New Horizons – 11 The old order ends

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An English Education, JVP, Kurunegala, Lakshmi, Nirmali Hettiarachchi, Servants, USJP

I was rarely at home during the two years after I left USJP, not only because of work requirements and my travels, but also because I was finding the situation unbearable. My niece and nephew seemed a nuisance, not least because they were clearly a strain on my parents. My mother shouted much more than was good for her, so much so that I even once remonstrated with her on my niece’s behalf, only to be told sadly that she was doing her best to get her straight, but did not think she would succeed.

Upset though I was by the children’s presence, I realized too that I could hardly blame them, certainly not the little girl, who was too young to understand why she had been sent away from her parents, and naturally reacted badly. When finally the whole family was together again in Australia, she seemed to settle down, which suggests that the trauma of separation is something that should be avoided. But by then it was too late to tell my mother that a refusal in 1994 to take on the responsibility might have served everyone better.

When in Colombo I found refuge at Nirmali’s, in the office that had been used for the various book production programmes the English Association had taken on when the British Council decided it should not take bread from the mouth of British publishers, as one memorable directive went. Initially we had had an office in Bagatelle Road, when the Association worked for the Council on the first CIDA book project, and we had used the place also to house Scott Richards when he came out for various workshops. This led to entertaining stories about what he claimed was attempted seduction by the caretaker the Council had put in place, but all this had to stop when the Council withdrew.

The Association was then kindly given space in Nirmali’s annexe, where she also conducted classes, and I produced several books there, helped by my old Secretary at the Council who worked for us for very little pay at weekends. We also had the Thalgodapitiya girls, whose mother ran the Lionel Wendt, two noisy but extraordinarily efficient characters. Between them all they taught me to use a computer, which I had long resisted on the grounds that I was too old. The result was a stream of prose, including the novels ‘Servants’ in 1995 and ‘An English Education’ in 1996. Since then, I fear, I have never really been sociable.

Though work and travel were fulfilling, and it was salutary to discover the joys of solitude, 1995 was a bleak year in Colombo. In May my aunt Lakshmi was murdered, at the house she had built for herself in Bagatelle Road. She had moved there to be reasonably near us while also guarding her independence, which she had cherished for well over a decade and a half at the Old Place, my grandmother’s childhood home in Kurunagala.

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New Horizons – 10 Colombo constrictions

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Chanaka Amaratunga, Chandrika Kumaratunga, Colombo, Gamini Athukorale, Gamini Dissanayake, GELT, Lalith Athulathmudali, Mahaweli, Ranil Wickremesinghe, Sri Lanka, Srima Dissanayake, UGC, UNP

While the world outside Colombo was figuring with increasing importance in my life in the mid-nineties, at home the lights, as Edward Grey described the onset of war in Europe in 1914, were going out one by one. My grandmother died in June 1994, on my father’s birthday, when my mother had arranged to have the British High Commissioner over for dinner. It had been a longstanding obligation, but she had wanted a date when I too was available, which had been difficult to fix. The dinner had of course to be cancelled, and I do not think I attended another formal dinner at Lakmahal until January 1997, just before my mother left for the operation in Oxford from which she did not recover.

I was still attached to Sri Jayewardenepura University in the middle of 1994, having celebrated my 40th birthday in May, with 40 guests. I had found it difficult to fill up the number, which made me realize how out of touch I had got with Colombo over the preceding couple of years. When I resigned from the British Council in 1992, I had celebrated my birthday – and the recurrence of Wesak, in the 19 year cycle of full moons – with a retirement party, which had been a very jolly occasion. After 1994, I did not celebrate a birthday again at Lakmahal, travelling to Oxford for my 50th, after I realized that one’s closest friends are generally those with whom one grows to maturity.

My grandmother had been ailing for a long time, her tenacious hold on life slipping when first she lost her sight, and then when she had to use a wheel-chair. It was odd to see her reduced to helplessness, since for most of my forty years I had thought of her as ruling over Lakmahal with a will of iron. Widowed in 1945, losing all her sons, the last two in rapid succession in 1983 and 1985, she had still maintained her authority, which I fear acted as a curb on my mother. Latterly I had begun to understand why my mother spent so much time at Girl Guide Headquarters, which allowed for the full flowering of her equally vibrant, but much more gentle, personality.

My grandmother’s death, though it left an enormous hollow, should also have been a liberation for my mother. This did not follow, because my brother, who had been in Hong Kong for the last two years with his family, decided to continue there but send his children back to be looked after by my parents. Previously they had looked after his son for years, while he and his wife were pursuing higher qualifications in England. But they had seemed to enjoy this, even taking on responsibility for the boy when, after his parents came back from England, his mother got pregnant again, and found looking after two children difficult.

But that it was a responsibility they could not readily fulfil as age advanced I understood, when I came back once on a Sunday afternoon after a trip to Yala with my sister, to find my mother almost in hysterics because her grandson had not come home after church. She was trying to convince my father, who was enjoying an afternoon nap, that he should go and drive round the church premises, to see if the boy could be traced. I tried to tell her not to worry, that doubtless the boy was hanging around with friends, as all of us had done at that age, without parents worrying overmuch. But she quelled me by saying, with a quaver in her voice ‘Other people’s children….…’ Her relief, when they called the vicar and found the boy had spent the day there, was palpable.

New Horizons – 9 Wider concerns after leaving USJP

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AUC, DELIC, Ena de Silva, GELT, NIE, UGC, USJP, WUSC

The first casualty of the enmity of the Head of the Languages Department was our English programme. The papers I had prepared about introducing a Special Degree in English and setting up a separate Department failed to go through the Senate and thus never reached the UGC. I found the new UGC too less than sympathetic about all this, whereas Prof Aluwihare had been keen that I join USJP and take on the AUCs precisely because he had hoped for a revolution in the teaching of English at tertiary level in the country as a whole.
I heard him once describe USJP as the flagship of the university system to a visiting World Bank delegation and, though I was surprised at the time, I could see how under Prof Hettiarachchi as Vice-Chancellor it had been a truly dynamic place. Certainly the innovations then taking place in its Management Faculty, with a superb professionally oriented course in Accountancy having been started under another visionary, Mr Wickremaratne, justified the description in an area which was just making the breakthrough to employment oriented education.

Prof Wilson as Dean was also keen to move forward. I was a bit surprised when he appointed to the committee to put forward proposals for English another Economics Professor, an older man called Sirisena Thilakaratna. But I found him immensely helpful, able to understand and build on the concepts I had worked on. When I thanked Wilson for his choice, he explained that Thilakaratna was his old guru. Later he became Chairman of the UGC, with Dorakumbura I gathered having been the other name suggested.

That would have been a disaster, for Dorakumbura proved deeply conservative. Under him and the regime he had set in place, USJP ceased to move forward. I had some sympathy for Dorakumbura because I believe the challenge to him being appointed Vice-Chancellor, based on prejudice against him being a Librarian and not an Academic, had soured him as far as many of his academic colleagues were concerned. He had therefore fallen back on the support of the less able amongst them. The result however was that many of the innovations I would have liked to push had to be abandoned.

Part of the problem lay in the fact that, in my letter of application, I had asked for a contract position rather than to be appointed to the staff. In the interview it had been explained by Hettiarachchi that there was no difference in terms of the freedoms I would enjoy, so I had agreed to be appointed to the permanent staff. But the letter when it came specified that I was being put on contract as requested. I did not challenge this and, though Dorakumbura initially suggested that this be changed, he seemed in time to lose interest in retaining me. As a result I was not really seen as part of the Faculty, and could not press for reforms as an insider.

More seriously, the practice in the Universities was that those on contract had to ask to have their contracts renewed. I refused to do this, on the grounds that the onus should lie on the university to renew a contract or not. At the end of my first year, the university did write renewing my contract, but a year later the situation had changed. My students attempted to convince the authorities to write to me, but they refused, and told them that I should apply. I did not want to seek renewal, since I felt that my usefulness was diminishing. Though I would have accepted the offer of an extension, I thought that my requesting it would put me in an impossible position if conditions were made thereafter about what outside work I could do. And so, towards the end of 1994, my employment at USJP came to an end.