MacInnes was sucking a strange fruit that Kops didn’t recognize. It was a passion fruit. MacInnes offered him a bite but Kops passed it back. ‘It’s so wrinkled,’ he said. ‘Yeah! Just like a black boy’s balls,’ MacInnes said, and then introduced himself. 2 He was the son of the novelist Angela Thirkell, his great-grandfather was the painter Edward Burne-Jones and other family members included Stanley Baldwin and Rudyard Kipling. It was a privileged background that he totally rejected. He was a homosexual, alcoholic anarchist who hated all forms of hypocrisy and called himself ‘the best off-beat journalist in London’. He was not an Angry Young Man; rather he was a precursor of the youth counter-culture of the sixties; the first to write about rock ’n’ roll, the youth scene, and, above all, the first to describe the lives of the newly arrived West Indian community in London. In 1948, Colin MacInnes was working as art critic for the Observer and living at 4 Regent’s Park Terrace.
