“Culture is like jam; the less you have, the more you spread”

by Jayantha Perera

The Central Bank of Ceylon had stringent forex laws and regulations in the seventies. In 1975, it approved 18 sterling pounds for me to take to England as a student and recorded the amount in my passport. The postgraduate studentship from the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) of Sussex University paid my airfare, tuition fees, and living expenses.

I travelled to Karachi from Colombo on October 1. The connecting flight to London was delayed because the plane had engine troubles. I did not have money to make a call to IDS or ARTI about the delay. The plan was for someone from IDS to meet me at Falmer railway station (the nearest to the university) on October 2 in the afternoon.

Pakistan Airlines organised a city tour on the third day for the stranded travellers. I was amazed to see crowded public buses and thousands of pedestrians. At a bazaar, I bought a rosewood pipe and a small tobacco pouch for nine pounds. I visualised how professors at Peradeniya smoked their pipes at the senior common room. I wanted to be a mature, pipe-smoking Marxist scholar at Sussex, which was then known to be a hotbed of Socialists and Marxists.

On October 5, I landed at the Heathrow Airport, tired and disoriented. I remembered it was my father’s eighth death anniversary. I tried to imagine what he would have told me about England. For him, leaving home was a hazardous business. At least, initially, he would have opposed my going to England. He had set ideas of what was suitable for his four sons. He wanted me to study law. Once, I asked him jokingly whether it would be okay to marry after completing my first degree. He was shocked and said I had enough time to think about such matters and should study without “spoiling’ my mind. He blamed my mother for “corrupting” me.

There were several immigration officers on duty, and most of them looked like Indians or Pakistanis. The immigration officer wanted to know my sources of finance at Sussex. He read the studentship offer letter carefully and re-checked the UK visa on my passport. He politely told me to get a chest X-ray at the airport clinic.

At the customs, an officer wanted to know why I was visiting England. I told him about my postgraduate studies at Sussex. He inquired if I had any cooked food in my bag. When I told him I hadn’t, he smiled and said, “Usually, Asian students bring cooked fish, meat, and dried fruits.” I was hungry. I walked to a café and bought a ham sandwich and a glass of milk. (That was the first time I ate ham and drank cold milk from a carton.) I took a double-decker bus to Victoria Railway Station.

I reached London Central Bus Station at 3 pm. A uniformed bus conductor called a taxi and told the driver to drop me at the Victoria railway station. It was a very short ride. I asked the driver how much I owed him and showed him several coins. He carefully checked them, took a 50 pence coin, and said, “This is enough.”

The train to Brighton was an express train, and I could not believe a train could travel that fast. I saw a young woman pushing a trolley on the aisle. She served coffee, tea, and sandwiches. Passengers paid for the food they took from her. I wanted to buy a sandwich, but I did not because I had only a few pounds in my pocket. I needed that money to buy a train ticket from Brighton to Falmer.

The view from the train was breathtaking. I enjoyed the undulating landscape and the mild haze that enveloped distant low mountains and woods. They reminded me of the picturesque English villages I had seen in school English textbooks. Occasionally, I spotted sheep grazing in vast stretches of rolling land. Lines of old houses, narrow streets, and forests with glistening streams uplifted my spirit. I thought about my childhood and adolescence, especially my life after my father’s death. As the train rattled on, I found myself lost in a whirlwind of memories and emotions, each landscape outside the window triggering a new thought or feeling.

There was a connecting local train to Lewis from Brighton, and it reached Falmer railway station in about 20 minutes. When I got off the train, an elderly gentleman greeted me. He introduced himself as the station master. He took my suitcase and led me to a tiny room at the Station. I saw a jar of biscuits, a few slices of cake, a large flask, and two mugs on a small table. He wanted to know why I was late. I told him that the flight was delayed in Karachi. He offered me a slice of cake on a paper plate with a plastic fork and asked whether I wanted a cup of tea.

When I said, “Yes, please”, he asked me, “With or without sugar?” I said, “With sugar.” He pushed a container of white sugar cubes towards me. I asked him how many cubes to dissolve in the mug. He said two would be enough.

Then he said, “Oh, I am sorry. Would you like some milk with your tea?” I said, “Yes.” He opened a small packet of milk and poured a little into my tea mug, making tea lukewarm. I ate two slices of cake, and he then offered me a sizeable homemade chocolate biscuit from a jar in the room. He sat before me and said he was a young cadet at the Trincomalee Royal Air Force Base during World War II. He revisited Sri Lanka in the 1960s and stayed with his wife at the Galle Face Hotel for three nights before going to Trincomalee to see the Air Force base.

The station master accompanied me along the narrow path behind the Station to the Brighton-Lewis Highway. He advised me to cross the highway and read students’ graffiti on parapet walls. He waited until I crossed the road. I was thrilled to see the large graffiti on a parapet wall. One read –

‘Culture is like jam

the less you have,

the more you spread!’

I read the graffiti several times, stopping for a minute to absorb its meaning and context. It hinted that British culture was shallow. The British used force to deal with the people they met in the East or the West. China, which invented gunpowder, paper, the compass, and the printing press could have used such ‘weapons’ to conquer other people and build an empire, but they did not.

In five minutes, I reached the front entrance of the university. There was a Student Union kiosk. A student approached me, introduced himself, and welcomed me to the university. He offered me a cup of tea. I told him that I had just had tea at the railway station. Then, a man in a dark suit approached me and asked politely, “Are you Jayantha from Sri Lanka?” I smiled, and he introduced himself as Charlie and welcomed me to IDS. He was a porter at IDS. The stationmaster had phoned IDS to inform them of my arrival. Charlie opened a plastic bag, took out an old black overcoat, and asked me to wear it as it was getting cold. He carried my suitcase on his shoulder. We walked through the central court of the university. I could see the university’s motto – Be Still and Know – enshrined on the horizontal beam that connected two tall towers.

The IDS was a two-storied octagon-shaped building nestled in an undulating grassland that rose rapidly to form a thicket behind the university. Charlie introduced me to his colleagues and took me down to the cafeteria for a cup of tea. I ate a roll and drank a cup of hot chocolate. It reminded me of my mother, who gave me a hot cup of Ovaltine whenever I had a fever. Charlie paid the bill. He took me to the IDS Administrator’s office and told me to collect my suitcase from the porter’s office.

The Administrator was a charming man in his seventies with a disarming smile on his bearded face. He cordially hugged me for a minute or two and asked me, “How are you, son?” He told me he had spent a few weeks in Sri Lanka as a young army officer during the war. He opened a drawer, took out a brown envelope, and gave it to me, saying, “This is your stipend for the first term.” I felt happy and settled. He informed me I could stay at the IDS’ residential wing for two nights at the IDS’ expense. He invited me to dinner at the IDS cafeteria at 7 pm. I met Charlie downstairs, and he carried the suitcase to my suite.

The attached bathroom of the suite mesmerised me. It had a large bathtub and a beautiful wash basin with two taps. I opened one, and boiling water came gushing down; the other gave me ice-cold water. I plugged the washbasin drain and filled it with water from the two taps. I decided to drain water each time I rinse my mouth. I needed help with how to fill the bathtub or control the shower. I stepped out of the suite to get help and saw a tall old man with a beard at a fancy coffee machine in the corridor.

I asked him to show me how to operate the shower knobs to get hot water for a shower. He introduced himself as Dudley Seers, the former IDS director, and welcomed me to the IDS. I introduced myself and told him I had just arrived in the UK from Sri Lanka. He said that he was happy to meet me. He had many great memories of Sri Lanka, where, in the early 1970s, he led the ILO Employment and Development Mission. He remembered hot curries and aappa that he ate at roadside tea kiosks. He turned the knobs and showed me how to control cold and hot water.

I asked him how to operate the machine to get coffee. He inserted a coin, patiently played with several buttons, and produced a creamy coffee. It was different from the half glass of coffee my mother gave me, which had lots of sugar. He gave me two twenty-cent coins to get morning coffee from the machine.

Soon after I had a shower, there was a knock on the door. At the door was an old woman who introduced herself as the manager of the residential wing. She called me ‘my glamour,’ and I did not know how to respond. She smiled and told me she would return to take me down to dinner in an hour. Her sailor husband had visited Sri Lanka many times and once brought her a blue sapphire ring from Colombo.

I had a cold draft beer at the IDS bar, and it was like amurtha (nectar). I studied how the bartender siphoned beer into a large mug from a hidden barrel while debating with a customer on the British economy. The dinner was lavish. First, I had soup with bread and butter. This reminded me of issaraha kaema (a slice of bread served with a bowl of soup) at Sri Lankan weddings before lunch or dinner. I chose a steak covered with baked vegetables and fried onions. Then I had cheeses and crackers and, finally, a glass of Port.

The next day, I visited the Chairperson of the Sociology Department to introduce myself and to get the first term timetable. He sat behind a beautiful dark table. On it, there was a carved bamboo container with several pipes of different colours and shapes, neatly arranged according to their length. He asked me to sit down, picked a pipe, and fumbled with it without looking up. He then lighted his pipe and started smoking. His eyes got smaller, and I thought he was asleep, but he was awake. He welcomed me to the MA Sociology course and asked me about my preferred two courses for the term. I selected Marxist Sociology and Sociology of Development from the list he gave me. He was sad that I would not follow his course on European Radical Sociology, which focused on Jews and their persecution.

My principal teacher, Tom Bottomore, was a Marxist scholar. When I met him in his office room, I was overwhelmed by heavy pipe smoke. He was a friendly teacher. He told me he had spent time writing the well-known Sociology textbook for Indian students. He wore a thick tweed jacket with leather patches on his elbows. The other teacher was Prof Ron Dore, a development expert who published many books on Japan’s land reforms, city life, and industrial development. His famous book, ‘ Diploma Disease’, discussed the pitfalls of the traditional education system in Sri Lanka. He did not smoke. Once, he saw me smoking, and a few days later, when I visited him, he sarcastically remarked that pipe smoking is an emblem of the bourgeoisie, not the proletariat. Ron was the only IDS Fellow who did not profess Marxist thoughts.

By the end of the first term, I was well-adjusted to the university community, which was warm and friendly. Listening to debates over a pint of beer at the IDS bar in the evenings became my habit. I learned a lot from such debates and discussions. Two doctoral students from Sri Lanka often joined me at the bar. One of them, Newton, urged me to read Das Kapital as early as possible. It was a pleasure to listen to his stories and to watch how he explained complicated social theories with his fieldwork findings in the Kandyan countryside in Sri Lanka.

Tilak, the other doctoral student, told me to avoid visiting Brighton City on Sunday mornings. He said droves of ‘punks’ descended on the Brighton beach from London on Sundays, and the two piers were their favourite joints. They came in noisy motorcycles and wore dark denim jackets and silver chains. They had heavy boots with silver buckles. Their hairstyle, Tilak said, was short and coloured, which gave them the title of ‘punks.’ They were loud and carefree. He said that he had lived in an apartment not far from the Brighton Piers and avoided the town on Sundays.

I became curious about the punks and their subculture, which emerged in the 1970s in the UK. It was a youth subculture, and the youth wanted a cultural revolt and believed it was underway in the UK. People feared punks and thought that they would target, harass, and assault them. But punks were not hooligans or criminals. They demanded a cultural space for the youth to play a vital role in society. In this sense, the label ‘punk’ is for young people who want space to reimagine, discover, and challenge the society in which they are coming of age.

One Sunday morning, I went to Brighton Beach to see them. Around 10 am, I could hear motorcycles coming along the railway station road to the city’s heart. I counted 21 motorcycles, each carrying two punks. They parked their motorbikes and walked around shouting and laughing. One punk got knocked down by a car when he tried to cross the road recklessly. He was limping but refused to seek medical help.

Bands such as Sex Pistols and the Damned were popular in the UK in the 1970s. They gave punks some recognition and respect among the youth. Skirmishes with authorities were the centre pieces of the subculture that exposed chaos, ugliness, and outrage against the state in the 1970s. They showed anti-establishment sentiments and their desire for personal freedom. They hated hippies’ laid-back attitudes. Punks thought hippies who guided some youth in the 1960s to seek freedom just sat around and got high on drugs rather than getting out to act.

While settling down in England, I felt hidden and persisting ambivalence among some locals in Brighton towards towards South Asians. Once, at a small shop in Brighton, its owner told me that he would not sell anything to Asians, especially to Pakis. He thought I was a Pakistani. He felt I should live in my own country, not his country.

I thought he had expressed a general feeling among the English about Asians. An Indian friend at the university told me she had a similar experience at a bric-a-brac store in Brighton where the shopkeeper told her to “go home to your country. This is not your country.” When she ignored him, he became aggressive and started telling her rude jokes about Asian women, and my friend did not understand most of what he had said.