Born in Trinidad, the son of an Indian father and a Scottish-Indian mother, Selvon had a relatively comfortable middle-class upbringing. After serving in the Trinidadian navy, he worked on newspapers and literary magazines in Port of Spain, Trinidad before moving to England to avoid ‘being lulled into complacency and acceptance of the carefree and apathetic life around me’ (Selvon in Nasta and Rutherford 1995, p. 58). His early experiences of London shaped The Lonely Londoners.
His first home was the Balmoral Hotel in South Kensington, a hostel mostly populated by colonial students, and many of the people Selvon met there provided the raw material for the novel’s central characters. This period was significant for what it taught Selvon about himself and other West Indians, and provided him with negative first impressions of England:
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