When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain (43 page)

‘The way this country is going with all this racialism in the hearts of people, it is not worth living here. I've had enough, not because I'm scared, but because I've lost heart and interest in the shop. Made me hard now. I've stopped being a nervous wreck. Trouble doesn't really bother me any more. I'm not scared of these boys.' He was, however, strangely frightened of being arrested for a revenge attack, and going to prison, a disgrace he felt he couldn't survive, but a danger he thought was real enough. ‘Coloured people are arrested these days if they fight back, even if they are innocent,' he said, and told the story of a friend who had been chased in his car by white youths who appeared determined to drive him off the road. Knowing that such things happen – pursuing skinheads forced a car driven by Asians to crash in a Thames Valley chase in the autumn of 1986 – he sped away, finally having to stop at a zebra crossing. The youths jumped out, and one punched him in the face. A passing police car stopped. The youths claimed they were restraining the Asian because he had been driving recklessly. The Asian gave his version, but was promptly charged with dangerous driving. The case was eventually dropped after his father took it up with his MP. The police told the young Asian that, if he had a complaint, he would have to take private proceedings against the white youths.

I heard many similar stories. One of the most extraordinary was the November 1986 attack on the Markazi Mosque in Christian Street, Tower Hamlets. Fifty youths stoned the mosque. Police arrived as the worshippers came out to defend the building, and, although the attackers were within sight and could be identified, the only people arrested were three of the congregation.

‘The police,' said Mr Hayat, ‘are the biggest gang. I am sure the government is encouraging them to ignore white hooligans.' A few nights before I visited, another, more serious, affray had taken place a few yards from the Southern Fried Chicken shop. White youths attending a party had, it was said by black youths at another party, been squirting tear gas through the letter-box where the black gathering was being held. Three blacks went to remonstrate, and one was slashed in the face with a broken bottle, losing, so it proved, the sight of one eye. Two months later the police appealed for witnesses on BBC's ‘Crimewatch', but received the smallest number of responses ever to a national television appeal. ‘It's boiling here, man, boiling,' said Dalton Macauley, ‘someone is going to get killed.' As I left, two white men in their late twenties emerged from a housing estate near Mr Hayat's shop. They were built like bulls, wore rolled jeans, denim jackets, bovver boots, woollen caps above shaven heads, and each had a powerful dog on a lead. Whatever business they were about that cold night, they were not vigilantes protecting Asian shop-keepers.

The next day I went to see Mr Lone in an Essex suburb. Londoners were still being advised to stay at home; British Rail was in disarray. But the odd tube, damp and cold, juddered its way through the east end, past a landscape of gas works, terraced homes, small factories and high-rise flats that had assumed the unreal, romantic aspect of a Lowry painting. Then the pebble dash terraces, with snow-bound vegetable patches and potting sheds, and finally ribbon development along arterial roads, from where bank clerks, book-keepers and office girls commute into London. The elderly ticket clerk smiled hugely: ‘Taxis. No. No rank here. No phone either. You'll have to go to the hospital and ring from there.' It might have been the Scottish Highlands, rather than a station less than twenty miles from Throgmorton Street.

At the time of the attack, Mr Lone was forty-six. He had come to Britain in 1965 with high expectations. The British he had known in Africa had been professional people, ‘gentlemen'. Here he was shocked by the difference. He met prejudice in the soccer team he joined – players refused to recognize him on the street, especially ‘if they were with their mother, girlfriend or sister'; prejudice at work – a foreman who held back his application for promotion, a worker who wouldn't have a coloured man as a ‘mate'. There were compensations: another foreman protected him, a fellow player urged the manager to play Mr Lone in the first team.

Ten years earlier he had had another traumatic experience. He had been driving on a summer's day with his young family when a pair of motorcyclists had spat at them, their spit flying through the window and hitting his eight-year-old son in the face. The boy started crying, and Mr Lone turned the car round and caught up with the youths. They jumped from their bikes, shouting: ‘Get out, you Paki bastard,' and hit him across the head with a heavy piece of wood. Police were passing, and took Mr Lone to hospital, where he was detained for three days with concussion, yet they refused to prosecute, saying it was a civil matter. Mr Lone learned later that the same youths
were
prosecuted for a similar assault on a white victim. When Mr Lone recovered – he was off work for several weeks – he wrote to the Metropolitan Police Commissioner. ‘What protection does a citizen get for defending himself against hooligans?' he asked, adding ironically: ‘Will it be in order for me to hit someone with a similar piece of wood?' To me he said: ‘The law and the police are very soft. If an Englishman is attacked by a black man, it is a big issue. If a black man is attacked, it is of no importance unless someone is killed.'

Nothing, however, had prepared Mr Lone for the ferocity and unexpectedness of the attack outside Mr Hayat's shop. ‘For a few minutes I thought the world was turned over,' he said. I met him two months after the assault: he pulled up his trouser legs, and his knees were still black with bruises, his facial scar was livid. But, worst of all, his back injury – he thinks he was hit by a lump of wood – had become progressively worse. He found it hard to stand for long, and had been forbidden to lift anything. His business – repairing domestic appliances from his own shop – had ceased. ‘I had always been concerned about the future, but this made me wonder. You plan for things, and then something like this happens and everything stops,' he said, adding ‘except the bills.' The local authority small business adviser suggested he should sell or let his shop so that he had an income. His life, like his brother-in-law's, had been destroyed by the yobs of Canning Town.

Mr Lone lost a stone in weight, and didn't feel like eating. He had been a keen sportsman, who before the attack jogged each night, played badminton and table tennis. Those activities had, of course, also stopped. There was about him a similar lacklustre air of fatalism to that about Mr Hayat. He was too dejected to make plans, though he talked enviously of brothers in Canada. ‘They don't have these kinds of attacks there. In Germany, when a Turkish
gastarbeiter
was murdered, the government made a major outcry. This country is not improving. Racial discrimination is against the law, but apparently it is not illegal to attack someone because of the colour of his skin.' Of the attack on his son and himself, he said: ‘It is unbelievable that this is happening in England. It is very hard to interest the papers: only the Asian ones take any notice. If this had happened to whites, it would have been all over television, everywhere.'

It is hard to disagree with that judgement. Imagine a white-owned shop in the middle of an area almost exclusively inhabited by West Indians. Every day a gang of young West Indians enters that shop, hurling racist abuse at the owner, stealing, fighting and smashing things. Respectable customers stay away and the business begins to collapse. The police say they will have ‘a few words' with the black yobs, then visit and warn the white shopkeeper that he will be ‘done for gang warfare' if he has friends round for solidarity and protection. How long would such a story stay off the front pages of the popular tabloids? MPs would bob up and down, ‘Any Questions' would work itself into a lather of self-righteous indignation, and Enoch Powell would be trundled out to say ‘I told you so.'

Seen through Asian eyes, the police, for all their protestations – to which I will come – are a highly partial force. Mr Lone, who is, colour apart, a model industrious, self-employed citizen of Mrs Thatcher's Britain, had recently been stopped by police. He and his son were ordered out of their van and separated, and the van searched. ‘What are you looking for?' asked Mr Lone. ‘We'll tell you when we find it,' replied the police, who were rude and casual. When they had found nothing, it emerged that they had been searching for drugs. How many white service engineers going about their business get stopped and frisked on such suspicions? ‘They push you around, ask unfair questions, say “Hey blackie, come here,”' said Mr Lone. Conservative, middle-aged citizens like him are beginning to approve of the tougher attitudes inevitably being adopted by younger Asians. After the Canning Town attack, a group of friends met to discuss what they should do. After listening to his elders, a younger man burst out: ‘This is all talk, all bullshit.' In the minds of a rapidly swelling number of Asians, the time for ‘bullshit' has passed.

That night, after leaving Mr Lone, I travelled to another world. The address I had been given in West Ham appeared at first to be an abandoned property. What had once been a shop window was crudely boarded with corrugated iron. The battered blue door, with its letter-box above the height of a man's head, looked as if it had not been opened in months. Eventually a glimmer showed in the half-light above the door, and first barking and then shuffling could be heard. A Pakistani woman, a scarf wrapped around her head, signalled me in. Her face was tired and lined, and the hair beneath the scarf was grey. I took her to be in her sixties, and was very surprised to learn later she was only forty-nine.

She led me into a small back room which was a tailor's den: a middle-aged man in a woollen hat and a thick, roll neck pullover sat at one of two Singer sewing machines. Paper patterns hung from the blue panelled walls and pieces of cut material cluttered every surface. A young woman, dressed in baggy pink trousers, embroidered slippers, and a green cardigan, was on the phone. The room was a tiny sweatshop: looking at the two treadle machines, I sensed the hours of toil that had been passed there and the solitary drudgery that went to make a subsistence living. Neither of the older people spoke good English, though the man, who had arrived in Britain in 1961, tried with a loud, insistent voice, adding from time to time ‘You understand' in such an imploring manner that it was impossible not to say ‘Yes.' His wife had only joined him in 1967. Such separations, and the loneliness they bring, are suffered by many immigrants.

This was a family under siege. Cocooned in their workshop, barricaded behind the corrugated iron, and warmed by a gas fire and whirring electric blower, they were safe for a while from an outside world of sustained hatred which, by then, had trapped them in that hole for four years. On the floor lay a large, nondescript dog, defiantly named ‘Soldier', their ultimate deterrent. Nasreen, the daughter on the phone, nineteen and employed as a clerk by the council, fiercely bright and voluble in the consonant-swallowing manner of the east end, had, I discovered, been conducting a campaign to free her family from their misery that had reached as far as Mrs Thatcher herself.

She had become something of a media-freak, producing dog-eared
Daily Mirror
cuttings, and a large blue file of correspondence. Life had been, she said, repeating a phrase that had pleased John Pilger of the
Daily Mirror
, ‘sort of like living beneath a table'. Pilger had gone one better, dubbing her ‘Anne Frank With a Telephone.' Her
pièce de résistance
was a dog-eared, red diary, in which she had recorded her family's persecution. It was monotonous stuff – a catalogue of harassment: windows being smashed; stones thrown – Nasreen's father was nearly hit by a rock; the door kicked in; rubbish tipped on the step – ‘it's good for you,' one of their persecutors had said; excrement dumped at the door – once, at least, a whole bucketful; urine seeping into the hall; graffiti spray-painted on their walls; and endless, endless name-calling. ‘Paki' must punctuate yob talk as regularly as ‘fuck'.

Her mother was a nervous wreck, worn down by years of sitting through the night, watching into the street in case the house should be attacked. The police had either lost interest or were indifferent. The one time the family brought a private prosecution against assailants – the recommended procedure for common assault – the magistrates bound over both the family and their tormentor, making a mockery of justice. Nasreen's father – like Terry Hayat – had seen his dreams destroyed by harassment. He had for years run a market stall in Petticoat Lane, and had bought the house with the shop in order to move up in the world. In the event, he lost even the stall. Louts attacked his van; finally, it was stolen together, says Nasreen's father, with £33,000 worth of leather jackets. With those jackets went the stall, and the tailor now sits at his treadle producing garments on piecework for a local manufacturer.

What especially bewilders the family is that they had lived in the east end without persecution for fifteen years. Their MP told them to cut their losses, and move into council accommodation, but the family refused. Said Nasreen: ‘
They'll
think they've won, and that we just gave up.' Occasionally, there is a break in the harassment, but it always starts again. The tensions in the home become intolerable. Nasreen's father is blamed for buying the house; her mother, a sufferer from acute asthma, is on permanent medication, including tranquillizers and sleeping pills. The stale, trapped air in that back room hits the visitor as he comes through the door: ‘We have no relatives in this country, so we don't go anywhere,' said Nasreen bleakly.

Her father, who had been silent for some time, nodding encouragement to his forceful daughter, boomed into life again, contrasting how kind the English had been a quarter of a century ago with his treatment today. Then if you were lost, he said, or on the wrong bus, someone would patiently help you. Today, they say, ‘if you can't speak the language, why don't you go home, Paki?' He added: ‘I cannot believe what is happening. How it has changed. The police used to help, but the world's changed so much. When there's trouble, they tell us to get inside, and say they'll deal with it. But we don't feel they do anything.' Nasreen added: ‘We're all human beings. All it is, we are a different colour and wear different clothes.'