July 1985 – London.
6 young Mauritians are called to the Bar at their respective Inns of Court.
I was one of them.
In the 1980’s, Mauritius was rocked by socio-political tensions. There had been 2 devaluations to our rupee in quick succession and as foreign students, we felt the pinch in our everyday lives. Indeed, we did not complain about how meagre our allowances looked when converted in pounds sterling – we knew they had been painstakingly earned in rupees by our guardians. We learned very early on, how to live modestly and sometimes creatively. Yet, we were content and none the worse for what we considered to be a small inconvenience.
At that time, air travel was still infrequent. Once we had left for our studies, we could not expect to return home any time soon – certainly not at the end an academic year, leave alone term. This meant that we needed to find local accommodation during holidays, spend Christmas and New Year with other lonesome souls or charitable English families and find ways of keeping ourselves occupied for long stretches of spare time.
There was no internet – hence no Netflix, Amazon Prime etc. We did not own televisions and although there were excellent programmes on offer, TV sets were not always easily accessible.
There was no DVD, or live streaming of music – there were vinyl records, called LP’s (long play) which ran at 33 revolutions per minute (rpm). For this you needed a record player which was not always available. There were also cassette reels which you could play on cassette players. Both for records and cassettes, you needed space and money.
There was no mobile phone. Landlines were not available to us and our only contact with the outside world was either by air mail (we used flimsy pieces of prepaid forms called air letters) or the good old coin operated phones in the red public booths. If we wanted to call home, we would need to book our calls in advance and ask the operator for a collect call. Our parents would then accept the charges in advance on their lines and we were able to speak to them on a crackling phone line which needed to be free at the time the phone rang. Alternatively, we could try getting a bagful of coins and keep feeding the phone every other minute in an attempt to have a semblance of an exchange of words with our family members. It goes without saying that the phone connections were not always reliable, the quality of the lines very poor and “trunk calls” were accompanied with a lot of shouting and repeating.
But if you think this is a sob story, you are mistaken. This was a very happy time of our lives and we had no reason to feel sorry for ourselves – in fact we had much to be grateful for.
To start with, we enjoyed the best of British education. Lectures were conducted without microphones or dictaphones – they were delivered in live sessions in ampitheatres of a reasonable size. Tutorials were very personalized and conducted in the intimacy of the tutor’s personal office with an average of 4-5 students. Relationships were forged quite organically and exchanges most enriching.
There were no computers. Books and lecture hand-outs were the only tools of work. The law library was the obvious nest for any law student. Photocopies were new and quite expensive – so long hours in the library, which thankfully stayed open till late at night, was a standard ritual. There were also unforgettable moments like those in the Lincoln’s Inn library, when one would have the privilege of sharing the same table as the awesome Lord Denning , then Master of the Rolls of the Court of Appeal, at the peak of his notoriety as a progressive Judge.
Then there were the Inns of Court and the strange rituals that came with them. We were required to attend at least 24 dinners for eligibility for call. Even if we had passed our bar exams with flying colours, we could not be called if we had not attended those dinners. Although we never fully understood why we had to dress up, wear borrowed gowns and sit on hard benches in huge cold halls to have a 3 course meal and claret, with total strangers, it has become clearer over the years that the true grooming for our professional life happened at these dinners.
As we left our Inns after being called on these summery days of 1985, who would have believed how our lives would unfold ?
Some of us carried the weight of progeniture, and had very big shoes to fill, being sons of a sitting Prime Minister, a sitting judge and a prominent politician who had spent a career as a government minister.
The rest of us were spared such pressures but were nonetheless acutely aware that we were at crossroads – we would be bound by the crucial next steps we would take in our lives.
All of us know however, that this was the day it all began … 35 years ago!