In short, I was a happy child, at home and at school, whether I was playing with empty bread crates with Ranjit, or running up and down Victoria Road with an army of other kids, completely oblivious to the fact that the foundations of the shop in which I lived this happy life were slowly eroding. What was behind this decay? Well, if you had asked my father to explain, I have no doubt that he would have cited the macroeconomic factors that are conventionally thought to have undermined the small British shop in the 1980s. Out-of-town shopping had become a trend, with the Merry Hill Shopping Centre in Dudley, at the time one of the biggest malls in Europe, becoming a prime attraction in the West Midlands. Retail parks began to be located, catastrophically, just outside the ring road, ensuring there was no need for residents to go anywhere near the town centre. The collapse of traditional industry had left Wolverhampton with one of the highest rates of long term unemployment in Britain.
But I actually think it was other things, closer to home, that really did for Bains Stores. Things such as the demolition of the last major steelworks in the area, in a controlled explosion, which is another of my clearest childhood memories, everyone gathering to watch it from a nearby park, cooing in amazement, unaware we were witnessing one more stake being driven through the heart of our community, and the creation of a large waste ground where people would dump old cars and take drugs.
Also, it didn’t help that many of the Asians who lived in the area had become affluent and began moving out to the suburbs. They returned regularly to visit one of the two temples on the road, their choice depending on their caste, and to buy Asian produce from Dhanda’s, which by the mid 1980s was running a fresh grocery section, a post office, an Indian catering business, and functioning as the base for Dhanda’s work as a Labour councillor, his campaign to get support for the teaching of Indian languages in schools on Saturday mornings and his chairmanship of the committee running the ever-expanding Jat temple. But these customers felt little need to pop into Bains Stores.
The fact was that my father had been proved wrong about the appetite among Asians for Asian culture. Not that this became evident quickly. The decline in trade was not extreme. After all, there are always days in any shop’s life when takings drop for no apparent reason, when a proprietor wonders if some event or holiday has taken everyone out of town. But in the 1980s, these days occurred more and more often. And though it feels like an act of vandalism upon my happy childhood memories to remember such things, there were all sorts of other warning signs, from the increasing number of household items kept behind the counter which might prove handy in the event of attack, to the deepening ominousness of the nicknames we gave customers. In my early youth, the characters I recall were people like ‘Hamboy’, the kid who was sent every three days to buy half a pound of ham, and ‘Flash Gordon’, a glamorous single bloke who would do all his weekly shopping in one go with a £10 note – so much money that my mum would have to get change from the safe in the living room. But by the late 1980s the regulars were people like ‘Nails’ (a man who appeared to have a phobia of washing his hands) and ‘Pashab’ (a more directly abusive phrase translating as ‘urine’).
I remember my mother once casually asking a customer about the whereabouts of her son, only to be told that he had gone down for two years in Featherstone for rape. And somewhere along the line the entrepreneurialism that had led my father to start offering a bike repair service, and then become an agent for coach tours, turned into penny-pinching and paranoia. Pretty much the only capital investment he made in the shop in the 1980s was an under-floor safe. When the till broke, it remained unfixed for years, and Dad never replaced the pricing gun – meaning labels had to be written by hand, a task I was occasionally burdened with.
I think I was quite old, however, ten or eleven, before I finally realised that the Dhandas’ were doing much better than us. Until that point, if Ranjit got a bike, I got a bike. If anything, I was the one who felt envied: Ranjit was the one forever asking me for sweets and magazines. But then Mr Dhanda bought a brand-new Mercedes S-class saloon. It was silver and cool and Ranjit nicked the keys so that we could sit in it in the garage. As we did so, he explained casually that the reason his family had so much more money was that they were Jats, who were the strongest of the Sikhs, and we were Chamars, who were by tradition servants. This was also the reason, he added, why he was stronger and taller than me.
It was only kids’ talk, and I guess he was just repeating things his father had said, but I was upset and I remember my mother’s attempt at consolation: she wiped away my tears and told me that she was Jat, which therefore made me one too. There was no attempt to challenge the gist of Ranjit’s argument, Mum adding only that I mustn’t under any circumstances tell my father what Ranjit had said.
Nevertheless, regardless of all this, my father decided in 1987 that I was going to benefit from a private school education. His only son was not going to be educated at the nearby comprehensive along with the likes of Ranjit and the other local ruffians who spent their afternoons skiving and smoking. I was going to do more than run a shop. I would grow up to be a doctor or a lawyer. To achieve this I was going to attend the local independent grammar school.
It was an insane plan: I wanted to go to Westfields like Ranjit and the rest of my friends. We absolutely could not afford the fees. But my father was insistent, saying he would sell the house we had never lived in to pay for it. And in the build-up to the entrance examination he became excited in a way I hadn’t see him get excited before. He devoured the prospectus with the kind of enthusiasm most middle-aged men reserve for checking out Harley-Davidson catalogues. He dragged me along to the Open Day, where to my mortification he tried to engage the history teacher on the topic of Henry VIII, who had just been the subject of a recent BBC TV series. Conversely, I had never seen him look so depressed when I scuppered his ambitions by deliberately failing the entrance exam.
However, he would not give up on his dream. He found another private day school, this one in Tettenhall, which had the advantage of being cheaper and not offering places by academic selection. We were called in for a family interview, and my father celebrated my entry as if he had just sired another son, even making a rare trip to Dhanda’s shop to brag and to buy twenty boxes of Indian sweets, which he gave away to customers in celebration.
As for me, I succumbed to gloom. I don’t think any child looked forward to starting senior school in the ’80s. Such was the bleakness and popularity of Grange Hill that we all grew up expecting to encounter sadistic teachers and children addicted to heroin. But I had the additional problem of Ranjit winding me up with scare stories about Tettenhall Royal. He warned that I would have to wear a top hat to school, that I faced having to pray in Latin and being beaten with a crook-handled cane for talking in class. It would not be long, he prophesised, before I would be cleaning my arse without using water like a gora, and bathing in my own filth.
My parents sought to ease my anxiety, but did so in characteristically ineffectual fashion – my mother embarking upon a programme of lengthy prayers, insisting I accompany her to the temple; my father spewing hectoring advice at every opportunity. Behave in a way that won’t get you noticed too quickly. Tell your new schoolmates a joke. You would have thought, from the way he banged on, that he had spent seven years at Eton, not two years in a dusty-floored village school in the Punjab so poor that it couldn’t afford tables. Maybe this is where my loathing of jokes came from.
My parents watched me as I walked stiffly towards the bus stop in my regulation black single-breasted jacket, black pullover and long, charcoal-grey trousers (cloth material – not denim or corduroy), clutching an outsized leather briefcase as I did so. Both of them were waiting anxiously for news of my day when I returned at half five. I told them all about the school buildings, which seemed enormous at the time, and the teachers whose names seemed to determine their roles and personalities: the idiosyncratic Mr Strange for French, a frail Mrs Gaunt for Physics. But w
hen it came to describing my classmates, I had nothing specific to say. So poleaxed was I by the poshness of my classmates that I had not talked to a soul.
There is something self-perpetuating about silence. Once you become known as the quiet kid, the prospect of actually speaking threatens to become an event, which makes you retreat further, and the whole thing becomes self-fulfilling. I became cocooned in silence. It took more than a fortnight to find someone I could call a friend at school: good old Matt Metcalfe. Though I suspect he responded because he was the only other boy who got the same bus as me to school and because I was a marginally better alternative to staring into space. He lived on a farm outside Wolverhampton, which required getting a bus through Blakenfields, was an exceptionally small child, afflicted with a disastrous bowl-shaped haircut (his mother’s handiwork) and had absolutely no sense of personal space. When he spoke, he would get right in your face and witter non-stop on his subject of choice, which was usually his Commodore 64.
A result of this enthusiasm, which was less infectious than relentless, was that I persuaded my parents to buy me one, arguing that I needed ‘a computer’ for my work, though I don’t think a minute of actual useful study has ever been conducted on a Commodore 64. By this point I had worked out that I could almost always get my way if I framed things in terms of my education. In my first year at Tettenhall Royal I got my father to buy a video recorder, arguing I needed it to study BBC Shakespeare adaptations, when I actually used it to record Doctor Who. I also got my parents to give me exclusive use of the living room at weekends to ‘concentrate on homework’, when I was actually using the space to kick back and play marathon games of Frogger. However, this honeymoon would come to an abrupt end with my first school report.
Tettenhall Royal had a combined letter and number grading system then, whereby for each subject you were given a letter indicating your effort, going from A to E, and a number, indicating your attainment, going from 1 to 5. So the worst grade you could possibly get was E5: zero effort and zero attainment. The best, A1: maximum effort, maximum attainment. My highest grade was B1, in Art. The remainder, however, were a dismal bunch of C4s and C3s and one D5 (in Physics). Though the thing that annoyed my father most was not my lowly attainment, but that when he attended parents’ evening, putting on his best suit and best turban for the occasion, a couple of the teachers struggled to recall who I was.
‘How can you be the only Indian boy in class and yet your teachers don’t know who you are?’ He flicked through my school report. ‘What do you actually do when you get to school? Do you even speak when you get there?’
‘You told me not to draw attention to myself,’ I mumbled.
‘That was advice for the first day! Not for the whole year!’
Mum intervened. ‘But look at his Art, ji. B1. Did you see his picture of a flower?’
‘We sold our house, we work ninety hours a week, so that our son can paint pictures?’
My bottom lip trembled. ‘I never wanted to go in the first place.’
‘WHAT DID YOU SAY?’ My father lifted his hand, as if to hit me. I knew it was mere theatre – my mother would not have stood for it, he was unlike Dhanda’s father, who was known to throw his wife and Ranjit around the house. But I cowered anyway. ‘WHAT DID YOU SAY?’
My mother positioned herself between us. My father threw the school report into the bin, ignoring the front slip that demanded a signature of receipt, and stormed off to his study. He didn’t speak to me for a week afterwards, giving me my first taste of the silent treatment which would characterise our relationship for life. His disappointment in me was tangible, a physical presence in the shop, so palpable that you could have put it in a jar and served it out like a quarter-pound of bonbons.
It caused me considerable pain, but it still didn’t provide me with the necessary motivation to do better at school. I was stuck in a rut. But an unexpected opportunity arose to change things in my second year when, standing in a corner of a classroom with Matt Metcalfe one morning break, listening to him talk on his pet subject (developing his own compiled programming language for his Commodore), while trying to turn the conversation to my pet subject (Eddie Kidd’s Jump Challenge), we were approached by Warren Nelson.
Nelson was the captain of the rugby team, who was dropped off each day in a Morgan sports car by his father, a local restaurant owner, and, to me, Nelson was the scariest boy in my year. Just his appearance was enough to render us both mute.
‘Hey, Banga, you live in a newsagent, right?’
I tensed up. The thing I got teased for most was my surname. But I got almost as much grief for living in a shop. ‘Why can’t Indians play football? Cos each time they get to the corner, they open a shop.’ ‘What do you call a Paki without a corner shop? Doctor.’ Etc. On the rare occasion I spoke up in class, some wag would more often than not remark, ‘Could I have a bag with that?’ But knowing that attack was the best form of defence, I squeaked, ‘Fuck off.’
Nelson got me into a headlock.
‘Listen, shithead. Can you get me some fags?’
‘What?’ I was in more pain than the time he had thrown a spitball at my head before class registration – a clump of surprisingly dense paper he had chewed and steeped in saliva.
‘Fags. You know, Embassy. Benson & Hedges.’
He let me go, and I fell to the floor. ‘You know those things in little packets that your parents flog?’
I gawped back in fear and blank incomprehension. In my innocence, I genuinely did not understand what he was on about. My mother had brought me up to believe that smoking was the worst thing you could do, and I was so prudish that I could no more imagine Nelson with a cigarette than I could imagine Matt Metcalfe seducing Heather Locklear.
‘Think about it, Mr Singh-a-ding-a-ling.’ He stamped on my foot. ‘Might even pay ya.’
I thought about it. Did nothing. Probably would have continued to do nothing if Ranjit hadn’t made a version of the same request more than a year later. You see, in the absence of any other friends, I was hanging around with Ranjit a great deal by this time. Which is not to suggest that we didn’t play together as young kids – I remember cutting a hole in a hedgerow at the back of my shop with Ranjit, making it into a den and calling it the ‘Hedge Club’. We were, despite my father’s and Mr Dhanda’s seeming inability to be in the same room together (when you run a shop, there is always an excuse not to appear at social occasions), always standing next to each other in birthday photographs. But as teens we were inseparable.
We both had mountain bikes and would ride for tens of miles – into Dudley, around abandoned quarries, to his relatives, to gawp at the properties that his family already owned in significant quantities. He would get me to do his homework, calling me professor as I did so, would play me Bobby Brown albums and the concluding scenes of various Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris films, and, more than anything else, we would play marathon games of Street Fighter II. If memory serves, I would always play Chun Li, a female fighter, who, while not as powerful as the others, was the quickest, and he would play Dhalsim, an Indian character whose fighting style was based on yoga. He would often give me a head start, not attacking me for the first ten or fifteen seconds, but would still always win, using a series of special combo moves like ‘yoga fire’ and ‘yoga teleport’ to obliterate me time after time.
I guess it was a sign of how keen I was to retain his affection that I carried on playing despite defeat. And it was another sign that when he asked me to get him some fags from our shop, I found myself casually suggesting to my parents one evening that I do my homework at the counter so that they could have dinner together, in front of Neighbours and Home and Away. ‘Doesn’t really matter where I do my homework, really,’ I croaked in my breaking voice. ‘The shop is never busy anyway.’
My parents seemed chuffed. The offer of helping in the shop fulfilled my mother’s fantasy of a caring son, who would look after her in old age, while I think my father simply liked the
idea of customers encountering his studious son sitting at the counter in his visibly posh school uniform. Almost all the photographs of us from that time have me standing next to my father in Tettenhall Royal garb. As for security, my dad had by this stage installed a buzzer underneath the counter which set off an alarm in the house in case of trouble, so it was safe enough. And soon after Dad had given me a pep talk – his view, when it came to pilferage, was that you should view any man below the age of twenty-one, or anyone who made eye contact, with deep suspicion – I removed a packet of twenty-five Royals from the display behind me and put £2.25 in the till so that my meticulous father would not notice anything.
The following day I gave most of the fags to Ranjit at face value. I only kept five as an afterthought for Nelson, and was stunned when he gave me £2 for them. From then on it was just too much temptation to resist. I became a teenage rebel. Nevertheless, as far as rebellion goes, mine was pretty timid. I didn’t sell cigarettes to anyone other than Nelson and his closest friends, though I could have sold five packets a day. I didn’t take more than three packets a week. I always put the correct money back in the till. I transported the contraband in my leather briefcase, making use of the combination lock. I never smoked a cigarette myself. I didn’t let the money I was making go to my head, my only indulgence being the occasional computer game, which my parents never monitored anyway. For me the real prize was not the cash, but a modicum of social acceptance. Not to suggest that the popular kids suddenly befriended me – they still called me ‘Sootie’ – but they didn’t mind me hanging around so much. I was pathetically grateful.
It was during this time I learnt something important about the English upper middle classes. I had, until then, had them down as morons. And they were, what with their fondness for Chinese burns and, mid-chat, kicking each other in the shins. But on closer inspection it became evident that this idiocy did not preclude hard work. They were under just as much pressure to justify the investment of their parents’ fees, it was only that they made sure it didn’t look like they were trying, a phenomenon I have since realised is more commonly known as ‘effortless superiority’, accomplishing amazing feats, seemingly with ease, and without any desire for approval.
Marriage Material Page 27