like their husbands, would not make demands or complain."
Meanwhile the motorway opens cutting through the fields bringing the outside world and suburbia ever closer while the television set and not the fire-place becomes the real focus of the home, in a two-up twodown house with outside toilet and a shed doubling up as a bath.
The leitmotif for the troubled relationship between Meena and the exterior world is her on-off friendship with the older, worldly-wise Anita Kitter.
Meena is continually reminded AG An exception proving the rule? The solidarity of Women Against Pit closures managed to break through usual racial barriers. that she is different, though she doesn't particularly want to be, and she spends much of her time trying to minimise that difference, through for instance exaggerating her broad Black country accent, eating fishfingers instead of Indian food and in endearing herself to Anita.
It is almost as if recognition by Anita will mean acceptance from wider society as well.
For this is also the Britain where Harold Wilson's 'white heat of technology meets Enoch Powell's 'rivers of blood'.
At the cross-roads are boys like ain is for Whites only and doesn't shirk from 'Paki-bashing' when opportunity presents itself, but is also puzzled when Meena despises him. "I never meant you, Meena! It was all the others."
How bitter-sweet that a white youth drawn to fascist ideas would deny that it was her he was talking about and committing violence against when evoking in her the realisation that she is indeed one of the "others".
Meena does not seek difference. She has difference forced upon her.
There is no real historical con-
ENTR KEEP Sam Lowbridge, who believes Brit-