3 - Campus High Living

As I mentioned it earlier, the city where I was an exchange-student, and which was to have such an impact on my future life, was Bradford, in West-Yorkshire. To French ears, it sounds a little like Oxford, but much less distinguished. Although geographically the two cities are less than two hundred miles apart, they are diametrically opposed in many respects. Bradford is emblematic of working-class values whereas Oxford is home to an intellectual elite. The university of Bradford can be assimilated to a red-brick university and, as such, does not have the prestige of the long-standing establishments. The university reflects the city of Bradford which was -and still is from what I hear- permeated by post-industrialism, its landscape dotted with the very high chimneys of mills and manufactures which had only recently stopped belching out their smoke. As a result, the stone walls of houses were dark, even black, the same colour as the sky most of the time. If you add the fact that in winter it becomes dark as early as the middle of the afternoon, just after four o'clock, you will be able to imagine the shock to the system for one coming from the sunny south of France. Indeed, it was a gloomy environment, a far-cry from Toulouse's blue skies but not without its own charm. Imagine comparing the atmosphere of a Van Gogh's painting to that of a Vermeer's.

To go back to Bradford's mills and factories, as a consequence of decolonization and of the spurt of rebuilding that took place in the decades following WW2, Pakistani workers had come in droves to find work in the industrialized north of England, but by the time I arrived there, most of them had already been made redundant and were living on the dole. However, they had had the good sense of buying houses while real estate was still cheap. They had also had young wives flown from Pakistan and, as a result, so many Asian families lived in Bradford's town center that it would have been easier for me to find a shop to buy a sari (although it was highly unsuited to the very cold and wet weather) than to buy a duffel-coat. The comment that some well-intentioned English fellow-travellers had made to me on my initial train journey to Bradford suddenly made sense: “You'll be going to Pakiland, dear”!

However, I would soon be adept at eating curries. It didn't take me long to realize that most of the cheap restaurants (and I could only afford extremely cheap ones) were curry-houses where one could eat for one or two pounds at any hour of the day or night. A meal consisted of a shoddy plate heaped with a very greasy sort of food which one ate with “chappatis”, served on Formica tables, sitting down on uncomfortable plastic chairs. The food was so hot and spicy that by the end of the meal customers had tears of sweat rolling down their cheeks and were gulping down jugfuls of water to soothe the fire, although connoisseurs would insist on not drinking any water until after the ordeal. Luckily, most of the customers, at least in the curry-houses located within walking distance of the university, were young and healthy students whose stomachs could take a fair amount of ill-treatment without too severe after-effects. The others, those customers who did not belong to the student crowd, could be spotted at once; they usually looked in bad shape and prematurely aged.

A traditional student's good night out would involve several hours of drinking beer and chatting up the opposite sex in one or several of the pubs in the university precincts -they called it “pub-crawling”, I wonder whether this manner of entertainment still exists in these technology-orientated times- followed by a party in one of the houses occupied solely by students and it would end with the obligatory patronizing of a curry-house in the small hours of the morning.

To be fair, occasionally there were more intellectual pursuits, mainly of an artistic nature; musical events, gigs or theatre performances took place around the university campus or in town.