by Craig Taylor
But another time I gave them a map as I was trying to do some sort of ‘Britain is multicultural’ thing. I wanted to ask people where their families were from, and then get up and draw a line from that place to Britain. The idea was that at the end they’d all have a map that showed we’ve come from everywhere. But they couldn’t do it because they didn’t know where anywhere was. They were like, Miss, where’s Germany? Miss, where’s America? Miss, where’s Britain? I said, can you sit back in your chairs? Let’s have a little conversation. See this little island? Anyone? Britain. Where’s London?
I love my debating club. They were on the television last Thursday – my debaters. I was very proud of them. They’re really really good. I went to a normal comprehensive and I did debating and I was forced into it because I spoke a lot and someone said, oh my god, give that girl an outlet to go and do this. That was what made me apply to Oxford. I would never have applied to Oxford before, but I’d been there and I’d debated there and I’d beaten boys from Eton who had like really expensive ties, so I thought, okay, I’ll try. So I started this debating club and I’ve got a really lovely mix in there. I’ve got one girl whose mum and dad are teachers, middle-class upbringing and really really lovely. And then I’ve got another girl whose mum was only 14 years old when she had her and was kicked out of school when she got pregnant with her and she gets drunk with her on the weekends. This girl is really clever and she’s like, I’m going to be a lawyer and I’m going to use this debating skill.
Those two are really good mates and they debate in a pair. It’s just the best feeling when they’re debating against these posh, private-school boys. They had one on withdrawing from Afghanistan and so there’s these two girls, very beautiful with this long blonde hair and these Eltham accents, and they’re like, ‘Ladies and gentleman, you should really fink about it, because like you ain’t gonna know nuffink and like Ahmadinejad ain’t gonna just like back off, he’s gonna be like, no, I ain’t backin’ off.’ The thing is, what they’re saying is really clever, but they have these heavy accents and there’s these boys across from them, you know, and they’ve got their floopy hair and their ridiculously expensive clothes and you can see that when they start talking the boys just think, ah, ha, well, we’ve obviously won this. It takes about two minutes into the speech and then you see it start to dawn on their faces while she’s talking about like, I don’t know, community fragmentation when you’ve got outside influences, or something. Then the boys suddenly start writing furiously.
There’s about eight who come regularly to debating club. I had a three-year plan: in this first year I said I’m going to take you to loads of competitions and you’re going to get beaten by sixth-formers – because they were Year 10. You’re going to get beaten by kids much older than you, much posher than you, all the time and you’ve just got to keep going. That’s fine, that’s fine. Then obviously they started getting beaten by all these kids and they had a horrid time. I would buy them pizza afterwards and say, it’s okay, come on, it’s going to be good. And at the end of the year they won this competition for all the state schools in London.
The grand final was against a school in Enfield, on whether parents should be prosecuted for their kids truanting. And my kids obviously knew that they already are prosecuted for their kids truanting. As the motion was announced in this room, this girl whose mother was really young, said, ‘That’s status quo, innit, Miss?’ I said, yes, yes it is. On you go. And they won.
It’s amazing. Apart from getting your phone stolen every twelve weeks, this is the best job ever.
GUITY KEENS
Interpreter
I’m a foreigner here myself. I wasn’t born here. It doesn’t matter how many years I live here – and my son is English, my husband is English – still I’m Iranian. But I know more about immigration law in England than any barrister. Every new bill, I’m aware of it. People call me from Iran, I say, you have to do this, that. I deal with a lot of immigrants coming from Iran or Afghanistan, because in part of Afghanistan they speak Farsi. They call it Dari, but it’s an old form of Farsi. I go through interesting but very tough and sad things.
She’s just come back to London from Cambridge, where she was working earlier today. She smokes behind the bike shed of the detention centre there, she says. She has painted fingernails and lively dark eyes that sometimes tear up as she speaks.
I had never worked in my whole life. I was a lady of leisure, I would lunch, you know. I went to university. I’ve got a degree. I got really bored. And a friend of mine, an Iranian, she had some dispute going to the court and she said, can you come with me? She can speak English, but not very well. So I went with her and her solicitor. It was like a magistrates court. Driving offence. And I said, can I interpret? So they said, okay, we’ll use you. And so we did it and she won. We went and had a big drink and she said, Guity, why don’t you do this job? I said, I don’t have any experience. I haven’t worked, you know. And then I came home and I thought about it and she keep pushing me and pushing me. Then I said to my husband, Michael, I can’t work. I don’t have confidence. He said, but you have been doing it for the last twenty years! When the Revolution happened, I was just married and my family, friends, everybody was coming here, so I had to take them to the Home Office, I had to take them to the solicitor, I had to take them to the hospital. I wasn’t as good at English as I am now, but I was okay. My husband reminded me that I’ve been doing it for twenty years – without being paid! So I thought, okay, I’ll try it. I started it and I love it.
I’m going to be quite honest with you now, okay? Afghanis don’t have any political problems. They come for work. And some of them they lost their family to the Taliban as well. But they come here to work and some of them they come here to better themselves. Some of them they come to work for a few years and take their money – say, £5,000 is huge money in Afghanistan, they can go and start a business in Afghanistan. Iranians, they don’t come here to work – there’s lots of money in Iran. Iranian young people come here for freedom. They want to go to the pub. They want to have a girlfriend. They want to go to the disco. They want to go clubbing. That’s why they want to come here.
They’ve been promised by the agents, the smugglers, a lot. Oh the pavement is gold, you know? They bring them here and take them for a nice shower, and the first thing I ask them is how is everything? And all the Afghanis say, it’s fantastic. It’s like a hotel here. They love it. Because nice bed, shower, food. And then they get very disappointed. Because there’s the other side of it as well, and that’s loneliness. They don’t have anyone to talk to, they can’t speak the language. People don’t bother with you. And sometimes they don’t like you. Obviously it depends which area you have been located. There are some areas, especially out of London, southern, the people they don’t like them. You can’t blame British people because it affects them as well. I go to these little market towns and you see this oldish couple, they’re scared watching those immigrants. They think they’re going to hurt them. They’re scared. But the British are really really good people. I’m saying it as a foreigner. They are really generous. They are really tolerant comparing to the rest of the Europe. I’ve been to Germany and I’ve been to France and I see the way they treat the foreigners in the street. It’s really horrible.
As soon as you say to them, ‘social worker’ or ‘the police’, they start crying. Doesn’t matter how old they are: men, women, young. I mean, I had a 72-year-old Iranian man, he used to be one of the ministers in Iran during the Shah. He wanted residency. He doesn’t want asylum, he’s a multimillionaire, okay, but he wanted to get permission to stay here. His family, his children are living here and he used to come and go in Iran. Anyway, as soon as his solicitor starts talking, this man cried. I’m not joking, crying and wailing. Can you imagine me? So embarrassed. I didn’t know what to do. I can’t hold him. I can’t hug him. He’s older than my father. Everybody cries.
That tears was real, I tell you. That
affected me because a man in his stage and in his position, to feel so broken, you know. That is a very very hard tear. That man, he was tough, I know his story. I know he’s been fighting with this regime for quite some times. He’s been in prison. Real prison, you know? And he said, you’re the only woman to see my tears in my whole life.
Children cry. Women cry. Men cry. They all cry. There was this man, what do you call it? Geezer? Yeah. Very strong man. Tall, big, you know, Mr Muscles. I took him to solicitor and he says, you’ve been refused. Aaaah, the tears were coming and this man is looking at him. What’s happened? Don’t know. It’s like a shock to them.
When they come they’re very appreciative. They change their appearances because they know when they come here they don’t look like everybody else, they look different. So they like to change and get mixed up with people and they are very much into girls. You can’t even touch their hair. It’s so sticky! I mean, when I see them it’s like, nice, you know, natural hair. Next time I see them, it’s spiky with lots of gel sticking up. What’s happened? You have an electric shock or something? And the trainers, they are mad about trainers. Trainers, mobile phones and hair gel. These three things are very big.
As they stay longer and longer, then start moaning and complaining. Weather first. Then people. Not very nice things. I don’t really want to repeat that because it makes me very upset because I’m very patriotic about Britain. As much as I like other people, I really love this country and I really get upset when people are ungrateful and they don’t appreciate what people have gone and done for them. They think we’re rich people. I say, no, you can’t say that. None of them have British friends, that’s another thing. I say, if you don’t like it, piss off. Let’s make room for another one.
The foreigners all see London as old-fashioned: the double-decker bus, black cab, the guards, Big Ben and all that. They don’t know that London has changed. It’s changed so much. They were so nice and polite; now it’s dirty, rude, more vibrant. I used to live in Notting Hill Gate when I came here first. That was supposed to be multicultural then, and there was only one shop open until twelve o’clock. You could have a meal and then you go there. One shop. Everywhere was so dead. But now it’s very lively, very upbeat.
Sometimes they get problems with police. I say, if you want to live here, you have to be law-abiding. Because the other thing is, you see, these people come from a very strict country which the police and the authorities have got very much control of. When they come here and see the policemen in the streets so nice and calm, they think, what a lovely place, we can get away with murder, you know? The first thing I tell them, I say, don’t look at them, they are very nice now, but if you go to the police station that’s a different matter, because I’ve been to the police station with them. So this is something I always tell them. This is the first guide or tip: do not even think about it, you cannot get away with doing something illegal if you want to stay here. Some of them are still waiting for the decision and if they commit any crime it affects their decision, you know, and they will deport them. So these are the things that I tell them to be careful of and if they don’t do it I get really cheesed off.
This one Afghani boy, he was young, and he went from Afghanistan with his brother. It’s something, they travel with brothers as well, the little ones, you know? They went to Iran. Stayed in Iran for a while, two or three years, saved his money. He was 15 and his brother was 11. They start coming to England. They came and they stopped in Calais. They couldn’t get through there. They tried, tried and tried, every day. Somebody said to them, I don’t know exactly, but there is like a little port where the ferry comes and then they transfer there to unload from the ferry coming out and he said to me, it’s like a little island, all around is water. The truck was standing on the land and there’s the water between them and the truck. So somebody told them, if you can swim at night, go to that land, there’s a truck there. You can get inside the truck. His brother said, I’m going first, I’m going first. He was 11, 12 years old. He jumped in the water at night and the older brother is standing there and trying to see the younger one going and the older brother feels like father, like mother, like everything. He brought up his younger brother. And as the younger brother is swimming, this ship is coming, and it hit his brother and he dies in front of him. Right in front of him. He went absolutely mad and other people really felt sorry for him. They collected money and gave it to agent because agent can really get on to bring him here. He came here, three times he tried to kill himself. Three times. And I don’t know, he’s like a cat with the lives. You know those bridges over the motorway. He jumped from one of them. Honestly, I’m not joking. He’s not just in a rage, he hasn’t grown up and now he must be 19, but he’s tiny. Still he feels so guilty. He said, this is going to stay with me for the rest of my life, this guilt, because I came here. I brought my brother here. And I killed my brother. It’s happened in front of me.
I mean, a British, they wouldn’t know about this. They just think, they’re coming here, taking our jobs, taking our benefits. All that. I have a friend, she’s English. Old friend, she’s very nice. She lives in Hampstead and every now and then we get together and see each other, go for coffee or lunch. I haven’t seen her for ages because I’ve been busy, but recently she called me and said, ‘Guity, I haven’t seen you, come over to my house.’ It’s a very nice house in Hampstead Heath. And she start talking about these bloody foreigners coming here, you know, this, that, this, that. I didn’t say anything. But we’re having lots of wine and finally I said to her, I am so proud living in this country and choose this country as my country. You, as a British person, should be so proud. Don’t knock it down. You have to be so proud that your government system is taking care of these people. And she started crying. Oh Guity, you’re right!
It’s because she didn’t know. She only read the papers, she doesn’t really know these people who are coming here. They’re not all scroungers. Not all of them. Some of them really have problems. It’s not easy to come here and it’s not easy to live here. So you must really have had a very tough time back home to tolerate here.
LUCY SKILBECK
Mother
I meet her at Holborn station at 10 a.m. and we walk to a cafe around the corner with an upstairs room. She is focused. It’s in the way she listens, in the way she dips into conversation, determined not to give anything away until finally the dam breaks and she speaks – about the necessary hustle of caring for a small child while trying to establish a career and then, soon after, caring for a mother caught in the throes of dementia. She speaks of her son and their peripatetic early years, moving from Australia to St Petersburg, Amsterdam, Denmark, to London, where he was placed in a crèche in Brixton.
I’m slightly famed in my family for every time we go somewhere nice, saying, let’s move here. They get a bit fed up with my desire to move anywhere that looks nice for a day. We were once up in Hathersage in the Peak District and I’d done my ‘let’s move here’ talk, this is lovely, etc. And then I saw these three teenagers, probably about my son Duncan’s age, hanging out outside the petrol station on the main street in Haversidge looking about as bored as it’s possible for a kid to look and I thought, if you’re in Haversidge the only thing there is to do is climb. That’s it. The whole town is about rock climbing because it’s in a particular part of the Peak District where there’s big climbs, and either you’re a kid who does that or you’ve got nothing else to do. I looked at those kids and I just thought, there’s no way I’d want my children to go through that interminable boredom. Obviously there’s huge things to be said in favour of bringing your kids up in the country and I’m not knocking it, but it did just make me stop for a second.
In Hackney there’s a really active cultural life. He also has friends that I think he wouldn’t necessarily have somewhere else, friends with greatly divergent interests, so all his friends aren’t like him, they’re all really different and they all want to do really diff
erent things. Some of them want to be actors and some of them want to be economists and quite a few of them are musicians themselves and some of them are really sporty and there’s just this breadth of experience because there’s a breadth of opportunity where he lives. The people he hangs out with all have such an access to so many different things.