in the Tropics as in the Motherland, Packed in Airtight Tins. . . .

There was a little girl in a pink dress eating a large yellow biscuit studded with currants—what they called a squashed-fly biscuit—and a little boy in a sailor-suit trundling a hoop, looking back over his shoulder at the little girl. There was a tidy green tree and a shiny pale-blue sky, so close that if the little girl had stretched her arm up she could have touched it. (God is always near us. So cosy.) And a high, dark wall behind the little girl. . . .

And that used to be my idea of what England was like.

‘And it is like that, too,’ I thought”

—Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, 1934.