You were not altogether wrong

You were not altogether wrong.

 

I have no talent for writing.
Real writing comes when characters on the page begin to take on some sort of reality and you begin to believe, as you to read, that in your subconscious they take hold with some sort of pseudo actuality. The writer subtly introduces them and their phobias for you to form opinions and it in this opinion forming phase that they become real in your imagination.
It been reading a delightful book 'Saying On' by Paul Scott. It describes a old retired ex army couple who stay on in a fast changing India after the fall of the Raj. It's a sensitive documentary of people left behind in a setting which is decaying around them but which even at their zenith they were never really a part of in terms of rank and privilege. The privilege of being white and part of the administration of the vast country brought them at least privilege and power amongst the Indian community but when Independence came and the roles reversed, they were left behind, acting a part but to an empty house.
The pathos of a married life, with servants to do the things which, back home, would have kept them rooted in a state of late Middle age responsibility, was missing and so the clock ticked on and they continued to live in some sort of time warp to which they were sadly oblivious or worse powerless to do anything about.

India, South Africa, large parts of Africa which had been colonised and then handed back left people on the ground marginalised as they reconstructed their lives around the fact that the roles had been reversed and the native was top man.

The trappings of the past are retained in that the housing and initially the community remained to bolster the illusion that there had been no change in circumstance but slowly standards change and deteriorate from the way they were. The clubs are full of mutter and discontent, even ridicule at the direction society is taking as the future becomes less rosy. Change which takes place in all societies is seen through the prism of the past but in the case of the disenfranchised colonial, the date is etched in the imagination, the date "they" took over. 

For some people "staying on" is all they can do. Their passport indicate their right of abode but they have neither the skills of the money to move. The world is changing as countries began to make moving to another country much more difficult and many are left to wallow in a sort of no man's land, resented and blamed by the newly empowered for not bringing the nirvana which the local indigenous politician had promised. 

Time moves on and one thing we learn is to move with it. That's not to say you can't criticise the changes but stopping them is impossible. The best is to try and understand them and understand the reasons behind them. To remain a 'stick in the mud' is to act as a lightening rod from left, right and centre, isolated and marginalised, surrounded by unfathomable compromise of ones own beliefs but inherent in the belief that you and the past were not altogether wrong.