Boxed up and Shivering in London
By Dr. Tilak S.Fernando
Picture credit: Daily News
As I came out of the controlled area of the Heathrow airport,
after going through immigration and baggage clearance, it was a great relief to
see, my old chum, Sam waving at me from a distance, the only Sri Lankan face I
could spot from the crowd waiting at passenger arrival gate.
After proceeding to Victoria by coach, I was taken to a house at
Hither Green in South London where temporary accommodation had been arranged
for me at a Sri Lankan professional, who had been in the UK for some time.
I was thankful to the landlord even though it was a tiny ‘box
room’ with hardly any space to move about when a single bed occupied most of
the area (without any other furniture) and having to use my suitcase as a
wardrobe stuck under the bed.
There was only one washroom for the house, and that was also in
a corner of the kitchen downstairs ‘partitioned’ with a plastic shower curtain
with no proper door! Their pet, a huge Alsatian dog, often put his head through
the shower curtain to sniff at, while I was in the tub naked and exposed to the
cold.
Bathroom had no shower unit, but only a tub with a hand shower
attached to a mixer tap. To activate hot water from a geyser 25p worth of coins
had to be slotted in, which was sufficient only to have a ‘cat wash’.
Being a student and new to the country, with limited funds, it
was impossible to relax in a warm-foam-hot-water-bath to heart’s content
because the moment the 25p ran out, so did the pilot light of the geyser, which
gave me two choices - to shiver in the cold or walk out of the bath with a
lathered up body! Being pampered at home and now thrown into a proverbial deep
end of a life abroad, I was beginning to feel homesick and wanted to take the
next available flight back, but there was a purpose in my going to England - to
study - as such, I had to bear all inconveniences and treat every challenge as
a new experience.
Similar to British practice in the plantation sector in the old
Ceylon, during the Colonial era, British had ‘imported’ cheap labour from
Africa and the West Indies to England, and by the time we landed in London a
second generation of ‘ coloured immigrants’ had begun to increase.
‘First generation of African and West Indian labour was utilized
to run British Railways, buses and for manual work in Borough councils. They
all wore uniforms like the English, with shirt, collar and tie and jackets (and
a hat often). While they were fluent in English, they had inherited their own
peculiar accent, which was difficult to understand till one’s ears got
familiarised with their verbal pronunciation.
London being a highly cosmopolitan town, many people spoke
English with different accents, which could be painful to someone used to ‘BBC
English’! Irish had a strong brogue, which was impossible to follow until one,
associated with an Irishman. East Londoners spoke with a ‘cockney’ accent (they
pronounced the word ‘Blade’ as Blaied and ‘take’ as Tyke); Scottish rolled
their tongue to vibrate the letter ‘R’ inside their mouth, similar to some
South Indians. West Indians always pronounced the word ‘the ’ as ‘DE,’ and of
course, the educated type spoke typical ‘BBC English’ with clarity at a slower
pace, so that the listener could follow. One thing that always confused me was
to understand the blue-collar workers’ language. When they spoke of ‘dinner’
they meant lunch, which made no sense to me at all in the beginning! On the
topic of accents, it takes me back to an incident much later when my elder
brother (MR) who was at the time the Director of Highways visited London, and I
went to pick him up at the Gatwick Airport in Surrey. As he was coming out of
the ‘arrivals’ I noticed the ‘poor man’, who hadn’t lifted a finger at home,
struggling to push a trolley loaded with bags. I quickly rushed forward and
took over the wheeled cart from him and engaged a porter for the job.
Halfway towards the car park, the porter wanted to start a
conversation with my brother. In a strong cockney accent he blabbered
something, which my brother could not make head or tail out of it. Then with a
shy grin, he turned towards me and said in Sinhala: “What is this bugger trying to say? I can’t understand a word of it”! Perplexed porter turned towards
me and said: “Ay mite, doesn’t this fella
speak English”……? We had to control our laughter, but I thought to myself,
‘ …..if only this porter knew the position he held in Sri Lanka’!
Another incident, which tickled us, was about a brawl between an
Englishman and his old West Indian neighbour ending up in a magistrate’s court.
It could perhaps be a yarn, but not impossible at all.
The Englishman apparently had cut off a branch of a tree that
spread out from the West Indian’s garden, due to leaves falling and littering
his neatly kept garden. After many arguments about it, things had taken a turn
towards worse until it ended up in a magistrate’s court.
When the old West Indian walked into the witness box, the English Judge, looking at his frail constitution sympathised with the guy and tried to bail him out of the situation by putting some words literally into his mouth with a view to clear him out of the muddle.
Magistrate: Now …Mr.
Thompson… did you hit your neighbour Eric , purely for self-defence?
Thompson: “ Ya.. maan, ! I
hit him on de face… and he went over the de..fence” ( meaning over the fence)
The Magistrate cleverly interpreting it as an act of
self-defence acquitted the old guy!
At the time we landed in England things were not rosy for
coloured immigrants. We soon found out that it was much easier for someone with
a pet (cat or dog) to seek accommodation, but not with a child! This was during
the latter part of 1968 when the original immigration act went through another
phase of metamorphosis since 1900.
From our own experience we learnt that despite many advertisements,
which appeared on shop windows, for accommodation, the standard polite answer
when an immigrant responded was, ‘Sorry
Love, it’s gone already’. Sam too had been in England only just three
months prior to my arrival, and barely knew what was happening in the country,
but soon we opened our eyes to the level of racial discrimination that existed
among the common folk.
Daily News- 2013