WAHP-Education
The priorities for most of the settlers were to earn money and unfortunately education was secondary to survival. The few who did engage in learning were teachers who were getting the opportunity to upgrade their skills.
Q. Tell me a little bit about your experience of being a student in this country?
“ I think you know again you know we did not mingle with white students very much because our classes used to be separate class. In some subjects we used to go you know with other students as well.
But otherwise we used to have our own classes our own lecturers and my experience that we learnt quite a lot when we came here when we went into the college especially because I still say sometimes when we talk about these things we learnt English but I always say we learnt flat English.
We did not know about phonics. We were just taught I remember in class six in high school to learn the alphabet A B C D by rote and we were taught C A T cat R A T rat yeah and again we did not know about you know dialect and a pitch you know high pitch, low pitch this pitch, that pitch and I remember one good example.
One of our lecturer was Bengali Mr. Rashid and he was a linguistic and I used to have fun because you know learning linguistic here from a Bengali not from a English person and he used to you know greet me and say good morning Mr. Parmar how are you and one day he said to me good morning Mr. Midlander and I looked at him and I said what do you mean by Mr. Midlander He said you speak proper midland accent and we never told about accent high pitch low pitch then we were told you know again you know where you put this stretch stress in the language.
If you say I am going to London in India we used to have I am going to Jalandher today not stressing today or Jalandher but here we learned that if its stress on London then you are going to London not going to Bradford or anywhere else.
If you say I am going to London today its today yeah and then you know so we learn quite a bit about English here and second bit you know which encouraged me again not to get frightened about other teacher or feeling that I am inferior is sometimes sitting in the staff room there talking and one say pardon I say you said this he said oh no it was some teacher you know from Wales or you know then we I used to laugh at then and say well you can't blame us you know we are from another country it's not our language its your language and you can't understand each other sometimes, so that used to be fun in the staff room sometimes. “
The full transcriptions are available from Walsall Archives.
