When my mother, Mallika, and I arrived in London in November 1962 it was by choice. We were following my father who had decamped to the city a few weeks earlier. But when he met us at Tilbury and angrily asked “Why are you here?”, we knew our fortunes had just changed forever. It was not a function of empire or exile or of politics or penury. Our story was far more localised, though it mirrored the human qualities that bring civilisations crashing down: a cocktail of human hope, frailty, and cruelty.
Shyama, aged 5, with the teddy her mother made ©Shyama Perera
Two weeks after we arrived, my father left. We did not see him for another 15 years. Mum had been convent-educated in rural Sri Lanka and her English was excellent, but she had never worked. Alone in a new country, living in a single room in a tenement block with a difficult 4-year-old, I can’t even imagine what that felt like.
She was just 31.
Thankfully, this great city offered opportunities – meagre, but every rung on the ladder takes you closer to the stars. She got work at the till in Lyons Corner House and folding linen at the Grosvenor House Hotel – a full-time job with a good lunch for the staff. Yet she got ever thinner, because the little she earned went on rent and on me.
I still remember turning off the lights and hiding in our room on Craven Terrace while our Sikh landlord, Mr Puri, would be beating on the door saying “Mrs Perera, I know you are in there. Open the door. You owe me rent.” I’d burst into giggles, and though she was terrified she would hush me with a smile. We always got it together in the end.
My mother was not an adventurer or a careerist, but my father’s departure accidentally opened for her a new door she could not have imagined.
My parents had married for convenience. He was being posted to Moscow as a diplomat and needed a wife. She was 24 and beyond bored, living with her parents in their rural home fifteen miles from Matara. Their land was being managed (badly) by staff, and there was no role for an educated young woman. When my father abandoned us in a strange city, he assumed she’d return home. Instead, she decided to stay and see what happened.
I read other people’s accounts of their early years in the UK and find no connection. Yes, there was racism. Yes, there was abject poverty. Yes, there were struggles and often life was utterly rancid. But there was always hope, and we were no different to the millions of people of all types, classes, races, and orientations trying to turn straw into gold.
Even when we were hiding from the Teddy Boys who roamed the streets of 1960s Paddington, looking for trouble; when my mother was walking the gauntlet of 1970s Skinheads on the Edgware Road shouting “Paki”; when I was reporting on patrols set up by East London Workers Against Racism, and collating the findings of Lord Scarman’s report on the Brixton Riots in the 1980s; poverty and any attendant racism were just a backdrop against which we lived our lives. They were not the backdrop.
Paddington was already multicultural when we pitched up. The biggest immigrant group in our neighbourhood were the Irish. The lettings signs which read “No dogs, No blacks, No Irish” are well documented. In buzzy Queensway, the first Pataks shop (now a huge pickle chain) did a roaring business on Westbourne Grove and the Indian newsagents sold rice and curry take-aways, ladling steaming food into tin foil boxes from large silver tureens on the counter. I couldn’t walk past without smelling the curry and begging Mum to buy. The restaurants however, were mainly Chinese. For six shillings (six bob) you could get a fabulous chow mein.
How can you not love a city that pulsates with life, and a system that endeavours – not so successfully today, alas – to protect the vulnerable. While we stayed on the council waiting list for the next eight years, sharing tenement toilets and baths with up to 26 other people, we were allocated a social worker who regularly checked on our health.
She made sure I got free school dinners and that my mother had a few weeks respite every year when the Children’s Country Holiday Fund, which sent city children to countryside hosts in the school holidays, sent me to stay with English families in Herefordshire.
Until her death at the age of 102 and 9 months, I still went to see my Aunty Mop – the herb specialist, Madge Hooper, who hosted me for several summers at her idyllic plot in Stoke Lacy, Herefordshire. We boiled up and bottled mint jelly for sale from her tiny shed which filled with visitors every weekend. I’d watch her make lavender bags – lavender is still my favourite smell – sending me home with handfuls for Mum. She introduced me to Maurice Chevalier, church on Sundays, clock golf, and chocolate kisses (yum). Happy days.
I was shared between Madge and the indomitable Brenda Herford who hosted six London children on her vast farm, Hawkhurst, for three weeks every summer. My mother once cooked dinner for Brenda’s daughter, Carol, in London. When Carol reported back on our living circumstances, Brenda asked Madge if she would take me for the second three weeks of every summer holiday to give my mum a longer break. All I remember is sunshine and games and herbs and harvesting and fresh eggs, fresh milk, fresh lemonade, fresh air…
Shyama aged 8 with her mother ©Shyama Perera
Through all of this, my extraordinary mother had finally taken and passed the civil service exams and after many years of living hand to mouth, her aspirations started to blossom. We were still in a single room at the top of a rooming house, but in that space my mother cooked feasts on a two-ring electric stove and people came to sit on our floor (we had only one chair) and sometimes in two rows on the bed like a cinema, and we ate and laughed.
Later my mother said, “We cooked and ate in the same room where we washed our faces, slept, and hung our clothes. We must have smelt like curry puffs.” Poverty smells. I remember children at my primary school who were decidedly unwashed. Far from being different, I was the same, but for my mother it was a long fall for a diplomat’s wife.
Nonetheless, she too placed the wins above the losses. She had married in order to leave the impositions of rural life within hidebound communities where a single woman lived like a captive bird unless freed into a different type of captivity through marriage. Moscow, where I was born, had opened her eyes to new ways of knowing and seeing the world and my father’s next move, to the Sri Lankan Embassy in Bonn, had further whetted her appetite for the wide-open spaces. Without knowing it, she was becoming an internationalist.
The friends who visited our fourth-floor room at 13 Craven Terrace, reflected her outlook. There was Aunty Verna from British Guyana, Uncle Emmanuel from Uganda, the Baldeo’s from Portugal, Aunty Judy from Australia, Uncle Ben from the Ukraine, and numerous fabulous Sri Lankan-born Aunties – Sinhalese, Tamil, Burgher – who, broadly, either worked for the High Commission in Hyde Park or were primary school teachers.
Shyama’s mother is in the striped slacks, Wilfred and Concy, the young Sri Lankans, Shyama’s aunty Rani on the far side, Judy from Australia on the floor, and Shyama sitting on the lap of her glamorous Aunty Erica ©Shyama Perera
If someone on the street looked interesting, my mother spoke to them. We were replete with friends and their stories, their cuisine, their kindness.
And yet when the adult me looks back and reconstructs what was happening, I am astounded. Firstly at my mother’s fortitude. Why opt for a hard and unknowable life when there’s safety back home? Secondly, I am gobsmacked by her recklessness: that the fate of a small child (me) should be dependent on things ‘coming right’. What if they had not?
Moving continents by choice requires a certain recklessness, doesn’t it? When anyone makes a decision to move across the world with no work or lodgings in place, it’s a risk. When children are added to that potent mix, it verges on folly. But it can come right. I see my mother’s journey from South Asia to the UK as being that of an Accidental Occidentalist.
At the time of writing, she is 92. Last weekend we went to a gay wedding – of friends made during a musical evening at The Crazy Coqs bar in Piccadilly two years ago, one German, the other a Kiwi. She spoke with every one of the guests who ranged from family to colleagues to neighbours. A video of her dancing at another wedding, aged 90 and in a sari, went viral on Twitter. She is living the life she wanted in the way she wants.
Of course, we flew from the branches of a tree that still stands, laden with family, in our ancestral homeland. What I’ve seen at SADAA, in the histories of the many artists whose collections we hold or have digitised, is journeys that start with division and expulsion. Whole families robbed in an instant of their landscape, their history, their connections, their safety, their status; the tree is uprooted. How does ‘no going back’ affect perspective?
Conscious of this difference, I have never felt my own story has any research or collectible value. It lacks the passion, the beauty, the reflection, the polemic, the pathos, the politics, the light and shade, of ‘real’ first generation narratives.
When I wrote my first novel, Haven’t Stopped Dancing Yet, I created four girls for whom adversity is a shared norm. The narrator, Mala, has best friends of different extractions: Irish, Chinese, English. Imbued with the music and fashions, the shops, food, romance and films that were the zeitgeist of the age, where provenance appears it is an incidental factor. How could this story possibly be of interest to anyone but ‘chick-lit’ readers?
A while later, my mother mentioned that a Sri Lankan-heritage academic in Australia had included the book in a paper she’d written. I was surprised. Then, a few years later, a visiting Sri Lankan professor built a seminar in Central London around the book, and me. It was picked up by an American University running a London-based literature module, as an example of the different cultures that make up this glorious city.
I was confused that my literary confection should count as anything more than that: a literary confection. My friend, the respected London-based academic, Sivasambu, explained: “It is the first novel about the Sri Lankan diaspora in the UK. That makes it important.”
So the Sri Lankan ‘stuff’ – milk rice on New Year’s Day, the aunties complaining about comprehensive schools, the sayings, the jokes, the snobberies, the assumptions, the parroting of unfeasibly complicated family trees and connections, the clothes, the rituals – was not just colour around the story. It was a part of the story. Of course.
And all writing, painting, dancing, composing, scripting by first generation South Asian professionals irrespective of whether their work directly addresses their experiences or leaves them forgotten on the side, is a part of the bigger story. I’m so glad I learned that lesson before joining the SADAA board. It was what made me want the collection to be more than an academic resource: to be known and available to all.
The SADAA archive boasts stories and essays, photographs, catalogues and scripts, interpretations and insights, manifestations, and performance, from an extraordinary diversity of people united by a shared ancestry but in every other way unique – from geography, religion, class, age, biology, family, education, to aspiration, expectation, evaluation.
Common threads are just that. The weft and the style of the tapestries into which they are woven, stand alone. What defines the work we collect, catalogue, digitise, is its quality. That’s it. Onto that can be laid any chosen narrative because there are sufficient threads of every hue to pull out and repurpose. That’s the challenge for future generations.
In the interim, I am leaving Mala and her friends, Caroline, Bethany, and Janice, in Paddington circa 1979 aged 21. They are on the cusp of the possible as I was at their age, working on local newspapers in the East End – The Stratford Express and the Newham Recorder. I was two years away from the big leap to The Guardian. Later it would be TV and radio, novels and essays, while raising two fabulous children single-handed; but it was only when I got my degree aged 50 that my mother said, “Darling, at last you have made it.”
I could have taken that as an insult, but I have learned from my mother, The Accidental Occidental who randomly landed in the UK, that life is an ongoing process. Things don’t happen because you want them to, or because you’ve earned or deserved it, they happen randomly; and every change of season requires a new strategy and a fresh eye.
Arriving from a far-off land has been the seminal turning point for many of the artists whose work we celebrate at SADAA as it turns 25. The UK is a terminus with so many exits, the eye is dazzled. It’s easier to home in on what’s going wrong, than look out at what is right, but the proliferation of great art that has come from the first generation of South Asians in the UK speaks to what is right, even when it speaks about what is wrong.
Please look at the SADAA archive – it is rich and redolent with certainty.
