About me 2 (end)

Southall in the late sixties wasn't a complete bed of roses. The full-on racist attacks were still a decade away, but there were various glaring cultural differences that stood out a mile and either caused amusement or needed careful handling.

We soon found out that the children were terrified of dogs, only ever having come across vicious wild ones I suppose, and were totally gobsmacked to see us stroke the head of our soppy old black Labrador, Alice, or lean down to let her kiss us. This was a real ice breaker, mum promising children that Alice wouldn't bite, whilst the dog sat silent but hopeful, waiting to make a new friend.

Most of the boys of that generation grew up to own the largest, soppiest, friendliest alsatians you could imagine, albeit kept on outsized choke chains which were never needed; the mere image and kudos of controlling a 'vicious beast' (even one which in reality would at worst lick a burglar to death) was still considerable, in their eyes, but that's jumping ahead.

The idea of external house decor was a new experience, as proud owners of houses painstakingly painted the entire frontage with colours to their liking, for example cerise pink brickwork and white on all the grouting. The bright colours were only available in gloss paint and gloss painted brickwork was quite a statement in itself.

The only real down side, apart from outside opinion, was that some of the more elderly gentlemen felt that the streets of London, if not paved with gold, were paved with prostitutes. Look at it this way; you come from a country were no decent single woman is ever seen outdoors un-chaperoned and is under no circumstances seen anywhere on the streets once dusk has fallen and well, wow, for a brief moment anyone with a taste for a bit on the side must have thought they had died and gone to heaven. It was rather embarrassing, walking home from Girl Guides in Uniform, with friends (we learned never to travel alone), only to have our concentration broken by a loud belch or a stilted 'Ello', from an asian pensioner who then proceeded to wink or make the universal sign for "How much?".

I soon learned that looking horrified and staring down at my feet in 'shame' got me a profuse apology; the poor old sod was almost as shocked and upset as me, at the thought that he had behaved inappropriately toward a 'good girl'. The shame wasn't really there, I was confident of my ability to run, the streets were well lit and the gentleman was always old, but I somehow knew they understood that as the proper behaviour of the sort of girl 'that didn't'. I often got a sideways glance at lots of head shaking and backward shuffling, with palms up and a look of absolute mortification. Those that knew a few stilted words of English ( and the older generation are always the last to learn) would do their best to repeatedly say sorry, although it sounded more like Sari and took a while to work out. This makes it sound like constant harassment, but it wasn't, you would only meet one or maybe two of them at most on the weekly walk home from the Church Hall, and then only half the year, when it was dark by 7 pm. It also reduced as time went on and the two societies began to understand each other.

On the other hand, girls that responded with a mouthful of abuse were just as likely to have a large walking stick waved at them and what must have been an equal torrent of disgust. I never did understand that, I thought perhaps it was outrage that a female should express any sort of aggressive opinion, but looking back now, it may have been that the 'gentleman' may have thought he had just been rather insultingly turned down for business by the sort of girl that wasn't supposed to be choosy.

I knew one boy who ran home in scout uniform with a nastily bruised stomach, kicked in the gut for refusing the offer of £5 for a particular service, but by then the racism was beginning to surface and as the offender happened to be a different colour to his near victim it was dealt with very quietly, the only change apparent to my young eyes being that from then on the boy in question always had a lift home from Scouts. That's sad and wrong, but understandable in a tinder box; too many on either side wanted an excuse to condemn an entire race. A couple of years later when a friend from church was beaten up by another 'friend' from the same youth group, kicked in the head when he was down so that the whole pupil of his eye was black for a fortnight, again it was dealt with privately through the church and between the families because one was white and one was asian, and by this time going out on a Monday meant you likely as not had to walk round dried blood puddles on corners outside pubs.

Apart from the infamous Southall race riots which happened when I was eighteen, I never actually witnessed any violence in the town. The race riots don't count. The leaders of the churches and mosques etc all got together and held a peace march but the violence that killed Blair Peach, a teacher who came by coach as part of the Anti Nazi league to face down a bunch of National Front supporters who had advertised they would be marching through Southall, was part and parcel of a clash between two outside forces with the Police stuck in the middle and cannot be taken as comment on the residents.

For the record I have no personal knowledge or opinion of how well or badly the police handled the job. I only know that the ordinary Southall people stayed indoors and if only the NF had turned up alone, without resistance, they would have marched down empty streets to no great effect at all, watched by enough police to make sure it was only a march. By memory, word got out about the ANL coming too, so I wouldn't be remotely surprised if both sides were gathering numbers and tooling up for a bundle ahead of the day. I had to go to Ealing for some reason in the early evening, I already travelled there to grammar school and had friends and the beginnings of a social life. I lived at the opposite end of Southall to the march, which was scheduled to be over a couple of hours before then and because I went directly to the station by bus, mum reluctantly let me go. Unfortunately the train was packed with college types, excitable girls with rampant hair and hippy skirts, all travelling home from, as they saw it, this important social turning point. However well meaning they were, they boiled down to left wing do-gooders who did more harm than good, but neither of us knew that at the time and I had a very uncomfortable journey under the disapproving and suspicious glares, once I had been obliged to admit that I hadn't been at the march at all, but indoors watching telly.

Just for information the violence I did witness was not technically in Southall at all, but on the other side of the Grand Union Canal in a residential area known as Heston. Blood was drawn between two young Sikhs, on a small bus stop down a quiet road, with much posturing, threats of revenge and reinforcements etc, because one had called the other 'a Paki'.

By the late eighties, two stops down the same bus route a shelter was regularly being used in broad daylight by young lads who would get cozy and then skin up joints, with a lazy glare at people who might actually want to catch a bus which described at once total indifference and a supreme confidence that they had every right to be 'about their business'.

Growing up in Southall? Those were the good old days.

About me 1

When I started this blog I was clueless, couldn't tell HTML from gobbledygook and just wanted somewhere to be occasionally silly, stretch the creative doodas and just get into the habit of writing.

Nosing around, I followed links and copied stuff and found myself resisting the urge to fill my basic single side column here with everything from a blogpet to a weather icon, just because I realised I could.

Now I'm getting into the swing of things, or at least edging my way towards understanding the basic sense of community on here and on the various supporting sites like blogexplosion ( see button) and starting to feel brave enough to leave comments at the nicer/funnier places I've found, it seems time (mostly for fear of return visits!) to paint myself into the scheme of things.

Born in Southall, West London, in a two-up two-down cottage with an outdoor loo and a tin bath hung on the wall in the back yard, I was there when Middlesex existed, when Southall wasn't part of Ealing and had its own town hall, and most of all before the rush of 'Asian' British citizens. To be honest, although it must have seemed like a mad and sudden influx to the adult population, one day I just had friends of different colours, same as I already had friends with different builds and different hair.

The Council moved us in 1967 when I was six so they could demolish the cottages, and granny came to live with us. She had only ever been just around the corner in the first place, and I thought her cottage was nicer than ours as it had an old cooking range and the outdoor toilet was built on, instead of being in the shed at the bottom of the yard like ours. Hers had a beautiful huge orange flowering of mould, the most exotic thing I had ever seen and I was only ever allowed to her toilet with a head full of dire warnings not to touch it, even though that seemed grossly unfair to a four or five year old. The adults kept removing, but to my delight it just kept coming back.

Ours had a load of scary wooden shelves filled with unspecific things, and spiders.

The new house had a back garden, 100 foot long and desperately overgrown. Instead of living across the road from Southall Park and the market, now we were quite literally across the road from the Grand Union Canal. There was only a steep drop and a towpath the other side of the tarmac road out front and for that we never had the power cuts that hit the rest of Southall in the seventies, because our electricity was on the same circuit as the essential street lights that stopped people accidentally driving into the filthy water.

Mum started work again once my youngest brother was born, and got a job with the IWA, the Indian Workers Association, doing the typing and correcting the English grammar as she went. Even though she was one of the most open minded people of her generation, I do seem to recall her feeling that one should speak slowly and clearly, as a sign of respect, if talking to someone who might not have a full grasp of the language. "Have - you - had - a - nice - day - dear - ?". Speaking clearly, it seemed, also meant upping the volume by a notch or two.

Its only now, looking back, that I realise my mother must have been obliged to defend her decisions, sometimes. For example, because of her work I ended up playing with two very nice girls who had clipped and proper English accents to rival that of the Royal Family, to be blunt, to my mind, they sounded like Ovalitinies, or the lady on the radio who did Listen With Mother. I remember one of them sobbing her heart out whilst I looked on helplessly, because she had been taunted and called a filthy wog, when she didn't even know what the word meant. "I looked it up in the dictionary, and it means Egyptian! Do they think I'm Egyptian?" I couldn't help, I heard of it, but didn't have the first clue what it meant.

I can't remember her name now, which shames me, but I can remember that she and her sister were "good intelligent girls, their father's a Doctor, and they have better manners and spoken English than the white children these days". As I say, my mother must have had to defend sending me to play with them. I didn't give a hoot whose dad did what, so that comment had stuck with me, as it had seemed important.

I still don't know the politics behind Southall becoming an asian enclave; maybe Ealing Council was in force by then and decided to shove their quota 'all in one place' and as near as possible to the next Borough, Hounslow, where the airport was, or to put it another way as close to 'not really being in Ealing at all' as it was possible to manage. Most whites that could, moved out. My mother complained, when another family tried to hide their airs and graces behind a veil of false reluctance at having to leave, that if they didn't want the town to fill up with asians, then why were they leaving? Why go, if you know it means that an asian family will have your old home? She wasn't so much angry at the airy fairy excuses used to mask fear, or feelings of insecurity, so much as browbeaten by it. It was like watching her lose people she had honestly thought more of than that, watching her faith in other people's good hearts and common sense take a proper knocking. Finally her attitude hardened; if they wanted to go they could jolly well get on with it, we, and Southall and life in general would be better off without them.

This is going to be longer than I realised, and the telly beckons, so more another time, perhaps.