After the novelty of flying in a Boeing 747 had worn off and Stevie Wonder\u2019s looped singing of \u2018Isn\u2019t She Lovely\u2019 on the piped music channel, I was rapidly losing the will to live. An infant two seats away yelled incessantly. The combination of this, the nauseating whiff of baby sick, food and poo was driving me to the edge. So, when the chief flight steward announced that we would soon be making our descent into London\u2019s grey and wet welcome, I rejoiced at the news.<\/p>\n
Everything seemed to have the glow of the new. Everything smelt fresh and clean. One was struck by the relative silence after the cacophony of Bombay, struck by the order and the absence of sweltering heat. There were neatly parked luggage trolleys which you helped yourself to \u2013 not a coolie in sight. We walked silently pushing our trolleys through long corridors with conveyor belts while beeping\u00a0 \u2018golf-karts\u2019\u00a0 ferried the disabled to and fro. It had a touch \u00a0of the surreal.<\/p>\n
I was bursting with optimism. I\u2019d left the familiar chaos of India; a brave new life awaited me, full of gleaming opportunities, I thought. The rest of life beckoned; after 25 years of remotely imbibing the cultural products of this society \u00a0\u2013 the centre of Empire – here I was in the capital of the \u2018first world\u2019 – the land of the Beatles, Bertrand Russell, Julian Bream, The Virgin Queen, Bobby Charlton & Stanley Matthews, Lorna Doon, JM Keynes, Adam Smith, Winston Churchill, \u00a0Emmeline Pankhurst, Charlie Chaplin, Geoffrey Boycott, Bevan and, of course, Shakespeare. The land of Blue Band margarine, of Eno\u2019s fruit salts, Shell, ICI, the BBC World Service, the Austin, the Ford Anglia, the Zephyr \u00a0and the Land Rover. Let’s not forget Florence Nightingale. Oh, and HP sauce, Tower Bridge, Buckingham Palace,Imperial Leather \u00a0and Pears soap, 10 Downing Street, the bustling London docks, of Test Cricket and of Queen Elizabeth II. The Queen Mother \u2013 yes, we\u2019d been out on the streets in Kampala waving little \u00a0Union Jacks in our little hands as the Queen Mother motorcaded passed us in an open limousine, hadn\u2019t we? Wasn\u2019t she nice? wasn\u2019t it wonderful how she smiled at us and waved with her regal, white, gloved hand? The land of The Beano, The Beezer, The Dandy, of Oliver Twist, of George Orwell and Shaw.\u00a0 Here I was, on life\u2019s threshold.<\/p>\n
Ahead of me in the immigration queue was a young man, an English man I presumed, not the Englishman of literature, of the public school with a bowler hat and coat tails. No. This Englishman wore a magnificent, long peroxide red, spiky erect fan of hair from the top of his forehead to the back, like a Mohawk Indian. The rest of his head was clean shaven. He wore a black, studded, leather jacket and, oddly, red and black tartan trousers. There were chains looping\u00a0 from his belt, the purpose of which I was unable to fathom. Desperate Dan, the wild west character in the British comic, Dandy, would have been dead proud of those boots \u2013 they were enormous and steel toed. I remembered enjoying a cartoon in Punch magazine I\u2019d bought in the bazar in Bombay which showed a group of boys all dressed just like this young man with one of them saying, \u201cThey\u2019ll never catch me in a uniform!\u2019<\/p>\n
As we approached the immigration officer, the one at the neighbouring desk was attending to a withered old Gujarati woman in a sari. She spoke no English. He took a sponsorship letter from her and, laughing, called to his colleague, \u201cOi John\u2026.get this\u2026it says: Mrs Jantilal is my sister \u2026.in brackets\u2026(real)\u2026\u2026\u201d . I laughed too. The man in the Mohican turned around. He has a safety pin in his upper lip. I smiled at him.<\/p>\n
\u201cWot you f****n\u2019 smilin’ at, Paki?\u201d he blurted venomously.<\/p>\n
As I left the terminal, I saw a huge hording saying \u201cLabour\u2019s Not Working\u201d. Driving through the city I saw buildings with neon signs that said TAKE COURAGE.\u00a0 What did these signs mean? There must be a national crisis of some sort, I thought, and how nice of the government to urge its people to be brave. Perhaps this had something to do with that Winter of Discontent, I had heard of on the World Service.<\/p>\n
Outside, although it was summer, I felt cold. Confusion started to creep into my mind like some foul miasma.<\/p>\n
Unloading my suitcase from the car, my brother said: \u201cWelcome to Great Britain!\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
After the novelty of flying in a Boeing 747 had worn off and Stevie Wonder\u2019s looped singing of \u2018Isn\u2019t She Lovely\u2019 on the piped music channel, I was rapidly losing the will to live. An infant two seats away yelled … Continue reading