Tales of Serendipity

Part 1/5: Norfolk to Anuradhapura

In the early Eighties I was a young lad living and going to school in a small village in the middle of Norfolk. My Dad worked at a nearby training college, teaching people how to use huge earth-moving machines, and my Mum worked part-time in a little cottage industry that made wooden jigsaws. I was also employed, not least by schoolwork, but also mastering wheelies on my Raleigh Grifter and exploring the woods and fields for miles around. My horizons, while as wide as the Norfolk skyline, were quite small.

One day my Mum had some big news. My Dad had got a job working in another country, helping teach them to drive the earth-moving machines so that they could build a huge dam. It was in a strange-sounding place called "Sri Lanka".

Sri Lanka is an tear-shaped island that drips into the ocean off the tip of the India. In a way, Sri Lanka is the same age as me, because we were named the same year. In 1972 it changed it's name from Ceylon, which is the name you still tend to see on the country's tea. Even further back, in ancient times the Arabs referred to it as Serendib, which is where we get the word serendipity.

To give you an idea how sheltered an existence I'd had up until that point, and how limited my geographical knowledge was: a school friend once boasted that he was spending the summer on Canvey Island, and I thought that sounded exotic.

My Dad's work would take him away from home for half a year, which for a young boy seemed a huge amount of time to be without a father. The tanned man who returned six months later was almost a stranger, but although his contract had been extended, we wouldn’t be parted from him again. He was now allowed to take family out with him, and we were all going to live in Sri Lanka.

A few weeks later my parents, my younger brother and I were flying over the Indian Ocean to our new home. Stepping off the plane I was immediately hit by a wall of heat, which I assumed was coming from the 747's massive engines. It was only as we were walking across the tarmac towards the airport building that I realised that it was this hot everywhere.

It's hard to describe just how jarring those first few hours were. Everything was different, from the oppressive heat and humidity to the strange smells and alien sounds of the city. I spent my first night in my new bedroom just sobbing at the sheer strangeness of it all. Just the thought of staying in this place was terrifying, let alone having to live and go to school there.

Luckily I had a bit of time to adjust to things before starting school. Our house in the capital wasn't ready yet, so we were temporarily housed in the town where my father had been billeted for work, a place called Anuradhapura.

An ancient capital of Sri Lanka which had fallen a millennia ago, Anuradhapura was now a relatively sleepy town in the north of the country, surrounded by the ancient temples and water-works of the old city.

Apart from the inconvenience of daily homework arranged by our old school in England, most our time was our own. We picked mangoes from the tree in the garden, visited the nearby dagobas (giant mound-like monuments) and reclining Buddhas, and slowly began to get used to living in a foreign country. My one piece of "home" at that time was my first ever computer, a little Commodore VIC 20 I learned to program between the frequent brown-outs of the town's power supply.

I don't really remember much about that time. One thing that sticks in my mind was the fence of the house next door was decorated with tiny swastikas. Having recently seen Raiders of the Lost Ark, I was convinced it was filled with Nazis, probably conspiring to steal the ancient relics of Sri Lanka... until my Mum explained that the swastika design had an older and totally benign meaning in the local religion.

Part two: Back to School