Although they pretended to be friends my parents and Tanveer’s parents were engaged in a lengthy war as to whose child was going to be more successful. When I visited his home in Bury Park there would be maths textbooks that he had taken out from the library which included extra tests that the teachers had not set. After he finished junior school his parents enrolled him in a school that was miles from where he lived which had brand-new facilities and virtually no other Asians. Anything and everything to ensure he excelled in his exams.
On the night that our O level exam results were revealed I received a telephone call. It was the middle of August 1987. I had learnt earlier that day that I had passed ten subjects with a scattering of As, Bs and Cs. My parents had seemed reasonably satisfied and I had retired to bed feeling mightily relieved. That was before the telephone rang. I ran down the stairs. It was Tanveer. ‘Hello, Sarfraz, how are you?’
It was past eleven and Tanveer never usually rang so I knew immediately that his mother and father had put him up to it. ‘So how did your exams go?’ he asked in a voice that made it clear he was only asking because he had been told to.
‘Not too bad. Am quite pleased,’ I told him honestly. ‘Got ten, four As, four Bs and two Cs.’
He paused before saying, ‘That’s really good, your parents must be very pleased.’
‘Yeah, they’re all right, I think. What about you, how did you do?’
‘I . . . they went well too . . .’
‘Really? So, go on, what did you get then?’
‘Err . . . well, I got twelve passes with eleven As and one B.’
I knew the instant Tanveer told me his results that I was in for a verbal battering from my father. ‘Who was that?’ asked my father.
‘Tanveer,’ I replied.
‘Come here. What did he want?’
I told him Tanveer’s results. It was not just my father who exploded with rage, my mother was also livid. ‘So this is how you thank us,’ screamed my father, ‘making us look like fools in front of his mother and father? Do you know how hard they must be laughing at us in their house?’
‘We were told this was a bad school,’ added my mother bitterly. ‘All council house people. His parents took him to a good school in a private area.’
Tanveer’s better grades meant that I had committed the worst of crimes: I had embarrassed my parents in front of others. I had let them down.
When I try to recall the atmosphere in our home the most overpowering memory is the urgent pressure we all felt to earn and save money. The sofa in our living room was golden velvet but in order to preserve its condition my mother had made a cotton cover that we stretched across the sofa and armchairs. The only time the cover was removed was when guests were coming; if someone unexpectedly came I would have to hurriedly whip the magnolia shroud off the three-piece suite. When we ate, my mother’s constant refrain was ‘You can eat as much as you like but finish everything in your plate.’
Nothing infuriated my father more than a light left on in an empty room; he would patrol the house in search of electrical appliances left switched on unnecessarily. We were constantly told we were living beyond our means, that all of us shared a responsibility towards contributing to the household. Before I was old enough for a part-time job I was dreaming up ways to make money. During the Rubik’s Cube craze I would complete the cube in exchange for money. In order to preserve my secret technique I insisted on pocketing the cash and doing the cube in private. When I was safely in my bedroom I would use my mother’s machine oil to grease the coloured stickers and reattach them so each side was a single colour. This ruse lasted a week before my friends began complaining that the coloured stickers were falling off their cubes.
I also scoured the classified advertisements in the Luton Herald for items that I could buy and resell for a profit. My most spectacular deal was a 1955 edition of the Guinness Book of Records which I bought for fifty pence. It was the very first one so I thought it must be valuable. The man came to deliver it to our home, which must have meant he made absolutely nothing from the sale. The following week I placed a for sale advertisement in the paper. I did not put a price on the book but said that the highest offer would secure the sale. It eventually sold to a man who needed it to complete his collection. He paid fifteen pounds. The money went straight to my father.
Many of my schoolfriends already had Saturday jobs. Usually my father dismissed comparisons between me and my friends but when it came to work he was suddenly far more receptive. ‘Look at your friends, they all work, time you started looking for work too,’ he would tell me. ‘Look at you, almost a man, you need to start behaving like one.’ There was no purpose in pointing out that the reason my friends had jobs was because they were allowed to keep the money they earned.
At weekends I would take the bus into Luton town centre and try to find work. I would visit every store in the Arndale and on Leagrave Road. Friends would tell me that there was work available somewhere but when I turned up the vacancy would have disappeared.
I was in a newsagent asking the man behind the counter if he needed help when someone overheard me and asked if I was looking for work. He owned a store nearby and needed someone to help during the coming half-term holiday.
The shop was called The Door Store and, unsurprisingly, it was a store which sold doors. On my first morning I arrived half an hour earlier than the owner. ‘So what they call you?’ he asked brightly once he arrived.
‘Sarfraz,’ I told him.
‘OK, so what do your friends call you?’ he asked.
‘They call me Saf,’ I said hurriedly.
‘Great stuff, Saf. OK, well, your first task of the week is to make a brew. Let me show you the kitchen. You make us both a cup of tea and then I’ll run you through what I want you to do during the rest of the week.’
And with that he led me to the back of the shop and into a tiny kitchen. He pointed to the kettle before bounding into the store. It was not yet ten o’clock and the boss had asked me to do what he thought was a simple task, but already I was panic-stricken. I had never made tea using a kettle. When my mother made tea she boiled water in a pan, added tea bags, poured in milk and let the whole thing stew until a thin film formed on the surface. I filled the kettle with water, waited until it boiled and then added the tea bags. The owner walked in. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ he asked me. ‘Don’t tell me you don’t even know how to make a cuppa?’
‘I’m sorry, I just know how we make it at home.’
‘All right, let me show you how we English make it. You take a mug and put a tea bag in it. You then fill the kettle and when it’s boiled you pour the water into the mug. Then you stir and add milk. Got that?’ I nodded my head. It seemed a bizarre way to make tea. ‘So you sure you can do it next time? OK, what I need you to do now is help with this door.’
For the next five days I carried doors from the storage area at the back of the shop into the display at the front. No one bought a door in the time I was there; most of the time I minded the store and gave price details to anyone who asked. When I returned home in the evening after my first day of work my father treated me in a way he never had before and my mother had made keema aloo because she knew it was my favourite.
At six o’clock on the Friday afternoon, just as I was about to say goodbye and thank the owner for giving me work he put his hand into his pocket and drew out three ten-pound and one five-pound note. I had not discussed what I would be earning with the owner as I had been so relieved to be working at all.
As I took the number 27 bus back to Marsh Farm I held the thirty-five pounds in my hands, feeling the notes and thinking of what they could purchase. A Lyle & Scott sweater, maybe a pair of gleaming white Hi-Tec Capitol trainers. It was all fantasy, of course. When I got home I rang the doorbell and my mother answered. ‘This is for you,’ I told her, handing her the notes.
‘There is no more beautiful thing that a son can do,’ my father claimed later that evening, ‘than to give his ha
rd-earned money to his mother.’
I knew I should have agreed but the truth was I could think of plenty of beautiful things I could have done with the money instead. Even though I had not expected to keep the money I had earned working at The Door Store, handing it over to my mother still felt painful; if I could have had even a few pounds to myself it would have justified working the week but as it was, there was a shuddering anti-climax to my first experience of paid employment.
The following month Scott and I took the train to London to take part in Sport Aid’s Run the World, a charity race organised by Bob Geldof. We had been training two times a week for the past three months and I had been persuading friends and teachers to sponsor me. I really wanted to take part because the previous year I had not been able to attend Live Aid. A boy in my class, a lanky lad called Paul Wilson, claimed to have tickets which he was willing to sell to me but my father had forbidden me from going. At the time I was crestfallen, so when Geldof announced Sport Aid I signed up even though it was not nearly so glamorous as the Wembley Stadium concert. The race was exhausting and the preparation we had done was wholly inadequate. The good news, however, was that both Scott and I did finish the race and the following week I set about collecting the sponsorship money. This amounted to over seventy pounds. Each night as I held the cash I promised myself I would mail the money to Sport Aid the following day but something always seemed to prevent me. This was money that my father knew nothing about, he had no stake in it. It was intended for the starving children of Africa, those desperate babies with the swollen bellies and huge sad eyes. I knew their need was greater than mine would ever be, I had cried when I saw The Cars perform ‘Drive’ on Live Aid. But the shameful truth is I never did send the money I raised to Sport Aid. I kept it and spent it on myself, being careful not to spend it on anything suspiciously expensive. I was not proud but the simple fact was that I had never been allowed to have so much money in my possession before and such a chance might never come again: the temptation was too great. And so, to my lasting shame, I kept the money intended for the hungry African children.
As I had proved I was able to find work at The Door Store, my father continued to push me to find work for when I left school. I was in my final year and trying to revise for my O level exams whilst looking for a summer job. The pressure to find work overwhelmed everything else; there were eight weeks between ending my exams and beginning at sixth form and I had to find a way to earn money. I wrote to the local radio station wondering if they might be looking for helpers, I wrote to the local newspaper asking if they needed any assistance but both said there was nothing suitable. My father would search the Herald looking for possible jobs for me. One evening he noticed an advertisement for people to work in a factory which made sandwiches and he suggested I apply. There was the possibility of plenty of overtime. I applied and went for an interview where they asked me a few questions and handed me a small plastic cylinder into which I had to provide a stool sample, which I would then post to their laboratory to ensure I wasn’t carrying any unpleasant diseases. Why could they not have provided a funnel to make it easier? I wondered in frustration as I valiantly tried to evacuate my bowels. Having failed to relax sufficently I was reduced to using a spatula to poke, scrape and deposit. My mother kept asking what was taking me so long in the bathroom but I was too embarrassed to explain.
I started work at the sandwich factory at the end of June 1987. On my first morning I was handed my uniform – a white overcoat and hairnet – which all employees were obliged to wear. The factory floor was divided into half a dozen production lines. At the start of the line were dozens of loaves of sliced bread which would be fed to the start of the line. Hanging over the belt that drove the slices of bread along were large metal funnels that were filled with sliced tomatoes, cucumbers, eggs and so on. As the bread slid past, each worker would be tasked with adding a different filling. By the time the slices had reached the end of the line they had graduated into fully fledged sandwiches, packed into plastic cases and carted off for the nation to enjoy.
For the next twelve weeks I worked on the production line slicing eggs, adding tomatoes, spreading mayonnaise, opening loaves and other duties. The shift began at eight in the morning and ended at four in the afternoon; at around two the line manager would walk along the production line offering overtime. I was instructed to accept any overtime offered which meant I usually didn’t end the day until six in the evening. At weekends it was possible to sign up to two double shifts – two days starting at eight in the morning and ending at ten in the evening. The work was not physically gruelling but it was mind-crushingly dull. I perfected a technique of dividing the day into eighths, quarters and halves to try and hurry the hours along. After two hours I would tell myself I was a quarter of the way into the day; by four hours I would remind myself I had broken the back of the day and so on. The reward for my efforts came on Friday when the line manager handed me a small brown envelope with my printed payslip inside; after tax I was clearing over two hundred, sometimes three hundred, pounds a week.
Every Friday at lunchtime my father would wait for me, the golden Vauxhall Viva parked outside the factory. He would drive me along Leagrave Road and towards the Midland Bank in Bury Park where I had recently opened my bank account. The bank had expressed their gratitude at my banking with them by giving me a dictionary and official pen. My father was generous enough to allow me to keep both those items but insisted I withdraw my wages each week and hand them over. There were a couple of times when we left it a few weeks and I can still remember the excitement of holding a thousand pounds in my hands. Each time I gave the money to my father, I felt a little piece of me die. I knew it was the right thing to do but it frustrated me beyond words that my friends were seeing Madonna on the ‘Who’s that Girl?’ tour at Wembley Stadium and, although I had earned the money, I was not able to go. I would often wonder why my father didn’t give me even a fraction of what I had earned; it would have boosted my motivation and made me a less sullen presence at home. The truth was that he probably never contemplated it. All family income had to be pooled into a central bank from which he would then distribute to us according to our needs. When Uzma was in school she would ask my father for lunch money. Each time my father would apologise for having forgotten and then give her fifty pence. My sister did not have the heart to tell him that even a portion of chips cost sixty pence. He was not being miserly, he just had no idea how much things cost.
I grumbled and I sighed but mostly I was ignored and when I was noticed my father would say what he always said when any of his children voiced frustration about money. ‘Do you think I spend your money on myself? Are my clothes any better than yours? When I eat do I eat any different, any better than you?’ It was true too that my father cared nothing for material possessions for himself; wherever the money went it did not go on him. I only learnt later that my father sent money to his and my mother’s relatives back in Pakistan. The pale-blue aerogramme letters that regularly arrived from our uncles and aunts were filled with pleas for contributions to weddings and operations. They assumed that because he lived in England he was rolling in money. My father did not make a fuss about it but sent thousands of rupees back to Lahore and Karachi to help the relatives he left behind.
When I started sixth-form college I was allowed to choose the A levels I wanted to study and what degree topics I took was my decision. Not all Asians were so fortunate; at college many of those who studied the A level subjects that would get them into medical school did so under duress from their parents. While I was studying at college I was still unsure as to what career I was destined for. My father tried to assist. He would read the newspaper and if he read about a job that seemed lucrative he would call me into his room and suggest I pursue it. ‘Have you thought about actuaries?’ he once asked me.
‘Not recently,’ I replied.
Another time he became convinced that I should study biochemistry as it was an emerging field.
My father had tried and failed to persuade me to aspire towards medicine. This was only because Tanveer’s parents had already declared their little boy was going to medical school and my parents wanted me to keep up with their maniacal ambition. I, on the other hand, always knew that I could never be a doctor; I did not care enough about other people and could imagine few things more depressing than spending time with the ill and the infirm. One needed to have a calling to be a doctor and for me that call never came.
I knew I didn’t want to be a doctor but I did not know where my employment future might lie. Amolak was the same. His father had worked for British Steel in Sheffield, then in a rubber factory in Letchworth and he was now in the building trade. He had almost single-handedly built the extension on his house. My friend had spent his teenage years assisting his father on building sites across Luton but he was not going to be a builder just as I knew I would not work on a production line. On Saturday afternoons Amolak and I would sit in Greenfields in the Arndale Centre fantasising over the teenage waitresses who seemed only interested in bringing us our pots of tea and wonder what would happen to us once we left sixth-form college. ‘I’d quite like to do law,’ I once said to him. ‘It must be really cool, to actually make a difference in someone’s life, you know what I mean?’ Ever since I had been at school teachers had said my argumentative nature made me a natural lawyer and every time I watched LA Law it reignited my interest.
‘Wake up, mate,’ said Amolak incredulously. ‘The fact is the only law us lot get a look in on is immigration law. None of that high-class corporate tax shit. No. It’s Mr Shah wants to bring his missus from Bangladesh. That’s it.’ I sat gloomily staring at my cup of tea. ‘Thing is, mate,’ continued Amolak, ‘if you want to make some serious cash you gotta either go it alone or get into the City. No other way. Look at all the fellas with cash and carrys in Bury Park. They’re building fucking mansions back home.’
Greetings from Bury Park Page 14