When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain (42 page)

Bestriding two worlds – the brown and the white – Mrs Gifford is able to test British attitudes in subtle ways. If she phones someone, and – in her best Roedean voice – leaves the name ‘Mrs Gifford', she is invariably called back; if she leaves her maiden name ‘Zerbanoo Irani', the odds against the call being returned lengthen considerably. There is a similar difference in reaction from, for example, the police, depending on whether she is wearing western clothes or a sari. ‘People even speak more slowly when I wear a sari.' She wears Indian costume, ‘when I want to look pretty' and on public platforms, because she feels that visible gestures from public figures give moral support to the tens of thousands of Indian women who wear a sari all the time. She told of the snobbery she meets: for example, the subtle change of attitude when visiting a British embassy when she lets drop she was at Roedean. Abroad you see Britain as others see it, she said. ‘The first thing I am asked on foreign soil is “Aren't the British racist? How can you hope to be elected to parliament?” I find myself having to defend Britain, act as PR for my country once I am past the white cliffs of Dover.' She dismissed Mrs Thatcher as insular and mean-minded. Like other Asians, she finds the Napoleonic gibe that the English are a nation of shopkeepers ridiculous. If they were, how would the Asians have established themselves here? ‘More closed shop, than shopkeepers,' said Mrs Gifford.

A steel, she said, had entered her soul as a result of the intimidation she suffered. ‘Nothing now knocks me off balance. If your life has been in danger, it makes you aware of the importance of doing something with it. My father said: “If you don't carry on, they will have won, and you'll never be able to do anything.”' If she gets to Westminster, her presence in itself will be a significant statement. But she knows what she is up against. How long, she wondered, will it be before it is a political plus to have been an immigrant or the child of immigrants? ‘My father sacrificed for us. We now have the right to fulfil the dreams he had for us.'

One of Mrs Gifford's suggested contacts was J.K. Gohel, who first came to Britain in 1933, when all Indians were still ‘maharajahs'. ‘If I saw an Indian then, I'd run half a mile to shake him by the hand.' He had stayed here until the early years of the war, qualifying as a barrister. We were, apparently, no less ignorant then of foreign ways than we are now. A fellow student wondered what Mr Gohel would do with his law degree when he returned to India: the idea of brown people having courts and justice hadn't occurred to her. Mr Gohel had been in Britain during Dunkirk, and remained impressed nearly half a century later. ‘The British are best when the chips are down. It is a different cup of tea when they are faced with an emergency.' After a distinguished public career in India, he returned to Britain in 1960 in time to catch another chapter he admires in British history – de-colonialization. ‘Only the British had the guts, the sense and the wisdom to withdraw with grace,' he said. He lamented American leadership in world affairs, likening the United States to a wrestler – too much brawn and sadly not enough brain. They've no idea of history or how the world works; Britain, which really knows better, has become ‘a cheerleader for American policies, whether it agrees with them or not.'

We met at the private bank where he worked, a discreet place of business near the Inns of Court, which was not, I was informed sternly, to be mentioned by name in any writing. Mr Gohel wore an Oxford blue turban, slightly lop-sidedly, and a pin-striped suit cut in the Nehru jacket style. His fifty-plus years of watching Asians in Britain gave him a balanced view. When the first post-war immigrants returned to visit their villages, they seemed like millionaires, so brothers and cousins were encouraged to come. It was a ‘gold rush': better housing, better clothes, free health, free education, the dole if needed. East African Asians were already on the second rung of the ladder, established shopkeepers. There was no mystery about their success – ‘hard work and economical living'. It's in their blood, traders for a thousand years. They were helped by ‘the comparatively easy-going English.
They
don't feel the world owes them a living. If you want something, you must earn it, and earn it the hard way. What incentive do you have if you are not driven hard?' That, he said, was the deficit side of the welfare state. A family with several children was better off on benefit: what incentive did they have left?

He gave Asian characteristics – culture, religion, family solidarity – a longer lifespan in the British environment than did Major Saroop, three or four generations, an estimate that was supported by a survey carried out for
New Society
amongst young Asians in 1985. The Asians interviewed said that English young people had too much freedom, did not care enough about their education and were workshy. An eighteen-year-old Sikh girl said: ‘It is not good to have that much. The girls think it is a good thing to go out with a different boy each week. They have no self-respect … Then you see them pushing prams along, and most of them aren't married.' A Muslim father said: ‘A culture in which parents are left in old people's homes and old people are beaten to death or beaten up for the sake of a few pounds, such people are not fit to be human beings.' A Hindu father complained: ‘The English are not really bothered. Education is free. They don't really appreciate the ample opportunity to educate themselves. They concentrate on meeting people. Pubs. Skinheads. Punks.' But I suspect that the attitudes defined in that survey are eroding faster than Mr Gohel would wish. Young Asians I met spoke about smoking, drinking and eating taboo meats. ‘How,' asked one, ‘can you live in this country and not eat at McDonalds?'

Why, I asked Mr Gohel, are the British prejudiced? The colonial powers, he said, had to argue that they travelled halfway round the world to conquer other people's countries for the good of the natives. They had the guns, so we didn't argue. A picture was painted of a barbarous people, who had to be civilized by the British, of a nation of snakes and elephants with people living in trees. The legacy is the deep-seated belief that coloured people are inferior. Most people don't know any better.

Mr Gohel is a lifelong Conservative. ‘Asians have everything in common with the Tories – a belief in family and God, in property-owning, in the creation of wealth, and' – this with a smile – ‘in paying as few taxes as possible. Labour's historic moment – child labour, long hours, exploitation – is past. The unions are no longer the defenders of the people, but their masters. They harass the general public.' A Labour government, he said, would be a tragedy. ‘The nation will revert to less work for more pay. The government will place its own “isms” before the welfare of the country. The economy will suffer, and we will be the scapegoats – “Pakis go home”.' Labour smiles and makes promises when in opposition, he said. In office, the smiles remain, but the promises are like ‘a plastic lollipop'. It seemed an apt image for much of immigrant experience in Britain.

This elderly, distinguished man had had his own brush with skinheads. Leaving a cocktail party east of the City, he had been unable to find a cab, and had gone to an Underground station. He was surrounded by five or six youths who started abusing him. He tried to ignore them, but the abuse and jostling got worse. A train came just in the nick of time. ‘I try to be discreet, avoid the area of pubs at closing time. In the thirties, when I was a student, we would go anywhere at any time. The bobby on the corner was a reassuring figure. We dress differently and have different customs, but we can smile and cry like the rest of humanity. The British working man in his ignorance thinks of us all as coolies.' However, he added, there is not a single Asian who has not got a friend or two, whom he meets over ‘a cup of tea, a pint, or a tandoori chicken.'

Across the world Asians put their trust in education: when they do well in business, they like to advertise their success with worldly goods, like expensive motor cars. These aspirations come together in Britain in the large number of Asian children who are being educated privately. Fee-paying is both an investment and a status symbol. Ram Bedi, the coat-hanger manufacturer, said: ‘I paid for the best education for my four children.' He was clearly satisfied with the return. His eldest daughter was fluent in four languages, his second daughter had a degree in computing, and his third was studying to become a chartered accountant; a son was still at school. Another Asian said that British state schools were just not good enough.

Mr Nagda, of the Sangat Community Centre in Harrow, said: ‘Asians put education top of the shopping list. Asian children take up more than 50 per cent of the places at Wembley and Harrow private schools. If the children are in state schools, parents make sure they spend time on their homework. If children are not highly educated, it is difficult for them to get good jobs and survive in this country: they have to be better educated than white people.' His own children were at a comprehensive: ‘If my children are clever, no matter what school they are at, they will study hard and be at the top of the class.' In the United States the 1986 Westinghouse Science Talent Search, open to all American high-school students, was totally dominated by Asian pupils: the organizers reported that in each case the pupil had had the strongest possible support from parents throughout his school career.

If a good education is one form of insurance against prejudice, preparing a bolt-hole is another. The Indian government has recently opened the way for investment in India by Indians living abroad. Praful Patel, a former member of the Ugandan Resettlement Board and a Labour parliamentary candidate, was engaged in late 1986 in promoting such investment, and reported a strong response. Of course, by no means all investors were thinking in ‘bolt-hole' terms, but few Asians, however successful, escape moments of pessimism about life in Britain. ‘I have given up,' said Ramesh Vala, the Kenyan solicitor, ‘on the media ever making a positive effort to educate the British that, beneath the colour of our skin, we are all the same people.'

In 1986 Prafulla Mohanti, an Indian painter and writer, who had come to Britain in 1960, produced a chillingly sad autobiography. For twenty-five years he had closely observed a decline in British decency and tolerance; at the same time, on visits to India, he found himself an increasingly alien figure, aghast at the corruption, nepotism and bureaucracy he found. His expatriate experience was tragic. When he arrived as a young architect, he had thought ‘of England as a land of daffodils … men wore bowler hats … there was no poverty and people were honest and fair.' The immigration officer greeted him with the words: ‘I hope you will be as happy in my country as I was in yours,' a welcome that became increasingly ironic.

Before his story ends, he had been driven from his home in London's east end, attacked in parks, spat upon by skinheads, and demeaned by the police. He had a dream that he would one day return to his native village armed with the technology and money to cure its Third World, primitive ills. His tragedy became the impossibility of marrying the strong spiritual values and simple, unstressful human relationships he brought with him from the East to the greater practical knowledge he discovered in the West. He grew ever more isolated between two incompatible worlds.

It is that bleakness that men like Major Narindar Saroop fear may lie in ambush for coming generations of British Asians – whatever their material success.

It was the coldest night for twenty years. London was immobilized by snow that had crippled railways, closed schools and blocked roads. ‘
TODAY IS CANCELLED
' read the headline in the London
Standard
. The east end was quiet and beautiful, its grime invisible beneath three inches of soft snow, which shone like phosphorus, catching and reflecting the light trapped in the city sky. I had walked a mile or so, entranced by the peace. The only people on the back streets were children, throwing snowballs and shouting. A gaunt Victorian school looked romantic against the white backdrop; the hulking tower blocks became architectural. They may have affronted the humanity of the thousands of families stacked up inside them, but in the fresh, lucent snow, they rose like brooding cliffs from the Victorian terraces below.

Outside one row of homes, Asian girls in saris were throwing snowballs, shrieking in sharp east London voices: ‘Quick, 'ere she comes. Duck.' A snowball flew past my head, and we all laughed. At the street corner, light shone from a small sweet shop: inside, through the steamed-up window, I saw a boy on tiptoe pointing to something in a large glass jar. My feet were so cold that each step was an agony, but I felt deeply contented, as if the years had rolled away and I, and everyone trapped in this overcrowded, dirty corner of London, could make a fresh start. The snow was a fond beguiler, wrapping the world on which it fell with innocence.

An hour later I sat in a miserable upstairs room, where the wind cut through the window frames, piercing even outdoor clothing with sharp draughts, and stirring the soiled, floral curtains. Gas and electric fires blazed futilely, the hot air seeping through the poorly built walls. Someone had begun to fix the room – unpainted wood supported a newly made archway to the back of the house – but had abandoned the endeavour. There were piles of discarded brochures and magazines dumped on the floor, and a sit-up-and-beg typewriter lay beneath unattended business bumph. It was the room of a man who had given up; a set for Pinter's
The Caretaker
. Through the archway in a ‘kitchen', unwashed mugs were stacked alongside throwaway, but not thrown away, paper cups. The water supply to the sink had frozen.

From time to time there was a raucous, challenging shout from the street, and my companion, a slim Asian wearing several sweaters, an ancient grey leather jacket and an incongruous pair of heavy, black working-man's boots, leapt to the window, and peered round the curtains, keeping to one side so that he couldn't be seen from below. ‘Did you hear that? “Bang, bang, bang.” It's them again.' Four or five white youths loafed along the otherwise deserted road. Seeing them through my companion's eyes, I felt the menace they represented: arrogant, hostile, unafraid, masters in this benighted tract of Canning Town of all they surveyed. The shabby room was bleaker yet when we resumed our seats.

Ezaz ‘Terry' Hayat had a story to tell that would have been sad enough if it had been the isolated case of one good man's ambitions destroyed by thuggery and official indifference. But it was by no means isolated. Within a few miles of where we talked, thousands of other brown-skinned Britons cowered in similar beleaguered rooms. By day the streets of the east end of London teem with Asians, women in saris, men in turbans and Muslim caps, children in school uniforms. By night, on the roads round the estates in which they are packed, there is scarcely a brown face to be seen.

Like most people who live removed from direct experience of racialism, I knew that Asians are frequently discriminated against and abused in Britain's inner cities. They are, the Home Office has reported, fifty times more likely to be victims of racial attacks than are whites. Responsible papers run regular features, especially after such outrages as the arson murders of women and children – the most horrifying of these racial attacks. But few, I suspect, have an inkling of the ubiquitous nature of racial harassment, which is a deep stain on the national reputation for tolerance. Shortly after my return to Britain, I read of a Pakistani girl who lived in the east end and worked as a secretary in the City, who had to wash her hair almost every night. During an average day, someone – from a balcony overhead, on an Underground platform, on the street, from the stairs of a bus – spat at her. Such assaults do not show up in police files, nor are they reported to neighbourhood monitoring units. But they are part and parcel of a systematic humiliation, which becomes, like the weather, accepted by Asians as inescapable and therefore scarcely worth commenting upon. I had to jog people's minds before they bothered to recount such incidents. Several Asians said they were never abused. ‘Not even called “Paki bastards” in the street? Spat at, or told to “go home”?' I asked. ‘Oh that. Yes, of course. We don't take any notice of that: that's part of everyday life.' A girl, born to Pakistani parents in the east end, said: ‘I have had abuse all my life. I'm used to it. I don't take any notice of what they say.'

Mr Hayat, who came to England from Kenya when he was twelve, had schooled himself in similar stoicism. He had studied electronics, but, like most East African Asians, had set his heart on running his own business. He joined the family leather concern – manufacturing and selling: at one time they owned four shops – but, through a series of disasters, the enterprise collapsed. A strike cost the family a substantial contract with C & A; they were twice robbed of uninsured goods. One by one the shops went, and finally the business folded. Mr Hayat set about rebuilding his fortunes by training as a motor mechanic. For seven years he was employed by the Post Office, worked as much overtime as he could, and bought a house, while he dreamed his independent dreams. A year before we met he had sold his home, borrowed from bank and friends, moved his family into rented property, and bought a derelict shop in Barking Road, Canning Town, in the heart of London's old docklands. He negotiated a franchise with Southern Fried Chicken, and converted the shop himself. ‘I tried to make it as nice as I could. I thought people would be pleased that there was something decent coming to their area,' he said. One evening, as he worked, some children threw stones at glass he was about to put in the windows. He shouted at them, and they vanished. The incident seemed no more than a tiny cloud in a sunny sky. When he opened early in 1986, business was brisk enough for Mr Hayat to believe he would prosper.

However, after a few weeks a gang of local youths began coming to the shop. They called Mr Hayat and his black assistant names – ‘nigger', ‘Pakis', ‘black bastards': they shouted contradictory orders, stole the ketchup and anything else they could lay their hands on, asked in leering tones for ‘white' not ‘black chicken' – ‘know what I mean, nigger?' – wheedled or conned their way out of paying, blew smoke round the serving area. The abuse got worse day by day. Police who bought food in the shop said they would speak to the ‘boys'. Mr Hayat said: ‘They told me, “We know them all. We've warned them – blah, blah, blah” – but it made no difference.' The youths started to threaten violence. ‘I'd really like to get you outside and smash your face in, nigger,' the ringleader said to the black assistant. The gang occasionally produced knives and other weapons.

Mr Hayat had been trained in professional self-control. ‘Ignore the customers' insults, and don't start anything unless they jump the counter. Let them say what they want. If anyone comes in and “mouths” it, let him. Don't lose your temper.' He paused, and added in a quiet voice: ‘Apparently it doesn't work like that in this area. You've got to stand up for yourself.' The plate-glass window was smashed, catapults fired at the shop. Every time there was an incident, the shop lost more custom: ‘decent people', as his assistant put it, stayed away. Mr Hayat installed closed-circuit television, and placed a pickaxe handle amongst the sauce bottles and paper napkins beneath the counter.

His assistant, Dalton Macauley, was a large, cheerful and very black youth of eighteen, with a curious ancestry. He had been born in Washington, DC, to an American father and British mother; the family moved to Sierra Leone when he was two, and he had finally come to London when he left school. He was something of all three countries, sitting at the back of the shop on a steel table next to the ‘Henny Penny Fryer', swinging his feet in their Hi-Tec basketball boots. I half expected him to say ‘Have a nice day,' but his accent was a hard to comprehend mixture of black America, West Africa and the east end. He lived close to the shop, and one night one of the white youths tried to run him down as he crossed the road. At midnight, when he closed the shop and put the bins out, they'd walk by taunting ‘nigger, nigger'.

Inevitably Dalton lost his patience, once vaulting the counter to get at his tormentors, who kicked in the shop window and ran into the street. Mr Hayat was approached three times by men who suggested life might be more comfortable if he paid protection money. He refused. A ringleader said: ‘This is a white man's area. We're going to shoot you. Burn the place down with petrol bombs.' A few nights later two petrol bombs were thrown at the shop. By then Mr Hayat was calling the police three or four times a week. But the soft soap continued. Dalton said: ‘We'd be told, “They've been taken care of, they'll never come close to the shop. Don't worry, they'll never do this, they'll never do that.” They'd be back again straight away.' Mr Hayat asked the police to spare one man for one day to protect the shop and watch what was going on. ‘They refused. Told me that if I was scared I should “go home”. I don't know which “home” they meant.'

He was trapped. Fighting back wasn't worth it because it drove away customers. ‘You don't,' as Dalton put it, ‘open a shop to make a fighting place, but to make a living.' Appeasement was almost as bad. The youths sensed that the two men were scared, and played cat and mouse with them. They would stay away from the shop for a few days or weeks, allowing custom to seep back. Then they'd stage another confrontation. ‘My business,' said Mr Hayat, ‘was going completely dead.' One night, fearing an attack, he assembled some friends in the back of the shop, reasoning: ‘If there were more of us, we'd have a better chance of survival.' That evening the police
did
come, accused Mr Hayat and his friends of plotting criminal mischief, and threatened to prosecute them for gang warfare.

The health of both men began to suffer. Dalton said: ‘I can't take the pressure, no more. So much headaches. I can't sleep, man. Headaches, can't sleep. I want to leave the shop. But I won't run. They'll only chase me to my home.' He did, in fact, later leave, opting for unemployment rather than the intolerable pressures of the shop. Mr Hayat passed through that phase. He abandoned his hope of moving his family into the upstairs flat, which was why the conversion was unfinished. He couldn't place them in an environment in which they would be insulted daily and possibly in mortal danger from arsonists as they slept. He himself battled on hoping for a ‘miracle'.

What actually happened was the bloodiest fight yet. At about ten o'clock one winter's evening, his brother-in-law, Mike Lone, originally from what was Tanganyika, with Mr Lone's son, Naeem, and a cousin were leaving the shop after a visit. One of Mr Hayat's persistent persecutors was on the pavement with a glass of beer in his hand. As the Lones left, he started his familiar abuse, calling Mr Lone a ‘Paki bastard'. Mr Lone told his son and nephew to ignore the man, and made a sign with his finger to his head, as if to say ‘he's mad'. The youth threw his beer over Mr Lone, followed by the glass, which narrowly missed his head and smashed against the car. He ran to a pub opposite, and seconds later rushed back out with a mob of about fifteen young whites at his heels. ‘They were coming out of the pub like flies,' said Mr Hayat. The gang pitched into the Lones, with four or five youths on Mr Lone and another four or five on his son. Sticks, knives, bottles, scaffolding poles were used. A girl joined in with her high-heeled shoes. Traffic halted as fighting spilled across the road.

When it was over, Mr Lone had to have seven stitches in a jagged wound below his right ear – two inches further down and his neck would have been slashed open – and three stitches in a head wound. His back also was badly hurt. His son had broken his hand, and had to have stitches in a face wound. Two of the assailants were arrested in the pub, where they had returned to continue drinking, and two others were charged later. (As I write, their trial is yet to be held.)

The affray ruined two lives. Mr Hayat's business virtually ceased. The night I was there the shop door only opened when the wind blew it. ‘Crack' it would go every five minutes as a fierce gust swirled down Barking Road, deceiving the listener upstairs that business was being done below. Dalton took a total of £35 in twelve hours on that day. Mr Hayat said: ‘The publicity from this case has ruined my business right to the ground. I've tried selling, but nobody wants to know. I can't shut because I can't pay off my debts. I have lost everything. Sooner or later the shop will have to go. When it does, I'll never be able to stand up again and do anything positive.' Later he was negotiating with a potential buyer, but at a price that would leave him with nothing with which to start again or to buy another home.

Without the thuggish assaults, with decent police protection, he would have had a comfortably expanding business, a home for his family and the beginnings of a secure future. The casual destruction of his life by a band of teenage racists left him with mixed emotions, and fantasies of a government-stimulated conspiracy to drive immigrants out of the country. He has white friends, and has lived happily in many parts of Britain outside London's east end, but his bitterness was winning out. ‘If a white man goes to Africa or India, believe me, they give him so much respect. I have been here twenty years. Is it my fault that the economy's in trouble? What are we? Are we really second-class citizens? If we are, they should come out and tell us, then at least, like in South Africa, we'd know where we are and what to expect.