From Home to Home: Hard Work, perseverance, patience and a will to succeed

By Manoo Mootien

Manoo Mootien's memoir tells of his life from his birth in Mauritius in 1947, his arrival in Great Britain in 1966 when he joined the NHS as a trainee nurse, and his long career in the health and caring profession. His career was built through sheer perseverance, hard work and a constant search of further positive matters at all times – it has few equals.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brown Dog Books
• Release date: Nov 23, 2022
• ISBN: 9781839525735

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

By my brother, Sattyvel Mootien

Being the last-born to our loving parents, I am blessed with seven older siblings. The seven have humbly shouldered, when called upon, the responsibilities of being a second Papa and Amma to me. Manoo, by sharing my pains and dreams over the years, you are one of those truly ‘magnificent seven’. For this, I am eternally grateful.

Following the untimely demise in the 1970s of our first and second siblings, Jaya and Arjuna, the mantle of eldest sibling was thrust upon you. You brought your personal character to this noble position, a position that weaves kindness with responsibility.

As a caring husband, you have provided Salma with constant companionship for nearly 50 years. As an affectionate father and grandfather, you have showered Davina, Colin and Emelia with unconditional love and support. Indeed, your family has enjoyed the privilege of standing on the shoulders of a doting giant.

As a citizen of both the UK and Mauritius, you have proved to be a model employee and employer, excelling in both roles in both countries. Geography presents no constraints to your hardworking qualities. Your life is a living example of globalisation. This is no mean feat: one industrious man whose values and standards never slip.

You approach each day with the same gusto to provide for your family and employees alike. This is a commendable approach, with your daily activities adding life to your years and not simply years to your life.

I truly hope all the readers find something of value in your autobiography to remind them of the glorious meaning of fulfilling lives and faithful relationships.

CHAPTER ONE

Family Roots in Mauritius

Mauritius has an interesting colonial history. It was first settled by the Dutch, then controlled by the French until 1810, and it was then a British colony until it gained independence in 1968, two years after I left the island to settle in the UK.

My paternal great-grandparents were born in the state of Tamil Nadu, southern India; that is, my great-grandfather Appa Mootien in Madurai, and my great-grandmother Atta Meenatchee in Thanjavur. They were among the indentured labourers who were brought by boat to Mauritius to work on its sugar plantations in the decades after 1835. They came over separately, my great-grandmother arriving in 1854 and my great-grandfather in 1859. They both ended up working on the Rich Fund sugar estate in the district of Flacq, and they were married in 1879.

They were blessed with six daughters and six sons, one of the latter being my paternal grandfather MootooVadgoo Poollay Mootien (nicknamed Sinsamy). My father, Tegarassa Poollay Mootien, was the sixth of MootooVadgoo’s seven children. The Mootien family was by then a very large one, living in many different places across Mauritius. Because of my roots, I was, later in life, able to be officially classed as a citizen of Indian origin, which makes travelling to India very much easier, although I am still Mauritian by birth and I now have British citizenship.

Although my great-grandparents were not slaves, life was nonetheless very hard for them. They must have had no idea as to what to expect when they arrived in Mauritius to work there. I am led to believe that their living and working conditions were very primitive, basic and poor. The French, and then the English, took the credit for the development of Mauritius, but the indentured labourers and their subsequent offspring shed their sweat and blood to further progress the island.

Indentured labourers were confined to the sugar cane plantations, where they lived in camps. My paternal great-grandfather was born in one such camp, known as Rich Fund, which is about three miles from the village of Lalmatie, where I was born in 1947. However, because my great-grandfather was rather better educated than many of the other workers, and could read and write basic English, he soon moved to a supervisory role which gave him an improved standard of living.

We have researched in a library in Mauritius the heritage of my paternal grandparents – my grandfather, nicknamed Sinsamy, and my grandmother Nawoo. I still have copies of their birth certificates and many old family photographs. I assume that my grandfather had good business acumen as he made some money and later ran a couple of corner shops. He also bought land on which he started his own sugar cane plantation, around Lalmatie and other neighbouring villages. His old house, in Lalmatie, later became the government school that I attended for my primary schooling.

My grandfather died at the age of 57, before my birth, and the family’s fortunes started spiralling downwards thereafter. My grandmother outlived him by several years and I can remember her quite clearly, before she died when I was about eight. She was revered locally because of the family’s shops and land holdings. Once my grandfather had passed away, some of her siblings started making demands on the family estate. She sold the family house to share the wealth and moved to a smaller property in Lalmatie, on the site of which my family later lived, having built new accommodation, and it was there that I grew up until my move to the UK in 1966.

*  *  *  *  *

Both my parents were bright. They were numerate, literate and could read and write English, French and Tamil, but neither of them had had a secondary education. Their thinking on most things was very different from the modern norm.

My mother grew up in Port Louis, where she attended a boys’ school run by the Tamil Society, which mainly took Tamil children. She learnt the Tamil language, and many Tamil prayers that she later passed on to her children. She would have made a wonderful Tamil teacher, but it was the norm for women in those days to stay at home and not go to work. Instead, she became a busy full-time mother with seven young children to care for.

My eldest sister, Jayranee, grew up with my maternal grandparents in Port Louis until her marriage in 1961. As my grandparents were rather young themselves, I think Jayranee was thoroughly spoilt by them, as there were more things to do in Port Louis (where she attended the same primary school that my mother had and learnt fluent Tamil) than in Lalmatie. I was rather detached from Jayranee as she grew up, but I always addressed her as Acca Jaya, a respectful term for an older sister.

There were approximately two years between each sibling initially, as was the norm for children in most Mauritian families in those days, and my parents seemed to be contented with their brood. Their last child – my brother Sattyvel – is 13 years younger than me.

In our culture, we refer to our parents’ close friends as uncles and aunties as a way of showing respect to our elders, and we had plenty of them around us as children. Mauritian families were almost always large in those days. My father was himself the sixth of seven children. After my paternal grandfather’s death, many of his siblings and in-laws demanded their share of the family fortune. The eldest son of the family could have been more ambitious but, unfortunately, was not too helpful, I suppose, and he squandered his inheritance, while the other sons moved away from home and the daughters married. My grandmother was very likely ill-advised about how to deal with such matters and the outcome of her interactions with people on business matters, such as the sharing of her wealth with her siblings, was far from satisfactory.

Although we were perceived as a well-off family, by my teens, we were, in fact, going from one financial crisis to the next as my father’s business dealings kept floundering. Unlike his own father, my father was unfortunately not a successful entrepreneur.

When I was still a child, my father became involved in a haulage business, with encouragement from one of his older nephews, Somoo, carrying goods from the harbour of the Mauritian capital Port Louis up and down the east coast, as well as taking building material to other parts of the island. It soon turned into a declining business because my father, sadly, never had the necessary skills to run it properly. The nephew went to the UK in the late 1950s, and as my father had never learnt to drive himself, he had to rely on friends to do the driving of the vehicles. However, these so-called ‘friends’, who he believed were helping him, in fact took business away from him by starting haulage operations of their own. My father was thus at the losing end of a very competitive business in those days.

My father was sailing against the wind in a cut-throat business, and by the time I went back to Mauritius in 1971, on my first return visit from the UK, his haulage operation had failed. Fortunately, I am reliably informed that there have been positive changes in the haulage business in Mauritius over the past 40 years. A better pricing policy for the transfer of goods by truck, bags of sugar, rice, flour and fertilizer are now of manageable weight and, above all, automation of most of the loading and unloading, in line with systems in western countries. I was delighted to see these changes on my recent visits to the island.

To try to keep the business afloat, over the years my father sold off as building plots much of the land he had inherited from my grandparents and ploughed the money back into the business, which soon became a bottomless pit. My father was delicately featured and fundamentally believed in people, unless or until he was proved to be wrong. This was a trait that, on the whole, was to make his life a failure in worldly terms. He was a humble man and got along with most people,