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Anita and Me - Setting

Discover how the setting of Tollington shapes Anita and Me, from slag heaps and scrapyards to tight terraced streets, reflecting change, class tensions, and Meena’s sense of belonging.

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Fascinating Fact:

Declining industry shapes the landscape, with slag heaps, scrapyards, and terraced streets creating a backdrop of change and uncertainty.

In GCSE English Literature, you explore how setting reflects wider social change. In Anita and Me, the industrial Midlands backdrop highlights economic decline, community tensions, and Meena’s shifting sense of home.

Key Terms

Setting: The time and place in which a story happens, including landscape, buildings, and social conditions.
Industrial decline: When factories and mines close, bringing job losses, abandoned sites, and changes to community life.
Backdrop: The background against which events unfold, helping to create mood and support themes in a text.

Frequently Asked Questions (Click to see answers)

How is the setting of Anita and Me important for GCSE?

The setting of a declining Midlands village reflects economic hardship and social change. It helps to explain characters’ frustrations, prejudices, and Meena’s feeling of being caught between cultures.

How do I write about setting in Anita and Me in an exam?

Choose a short description of the streets, slag heaps, or scrapyards. Analyse words and images, then link them clearly to themes such as belonging, racism, or change.

What does the industrial landscape suggest about the characters’ lives?

The slag heaps and scrapyards suggest limited chances and fading pride in work. This tension feeds into characters’ boredom, risk-taking, and the novel’s moments of anger and resentment.

Try These Related Quizzes

1 .

When is Anita and Me set?

Early 1950s

Early 1960s

Early 1970s

Early 1980s

Mentions of Pan's People, the films Mary Poppins and Bedknobs and Broomsticks, and Reita Faria's crowning as Miss World in 1966 as an early memory of Meena's place the time of the novel in the early 1970s

2 .

Where is the novel set?

West Midlands

Northumbria

County Durham

Essex

The fictional village of Tollington is located in the region of the West Midlands known as the Black Country

3 .

With which industry was Tollington associated?

The steel industry

Car manufacturing

The paper industry

Mining

Tollington is an ex-mining village; the narrator reports that the mine once employed the entire village

4 .

Which of the following best describes Tollington?

Tollington is a wealthy suburb of Wolverhampton

Tollington is a rural village with a mostly working class population

Tollington is a wealthy, rural village

Tollington is a poor, urban housing estate

The village is near enough to Wolverhampton to see its industrial chimneys on a clear day

5 .

"It was a constant source of embarrassment to me that our front garden was the odd one out in the village, a boring rectangle of lumpy grass bordered with various herbs that mama grew to garnish our Indian meals. 'This is mint, beti,' she would say, plucking the top of a plant and crushing the leaves under my nose, 'This one thunia...coriander I mean...this lemon verbena, you can make tea from this...' I did not want things growing in our garden that reminded me of yesterday's dinner; I wanted roses and sunflowers and manicured hedges and fountains where the blackbirds would come and sip." Which of the following is correct?

Meena is embarrassed by her mother's poor gardening skills

Meena wishes for an ornamental English garden, like those of her neighbours, rather than the practical garden her parents keep

Meena believes that sunflowers, roses and hedges are more practical than herbs

All of the above

The garden symbolises the cultural differences between her parents and their English environment. Meena longs for a fantastical version of her neighbours' gardens while undervaluing her own, with its links to the foods of her parents' homeland

6 .

Syal depicts Tollington as a close-knit community. Which one of the following settings does NOT contribute to this depiction?

The shared alleyways between houses

The village school

The quarry pond

The "yard"

Sometimes the intimate nature of the village is too much for the young Meena, such as when Mr Mitchell conducts conversations from his outdoor toilet! Although it does provide for a common source of fear after a local child drowns there, the quarry pond is one of the village's few isolated, rather than communal, places

7 .

Where does Anita and Meena's "gang" meet?

In the park

In a pigsty

In the schoolyard

By the quarry pond

Their "headquarters" are in a pigsty in a neglected part of the yard, surrounded by garages, sheds and stinging nettles. The description is far from the glamour the place seems to hold for the young Meena, enamoured as she is with Anita

8 .

Which of the following is associated with Meena's kitchen?

Clutter

The smell of spices

Busy, sweating, efficient women

All of the above

The kitchen of Meena's house features in many important scenes and sustains the family in more ways than one. "My mother would right now be standing in a haze of spicy steam, crowded by huge bubbling saucepans where onions and tomatoes simmered and spat, molehills of chopped vegetables and fresh herbs jostling for space with bitter, bright heaps of turmeric, masala, cumin and coarse black pepper whilst a softly breathing mound of dough would be waiting in a china bowl, ready to be divided and flattened into round, grainy chapatti. And she, sweaty and absorbed, would move from one chaotic work surface to another, preparing the fresh, home-made meal that my father expected, needed like air, after a day at the office about which he never talked"

9 .

"When I looked at Mrs Christmas' frocks, I thought of tea by an open fire with an autumn wind howling outside, horses' hooves, hats and gloves, toast, wartime brides with cupid bow mouths laughing and waving their hankies to departing soldiers, like I'd seen on that telly programme, All Our Yesterdays." Contemplating Mrs Christmas' clothing transports Meena to which of the following?

The Big House, circa the 1920s

Tollington, in its heyday as a mining village

The India of the 1950s

A nostalgic version of Englishness

Whereas her mother's clothing transports her to an idealised India of peacocks, "dancing elephants", "honking taxis" and monsoon rains, Mrs Christmas' clothing conjures up a mixture of English imagery collected from film, novels and television programmes

10 .

Which one of the following does NOT feature as a setting in the novel?

The hospital

The Big House

India

Anita's kitchen

This is a bit of a trick question! Although Meena herself does not visit India during the time period of the book, the country features as a setting for many of the stories her parents and Aunties tell

Author: Sheri Smith (PhD English Literature, English Teacher & Quiz Writer)