As a Guest of my Landlady

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.