Seeing the Other Side or Being an Immigrant in Your Own Country | Max Scratchmann | TEDxPortobello

Brilliant, thank you Sarah. What a great way to start. We can all start thinking about seeing things differently and what we're going to redesign. Next we have Max Scratchman. Max is an illustrator, a writer, performance poet and opera lyricist. He is one half of the poetry circus in Portobello and a regular performer on the Edinburgh spoken word scene. Please welcome Max Scratchman and his talk titled Seeing the Other Side or Being an Immigrant in My Own Country. Do any of you read self-help books? Come on, somebody must. You may have heard the thing in self-help books where they tell you if you really want to see, if you want to know how a place works, how your own country works, how your own community works, you should be a tourist in your own town. Yeah, so I mean the way to do that in Edinburgh is to get a suitcase on wheels and block the pedestrian traffic in Princess Street. But my parents, self-help books hadn't been invented back then when the dinosaurs were still walking, but my parents thought let's go one better with him. Let's not make him a tourist in his own town. Let's make him an immigrant in his own country. So that's me. I'm the little cute one when I had hair back in those days. I'm on a boat. It's 1963 and I'm coming from India to Scotland for the first time. Why was I in India? Because at that time India was full of Scottish people, particularly people from the east coast, from Dundee, from Edinburgh, from Forfar, all the Angus, Lothian counties, because we worked in the jute industry. And whenever I say this to people, people always look at me blankly. They say, what's jute? Right, now you'll know jute if you've ever bought an expensive rug, because if you flip it over, the backside of it will be made of jute. Nowadays most of them are made out of polypropylene, so if you've got a cheap carpet that's what it'll be or it'll have some horrible foam on the back of it. But where you're most likely to have encountered jute is if you bought a trendy shopping bag from Sainsbury's or Waitrose or whatever else. It was probably made in a mill that my dad used to manage, because those mills are still there, they're still going. But just to give you an idea of jute, at the turn of the century, the last century, the 20th century, the Dundee jute barons who lived in Broughty Ferry, does anybody know Dundee? Yeah, Broughty Ferry is to Dundee what Portobello is to Edinburgh, it's the seaside, it's where the rich people lived. Portobello, of course. But just to give you an idea, the jute barons all had their big houses out in Broughty Ferry and where they lived was the richest square mile on the planet. Not in Scotland, not in Britain, not in Europe, but the planet. And it took 1920s Hollywood to surpass that. So that's how much money was being made out of jute. So why was jute in Dundee anyway? Strange thing, it grows in India. But they found a boffin at the time, at the time of the Industrial Revolution, discovered that if you mixed whale oil with raw jute flax, you could spin jute so much faster and make so much more money. And they thought, well, where can we do that? And they thought, well, Dundee is a good place, there's a whaling port, there's a port to bring in jute boats. Great, we'll make it there. And so the people in Dundee all started out, they all worked in the jute industry. Gone one ahead there. And my dad was one of these people, my dad worked in the mills from a young boy. But the jute barons thought, we're making all this money, we're so rich, how can we be richer? What can we do? What can we do to make more money, even more money? Does that sound familiar? And they said, I know, we can go out to India and we can actually build the mills at source. And they thought, well, who's going to run them? We'll get cheap labour from the Indians, that's fine. We can pay them a rupee a year and a bowl of rice and they'll all work for it. But we need somebody who knows it. And they thought, ha, we'll take people from Dundee out there. So that's my dad there. That's quite a late picture. In the early 30s or whatever, that front row would have all been Scottish people. Okay, that's been taken in the 60s when there were more Indians. The Indians would have all been at the back in the menial jobs. And so we were all out there, we were living in India and we were having this great life. Now, we think of the British and Indian, has anybody seen Indian summers on TV? Anyone? Oh, a few. Buy the DVD, it's great. We think of the British and India as these very stiff upper-lipped English people who were out there, you know, in their tuxedos in the heat and being very proper. But most of the British people that were in India were ordinary working people. A lot of ordinary working Scots. There used to be a joke about Calcutta, there used to be a street in Calcutta called Charingi and they used to say on a Saturday night in Charingi, if you could hear an Indian accent amongst all the Dundee ones, you were doing really well. And the people from Dundee, my dad, this isn't an actual photo, but my dad came from a house that was two rooms with a toilet out on the stairs. There were seven of them living in it. He went to India in the very late 20s, 1929 or 1930, I'm not sure when. He went out there, he couldn't even have pointed it out on the map. All he knew that is where you went, it was the next step from Dundee. And Indian independence was 1947, but the Scots were all still there well into the 60s. And you think, well why were they still there? This is where they came from, that's where they went to. That was our house in India, that's what I grew up in. So you can see why they all stayed. Anyone want to take a guess on servants? We had a family of four, myself, my sister, my mother, my father. How many servants did we need to run our house? Three, two, ten, that's getting closer. No. We had 15. Right, and that wasn't counting like the people that came in to do the washing once a week or whatever. This isn't actually our servants, I don't have a photograph of them. But the servants were an integral part of your household, they were like your extended family. Who's missing from that picture is the most important servant of all, which is the Ayah, the nanny. I mean, the Ayah was like your favourite auntie or your granny or whatever. You always lived with her, she was around with you constantly. When I was a small child, they actually had to make a point of speaking English to me because I spoke Bengali all the time. And the mills were huge. Let me just go back a second. Can you just see that the railway tracks there? That just gives you the idea of the size of an Indian mill, that we had our own railway to get the jute from the jetty to the mill. There was actually an incident when I was a small child where the train was chugging along and I pulled the point lever and almost sent it off the end of the jetty. I was not very popular that day. But this particular mill where I grew up, for instance, if you see the riverfront there, was an exact replica of the South Bank embankment on the Thames. When I was a young man in the 80s and I went to London for the first time, I was walking along the Thames and I was like, déjà vu, I've been here before. Hang on, and I phoned my dad up and I said, Dad, did Barmagor have a replica of the Thames embankment? He said, yeah, you're supposed to be smart. I said, Dad, I was six. How would I have known? That's our garden. It just gives you an idea. But what was different about the life that we led there was that, unlike they show you in dramas and films like Passage to India or whatever, this non-mixing thing didn't exist. We all used to mix. The Scots were great mixers. We had a great time in India. We loved getting out with the Indians. We loved going to the pujas. We We also used to, every year, have a Caledonian ball where you became very, very popular with all the Indians who all wanted an invite. It was an absolutely amazing life that we had. So here was me, six years old. That's how I'd lived. We're on a boat. We're heading to Scotland in 1963. Now, some of you are sitting there with little handy telephones and googling away, and you'll know that it was the worst winter since the Second World War. It was absolutely frozen cold. So that's what I came to. I came from a tropical country to that I'd never seen snow before. And we'd come along. The way we used to go used to come from Calcutta to Bombay by train, and then that took about two or three days in the train. You then went in a ship, which took four weeks to get over to Liverpool, and then you took the train from Liverpool up to Scotland. And I don't have a picture of it, but that's roughly what the railway tracks looked like. The snow was so heavy. They'd ploughed the tracks. They didn't stop the trains in those days. They just kept running them. And the snow ploughs had been the long, and the snow was up this high over the top to the carriage. So we just had this journey, which was like going through an ice tunnel because it froze in solid. It was like, you know, Superman's ice castle or something like that. And I thought, what is this place? Where have they brought me? Why am I here? And we got to Dundee eventually, and it was about, oh, around 11 or 12 o'clock at night when we'd arrived. And we got a taxi home. We went to my parents' house. Now, I'd been there as a baby, but I obviously don't remember that. And we'd come into this house. So I'm used to these palatial mansions. And we come into this tiny little two-bedroom semi. And the next-door neighbour had lit a fire for us, but of course it had almost died out by this time of night. And it was frozen. You could see your breath in front of your eyes. And I thought, what is this? Why am I here? Don't do this to me. And my dad took me to bed, and there was no heat in any of the bedrooms. Single glazing, no central heating. There was just this little fire. And the bedclothes were wet. And I said to my dad, Dad, when are we going home? He said, you are home. This is your home. This can't be home, please. I want to go back home. But I'd come from the wonderful colour of the breath, the scope, the huge scope of India, to a place that looked like this. And I hated it. Please don't let me stay here. And the culture shock of Scotland in the early 60s was just incredible. There was the cold, there was the grey, there was the wet, there was the general, conservatism, there was the language. I would go to my dad's aunties, and they would say things to me like, What? What are you even saying? What language is that? I had no clue what these people were saying to me. I had no clue what I was doing here. And the food was bloody awful. They ate mince. There was no fruit. I mean, you've got an apple or a banana, you've got an orange on a sundae, if it was really, where are the mangoes? Where are the lychees? Where's the melon? It didn't exist. When they used to get melons in season in the fruit shops, they used to sell them in little quarters, because it was too expensive to sell you a whole melon, because they had to be imported in. Oh, and don't talk about school. I'd gone to a little private kindergarten school in India, which was one of the few, one of the last remaining whites-only schools there. And we used to sit in a little room, and there was like ten of us in our class, and we used to, the cooler weather, sit out on the veranda, and there was a huge banyan tree, and we had little desks all painted in nice colours. Ah, it was great fun. School was great. Yay, let's go to school. And they took me to this Victorian place, where the desks were bolted to the floor, and there were these awful teachers, and the windows were all frosted in case you saw outside. And I thought, what's there to see anyway? It's grey and wet and smitty and horrible. Why would I want to look out? And I had to wear awful clothes. So that was Scotland. That was how I saw Scotland. And I had to learn this whole new country. But I feel that as I grew and I got older, that Scotland changed as well. I mean, look at Scotland today. Look at the wonderful election result we just had. We're a vibrant, creative, industrious, wonderful place. And how did we do it? We did it by opening our hearts and our minds. And we looked at the immigrants that were coming into our country, and we looked at the things they could bring. Because without immigrants, there'd be no Indian takeaways, there'd be no Chinese, there'd be no pizzas, there'd be no fish and chips, there'd be no ice cream. All these things were brought here by immigrants. They brought us colour, they brought us art, they brought us culture, they brought us the fabrics. I mean, you know, 1930s Britain, everybody wore grey. We weren't a bright-coloured nation. We got that from abroad. And we went abroad too. We shared our technology, we shared our language, which was the most important thing. Everybody speaks English. Whatever country you go to, you'll find someone who talks English, and it's because we took it. And they listened to us, and they adopted it. And, I mean, our health service would fall apart if we didn't have all the wonderful doctors who come in from other countries. So, really, I want us to not be typically British and embrace the unfamiliar, because that way lies a wonderful, wonderful world. When you have immigrants in your country, you don't need to travel, because they bring the world to you. You have been an absolutely wonderful audience. Thank you, and bye.