Rumer Godden writes about a multiracial London street in 1956

I'm reading An Episode of Sparrows by Rumer Godden - it's for a thing - and have come across another early celebration of multiracial London. The previous one, by Marjorie Allingham, dated from 1965: this one from Rumer Godden dates from 1956:

The ugly accents of the Street children were unmistakably English, but the older people could have belonged anywhere; a great many had come from somewhere else, all tongues were spoken in Catford Street, faces were all colours, but even the people who had been born there and lived and died in it were like any people anywhere. 

It was all perfectly ordinary; seen from above, from the back windows high up in some of the Square houses, No 11 for instance, from the old schoolroom at the top of the house, Catford Street. with Motcombe Terrace and Garden Row - which had no gardens - running to left and right of it, made the shape of a big cross.

The observer is Olivia, the most sympathetic of the novel's adult characters, but even her worldly younger sister Angela is worried by the social class of the Catford Street children who sometimes spill into the more genteel Mortimer Square, not their race.

And note that Godden doesn't see the assimilation of people from other cultures into English society as a problem. Instead, she wonders at how quickly it takes place.

An Episode of Sparrows is the book on which perhaps the most interesting of my children-and-bombsites films, Innocent Sinners, is based.

Reader's voice: Have you left in that last bit of the quotation because it contains a whopping great Christian symbol?

An impressed Liberal England replies: Not much gets past you, does it?