87-year-old Eastbourne author looks back on his Ceylon schooldays

Bill’s real name is Ranjit Ameresekere, and he wrote Memories of my Ceylon Schooldays under that name. For Migrants ’62, as he says, he is using a nom de plume.

“In 2020 I published a book titled Memories of My Ceylon Schooldays. This book was entirely about my experiences as a schoolboy in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) covering the colonial period (1944-1948) and post-independence (1948-1956).

“Migrants ’62 is a sequel but includes my wife Ruth, beginning from the time we both left school. It is our biography spanning just under seven decades. We migrated to the UK in August 1962. It traces the challenges we faced in employment, housing etc particularly in the early years. I felt that people would be interested in reading about the changes in the political, social and cultural life in Britain from an immigrant’s perspective.

“The book also refers to the impact that Commonwealth immigrants, particularly those of South Asian origin, including those evicted from Kenya and Uganda, have had on the political, professional and social life of Britain over the last sixty years.

“My inspiration was that the book about my schooldays needed a sequel which was suggested by several people who read my first book. This book is aimed at the British public who may be interested in learning how a couple of migrants from the New Commonwealth integrated with the British way of life and were reasonably successful in their careers. The starting point of the book is the end of our schooldays. There is a brief description of our family background.

“Whenever we visited Sri Lanka my wife and I used to attend reunions of my classmates from secondary school (1948). My wife pointed out that we repeated the same stories every year and suggested that I wrote a book about my very enjoyable schooldays, eight of which were spent as a boarder. That inspired my first book.

“I have published three books through kdp.amazon. Memories of my Ceylon Schooldays (2020) is a factual account of my schooldays in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) from 1944 to 1956. Kipper & Friends (2021) traced our family history over a forty year period when we had pet dogs and cats. During that time we lived in a large house in Surrey with lots of land. The story is narrated by two cats and a dog.”