Kam Raslan’s Talking Edge

(Reprinted from The Edge – Options pullout, 20 June 2016 issue)

Dear Kam,
It looks like you’re in England. What’s it like?
Internet Explorer

I’m in England and Britain is on the verge of voting to leave the European Union. Or rather, with England on the verge of dissolving Britain. Scotland wants to stay in Europe, but where I am, Suffolk, the clamour is to leave and close the borders. Immigrants are the issue. Apparently, there are too many and they are leaching off the system by claiming benefits, and so on. I have seen a few foreigners but not many. Nearby is Sutton Hoo, where in 1939, as Europe was about to go to war again, it was discovered that a 7th century Saxon king had been buried along with his longship and a treasure trove of riches. To this day, this part of the world remains almost entirely Anglo-Saxon.

Because of the British Empire and The Beatles, there are millions around the world who are intimately familiar with the history and culture of England and yet, it’s quite possible that the people I see in Suffolk have never left this place. The world might know about them but right now, they appear to want to keep the world away.

I grew up in England, so I like the English and I like England. I don’t feel the need to blame them and their old Empire for, you know, everything, but I needed to go somewhere where there were some outsiders, so I went to the town of Bedford. I had never visited Bedford before but have wanted to ever since I started reading about a period of its history. Bedford is just north of London and it was once a popular retirement destination for British colonial civil servants, if they could afford it, and I wanted to see if I could find any trace of their presence. The British Empire is dead and buried and is certainly not a voting issue for the EU referendum. It probably never was a voting issue because so very few Britons had any actual contact with the Empire. The Raj of British India included present-day India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, but even at its height, there were only 100,000 Britons in India, fewer than the population of nearby Ipswich. But perhaps the Empire does cast the faintest glimmer of a shadow on today’s Britain and a much heavier shadow on its ex-Empire.

There was a time when British schoolchildren gazed at world maps with vast swathes shaded in pink to denote that these faraway lands were “theirs”. It must have been a uniquely empowering feeling even if it didn’t make any actual difference in their lives. What difference did it make if Britain owned Swaziland if you were destined to work down a Welsh coal mine or in a Lancashire cotton mill? The Empire may have been prestigious but it didn’t make any money. Only Malaya made a profit while India was a drain on British finances and throughout the 19th century, British investors pumped their money not into the Empire but into America, making Britain the latter’s largest overseas investor.

The people who actually went to the Empire and then retired to Bedford were a breed apart, very different from their fellow Britons then and completely different from their compatriots today. These were people (exclusively men, although they travelled with their wives) who had lived and worked around the world, were often from families that had been in the same colonial outposts for several generations, spoke the local languages and developed a taste for the local food before their mandatory retirement at 55. And when they retired, they were not allowed to stay in India or Malaya or wherever … they had to leave. The colonial authorities did not want the natives to witness once-esteemed civil servants descend into old age and poverty and instead wanted to project a constant image of British virility by ejecting all old people.

Other popular retirement destinations included London’s Notting Hill (if they were rich) and many English seaside towns. But if they didn’t have much money or simply couldn’t fit back into British society, then they went further afield like Trieste (present-day Italy) or the French Riviera. The famous Promenade des Anglais in Nice is now synonymous with luxury and glamour but it was named after the retired British ex-colonials who were dropping into genteel poverty.

If they had saved enough, they retired to Bedford where the locals called them “Indians” or “foreigners” and were viewed with suspicion because they kept to themselves and because they cooked strange-smelling food called “curry”. It was once common in Britain to give a name to your home and a popular one among these returnees was Dun Roamin’ or the name of where they had been posted. I grew up in a house with the name of Tarasingi, which is a small village in India’s Orissa. Perhaps where a previous owner had been a District Officer?

So, I walked the streets of Bedford looking for a name from India, Africa or Malaya but found nothing. The large houses were subdivided into flats and all had blandly English names like The Limes. Adele boomed from one house, outside another hung an Italian flag (Bedford has a large Italian community, I don’t know why) and various windows displayed posters demanding that Britain leaves, or remains, in the EU. But of the ex-colonials there was no trace.

Near the houses, people were playing cricket and football, sights and sounds that must have been familiar to these colonials thousands of miles away all those years ago and which have now become cultural totems in those faraway lands. On the river floated swans and a woman walked past in full purdah. I don’t know what the colonials would have made of Brexit. They would have been horrified that Britain has any dealings with Europeans but they would equally be horrified to find the English so insular and disinterested, even scared of the outside world. But Bedford is pretty. You’d like it.

Reprinted with the kind permission of