English: A personal anecdote on the need for it

By Dr B.J.C.Perera
MBBS(Cey), DCH(Cey), DCH(Eng), MD(Paed), MRCP(UK), FRCP(Edin), FRCP(Lon), FRCPCH(UK), FSLCPaed, FCCP, Hony FRCPCH(UK), Hony. FCGP(SL) Specialist Consultant Paediatrician and Honorary Senior Fellow, Postgraduate Institute of Medicine, University of Colombo, Sri Lanka.

I have followed with great interest the erudite articles by scholars regarding education in English in The Island. Of course, teaching English in the entire country will be a very difficult, winding, steep and narrow road that needs to be navigated for it to be a successful enterprise. The rewards are of course many and in the world of today, it is a worthwhile pursuit.

Yet for all that, it requires intense dedication and unbridled commitment on the part of students as well as teachers. For me, the latter part of my secondary school tutoring, the undergraduate education and postgraduate instructions were in English. Without English, I would not have been able to get anywhere.

In such a context, the account that follows is my personal experience in learning English. I am reproducing some excerpts from my autobiography, ‘A trek known only to a few’ so that it would perhaps help and encourage those who aspire to learn Her Majesty’s language.

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I was taken out of De Mazenod College in December 1959 and enrolled at St. Peter’s College, Colombo 4, in January 1960. I was in a Grade 8 Sinhala medium class until the end of the year, when I was promoted to the Senior Prep-Year 1 Class, which was the first of the two-year GCE O/L programme. My teachers decided that I should be in the bioscience stream. I did as I was told and found myself in an English medium class, where there were a whole lot of English-speaking Burgher, Tamil and Sinhala boys.

I had a major problem—a challenge of gigantic proportions. I could not communicate in English. I could barely manage to write a few poorly constructed sentences, but my level of comprehension of what was being taught, and even talked about, was simply appalling. I could not converse at all in English and persistently avoided talking in English. During the first month, I struggled and managed to stay afloat.

Then one day, something happened that completely changed my life. We had an English language teacher called Mr Clive. He asked us to write an essay, collected our exercisebooks and took them home. The following day, he gave them back to the boys but kept mine. Then, he called me and tried hard to tell me in English what rubbish I had written. I could not answer him in English. So, I tried to tell him in Sinhala, what I tried to write in English. Mr Clive, a reputed scholar in English and French, could not understand Sinhala very well. It was a complete impasse as neither of us could understand each other. Then he came out with a sentence of seven words that had a profound effect on me for the rest of my life. He said “You will not get anywhere without English.” I managed to commit those words to memory and pondered over them the whole day. Those were seven golden words that definitely changed my life.

I went home and thought very deeply about those seven words and realised the seminal value of that sentence. I carefully plotted a course of action and acted on it. Every afternoon, after school, I went to the college library and borrowed a book written in English. We had to return the book the following morning at 7.30 am. On Fridays, we were allowed two books, to be returned on Monday morning.

I struggled immensely. I tried to look up the meanings of words but it was a very hard grind. I burned midnight oil. The strange thing was that my father was extremely

fluent in all three languages, and my mother too was conversant in them. English newspapers were available at home but up to that time I had never bothered to read them. In the evenings, there were several people waiting on our porch to get my father to write official letters to government departments in English, as he was a colonial public servant with an excellent command of English. All those facilities were there at home, but thanks to my stupidity, I had not bothered to make use of them up to that time.

Then, I started going to my mother for help with the difficult words and sentences in the library books and to my father too when things were getting quite tough. I tried to read every book in the library. I just started reading on my own, and got to know that the best way to learn a language was to read. In addition, I started to read the English newspapers available at home. I concentrated on the editorials, which were in high-quality English and helped to improve my grasp of the language. For these, I needed my parents’ assistance.

I continued to borrow books daily. With such a Herculean effort, my command of the language started to improve, albeit slowly. I used to read even while having meals. My parents, my brother and my sister tolerated the seemingly annoying habit. I managed to pick up the language slowly and even started to talk to others in hesitant but correct English, a few months later. With all these intense efforts, my ability to study the other subjects in English too improved gradually. By the end of the first year, I was able to communicate in English reasonably well. My class grades too went up, and I was usually the second or third in the term test rankings.

Lo and behold, by the end of the second year, I was ahead of my classmates in English as well as in the other subjects. That mattered a great deal as we were due to sit the GCE Ordinary Level Examination at the end of the second year. As it turned out, I got two distinctions and four credits.

Meanwhile, my passion for reading English books continued and developed into a habit. In 1964, I pased the GCE A-Level examination and entered the Faculty of Medicine in Colombo in 1965.

Sir Francis Bacon has said, “Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man“. For me, the latter two components of this postulation came about very much later.

The icing on the cake or the jewel in the crown was my experience at the MRCP(UK) examination in England. I managed to go through the theory parts without any major problems. Then I went for the clinical examination at Westminster Hospital in London. For the clinical component, there was an English lady who had been brought for the exam repeatedly as the long case. She had been a diet clerk at the same hospital. She was extremely nice and provided me with all the details when I asked all the right questions. I had finished with about 10 minutes to spare and I was chatting with the patient. Then she asked me, “Doctor, which year were you in Oxford?” I said that I had not been to Oxford even for holiday. Then the lady said, “Impossible, it is quite a surprise. You speak perfect Oxford English“. Then I asked her what Oxford English was, and in return, she asked me, “Have you heard our Queen speak?” I said, “Yes Ma’am, I have heard her speak on television“. She then said that Her Majesty spoke very clearly without an accent, and that was Oxford English. And, she added, “You speak just like that”. I thanked her and thought to myself that for someone who could not speak English up to about 15 years of age, this must surely be the ultimate accolade, especially when it came from an English lady.

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People find it difficult to believe this saga when I tell this story. I repeat it whenever I have to and whenever I can in the hope that it will help and encourage our younger generations. It is also because of my conviction that if I could do it, so can anyone else, who would be willing to put his or her heart and soul into such an endeavour.