Having resigned from my job as a Sub-Inspector of Police, in Ceylon, after a spat with my boss, the Assistant Superintendent, I considered emigrating to the UK, to work, but also with the ulterior motive of returning to my studies and improving my prospects in life. I applied to the British High Commission and was awarded a ‘priority voucher’ to enter Britain. I was 26 years old. Accompanied by two former class-mates roughly my age, I reached London on 30th March 1963.

Five years of menial work, washing dishes, factory assembly, van driving, night security, ice-cream selling, postman and the like, was my lot while I acquired GCE A’levels through self-study. My subjects were; English Literature, British Constitution, and Economics. I had to overcome another hurdle before I was allowed to enter London University to read psychology for a BA (Hons) degree. The requirement was for a GCE O’ Level in a modern European language. I attended evening classes at the West London College in Notting Hill for a year, before I got that qualification in French. Since I did not have science subjects at GCE A’ Level, my qualification would not be designated a B.Sc. although the curriculum and the final examinations were the same for both the BA (Hons.) and the B.Sc. However, I had to pass an internal mathematics paper before I was finally declared suitable to read psychology as a full-time student at the University of London, Goldsmiths College (1968-1971).

It took a while before I was finally awarded the annual £400 grant paid by the state covering the three-year period of my degree studies. I was attracted to psychology mainly because of the narrative and literary charm of Freud and Jung’s writings; although at the time I could not have articulated it as such. I found reading popular journals in psychology, in some way, for me, therapeutic. I was therefore disappointed by the dull ‘experimental’ and statistical treatment of the subject that the course at Goldsmiths provided. It was the heyday of behaviorism and what went inside one’s head, the ‘black box’, was totally ignored. The word ‘mind’ was taboo and anything relating to consciousness was dismissed as being 'metaphysical', a term of opprobrium to almost all psychologists of the time.

Meanwhile, I found that I was always short of cash after paying the weekly rent for my digs, that I had to ration my food intake and visits to the launderette. Soon, I found a uniformed job as a part-time security guard where I could work the whole of the weekend at a factory-site eating (stale!) sandwiches and drinking coffee from a Thermos flask, earning a mere ‘fiver’ (£5) for my pains. Unfortunately, this restricted the time available for serious study at the College Library as well as the London University Senate House Library. I left university with just a Lower Second-Class degree. Such a degree, I soon found to my dismay, was almost worthless in the job market at the time.

After a short period of work as a proof-reader at a publishing house, I returned to my preferred role as a van driver. I delivered anodized metal to householders in Edmonton and Tottenham in North London, who returned the finished (assembled) products through me back to the factory. While engaged in this job, I had the opportunity to read the London evening newspapers. In those days in London, there was an ‘Evening News’ in addition to the ‘Evening Standard’ still much in evidence today. The ‘Evening News’ carried items designed as IQ tests over a period of a few weeks and I discovered that I was quite adept at doing most of them correctly. So, I applied to take the supervised IQ test and was recognized as falling within the top three percent of the population in terms of general intelligence. I soon found myself a member of British Mensa.

Mensa paved the way eventually for me to become a Chartered Psychologist. Once, I was invited to the Blackheath home of the then British Mensa President Victor Serebriakoff for lunch. I was also one of the participants in a televised program on Mensa presided over by David Dimbleby in 1973. The Belbins (Eunice and Meredith) directors of the Industrial Training Research Unit in Cambridge saw me on the program, called me up, tested me further, and offered me my first job in applied psychology as a research assistant. Much later, in the 1980s with an M.Sc. in occupational psychology from Birkbeck College, I could proudly call myself an Occupational Psychologist with Chartered status. Much of my professional work since, has been administering psychological tests, assessing and rehabilitating those disabled and disadvantaged in the world of work, and helping them back into employment.

In August 1974, I left my job and digs at Cambridge, sold my little old Austin Mini for £100, packed everything else I possessed in a suitcase, and left with two Cambridge girls in a Vauxhall Estate owned by one of them on an overland trip to India. I have written and published an account of this trip in ‘A Literary Smorgasbord’ (2019) published by Xlibris.

Before I left Cambridge, I had appeared before an interview panel which selected psychologists for the Educational and Occupational Assessment Service, a government department in the Ministry of Labor and Social Services in Lusaka, Zambia. They were keen to have me, but I politely asked to be allowed to make the decision after I had completed the overland trip.

After many adventures, the unlikely trio finally arrived in Bombay in mid-September, where we split up. I continued my journey by train, ferry and taxi to Sri Lanka to reach my younger brother's house, where both my parents also were living. Soon, I met a beautiful and demure young lady, nine years my junior, speaking good English, who was willing to share my life abroad. We had a beautiful, well-attended, traditional wedding at the bride’s home, not far from Colombo, on 3^rd January 1975.

I hurriedly telephoned the authorities in Zambia, and accepted their job offer, on condition that they recognized my changed civil status and issue me with two airplane tickets to Lusaka. They readily agreed. We flew to Lusaka in mid-January 1975 and I took up work as an occupational psychologist with the Educational and Occupational Assessment Service. Dr Jonathan Hill, a young British psychologist was the Director.

In Lusaka we were put up at a pleasant enough hotel and spent several months there in what felt like an extended honeymoon. While I spent most of my day at work, my newly acquired wife, Sue (shortened, anglicized name) remained in the hotel room. This irked her somewhat, but was soon able to secure a job as the personal secretary to an American heading the World Health Organization branch office in Lusaka. This guy and his wife, black Americans, soon became our friends, and when we finally secured a house to rent, were able to invite them for dinner. They, of course, would invite us in turn. There was a vibrant expatriate community of varied nationalities in Lusaka, and quite a few of them became our personal friends.

Then the inevitable happened, and Sue had to leave her job after eight months, to have our first baby. He arrived, a few days later than anticipated, on 21st December 1975. Not long after his first birthday, Sue was pregnant again, but the climate in Lusaka, with Ian Smith of Rhodesia dropping bombs on us whenever he felt like it, was not all that salubrious. So, reluctantly, I had to agree to let her go back to Ceylon, (renamed Sri Lanka, in our absence), all by herself, with our son T, only a few months after his first birthday, so that she could have the second baby safe in a maternity home in Colombo.

By the time I completed my 3-year contract in early 1978, our second son D, on whom I had not set my eyes, was four months old. I was in a hurry to get back, but the Zambian authorities were practically begging me to sign another contract. I had by then been promoted to one of the two Assistant Director positions of the EOAS, and for the last six months or so, was acting as Director. They wanted to confirm me as Director. I had to ignore all their pleas and return home.

However, in April 1978 when I returned to the UK alone, I was only able to find work as a clerk with a firm of West End solicitors. I found temporary accommodation of a one-bedroom flat belonging to my alma mater, Goldsmiths College, during the summer vacation. I was therefore able to get down my family (wife and two sons) to Britain by July 1978. But our situation was far from satisfactory. When the students started arriving towards the end of September, we had to leave our flat. For the first time in our lives, we were facing the prospect of homelessness.
The Royal Borough of Greenwich council put us up in temporary accommodation, a ‘dump’ where we were pelted with rotten eggs and our second- hand car vandalized by yobos. We stuck it out for about three months, feeding our two toddlers on take-away Chinese, until we were able to put down a small deposit on a terraced house in neighboring Plumstead, in southeast London. Even with my three-year stint as an occupational psychologist in Zambia, apprenticed, as it were, to experienced British psychologists, I was told that without a postgraduate qualification, I could not expect to work as a psychologist in Britain. My chances of returning to a professional work role began to look very slim indeed. When finally, I was able to get my savings across to the UK from Zambia, I foolishly believed that, with a young family, leasing a corner shop selling sweets and tobacco would secure my financial future. This venture proved to be very ill-advised. It was based in New Cross not far from Goldsmiths College. The shop was broken into several times and we faced violence from putative customers who refused to pay for items they grabbed from our shelves. Even school-boys in gangs began to plague us.

My wife then took up secretarial work with a Bank in the City, and I closed the shop down to concentrate on gaining the Occupational Psychology M.Sc. degree from London University Birkbeck College. I could just about claim four years work experience in applied psychology to qualify for admission for the 2-year part time course. Just before I qualified in 1982, I was able to get a temporary job as an occupational psychologist at the Waddon Employment Rehabilitation Centre, near Croydon in Surrey. Although we could sell our house in Plumstead and move closer to my place of work in Croydon, we had great difficulty getting rid of the lease of the now empty shop premises. Finally, I managed to transfer it back to the previous owner for a pittance.

After a period of nearly a year, I was confirmed in my job with the Manpower Services Commission. I was to continue working at the Waddon Employment Rehabilitation Centre for over seven years at the same basic grade while even those new entrants to the profession whom I had helped to train were being promoted to senior positions. My manager at the ERC championed my cause since he saw me as one of the more competent psychologists, he had come across during his period of service with the Manpower Services Commission. The MSC by then had undergone many changes and was renamed the Training Education and Employment Directorate. I was impelled to take my grievance of not being promoted to an Employment Tribunal. At the height of the Thatcher era this proved to be ill-advised, and I lost my case. The concept of ‘institutional racism’ had not yet been recognized. I was then transferred to the Manpower Services Commission Head Office in Sheffield and served one year commuting between Croydon and Sheffield spending only weekends at home. In 1989 I found myself designated a Higher Psychologist, a new designation concocted as a compromise between the Basic Grade and the Senior Grade to work at a residential Employment Rehabilitation Centre in Egham, Surrey. This involved a daily drive of over 30 miles on the motorway M20, to my place of work.

I sensed a degree of harassment in the workplace in the form of occasional missives I received from the Head Office, that I was impelled to resign in 1990. After a short period in the wilderness trying to sell insurance and the like, I took up private consultancy work as expert witness in personal injury litigation, redundancy counselling, and running (ironically enough) job search workshops. As the work was intermittent, I wasn't making a living, and although my wife was now working for the Home Office, we failed to keep up the mortgage payments regularly. We were taken to court and nearly lost our home and all that we had worked for.
By then, I had also acquired a teaching qualification from the University of Greenwich, which again proved worthless in securing employment. I was in my late fifties and no prospective employer, I realized, would take a second look at me. I had been applying for literally hundreds of jobs, even simple clerical jobs, with all my efforts proving negative. However, just in the nick of time, early in 1996, my sixtieth year, I was invited to an interview by the Royal British Legion Industries at the Royal British Legion Village, in Aylesford, Kent, a 30-mile drive away from my home. The position advertised was for an occupational psychologist, specifically for someone to start from scratch, a vocational assessment and development center on the same lines as the state-run Employment Rehabilitation Centres. By this time the ERCs were being phased out.

I was interviewed by the Health Services Manager Mrs. Patricia Wheeler. She appeared to be impressed enough to consign a large sheaf of applications for the position lying on her table to the dustbin, and to hire me on the spot. I established from scratch the Royal British Legion Industries vocational assessment and development facility catering to the employment rehabilitation needs of ex-service men and women from all over the UK. At last, my work began to be widely appreciated and I began to contribute articles in applied psychology to professional journals. I thought I could work at the RBLI until I reached the state retirement age of 65 in June 2001, but was unceremoniously given ‘gardening leave’ in April by a new manager who had succeeded the retired Mrs Wheeler.

The publication of my book ‘Counselling in /Careers Guidance ‘(2001) Open University Press, translated into Japanese (2004), coincided with the end of my career as a psychologist. Since then, I have been involved in creative writing, my erstwhile hobby. 

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