This
week I met in the coffee shop a young woman who hails from Karnataka state in
the south of India, and who has come here briefly with her son of 18 to help
settle him into enrolment in political science courses as a student at McGill
University. A couple of days later I met the son, who seemed like a very nice
lad, with an air of some confidence, and it got me to thinking back on when I
left home in the year 1948, which happens to be almost exactly 70 years ago. I
had been living with my family until I was 20, my family consisting of my
parents and the three our six siblings, our eldest three having already married
and moved into their own homes.
Immediately I look up Karnataka: 61
million people; twice the size of New Brunswick, so, crowded, rather; GDP per capita
just over $2400 US equivalent (Quebec’s
20 times larger); moderate winters, highest ever summer temperature 45.6 C;
Bangalore, the major city, 9 million pop., in recent years renowned for its
hospital and as a hi-tech centre; a state with, apparently, a rich history and
mythology. How any of this may have affected
an 18-year-old is hard to say, but that his family can have him study abroad
suggests they live far above the per capita average income levels. While the
winter will be the lad’s overwhelming challenge, he might be impressed that
while his state has 10 more or less officially recognized languages, Quebec has
been tearing itself apart for years over just two. He has promised to get in
touch with me if ever he feels he needs someone to talk to (although I can hear my readers asking what
can a 90-year-old dodderer possibly have
to say that could interest an 18-year-old youth? Good question).
My move at roughly his age was only
about 130 miles north to the city of Dunedin, a move that certainly
cannot compare with the one = our young friend is making from the heat of
southern India to the deadly winter cold of Montreal, something he can scarcely
even have imagined.
For myself, I am almost embarrassed
to recall how gauche and unprepared I was to take on the world at the age of 20
when I left home. The first day I got into a room in a miserable boarding house
shared with a working man who came home late at night in a slightly inebriated
condition, arousing in me feelings of trepidation which quickly became a painful
homesickness. I quit that room almost immediately, moved into a friendly working-class
home where I began to be more at ease, until I was suddenly kicked out on the grounds I was
showing too much interest in one of the two rather appalling unmarried daughters. But this place had cured me of my
homesickness, a disease that disappeared within a week or so of leaving home,
never again to re-appear.
Then I took a room in the home of a
nasty, conservative widow whose hatred of the Labour Party, which I supported
wholeheartedly, took the form of holding up newspaper pages and jeering and
cackling at the latest statements of the Labour Prime Minister, Peter Fraser, a
self-educated Scottish working man. She
would have been better off cleaning her house occasionally, but I cultivated
the posture of being above it all, keeping myself to myself, lying for hours on
my bed when not working, reading and writing letters to my future wife, who
lived at the other end of the country, and whom I had recently met briefly when
she was visiting Dunedin.
Only one of my four children has ever
shown much interest in my early days, and then only recently; but he confesses
himself puzzled by the fact that I left my family at an early age --- in fact,
I left the country entirely two years later --- and never bothered to return
until 25 years later, and then only briefly, moving back to Canada within 18
months.
We married when I was 22, she 25,
soon after she returned to Dunedin to be with me. We married because when we
decided to go to Australia, the shipping company would not allow us to travel
in the same cabin while unmarried. So we gathered the parents, had a truncated
church wedding to please our mothers, and took off.
Life was quite different when we took
a small, ground-floor apartment in the small North Queensland town of Mackay, a
centre of the sugar cane industry. In this hot climate people were accustomed
to having snakes in their rafters, and slithering around their streets, along
with every other awful creature under the sun, crocodiles being a regular presence
in the tidal river estuary. All food had
to be in cupboards whose legs sat on cups full of poison, to keep the ants
away. If we trod on a cockroach while obeying a bathroom call overnight by the
morning the carcass was gone, cleared away by lines of these tiny Argentinian
ants.
I found the people in Australia
almost as strange as the animals. It was still the era of White Australia, the
official Aussie immigration policy, then only slowly giving way to allow
non-white Asians to study at centres of higher learning, but otherwise kept
intact by the prohibition of the native Australians from living in the
cities.
Six months was enough: our next abode
was a tiny adobe house in a newly-created Indian village in the Punjab, 85
miles north of Delhi, to which we had been attracted when, against all the
odds, I received a reply to a letter I wrote (oh, the follies of youth!) to Pandit
Nehru, the remarkable man whose books I had read and admired. I have written
about this experience in an earlier Chronicle, so will not weary the reader
with repetition. Suffice to say, the searing pre-monsoon heat, combined with
the insanitary conditions --- the butcher would cut off a piece of meat by
holding it with his toes, and the milkman always poured our milk through his
dirty old dhoti that looked like it had never been washed --- these all did for our health, so that
after a few months, with great regret for ourselves and the many friends we had
made among our Indian neighbours, whom we were supposed in theory at least to be
helping build the New India, we decided that discretion was the better part of
valour and escaped the likelihood of approaching debility by retreating to
Kashmir, a gorgeous valley in the midst of a political crisis from which it has
never to this day recovered, so that we were almost the only tourists at the
time, and could hire a houseboat complete with servants, cooks, and food, for a
minimal sum, which allowed our health to recover in good order.
Our next permanent place of residence
was London, in north Kensington, the slummy part, not far from Wormwood Scrubs
prison. We lived upstairs from a young doctor who entertained us with a recital
of burps, belches and other noises as he washed himself each morning in our
communal bathroom before he went off to minister to his patients. I don’t
remember much about this apartment, but I do remember that by taking the No.11
Ladbrooke Grove bus southwards you could travel from the slums into the poshest
part of London, along one street. This was so offensive to my egalitarian
instincts that it immediately produced in me a distaste for English life, a
distaste that, in spite of my intense admiration for many aspects of it, I was
never able completely to overcome after living among the English, on two
separate occasions, for eleven years. It is that class-based structure that has
always grated on me.
Eventually we moved into a Scottish
castle that had been given to the nation by Lord Lothian, a pre-war British
ambassador to the United States, for use as an adult education college. My wife
and I lived there for almost nine months, me as a student, she as a teacher in
a nearby mining village, Newtongrange, which I helped her to reach every day by
taking her to the bus, and picking her up again, on our tandem bicycle, on
which we had just made a tour right around France. These months in Newbattle
Abbey College when I was one of only 16 students attended to by four tutors, I
still number among the golden months of my life, an interlude of pure pleasure
in which we enjoyed intimate contact with our fellows of a type that, for the
first time since leaving home three years before, took us back to the way we
were brought up, as part of a community whose members were known to all of us
and with whose lives we were closely intertwined.
We went from the beauty of the Scottish countryside to a crowded house
in Coventry which had been turned into 16 one-room apartments, with a common bathroom,
and each with one small electric stove for cooking. This was going from the
sublime to the ridiculous. Most of our neighbours in this overcrowded building
remained unknown to us: for the first time, we were rubbing up against the
anomie of modern urban living. We got to know only one young couple, Tandon and
Prabha, from India, en route to Sweden, where Tandon was going to work for Ericcson,
the electronics company in Sweden. Prabha, though essentially idle and slightly
overweight from lack of exercise was incredibly beautiful. We seemed to be
attracted to each other, and on my afternoons off, I would go upstairs and
spend time playing mahjong with her. Of course, I ached to touch her, but was far
too proper, nervous, timid, use whichever adjective seems appropriate to the
case to do anything, not even touching her hand. But it didn’t go unnoticed by
my wife, and she never forgave me for it, even recalling it during a disagreement
we had fifty years later, bitterly commenting, “Oh, yes, I remember how you
used to look at Prabha.” It came right
out of left field, that one, but I really couldn’t deny it. We never saw them
again after we left Coventry to emigrate to Canada, and I have often wondered
how they made out.
And so here I am, taking my coffee
downstairs every morning, meeting this mother and son from India one day,
another day a Chinese engineer working in Houston, Texas, and visiting his wife
and family who are living in Montreal for six months until he can come back and
work here.
The four people who run the coffee
shop make it like a minor United Nations: the owner and a charming young waitress, are from China; a second waitress from Korea; and a late-30ish
Peruvian is working part=time in the coffee shop while upgrading his skills in
graphic design in an effort to fit himself for work in his chosen profession.
The world is present there and it is
a way to overcome the dramatic anomie that comes from my living on the
fifteenth floor of a high-rise apartment building in which I never meet even one
of the many people who live on the same floor.
Such is life I guess.
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