Zadie Smith
White Teeth
To my mother and my father
And for Jimmi Rahman
‘What’s past is prologue’
– The Tempest, Act II, scene i
Archie 1974, 1945
‘Every little trifle, for some reason, does seem incalculably important today, and when you say of a thing that “nothing hangs on it” it sounds like blasphemy. There’s never any knowing – how am I to put it? – which of our actions, which of our idlenesses won’t have things hanging on it for ever.’
Where Angels Fear to Tread, E. M. Forster
1 The Peculiar Second Marriage of Archie Jones
Early in the morning, late in the century, Cricklewood Broadway. At 06.27 hours on 1 January 1975, Alfred Archibald Jones was dressed in corduroy and sat in a fume-filled Cavalier Musketeer Estate face down on the steering wheel, hoping the judgement would not be too heavy upon him.