by Sri Ajit Halder
The word ‘Landlady’ in the title of this article has been used to mean a
woman who rented out rooms in her house to provide boarding and lodging to
overseas as well as British students studying away from home. During my
student days spent in Liverpool and in my initial year as an academic at the
University of Salford, I stayed with landladies. This article is my acknowledgement with gratitude
of the kind and caring service I received from the landladies during my early
years in England. I begin with my
memorable experience of staying with the Liverpool Landlady.
Many years ago on a cold, misty November evening, I arrived in the city
of Liverpool, This was my first visit to that city, and I came to join the
University of Liverpool to do research for a PhD degree program. I was a
complete stranger to the city having no ideas where to find accommodation for
the night. The taxi driver took me to several hotels located close to the
university but I was disappointed failing to find any hotel accommodation that
evening. This happened because Princess
Margaret, the sister of Queen Elizabeth, was in the city that day and all
hotels were full with guests who came to the city to welcome the popular
Princess. I really felt dejected by the failure to book a hotel accommodation.
Noticing my worried look, the taxi driver by way of comforting me said,
he knew of a home where students lived, and assuring me, he said he hoped to
find a place for me in that house. He
drove me to that address, and thanks to the driver and luckily for me, I was
offered bed and boarding by a kind-hearted landlady who owned that
residence. I spent some memorable years
with that gracious landlady in Liverpool. I am also grateful to my other
equally benevolent landlady in Bolton from where I commuted to attend to my
university service in Salford. I will
tell that story later. Let me begin with
my Liverpool landlady.
We addressed our landlady as dear Nelly, her full name was Miss Eileen
Tully. She came from a farmer’s family
in Ireland. She was a woman with rural charm and simplicity, and looked after
me with fond hospitality.
In that house lived another five young Indian undergraduates who were
studying business management in a local college. I enjoyed their companionship
that greatly helped me to overcome the sad feeling of leaving my dear ones back
at home in Kolkata.
I was indeed fortunate that I stayed in Nelly’s house and enjoyed a
worry-free, student life, for Nelly offered me food enough for my survival and
a comfortable living accommodation. Her support made it possible for me to
concentrate fully in my research investigation, complete my work and achieve my
objective of gaining a doctorate degree.
I cite here one incident to show how much Nelly cared for me.
One morning, I was preparing a cup of tea. Being unmindful for a moment,
instead of pouring the water into a cup, I poured the kettle-full of extremely
hot water on my left hand. Nelly was
watching television sitting on a sofa, her usual seat not far from the dining
table. Noticing my predicament, she
shouted: ‘Halder has burnt his fingers, Halder has burnt his fingers’. Uttering these words, she jumped out of her
sofa, picked up a whole cake of butter from the butter-dish and began rubbing
my hand with it. I felt a great relief
from the agony of a burnt palm and received the caring attention of a motherly
figure like my landlady Nelly.
I quote another incident which showed how much Nelly cared for me. Every
Sunday morning, I used to go to a local newsagent to buy a copy of the Observer
newspaper to learn what was happening in the wide world and also to enrich my
vocabulary by reading news reports and magazine articles presented in elegant
English by eminent feature writers. One
Sunday, as usual, after purchasing the newspaper I was returning to Nelly’s
place when on the street I was confronted by Pranesh, one of the co-dwellers in
Nelly’s house. He told me he was sent by
Nelly to look out for me on the street as Nelly was very worried that I had
left the house without eating my breakfast. She was concerned that with an
empty stomach I would feel weak, be unsteady on my feet, might fall down on the
icy snow covered street and hurt myself.
I came back to Nelly with Pranesh, and seeing me safe and sound she was
much relieved. Nelly was very kind and
considerate to me, and I owe to her a great deal of my ability to successfully
complete my research work in the university.
After obtaining my PhD degree, I secured an appointment in the academic
department of Salford University and moved to Bolton from where I commuted to
my work place in Salford. I rented one
flat owned by a remarkable lady who I affectionately called her ‘Mutty’ -
meaning Mother in colloquial German. Her
full name was Mrs. Katherina Davidsonas.
Hailing originally from Latvia, Mutty was a widow and the mother to her
only child, Mary (who lived in a nearby town).
Mutty rented out the spare rooms in her house to Indian and Asian
students studying at the local college.
From Bolton, I became used to my daily travel routine to Salford by
train and found my university job satisfying and academically challenging. I made new friends among the other residents
in Mutty’s place. I found they were
co-operative and friendly which made my stay in that house very pleasing
indeed.
Mutty served me evening meals and I had to prepare my breakfast. One morning I was late in getting up and my
first lecture was at 10.00 AM. I had
hardly any time for cooking breakfast and then walk up to the Bolton station to
catch the 9.20 AM train to Salford. I
dressed up, collected my lecture notes in a portfolio case and started to step
down the staircase towards the ground floor front door. Mutty heard my footsteps, realising that I
was leaving home without eating my breakfast, she rushed to the front door and
blocked my passage so that I could not leave the house. She told me in a firm, assertive tone: ‘Adit
(her way of pronouncing my name Ajit}, if your mum were here, she would not let
you go to work without eating your breakfast. Go and sit at the table, I will
prepare your breakfast, and you will have to eat it before you leave my house’. I had to obey her order; so I sat patiently
in a chair and ate with delight, a portion of cereal with milk in a bowl and
fried eggs on toasts, all that food she prepared for me. Mutty sat next to me and watched me finish
eating breakfast which tasted much nicer than my own preparation. As I was
waiting for the breakfast to be served, my mind travelled five thousand miles
away to my Mum in Calcutta and I sitting here in Bolton, visualized as if my
Mum in the guise of Mutty, was cooking breakfast for me. I thought Mutty of England acted just like
what my Mum would have done for me in a similar situation. Mothers like my Mum and Mutty are similarly
loving and caring persons to be found all the world over. Each one of them represents the inimitable
qualities of motherhood.
I thanked Mutty immensely for her kind consideration shown to me and
then I rushed to the station. I reached
the station platform just in time as the train was approaching; I boarded my
train and reached the university in good time and was able to give my lecture
scheduled for that morning.
I wish to add that when my Mum came to visit me in 1989, I took her to
meet Mutty in Bolton and it was a wonderful get-together of the two grand
ladies, one was my own Mother and Mutty, my adopted mother of Bolton. Sadly, both mothers are no more in this world
but I treasure the sweet memory of them chatting together in Mutty’s parlour
which remains ever fresh in my mind.
I now narrate a touching account of visiting an ailing lady, Miss Hilden
who lived a few doors away from Mutty’s Bromwich Street premises. Some Indian students studying at the local
Technical College lived under the care of Miss Hilden who was their
Landlady. I used to visit her lounge,
meet fellow Indian students for friendly gossips and enjoyed listening to Miss
Hilden reminiscing with passion, the heart-warming stories of her experience of
the fond relationship she developed with her student lodgers of past years. Miss Hilden was a spinster, a lonesome woman
who enjoyed the company of her guest students that largely filled the emptiness
of her life.
I treasured my acquaintance with Miss Hilden so much so that even after
I left Bolton to live in a flat close to the University of Salford, I made
efforts to gather news about her wellbeing through my friend Sunil Gupta who
continued to stay in her house. One day,
Sunil phoned me to say that Miss Hilden was seriously ill and had been admitted
to the local hospital.
I took the earliest opportunity to pay a visit to Miss Hilden and on the
following Saturday afternoon, Sunil and I went to the Bolton Hospital to see
Miss Hilden. We stood at the doorway of
the ward where Miss Hilden was an in-patient.
The duty nurse seeing us waiting at the door, approached us and wanted
to know which patient we came to visit and also our names. We mentioned to her our names Sunil and Ajit
and told her of our intention to see Miss Hilden. Hearing this, she pointed her fingers towards
the window on the left side of the room and said: ’Miss Hilden is over there on
that window-side bed’. The nurse then
told us to wait until she came back after informing Miss Hilden that Sunil and
Ajit had come to visit her.
The nurse while leading us to Miss Hilden’s bed commented: ‘Look at her
now, it’s amazing, as soon as Miss Hilden saw you two, she rose to sit up; until now, she was lying down on the bed,
sleeping most of the time’. As we were
walking towards Miss Hilden’s bed, we heard her exclaiming in excitement: ‘My
boys have come to see me’ certainly to give other inmates the happy news of our
coming to see her.
Miss Hilden died a week later and when I received that sad news from
Sunil, I felt at the bottom of my heart that our visit surely brought to her a
quantum of joy and helped her forget her suffering for a moment at least.
I have discussed my happy recollections of landladies who so kindly
cared for me during my early years of residence in England. I can
unhesitatingly say that their kind hospitality contributed greatly to my achieving
success as a research student and as an academic. I think rightly that like me, hundreds of
foreign students leaving own homes found new homes and achieved their goal
under the care of landladies in England.
So my tribute to landladies includes their (i.e. the foreign students’) grateful
appreciation of the hospitality they all enjoyed from their landladies.
I found landladies to be lonesome persons. They needed company, and the young lodgers in
their homes offered the conviviality that to a large measure filled the gap in
their lives. So the Landlady Culture benefited both the landladies and their student-lodgers.
Landladies by providing shelter and company to foreign students
succeeded in promoting international understanding and harmony among nations,
thereby achieving more than all the utterances made by politicians and the
legislations passed in the British Parliament to foster universal harmony.
