Brixton Summary

Sandy Ring, a recently-graduated nurse, flees a failed romance in Wales to take a job in Brixton, a heavily Jamaican neighborhood. There she rooms with fellow nurse Wilma Ring, who jokes about being cousins with a white woman. Wilma is studying for a degree in open university while working odd hours in admissions to accommodate her studies and favorite television programs. Good-looking Nelson claims that Wilma is a communist, but Wilma says that she would scarcely be earning a degree if she wished to overthrow the system. She wishes that Nelson should attend to Margaret, the hard-working mother of his three children rather than flirting and gossiping.

Wilma wants both to teach and to nurse, in order to repay all her mother and aunts have done to get her where she is. She insists that each generation of daughters must exceed the previous...