AUTHOR’S NOTE

This is a story about people from widely different backgrounds – West Indians, English villagers, professional men and women of one sort and another. To attempt to convey differing accents and intonations presents problems which are more or less insoluble. One can distort words to suggest pronunciation, or use the phonetic alphabet. Both seem to me to be tiresome to the reader. So I have let my characters speak in ordinary English, but in words that I think they would use. Please read with an ear to the text, as well as with the eye, listening to the softenings and elisions of Caribbean speech, the omitted ts, the replacement of th by d, the rather lilting intonation. To distort speech in print seems to me to distort character. With only 26 letters in the Roman alphabet there is not much one can do but to ask for the reader’s generous assistance.