by Craig Taylor
He introduced me to everybody in that section. It was so overwhelming, so much confusion, so much pressure. People were joking and talking as they welcomed a new colleague. I was trying to interact with them but I was so nervous. I had so much anxiety. I don’t know, I just … I was under so much pressure I don’t remember that first day.
I sat at a colleague’s desk who was away on holiday. The IT department had to set up my desk and computer. It was so good. I had a nice big desk, so many screens in front, two keyboards, a mouse – too good to be true. I had started a new life, doing what I really love: so many digits flashing on so many screens. I like the feeling of seeing them. A live market has a feeling of life to it: each time a number flashes in front of me a deal has taken place, and usually the minimum number is $1 million. They are constantly flashing. And they are flashing in London because we are the centre.
RUTH FORDHAM
Manicurist
We are standing in a drizzle out on Farringdon Road near her shop. She smokes a cigarette as buses roar past and black cabs splash the puddles. A police officer stands looking stern at the bottom of Ludgate. She has just finished her 1.30 appointment. At the end of the session the woman thanked her, spread her hands wide and admired her nails. Although she spent her first twenty years in Germany, she has adopted an East London accent. ‘When I try to speak in a German accent now,’ she says, ‘I just sound confused.’
I’d just come out of a really messy marriage, getting divorced, and I mean, when I left my ex-husband I left him, literally: two suitcases, three binbags of clothes, a sunbed – obviously a girl has to look good – and a Dell 500 DOS5 computer. I was like, yes, I can conquer the world. I knew that I wanted to run my own business and I’ve done nails before, mobile work and sitting in the car, living in Essex, driving twenty-five miles just to do one manicure for £7. I was chasing my tail. So to me, actually being in the city and all of a sudden people coming to me meant (a) no more travelling time, and (b) money. We were just coming out of one small recession so people had got fed up with having nothing. It was like women going, I’m going to treat myself. So, you know, I got in at the right level. I got in before the Chinese took over with their little, you want this, you want that? All for £20. And I think it was that freedom. Yes, I’ve got a job. I’m actually self-employed. It’s unsure so I have to be on the ball and I had no option. I had to make it work. And it was all about that, and the adrenalin kicked in.
My first day at work was January 1994 and I got off at Blackfriars Tube station and I walked and there’s a little short cut there, before they put all these big buildings up and as you walk up the stairs you see St Paul’s. My tummy went over and I just went, yes. I’ve arrived. I just knew. This is where I want to be.
Very green, as in naive, you know. Ah, there’s lots of mistakes you can make. Taking a booking with no deposit is one and then people not turning up. That was a lesson quickly learnt. Another lesson is don’t believe everything people tell you. You’ve got a set of nails on and someone says, I was sitting by the settee and they fell off. Hello? What do you mean, they fell off? You know, I was looking down, they was on the floor. Wow! You got spooks! But in those days it was my confidence that got knocked because I thought, I’m not good enough. You’re obviously challenging my work and then within a few weeks you sort of realize that it had absolutely nothing to do with that. It was people wanting something for free. They’ve gone out and done the gardening. They’d gone out and done loads and loads of different things, and then blamed my workmanship.
I mean, I’m just a nail technician, what do I know? And then every year it got easier because every year I learned a little bit more and I just made sure that I went on every course that was available. If there was something to learn, I learnt it. If there was something to change, I changed it. Because I just thought, I’m going to make a difference, but no one’s going to take the mickey either. And so far it’s worked.
I’ve got clients I’ve seen for the last fifteen or sixteen years, so to me a lot of it hasn’t changed, but I suppose it must have changed. Because it’s gone from doing nails for ladies that lunch or the ones that were in that financial bracket who could afford it, to actually now secretaries have it.
I’ve got Germans, Dutch, South Africans, Americans, pole dancers, table top dancers, lap dancers, a lot of Romanians, Latvians, Eastern Europeans. I’ve even got some English people come in the odd night. I deal with anyone. Crossdressers, you name it. They usually come in when it gets dark. You know, it’s like visiting a brothel in some ways. They walk up the street, look both sides and then come in. It’s brilliant. Barristers, the legal side of things. Misguided solicitors, obviously. She should be a bloody karaoke singer, her. A record comes on and we start doing nails, the next thing we’re both singing away and it gets louder and louder and louder. It’s quite embarrassing really. Yeah, just deal with everybody really. There’s no boundaries where nails are concerned.
They all have different temperaments, completely different personalities. South Africans, you either get really laid-back South Africans or you get really uptight South Africans. You either get the ones with attitude or the ones who are absolutely brilliant and great fun – lots of humour – or the other extreme is the ones that, you know, as you’re doing something they’re watching you and then they’ll pull their hand away and you’re like, I’ve only filed one nail. We’re only one-tenth of the way there – give me a chance, you know? Or you get the ones where you’ve finished and they’ve got to check, you know. I think it’s a power thing, just to let me know. That’s the South Africans, the ones that have had maids and the ones that have had a privileged upbringing, all of a sudden they’re paying for a service, therefore you become the service girl.
It’s a bit like a psychologist. I’m sure people shout at him and tell him he doesn’t know what he’s doing. He just thinks to himself, do you know what, for two quid a minute, you can think what you like because at the end of the day you’re a pound note walking out the doors.
Then you’ve got the Dutch. They’re a bit harder going. Trying to get a smile out of them requires a bit more effort and you have to really balance between humour and sarcasm, there’s this really really thin line and you sort of say something and go, oh shit, I shouldn’t have said that. I say, I’m so sorry, I’m hormonal, and just carry on.
And Americans, the more west they go, the more laid-back they are. Then you get the New Yorkers who try to be chilled, but oh god, you’re trying to do someone’s nails and they’ve got a BlackBerry and then they’ve got an iPhone and a mobile phone and you just go, right, you’ve got three phones, one pair of hands, I’m going to have one hand at the time, how are you going to deal with those three now? And then all of sudden the phone rings and they go, do you mind if I take this? Oh, not at all, you go ahead. So I just sit back and back away and they speak. Then they say, I hope you didn’t mind? No, that’s all right. If we run over, I’ll just charge you a little bit extra, that’s all right isn’t it? All of a sudden the phones get all put in the bag. Works every time.
Eastern Europeans, they’ve got a hard time, or feel they’ve got a hard time being accepted, so they are trying very hard to integrate. That comes across as a real effort. It’s really hard to explain unless you’re sitting in front of someone who desperately wants to belong somewhere and is not quite sure. Half of them don’t even want to be here, you know, they got sent by companies abroad and like, oh yeah, London, great, and when they get here, they could be at the top of their game and they’ll say, I’m Latvian. Bloody immigrant. Could be an immigrant with a BA honours degree or something and it’s people’s prejudice that then makes them behave differently because all of a sudden they feel they have to defend their nationality or the reason why they’re here. No one should need an excuse why they’re here. They’re here because they want to be here or work sent them. You know, you should never have to make apologies why you’re somewhere.
And then you
’ve got all the English. I love them. Oh god, I love them. Well, they’re just really strange people. They’re trying very hard not to be uptight and they take themselves very seriously, and they get stressed very easy. The Italians – ah god, the Italians! They’re in a rush all the time. And it’s like they’ve got this phrase, ‘I’ve just come for a quick manicure, how long will it take? Half an hour. I’ll just have a quick one.’ Right. Let me reinvent time then. So we have a standard thirty minutes and then a quick thirty minutes.
The recession was awful. Goldman Sachs announced, just after Christmas 2008, the redundancy of 600 people. To me, when I’ve got a client base of about 300, right, when you’ve got 150 coming from Goldman Sachs your client base goes down to 150, that’s 50 per cent of your business wiped out within the redundancy period, so you know it’s coming. So you’re sitting there and you’re going, right, these people are going to leave now. What am I going to do? I need to recruit … I have to go and find a replacement. And it was horrible. It was horrible. What did I do? Revamped my website. Made sure the key words were right and I just kept thinking to myself, right, okay, no one’s recruiting. Job agencies are not doing anything, so I know what we’ll do, we are going to just survive and I believe in positive thinking. I believe if you greet a smile with a smile, you get a smile back. If you greet a frown with a frown, you’re going to get someone either give you a bollocking or frowning back. So I can’t sell services if I’m down in the dumps because the people just go, I ain’t going to see her, I’m depressed enough as I am. I want someone to not entertain me but I want someone to actually take the pressure.
As people were looking for different jobs they weren’t feeling too good about themselves, so then they thought I haven’t got much money. I haven’t got this, I haven’t got a holiday. I know, I’m just going to get my nails done. So all of a sudden a different group of clientele. People that actually live in the city, like Smithfield. Covent Garden, you’ve got a great big council estate and people on social security have more expendable income than anyone else. Trust me. They have got more money available than anyone else, so anyone saying never open up a nail bar on a council estate is absolutely wrong. You keep your prices low and you actually, if you want to be like a churning out-morer, you just get in there and do that. But, you know, it sort of changed and people said, okay, I can’t have this, I can’t have that. I know, I’ll go and have my nails done. I’m going to go for a sunbed. I’ll have a facial. I’m going to have a relaxing time at home by taking away the £300, whatever it cost me, to get there. They were using their spending money here without having to spend the flight money.
London has been a trading city since 94 AD or 92 AD. You had the Druids. You’ve got the Thames is a river that brings things in and it’s almost like if you live near a canal, if you live near a river, if it’s got a port it brings people in. It’s the first stop for immigration. It’s the first stop for migration. People coming in, going out. And it’s a bit like you’ll never see Trafalgar Square without a pigeon, no matter how hard the Lord Mayor tries. They’re going to be there. You’re not going to stop London. You’re not going to stop the flow. The essence of London is trading.
It’s almost like I know where Shakespeare got his inspiration from. He watched Londoners and his plays reflect the times of what was going on. Like Othello, you know, the Moor? At the end of the day, this man is an immigrant. And now it’s immigrants coming in, immigrants going out. I just can’t understand the word ‘minority’. I’m German and no one’s going to build me a school. [She laughs.] It ain’t gonna happen. So I might as well just get used to it.
When I first came to England, Petticoat Lane was Jewish. Petticoat Lane had Jewish tailors, it had Jewish merchants. Everyone was Jewish. We had the Indians, but they have now decided they’ve made enough money, and they’ve moved out to the nicer bits. Now we’ve got Eastern Europeans coming in and selling their toot and it is toot. You literally just go, that’s crap. You look at a pair of trousers and you just go, that leg’s longer than that leg. Who was this modelled on? Heather Mills? Without the leg? Honestly. Who was the model for these trousers? A three-legged octopus or something? Because that’s just not going to fit, sorry. And then the sizing. Oh, it’s European sizing. Hello – I’m from Europe and if that is a size 10 then I’m size 0. No way. It’s just great. It cracks me up.
And people say, oh, it’s cosmopolitan. It’s such a crap word – ‘cosmopolitan’. What is it? It’s a magazine, as far as I’m concerned. Go back to old-fashioneds, it’s all nationalities. It’s global. It’s not just cosmopolitan, you know, where it’s just one city or a few cities thrown together – it’s global.
MARY FORDE
Publican
The Schweppes lemonade is going flat slowly, bubble by bubble, in a pub in Kilburn. There is a smoke-stained Irish flag hanging limply behind the bar. The orange strip looks yellow, the white strip looks yellow, the green strip … yellow. There is Polish music coming from the CD player behind the bar; a double CD set, 50 Irish Rebel Anthems, sits on top of the stereo. There are two sides to the pub, two entrances, two bars.
I was doing office work and I was just fed up with it. Same thing every day, and one year was the same as the next. I’d done a bit of bar work in the years gone by, and I just thought I’d take a chance on a nice little pub.
When we opened I was such a nervous wreck I could hardly sleep. My sister and brother-in-law were a great help the first two weeks even though they’d never done any bar work before. And the barman was staying for three months, so at least I had somebody I could ask if I didn’t know something. Somehow I got through the first six months, and I began to think the next six would be a little bit easier. And that’s how it’s worked out, really.
You need to have a good sense of humour to run a pub in London. And you need to be able to keep calm in whatever situation. You know, yobs and all that, and trying to deal with the youngsters who swipe phones and stuff like that. You just don’t know what people get up to, honestly. And when people get drunk, you have to ask them to leave nicely and not get all uppity. That’s what I always say to the staff: anybody out of order, deal with them pleasantly and they’ll go along with you 99 per cent of the time. If you just shout ‘Get out,’ that’s when they get upset. Come back tomorrow, come back next week, whatever, you know, when you sober up again. Otherwise there’ll be rows and stuff. There used to be an awful lot of that in pubs years back, but touch wood, from when I came here we’ve never had anything like that.
This bar here has mostly Irish and English, and they get on really well together. They call this side the English bar and that the Irish one. I reckon all the English, years back, used to drink in this side and all the Irish used to drink over the other side. But now you get both drinking on both sides. There’s a little space we cross over there to go to the other side, they say we need to see your passport; passport control they call this. Oh, there are some people who drink only on the one side, they’ll only cross it to go to the toilet. Some of the boys, they go over there to the toilet but maybe they’ll stop outside the door to talk to somebody and someone will say, you’re on the wrong side, you haven’t shown your passport. They have a red card over there and sometimes they show you the red card, get back on your own side. It’s very funny, they have a good craic over that. It’s all a bit of fun.
LOVING ONE ANOTHER
ALINA IQBAL
A love story
When I was younger there were certain things I wasn’t allowed to do. In the early Eighties, for example, I really wanted a miniskirt but I wasn’t allowed to wear one. It was because my father thought that it was not modest and it wasn’t fitting with our culture. Or I wanted to do ballet lessons, but because within Pakistani Muslim culture dancing is associated with prostitution, I wasn’t allowed to. These things matter when you’re a kid.
As my sister and I got older and approached adolescence, my dad became more obsessed with policing what we were doin
g. When I was 12 years old, I was coming home from school and my dad picked me up in the car. He was furious and I didn’t know why. It turned out he’d read my diary, and in my diary I’d written that I had a crush on a boy at the bus stop. That resulted in my dad not letting me leave my room, apart from to go to school, until I was 18 years old. So I spent my entire teenage years in my bedroom or going to school. I wasn’t allowed to go out with friends or have any semblance of a normal life.
It is not uncommon for Asian girls to be policed in that way. Rationally you may think, this is ridiculous, I should stand up to this – but you internalize these feelings of responsibility. There’s an Islamic concept of honour called izaat, which means you cannot bring shame to your family. The consequence of you doing something wrong is that your entire family or your tribe is shamed. It sounds ludicrous to other people, but that notion is so internalized from such a young age that it’s very hard to flip that.
I went off the rails at university. My whole social life changed. I was in Manchester and it was the early Nineties, the tail end of the acid house club scene. I got involved in setting up illegal warehouse raves and everything that goes along with that. So I went from never going out and not leaving my room to setting up techno parties in warehouses, and I did that for probably three or four years. I had a crazy time. I was lucky to get my law degree. All I did was party for years, basically.
