When Alfred Grayson, a retired and recently widowed civil servant,
decides to buy a dog, Sheba gives him a passport to the diverse
multi-racial community of dog-walkers and bench-sitters who meet in a
down-at-heel London park. Here Grayson engages with the cunning Finbar,
theatrical Arabella and her absurd tango-dancing sidekick, Harold
Heyhoe, Jamaican Maryanne, tortured by her demons, Rastafarian Rootsman,
old Uncle Nat from Sierra Leone, tattooed Judy and abandoned Lucy.
Grayson, originally from Barbados, has passed for white and kept his
origins quiet during his civil service career, but two, in particular,
of the relationships he makes in the park cause him to rethink his past.
In the park, characters, who would not otherwise meet, make unlikely
alliances and feel able to expose various identities, or in Alfred's
case begin to reconstruct one. Both park and characters have their times
of wintry bleakness, shabbiness and moments of glorious display. For
Alfred and Lucy there is even the hope that late flowering lust might
bloom into love. Like all the best, the richest and most truthful
comedy, The Green Grass Tango is filled with a sense of human
fragility and impermanence.
And there are the dogs: faithful companions and quizzical witnesses to
their owners' most intimate deeds!
Beryl Gilroy came to London over fifty years ago from Guyana. She
wrote six novels, two autobiographical books and was a pioneering
teacher and psychotherapist. Sadly, she died in 2000 at the age of 76.
