Autor: Ian Hodge

Ian Hodge is a musician with a first degree in music education and a master’s degree in music and liturgy. Before going entirely into music, he was a public servant for thirty-one years in the Caribbean country of St. Kitts and Nevis, where he served in several areas including home affairs, education, police, health, and defense. As an only child for the first ten years of his life, he took to reading the many interesting books that lined the ledges of the rooms in his parents’ semi-isolated home at Limekiln and was influenced, first, by the English writers of schoolboy fiction. He read many of the Biggles, Jennings, and William series of books, having graduated from Enid Blyton’s Famous Five series. His introduction to Caribbean writing was at the hands of Ms. Aimee Dinzey, a local beauty salon proprietor who was also a talented artist and who sometimes wrote amusing short stories in Kittitian dialect. Later, he came to know of Trinidadian author Sam Selvon and Barbadian George Lamming among others. But the greatest influence on him and the inspiration to write his own stories came from two of the books of V. S. Naipaul: Miguel Street and A House for Mr. Biswas. He began to write stories in the late 1960s and has only now resolved to publish some of them. The stories included in this book are all concerned with the same group of fictional characters who lived in the same neighborhood of the little capital town of Basseterre in St. Kitts during the period immediately following the Second World War.