by Anita Rani
I’ve racked my brain to think what I could have possibly done to make Kate’s mum decide that little old me was not allowed to come round and therefore not allowed to be friends with her daughter. Kate’s house was huge, beautiful, and I wished my parents had a house like it too. A classic big Victorian Yorkshire stone number, with a sweeping staircase and a smooth and shiny oak banister. And rooms for every occasion: piano room, dining room, lounge, playroom, snug, utility room, dog’s room.
I happened to be the only non-white person invited to the party. What do I now as an adult read into this? Kate and I had got on well, we loved talking about Top of the Pops. She loved that I knew so much about the latest releases, like all the words to George Harrison’s classic ‘I Got My Mind Set On You’, even at nine. There is no way of knowing if Kate’s mum was a little bit racist, but what we do know is that she thought I was a ‘loon’ and put a full stop to our friendship. I’m not sure how long our friendship would have lasted anyway, with her child being so fixated on finance.
Back to her line of enquiry: were we well-off? I asked Dad.
‘We are comfortable.’ And back then, when I was nine, we were.
My parents, Balvinder and Lakhbir, or Bal and Lucky, (or, as Dad used to be called back then, Bill) worked hard. Seriously hard. They had a successful manufacturing business and a factory in the centre of town. Most Indians in the seventies, eighties and nineties had their Indian name and an English name they’d use at work, to make life easier for the white people around them. Sukhjit became Pauline, Avinash became Richard and Gurbax became Dave. At least Dad’s English name made sense. Punjabis love a nickname – Pinky, Rinki, Shwinky, Babbloo, Tinku, Nani, Nane, Nikki . . . I’m not just writing down strange noises, these are actual Punjabi nicknames. Dad’s nickname at home was Billa, which was shortened to Bill.
They were a self-made Asian family in the ‘rag trade’, like a lot of Asian families in the eighties up north. You didn’t need qualifications to set up businesses and Indians are an enterprising bunch. Most of my mum and dad’s mates were doing the same thing, setting up small businesses which then went on to grow into very successful ones. They have a crew of upwardly mobile friends up in Bradford who are closer than family. They are all phenomenal people who have built huge companies in electrics, printing, wholesale, import and export. They are there for each other through the ups and downs, and in good times and bad they stand shoulder to shoulder. All of them over time went on to grow their once small businesses exponentially. My parents’ story, however, is a little different.
My folks manufactured jackets and coats for wholesale and they also retailed too. They had a shop on the street next to the factory, in the heart of the city centre, and were busy market traders on Saturdays, with various stalls dotted around Yorkshire, in places like Shipley, Doncaster, Ripon, Castleford and Morley. All of this was built from scratch by the two of them, with no help from anybody else. They are what you’d call proper grafters, my folks. Life’s doers. Good people. Full of energy. They worked tirelessly and without complaint. I don’t suppose they had a choice. Which to me is the most amazing quality. I don’t ever remember a day my parents moaned. I mean, they argued, daily, but moan, never.
What you must know about my parents is that they are not human. I can’t remember them ever saying ‘I’m tired’, or that something hurts, or to even cry for that matter, at least never in front of us kids. Not human, see? They were and still are the most dynamic couple I know. Completely different, but at least their energy levels matched. It would be quite an imbalance if they didn’t. They shared a common goal and motivation: to give me and my little brother Kul the best chance, to make sure we got to experience things they never did, to give us the best start in life they possibly could and to build a life for us. They wanted us to have every opportunity and, most importantly, the best education. For Mum, uniform was key. Schools in India have very strict uniform guidelines and kids are always immaculately turned out. She was shocked to see the schools in Bradford. Dad explained though that the best schools with the kind of old English uniform my mum was thinking of were schools you had to pay for. For Mum this didn’t seem strange, as her parents had paid for six children to go to school. They wanted us to have the best start in life and if that meant paying, then so what? They’d find a way. They were also very aware that it would help shunt us up through the ranks of the British class system if they sent us to private schools. We’d learn to speak the lingo of middle-class white folk.
They first ran the business in a small rented industrial unit, which was huge to us kids, down the road from the first home we lived in. This was a small rented two up two down terrace house. When the shutters of the factory were open, I’d ride my tricycle through the factory and out around the car park. This was our playground and where we’d spend most of our time while our parents worked away. This is when things really began to take off. I was put into a private day nursery, the only day care that would let me stay late. I was often the last toddler to be collected, well after 6pm. Already getting used to being on my own, learning not to be too needy or reliant on anyone. The local newspaper, The Telegraph & Argus no less, ran a story about my folks and described them as ‘myth breakers’, a young couple in their twenties with two young kids working hard and smashing it. I wish we still had the article but, as you’ll learn, my parents aren’t really the hoarding (or even just holding onto things for nostalgia) types.
Mum has only a few things from our childhoods: my baby blanket and school scarf, Kul’s school cap and first ever cuddly rabbit (which she won when pregnant with him at a fair, she knew the moment she won it he would be a boy), plus our first ever passports. Passports are important. Apart from giving us the ability to travel – and we did a lot of that, particularly to India – our passports prove our much sought after British nationality. Our passports were our passports to a freer and better life. The objective of operation migrate for anyone who decides to leave their own land: make a better life for their kids. In my story, that’ll be my bro and me.
My dad is incredibly bright, a natural entrepreneur, a born hustler, very creative with an incredible eye for detail. When it came to stitching the jacket samples to show clients, often he would do them himself as he was so good and neat on the machine. Plus, he can look at an item of clothing and cut material without a pattern. Anyone who knows about sewing knows this is a very difficult skill. Dad should have been the Indian/Yorkshire Paul Smith. If he had been born in London and was white, I imagine he would have been an eighties ad man. I imagine if he had been born white, he could have been anything.
The business boomed, enough for them to buy the next factory. These guys were going places. They were going into Bradford city centre! The factory was a three-storey building in town, painted sky blue. A proper old warehouse with Crittall windows and big double doors. Exactly the kind of space a property developer would drool over to convert, so that property addicts could then drool over it, so that some banker from the city could purchase it. Although this is Bradford and I’m not sure anyone really wants to live in the city centre, handsome as it is – not opposite one of the shadiest pubs in town. I know it was shady because the police once used the factory, mine and Kul’s room in the factory to be precise, for a stake-out spot. We’d regularly see people stumble out of the pub arguing or bleeding, or both. Not quite the friendly Yorkshire pub you’d want to pop into for a pint of mild. Definitely the wrong end of town.
What are your guilty pleasure websites you disappear into when procrastinating? Puppies are a pretty good source for vanishing away the hours but, for me, the ultimate hit, the purest rush I get, is from property porn . . . All property, but mainly warehouse conversions. I just love industrial spaces. The more exposed brick, metal beams, concrete staircases, the better. I even have a soft spot for breeze block walls. This is all because of a childhood spent in factories.
I’m going to give you a personal guided tour of the factory – in we go.
Keep up! Through the big double doors just to the right of you is the huge concrete staircase running up all three storeys – there was no lift. So, we’ll pelt up the stairs to the top floor, to the cutting room, where a giant long table sat in the middle of the room ready for layers of material to be laid out across it and stacked up against one wall were rolls and rolls of material, of all different colours and textures. The best were the giant thick quilted rolls, these made a great soft play area for me and Kul to clamber about on and hide in between. The next floor down was the sewing room, where around 25 women, most of them Indian and Pakistani, were sat at machines. Dad had set it up so that the machines were facing each other, the chatter was constant as was the sound of the machines, ‘RUUUUUU RUUUUU RUUUUUU’, and the chugchugchugchug of the overlocking machine, a vital piece of industrial equipment that finishes the edge of a seam, that reverberated through the wooden floorboards. In the far corner of this vast room was a separate area for trimming and packing. Down on the ground floor was the kitchen – a little canteen area with a kettle and microwave, all mod cons. There was always coffee, tea, coffee mate and a big old bag of sugar. This was before the days of Asians knowing anything about diabetes, two/three/four/seven teaspoons were standard for most people in the factory.
Also on the ground floor was Dad’s office, with his own filter coffee machine, a filing cabinet and a huge wooden desk. He also had two comfy armchairs and a little coffee table, his break-out space for meetings. I loved this room, it was clean and organised and quiet, and is where the business really happened. When Mr Wright, a big customer for Mum and Dad, would come over from Harrogate (a swanky bit of Yorkshire) for meetings, at the end I’d come in and join them. Mr Wright sat me on his knee and taught me Irish sea shanties. I was 17. Just kidding, I was a kid. Mr Wright was lovely and always smartly dressed, and he carried a leather suitcase just like my dad. Sometimes at lunch, Dad would give himself a little break, take the sack of small change out of one of his drawers and head up to the arcades at the top of the street. Yes, that’s right, a legit businessman, with his own factory and all the responsibility that came with it, would head up to play the slot machines at lunchtime. He was barely out of his twenties though, remember, and this was the time before computer games.
In front of Dad’s office was a room three times its size – the stockroom, full of big metal shelving units, like the ones in B&Q that are bolted together. I remember Dad building them himself. In one of my rented flats in London, in a warehouse conversion, I bought and built myself a similar unit. This flat had exposed brickwork that Mum couldn’t stand or understand. ‘Poor people live like this in India! Put some wallpaper on it,’ she advised. The room next to my dad’s office was the cloth overspill room and in this room at the far end by the window were two little sofas and a small white TV, plus a little table, all for Kul and me. This was our space. Our den, our universe.
It was the factory, as well as our ethnicity, that set us apart from everyone else at school and that made our home life so unconventional. Every day after school, or after roller disco birthday parties, rather than go home, Kul and I were brought straight to the factory. Straight to our little den where we were left to our own devices, while Mum and Dad worked. We made our own choices. We’d have a snack, something picked up in town. Our favourite was always a classic cheese and onion pasty from Thurstons (now known as Greggs), or a Pot Noodle. I loved Pot Noodles, especially drinking the brown slurry left in the bottom of the pot. We ate delicious healthy home-cooked Indian food every day but, when it came to Western food, we ate junk, delicious junk.
If my parents had to work late, then we’d stay with them. There was no other option. Bags down, blazers off, homework done (sometimes), pasty in hand, TV ON! We watched a lot of TV in that room, we watched a lot of TV full stop. TV was our pacifier, our babysitter. This was the heyday of kids’ TV and we were indiscriminate about what we’d watch and had no channel loyalty. Cartoons like Dungeons & Dragons, Thundercats and Gummy Bears, shows like Fun House and Grotbags and TV kids’ dramas Grange Hill and Round The Twist. Of course, we watched Blue Peter and John Craven’s Newsround (I still can’t believe he’s now my colleague and mate!). But our religion was Neighbours and Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
It’s where our imaginations flourished. We’d invent games. And we’d play. And we’d fight and play fight. We’d dance, we’d dance fight. Dance fighting was my favourite game. You dance for a while and then switch to a karate spar and then switch back, without telling your opponent when you were going to switch. Dance, fight, now dance . . . fight . . . dance. You want to play, don’t you? We were probably inspired by our hero, Bruce Lee. He was, in fact, a trained ballroom dancer as well as a major Kung Fu badass. What a dream boat! Kul spent a lot of time drawing. He always had a sketch pad and would disappear into his world of creativity.
This was our happy space, our safe space, where my little brother and I looked out for each other. We were each other’s best friends because we had to be. Only me and Kul were going through our particular life together. A lot of the time we’d help out in the factory too. Now, you could say this was child labour and you’d be right. But Asian families would say, this is just having kids. Working is part of the unwritten contract of being born to brown folk and no, you don’t get paid and you NEVER moan. Moaning about it gets a very stern look. Not a death stare, not a screw face, but a look so terrifying it would get you out of your seat in a shot. Our jobs would be in the packing area. Threading the jackets with tiny little scissors, trimming off any dangly excess cotton thread, tagging the jacket with the label, using the cool tagging gun, then folding neatly and uniformly, sliding into a polythene bag and sealing the bag with Sellotape. Ready for collection or for Dad, if he was to take the delivery. If an order needed to be ready and we were up against a deadline, the four of us would stay at the factory until it was done. Even if it got late and we had school the next day, we couldn’t go home until the job was complete.
The last thing to do at the end of the day was the rounds, dropping off big sacks of unstitched jackets to the seamstresses who worked from home. They were scattered around Bradford, mainly in the inner-city areas. Dad would drive the van, Mum, Kul and me squeezed onto the other two seats next to him. The laws were different back then . . . We Asians always managed to squeeze another one (or seven) more bodies than were legally allowed into any vehicle. These were the women who were unable to come to the factory so had industrial sewing machines at home, usually in their kitchens. Their reasons for working from home varied, but it was usually because they had young families to bring up. Kamala Aunty had two young sons the same age as me and Kul but was also helping run a small electrical shop with her husband. She sewed to supplement their income. Some of the women sewed at home because they were not allowed to leave to go to work.
We’d drive down streets of back-to-back houses, with kids running around everywhere. Beautiful little children, screaming and playing, covered in dirt. They’d chase the van down the street as we’d arrive and leave. Speaking a combination of Urdu and Mirpuri and English with a Yorkshire accent. A sack would be dropped off and a previous one collected. We could identify which house the sack came from by the smell of the tarka that had permeated the cloth. Most women sewed in their kitchens, stirring giant pots of gosht or chooza, wiping snotty noses, feeding crying babies. I adored the women who sewed for my parents and they all adored us. They were more than simply employees, they were our family, and they became each other’s families, too.
The factory was a daily soap opera. The women who worked there would laugh and argue, and they’d share their stories. Azra Aunty and Darsho Aunty both worked in the factory. They were proper besties, both Punjabi, but one was from Lahore in Pakistan and the other from Jalandhar in India. There may have been historic divides and modern-day divisions in Bradford between the two communities but, in the factory, no one really cared. There were more Pakistani than Indian women, but there were also Banglade
shi and English too. The majority were Punjabi, whether Pakistani or Indian, so they all spoke the same language and shared similar values and culture and, crucially, all these women understood something about each other without having to explain. They understood and held each other’s pain. They worked hard, these women were warriors. A few had alcoholic husbands, one had a son who had started committing crime, there was a son in prison, a husband behind bars, a runaway daughter, there were mental health issues and forced marriage, miscarriages, abortions and so much domestic abuse, but in this space, on that sewing room floor in my parents’ factory, they had each other. My parents knew the home situations of each of the women and became their confidantes.
The seamstresses loved my young parents. They referred to them as brother and sister, they were either Paaji and Penji or Bhaijan and Bhaji, depending on which side of the border you were from. We were invited to lots of weddings, because of this! Hindu, Sikh and Muslim, and my folks would always have an Eid party, Diwali party and Christmas party for them, sometimes in our home. All the women would cook and make a dish, including Mum. Indian women would cover the veg dishes and the Pakistanis would bring the meat, playing to their strengths. If you want to eat a delicious tandoori lamb chop, head to a Pakistani restaurant. If you want to eat amazing vegetarian food, always hit up an Indian and if prawns are more your bag, then you could do far worse than head for a Bengali. Mum and Dad were so young and hard-working, but they were also generous and kind-hearted. Everyone would get a present for Christmas. Usually a Marks & Spencer cardigan, which for an Asian woman of a certain age is a piece of ‘kwalti’.
