*
Her life would undoubtedly have been one of tougher choices and wider concerns, but there are those who have made their homes in east London as adults – like the people fleeing oppression and austerity in the past – who are more than glad to be part of their new community.
The first quote is from a political refugee, the second from a poet.
People in this country are very friendly. Since [my family] has come here, we have never had a quarrel, never made an enemy. People ask you to go out on Saturdays. They don’t say, ‘These are foreigners’, they just accept us as people. People are good to us. We are able to mix. They don’t care who we are. There are houses where, if you have problems, you can just knock on the door and it will be opened to us.
I love the East End of London. I came here in 1979. I love the down-to-earthness about the place. It’s interesting that a lot of people from the artistic community want to know why I don’t live in north London. I call them intellectual wankers. They don’t want to mix in the real world. The real world is difficult sometimes – I’ve been chased down West Ham Lane by about twenty skinheads who came out of nowhere – but I like mixing in the real world. One day [one of the broadsheet newspapers] wanted to do an interview with me. They wanted to do it in the dressing room before or after one of my meetings. I said, ‘I’ll tell you what, come to a school and see the work I do in the East End of London.’ They came, and they seemed OK at the time. They went away and the article that came out was terrible:
I woke up this frosty morning and went out to interview Benjamin Zephaniah, and I got my bacon and eggs down me, or my croissant, or whatever it was, and as I crossed over Tower Bridge and entered east London, I noticed the place was different. The people seemed hungrier. Staring faces into my car like they were going to rob me.
He described the East End of London like it was a Third World country, where all the people were hungry. He said all the people look thinner, like they were going to rob him. That all the kids at the school looked neglected. I got a call from the headmistress saying that all the kids wanted to write letters to the newspaper and I said, ‘Let them do it.’ People don’t understand about the East End, about working-class pride.
There is still, however, a great deal of concern among East Enders themselves over what they feel is happening in the area – their area.
There is racism. Racism is about fear. About being driven out. I hate it when people demonize a whole race, as resentment is such a sad thing. Refusing to see that new communities, Asians for instance, can bring vitality and even wealth to an area. And other things such as family values and a real concern for educational standards. It’s common to have people who are usually prejudiced confer a sort of honorary white status on individuals who have become known to them as friends and neighbours. They say something like, ‘She’s all right, it’s the others. She’s not like them.’ They also tend to get sentimental over ‘dear little babies’, as though they become a different race when they grow up.
But hope gleams through.
I think on my little street the whole of life is there. When I was moving there, people said, ‘That’s a nice street, there’s not many black people living there.’ Black people said that to me. Me, a black man. There was one of my neighbours who was wonderful. He played for West Ham football team before it was even called West Ham. He died when he was gone a hundred. He was a great guy, had a sharp memory, and really independent. He would get up every day and walk down the road. I think about him. He was just so nice, had no animosity. He must have known this area, must have seen so many changes, then to see a black guy like me moving next door to him, and he thought nothing of it. The guy on the other side came out and said, ‘I’m telling you now, I’m a racist and I don’t like you black bastards. You park your car there. I park my car here.’ He really put it on the line. I kind of took it as a challenge. The other day, he was talking to me about the Queen. And there he was, she’s English this and English that. And I said, “They’re from German stock.’ ‘Yeah, but she talks like an English girl.’ Then he started talking about her husband. He’s Greek. And Lady Di, she was all right, but what was she doing with a Paki? He is a real modern-day Alf Garnett character. When I moved in, white people came up and said, ‘Oh, shit, you’ve moved next door to him.’ But there are lots of other people. They know me. Their kids read my books, see my videos. The guy who lives across from me, his daughter recognized me when I moved in. His dad was one of the guys who fought Mosley’s Blackshirts. When he read my poetry and read the politics of it and everything, he was so proud, he showed me all the photographs of his dad being battered by the police. He was really proud. I was speaking to my next-door neighbour the other day. Another example. He wanted to know why I was here. I explained how Britain colonized Jamaica, India, wherever. We’re here because you were there. That’s why people from Surinam are in Holland. The people from Chad in France. It hit him. He had never thought it through. That’s what I like about the work I do, about being a self-educated working-class man. I know the way working-class people think. I couldn’t live anywhere else. I couldn’t live with all these other artists. Where would I get my inspiration from? I get my inspiration not only from the politicians, the big issues, but by looking at normal, everyday people and seeing their prejudices, seeing their aspirations, their wants and their needs and their struggles. That is my muse. There are times when, if I’m doing a tour and I’m with a group of ‘Wonderful Darlings’, I come home and still have to listen to my next-door neighbour’s ramblings. Racism is dumb, it’s wrong, but there are people who think like my neighbour, so I listen to him. But I am optimistic for the future of the East End. When I see the new generation of children that are coming up, I am optimistic. The people will lead the way, and then the politicians will have to catch up.
Optimism, as was seen in the previous chapter, is an important and powerful emotion, but, as in the see-saw life of any vibrant working-class area, there are undeniable problems related to living in the East End, especially if you are poor.
A Public Health Report published in autumn 1998, ‘The Health of Londoners’, concluded, with a point of analysis straight from the school of the bleeding obvious, that there is a link between poor health and poverty, and, regardless of what measures are employed, the inner east London boroughs are among the worst in the country in the league tables of deprivation.
But pessimism leads to impotence. Isn’t it better to ask what can be done than to simply bemoan the problems? One route is that taken by the Bromley-by-Bow Centre, a voluntary organization with the specific aim of improving the quality of life – from health to education – of local people; or that of the Newham Parents’ Centre and Bookshop, which plays a fundamental role in matters of education and access to opportunities in the lives of people from an area of the East End far wider than its immediate vicinity. But can it realistically be hoped that similar schemes will suddenly emerge fully formed in other neighbourhoods? No, they have to have inspired battlers behind them, people who will give their time, and ensure continued funding and support, to enable them to evolve and survive. In other words, they need a community behind them.
Again: community.
And community depends on decent, affordable, available housing for all who want to remain close to their families, preferably with a patch of grass where they can grow a few flowers, and put out the pram for the baby to get some fresh air; places without threatening alleys or crisp-packet-strewn walkways. Living conditions taken for granted by a large percentage of the British population – and rightly so – would ensure that the East End remains a place in which people aspire to live, and not just because it is so ‘handy for the City’.
I think it’s important to try and encourage successful young people to remain in the area, so we can have our own ‘home-grown’ lawyers, teachers and doctors and so on. Some of us have chosen to return – to work in the community, and hopefully to develop it.
I love
working in the East End and I love living in the East End. Nothing gives me a bigger thrill now – I’ve worked so long selling books – when kids who bought their first Ladybird book from me are now college lecturers. I’ve been through the whole education of a lot of children and I find that fantastic. Kids who started reading [went through] their GCSEs, then their A-levels and then a lot [went] to university. It isn’t acknowledged enough just how many do go. I really think that this bookshop, me and my colleagues have been part of that education… We’ve gone out of our way to make it a place where people want to come. Not off-putting.
While I was taping the above interview, in a side room of the Newham Parents’ Centre and Bookshop, a man came in asking for help with an official document. The recording then continued.
He felt he could just come in here. People come in with every possible problem. Unfortunately, sometimes quite severe social problems. They bring letters, forms they can’t understand because they are so ridiculously formal. You are struck by just how absolutely desperate some things are for people. You’d be surprised though by the attitude of some people. They go, ‘Good heavens, a bookshop like this in the East End?’ Well, we’ve been here in Newham for twenty-two years. We’ve built a reputation. It’s important that everyone who works in the shop is part of the community. Lives in it, works in it and have brought their children up in it - they’ve been to the local schools. It makes people know we’ve not just been imported from somewhere and are going to just leave. It’s important… I’m known as a book lady at the schools where I do book stalls. There are two schools that I do every week, and have done for the last seven years. There’s enough call for me to go every week. We sell huge amounts. The children can save up for the books and we’ve got stationery, so that if a child has only got lop there is still something they can buy.
No big city can remain static and London is no exception, but at times the changes have been dramatic: invasions; plague; fire; bridges spanning the great river; industry, docks; railways; canals; the beginnings of the commuter belt; wars; new towns and suburbs; East Enders leaving the bomb sites and slums behind them; and now, Docklands, with Canary Wharf’s massive tower dwarfing, and supplanting, the spire of St Anne’s as the great landmark rising above all that surrounds it.
Where once the Thames was so densely packed with shipping, you could walk from bank to bank across the decks of the vessels crowding the waters without wetting your feet, where apprentices had it in writing that they should not be forced to eat salmon more than four times a week, and the pleasure boats took trippers down to Blackwall to enjoy the sunset while feasting on fine whitebait suppers, the river is now a much quieter, lonelier place. Its waters are all but empty of craft, although the fish are returning, and rather than drab riverside slums the vision is of a new financial quarter for the new millennium, a glittering glass and steel extension of the City. But the East End is still an area of acute poverty. Demolishing slums doesn’t demolish homelessness. Nor does it do much to dispel the old prejudices about the place and its inhabitants.
A few years ago, someone asked my husband, who works in the City, to play a game of five-a-side football at the nearby pitches in the old Spitalfields Market, an area which butts on to the ancient boundary wall at Bishopsgate, adding that he was welcome, ‘If you can stand going there.’
Two insults in one! Not only was his wife – me – born in Bethnal Green, not that far away, but we had recently chosen to move back there to live. My husband did, and does – just – manage to play in an occasional five-a-side match, but he has chosen to do so with a different team.
Among the thoughts on east London I received from abroad – newspaper clippings about my research had been sent by families to Australia, New Zealand and Canada – were firmly held convictions that a leading supermarket chain employed only people from ethnicminority groups and that East End streets are no longer fit to walk along. I was reminded of this when I heard a radio programme, in February 1998, on the differences between private and state education. A teacher spoke about feeling – morally – that he should teach in east London, but, as he wanted to spend his time teaching and not acting as a social worker, policeman and crowd controller, it was obvious, to him, that he should work in the private sector. It was also taken as obvious - and unquestioned by his interviewer – that his description of schooling in east London was accurate.
Prejudices about newcomers arriving and settling in the area also continue.
As far as we Asians are concerned, people look on us as a problem. Jews, Irish, Europeans and others who have settled in this part of the country, at least they have got fair colouring or fair skin. It is a colour bias. I don’t know why. I think it is probably historical, [to do with] British colonial rule. India was one of the most important countries. The jewel in the crown. Think of the Indian people who sacrificed their lives during the two wars, and those who were given Victoria Crosses. I think racism is the biggest problem that Asians face. With no racism, you can see how enterprising we can be. Nobody knows about the great many professionals here who are from Bangladesh. The contribution to the catering industry alone is enormous – £1.6 billion a year. Is this contribution appreciated? Who is taking advantage of this economy? Building societies and banks? Insurance companies? The Asian banks here generate many millions just transferring money. The question is, would the assistant at the counter of Barclays deal with an illiterate, half-educated, curry-smelling old Bangladeshi with the patience and courtesy he would extend to an Englishman? You know the answer. Many of the successful traders from the East End use the Asian banks for that reason. Who is losing out?
Maybe, as this person suggests, the 1970s idea of promoting a cultural melting pot, rather than a discrete cluster of communities within a multicultural society, could be the way forward in the twenty-first century.
I am a Rastafarian. My wife is from Liverpool, her family is of Pakistani origin, and my mum’s Jamaican. I love the East End because there is not just one community which dominates. I was thinking of learning a language and thought of maybe learning French, but then I thought, ‘What use would French be in the East End?’ so I learned Urdu. But all communities have their prejudices. The Bengalis are the latest immigrants from Asia, and the Montserratians are the latest from the Caribbean. They become the butt of the jokes. Amongst the Caribbean community, the people from Montserrat are treated kind of like the Irish are. The Bengalis the same. They just change the joke from Irish to Bengali. In the United States they call it the ‘last-off-the boat syndrome’ – to explain all these internal prejudices. I’ve been to Pakistan and the people there can’t understand why this woman – my wife – who is beautiful and light-skinned, went and married a dark-skinned man. Once they get over that, they are great people. It’s like here, on the whole we all kind of live together. We don’t refer to the problems back in the Caribbean, or Africa, or Asia in order to negotiate our relationships here.
But all problems can’t be so easily dismissed. There are moments of a rise in support for the extreme right, such as the ephemeral but still-alarming success of a British National Party candidate in Millwall who, like Mosley before him, tried to rally the poor unemployed and disaffected who were failing to find any other answer to their problems.
Such events can be analysed within the context of ignorance and bigotry, or be seen as arising from disappointed individuals lamenting the loss of their once-secure community, or simply as the reaction of people standing in post office queues for their giros and feeling resentment at the numbers of strange faces surrounding them, strangers who don’t even speak their language. But communities do change, and probably always will, no matter what anyone might prefer.
I recently saw an elderly man in Brick Lane wearing what had, up until a generation ago, been the familiar outfit of the many Jewish men in the area – wide-brimmed hat, long dark coat and side whiskers. He was waving his arms in frustration at not being able to make himself understood by a memb
er of the local Bengali population. ‘All I want,’ he was complaining, ‘is for him to move his car forward a few feet.’
Perhaps it is too late for some to change, but ignorance of one another’s lives, needs, desires and feelings can be countered with education and, more importantly, a shared pride in being cockneys.
When I was a schoolgirl – an eleven-plus success -1 was encouraged at school to lose my accent, to improve myself. They didn’t do much of a job on me, although, like generations of cockney kids, I became bilingual in order to save myself from getting into trouble; not exactly speaking another language, as the Chinese, Yemeni, German and other immigrant children have had to do, but speaking with a different accent, slower, ‘nicer’, in front of the non-East Enders, especially teachers, who could have punished me for doing otherwise. The teachers failed to understand, in my school at least, that there was a real importance attached to being seen as respectable in my East End, but it didn’t depend on having a ‘proper’ accent – just on behaving in what was considered a proper manner. It involved taking a pride in yourself; working hard to get by; being there to help your neighbour during the bad times, and joining in their celebrations when they were good; feeling you were part of something bigger than yourself; and knowing that your kids could be kids, raking the streets and having a bit of fun, instead of becoming pasty-faced little mouse potatoes glued to their computers.
My East End Page 32
