Setting of Noughts and Crosses

Setting

This novel is set in an alternate universe but Malorie Blackman had taken ideas and events from the real world and turned them into her own imagination. She had set it in the 1960's but had included technology from the 1980's. Racism was a big problem in the 1960's but Blackman had flipped it so that the darker skinned people were superior and the paler skinned people were inferior.

For Callum and Sephy, them being together was one of the things that society discouraged. Very few people could look beyond skin colour and judge on personality meaning the rest weren't open-minded enough to accept it. It was discouraged for a cross to interact with a nought and vice versa. Crosses (in general) thought they were too good for the noughts and the noughts (in general) thought the crosses were mainly stuck up people who only care about the material things in life. In various parts of the book, Sephy and Callum were each told by others to just leave each other alone because it was "for the best" but they didn't give up. No matter who told them to stop, they didn't.

Callum comes from a poor background being a nought, though he had more access to the sophisticated lifestyle because of Sephy. His father, brother and sister would have not experienced what Sephy had exposed him to but because of his mother being the former nanny in the Hadley household, she would've experienced some of it as well. Callum doesn't like his own lifestyle and wishes his house was as grand as Sephy's. His house is basically a run-down shack that is nothing compared to the Hadley's.

"'I live in a palace with golden walls and silver turrets and marble floors...' I opened my eyes and looked at my house. My heart sank. I closed my eyes again. 'I live in a mansion with mullion windows and leaded light casements and a swimming pool and stables in the acres and acres of ground.' I opened one eye. It still hadn't worked. 'I live in a three up, two down house with a lock on the front door and a little garden where we grow veggies.' I opened my eyes. It never worked. I hesitated outside my house - if you could call it that. Every time I came back from Sephy's, I flinched at the sight of the shack that was meant to be my home. Why couldn't my family live in a house like Sephy's? Why didn't any nought I knew of live in a house like Sephy's?"

~ Quote from beginning of Chapter 2 in Callum's point of view

Sephy has always lived with being able to have anything she wants at anytime, but for her it's too much. Her house is the complete opposite of Callum's house, it's large, grand and luxurious. Her family are more adjusted to that life and enjoy living in their mansion. Everything is too over the top for her, it's too big, too grand, too fancy and too expensive yet worthless in her mind.

"She loved our house as much as I hated it. She called it 'grand'. To me it was like a bad museum - all cold floors and marble pillars and carved stonework which glossy magazines loved to photograph but which no-one with half a gram of sense would ever want to live in."

~ Quote from end of Chapter 1 in Sephy's point of view

Even though her state of living is what many others want, it's a place that's not for her.

It was never Sephy's fault that she was born into a rich family and to have a sophisticated lifestyle but it was also never Callum's fault that he was born with a life where there is almost nothing for them. For people like him there was never fancy food, never any grand houses, never a proper education and they were never treated with fairness of equality. All because of a skin colour.