Tales from Two Cities E-Book

Dervla Murphy

• Herausgeber: Eland Publishing
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

In 1985, Dervla Murphy immersed herself in two of Britian's most turbulent multiracial communities – the Asian community of Manningham in Bradford and the Caribbean community of Handsworth in Birmingham – with the intention of seeing firsthand the harsh realities of social deprivation. While living in these parts, she experienced hostility but also made many dear friends, several of whom opened up to her about the racism they experienced and their difficulties finding employment in 1980s Britain. She witnessed both the Drummond Middle School battle and the Handsworth riot, and in this moving account she explores in lucid detail the nature of prejudice. Drawing unsentimental comparisons to her experiences living among communities in Pakistan and elsewhere, Murphy displays a rich understanding of her subject, and offers genuine explanations for the urban decay that she sees. A passionate study of racial politics, Tales from Two Cities is a searing cautionary tale told by a master of travel writing.

Leseprobe

DERVLA MURPHY

Tales from Two Cities

Travel of Another Sort

For Margaret Fogarty

without whose practical help, moral support and many clarifying words of wisdom this book could not have been written.

It is always an impertinence for a man to claim to write about a community of men, whether his own or another. He cannot avoid talking about them as if they were objects under a microscope, and this denies them their subjectivity and dignity. Further, he cannot avoid making general observations about them, and that involves denying them their uniqueness. Such general observations again have an air of unreality about them. While they might describe some members of a society accurately, they never fit all.

BHIKHU PAREKH

Contents

Title PageDedicationEpigraphAcknowledgementsPrologue  PART ONE MANNINGHAM IN BRADFORD  1  Among the Mirpuris  2  Poor Britain  3  Domestic Dramas  4  Races Apart  5  How Anti-Racism Came to Britain  6  The Honeyford Affair  PART TWO HANDSWORTH IN BIRMINGHAM  7  A Bed-sit in Handsworth  8  Singing on Sundays  9  Black, White and Browned-off10  Black Talk11  In and Around the Villa Cross12  Liming Rastas and the Law13  Action14  Post-Riot  EpilogueCopyright

Acknowledgements

Many people have contributed in diverse ways to this book. Some, who will violently disagree with certain passages, would prefer not to be named. But my gratitude goes to them no less than to: Diana, Jock and John Murray, Jim Rose, Brenda and Keith Thomson, Jenny Woodward – and my neighbours in Manningham and Handsworth who appear in these pages not under their real names but without whose friendship, trust and guidance this book could never have been written.

The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust made it possible for me to devote more than two years to this project but are in no way responsible for the views expressed or for any inadvertent factual errors.

Prologue

The seed of this book was sown in the autumn of 1966. While cycling from London to Edinburgh I met many representatives of ethnic minorities, the majority then comparative newcomers to Britain. From Scotland I wrote to my publisher, describing this journey, and in response he suggested a book on Brown and Black immigrants. Although the subject tempted me, I doubted my ability to tackle it and not until 1983 did I find enough courage to accept the challenge. But my 1984 activities were curtailed first by a peculiarly debilitating form of hepatitis, acquired in Madagascar, and then by a frolicsome bullock who broke my back on a riverbank in Ireland. So the project was not begun until January 1985.

Nothing in my life had prepared me for residence in deprived urban areas, as distinct from reading about them or discussing them with involved friends. After a few months I began to feel slightly peculiar – on edge, restless, in an odd way under stress despite the increasing fascination of my work. Only then did I realise that never before had I been confined for so long to a city, or even a big town. As a truly rural animal, this new experience in middle-age almost over-taxed my adaptability. Curiously enough, the obvious horrors of urban life – traffic noise, crowds, polluted air, over-heated shops and offices – bothered me no more than the many unnatural minutiae. Like taking clothes to a laundrette, full of baffling machines, instead of washing them in a tub and hanging them on a line between apple-trees. And swimming in a chlorine-flavoured indoor pool instead of a river. And using fire-lighters instead of kindling gathered in a wood. And never seeing the night-sky or being able to enjoy the weather. In the country, every sort of weather is pleasurable: gales, frost, heat, rain, snow. In cities, each weather mood merely exacerbates some nuisance – litter blown in one’s face, burst pipes, effluvia from rotting garbage, sprays of oily water, treacherous piles of dingy snow. At the end of my exile I was no longer puzzled by youthful vandalism, drug-addiction and despair.

As a newcomer in Manningham and Handsworth, I had to explain to some of my neighbours, and to local community leaders and Race Relations Industry (RRI) workers, that I am neither a journalist nor an academic, that I belong to no political party or pressure group and have no religious affiliations. This thumb-nail self-portrait baffled many. For some thirty years, race relations have been providing much grist for the mills of academics, journalists and politicians. Such people are familiar figures in multi-racial districts, but a pen-wielder belonging to none of those categories (and who chose to live in inner-city areas!) had a disconcerting effect. Among Browns and Blacks, my scribbling presence in their neighbourhoods provoked varied reactions. There was much uncomprehending indifference. There was an amount of explicit hostility – “We don’t need any more studies of our problems, we need action!” And there was occasional faint optimism – “Maybe your book can help us.”

Many Whites imagine Britain’s ethnic minorities to be far more numerous, and therefore ‘threatening’, than they are; ‘ten or fifteen per cent’ is a usual guesstimate. Yet the 1985 figure for the entire non-White population, including Chinese, was 2,376,000 – 4.4 per cent. It is therefore ridiculous to describe Britain as a multi-racial society; that description applies only to certain urban areas. Ironically, racists and anti-racists reinforce each other’s positions by over-emphasising the significance of the Brown and Black elements in contemporary Britain.

Despite the above figures, this is not a book for those in search of statistics, graphs and percentages. It is a personal record of daily life in multi-racial areas and those academics and race relations experts who dismiss it as ‘anecdotal’, ‘impressionistic’ or ‘subjective’ will be right. Much of it deals with perceptions – with how people feel, and why.

PART ONE

MANNINGHAM IN BRADFORD

The Council’s race relations policies must make more progress if we are to meet the expectations of young Black Bradfordians. Some 62,000 in the District (out of 464,000) have their family origins in the New Commonwealth and Pakistan … In two areas there will be a large measure of agreement among all three political parties on the Council. Firstly, there is the unique nature of Bradford’s problems, facing the largest increase in population of any Metropolitan District in the country – and facing it in the inner-city areas where our resources and land are already under severe pressure. Secondly, the changing face of Bradford will call for new ideas, new attitudes and ways of working, and new relationships from all of us, members as well as officers. In ten years the District has moved from full employment, a superficially healthy-looking economy and relative prosperity for virtually everyone, to massive factory closures, some 12,500 people who have been out of work for more than a year, 7000 of whom have been jobless for more than two years. Nearly 50,000 people in the District are drawing Supplementary Benefit, and more than a third of all families rely on some kind of State benefit … Only 7 per cent of black school-leavers are finding work, compared with 37 per cent of white school-leavers. One in six of all unemployed people come from the black communities, though they make up only a tenth of the workforce …

District Trends 1984: The Changing Face ofBradford

It is human, when we do not understand another human being, and cannot ignore him, to exert an unconscious pressure on that person to turn him into something that we can understand. The effect on the person so influenced is liable to be the repression and distortion, rather than the improvement, of the personality; and no man is good enough to have the right to make another over in his own image.

T.S. ELIOT: Notes Towards The Definition ofCulture (Faber)

1 · Among the Mirpuri

It was 8.30 on a January evening: very wet, very cold, very dark. Outside Bradford’s Interchange the passengers off the London train scrambled for taxis, bent against a squally sleet-laden wind. An elderly couple asked where I was going and offered to share their taxi. It seemed the White driver was an acquaintance, which probably explained why they had deliberately missed their turn in the queue, allowing someone else to take a Brown-driven taxi. (Few Bradford taxi-drivers are White.)

Almost opposite the Interchange a floodlit neo-classical building – St George’s concert-hall – magnificently contradicted my expectations of universal urban decay. But the rest of that taxi-ride was as expected, along a wide dark street – Thornton Road, where Bradford’s first mill was opened in 1798 – with blank industrial ruins looming cliff-like on either side, followed by black voids where other mills or factories had recently been demolished. The street lights were very dim. There was almost no traffic. There wasn’t a human in sight. I was reminded of travel in Madagascar, where one always seems to arrive after dark in unimaginable, unlit towns. Yet already, most oddly, I found myself falling in love with Bradford – perhaps partly because of the welcoming atmosphere created by my three companions, with their direct, warm-hearted interest in the newcomer. But of course it was more than that; places have energies that are instantly apprehended, regardless of the manner or moment of one’s arrival.

My companions’ warm-heartedness did not extend to Browns and Blacks. When I divulged my Bradford purpose their feelings were at once revealed.

“I hope you’ll tell it like it is,” said the driver. “How they’ve messed up this city – and worse to come, the way they’re breeding.”

“Back in the sixties,” said the wife, “we were told they’d not settle, they’d be gone after a few years. I never believed that. Why should they go back to their jungle when they can live off the tax-payers here?”

“They’ve destroyed us both ways,” said the husband. “Our industry’s been killed by cheap imports from Asia – and why? Because out there they still pay slave-wages. It’s OK if they exploit each other, but sack one of them here, for good reasons, and we’ve a court case about discrimination! No wonder people don’t want to employ them. Once you’ve got them you can’t get rid of them – I know! I’ve had my problems. It’s intimidation of Englishmen we have now – not discrimination against blacks …”

I was soon to become familiar with these half-truths, suspicions, exaggerations and distortions: symptoms of fear, ignorance and angry frustration. If something has gone dreadfully wrong with the management of your own society, it’s some comfort to feel that ‘They’ are really to blame.

Turning right off the Thornton Road, we zig-zagged through a maze of little one-way streets. “Paki kids have no road-sense,” explained the driver. “They fool around all over like they never saw a car. So the Council blocked one end of half the roads – never mind us being inconvenienced!”

“You’re wrong,” said the husband. ‘The police had them blocked! Makes it easier to deal with riots. And riots we’ll have, sooner or later.”

The driver evidently knew Boston Street well and despite the slashing rain insisted on carrying my luggage through a dark covered passageway to what seemed to be someone’s back-door. As a stranger to the North of England and its architectural idiosyncrasies, I could never have found my destination unaided; it wouldn’t have occurred to me to look for a hall-door in what appeared to be a backyard.

A chain of friends and friends’ friends had led me to Boston Street, in the heart of an area described by some locals as Bradistan or Pakiford. The luxury of my small, square ground-floor bed-sitter took me aback. It had a writing-table by the window, books about all aspects of race relations lining one wall from floor to ceiling, a dual-purpose divan and wall-to-wall carpeting – not my idea of slumming it. In the tiny hallway I found a sink and electric kettle; at the top of the narrow stairs was a bathroom, to be shared with a young White couple – among the few Whites on Boston Street – who soon became good friends. Later I discovered that during vacations this luxury apartment serves as an academic’s refuge, to which my friend Kate retreats from family distractions to write about race relations learnedly and sensibly (the two, alas! don’t always go together).

I awoke before dawn and for an instant fancied myself back on the Indian sub-continent. Small sounds, like fleeting scents, can have powerful associations; and a yard or so from my head, on the other side of the wall, a woman (or child) was rhythmically pounding spices.

Joseph Fieldhouse’s , read over breakfast, told me that during the second half of the nineteenth century six mill-worker families sometimes occupied two back-to-back dwellings and it was not uncommon for forty people to share one earth-closet. The Boston Street area then included some of Bradford’s most congested and poorest housing, where the highest death-rates from infectious diseases were recorded annually and infant mortality was one in five. (In 1985 Manningham was one of two inner-city areas where seventeen out of every thousand babies died before their first birthday, compared with ten in other areas.) The building of back-to-backs was made illegal in 1900. Earlier attempts to ban them had been thwarted by the mill-owners, who liked the idea of being able to squeeze forty-two houses onto one acre. Before the passing of an 1860 bye-law, the density was dwellings to an acre; but none of those older back-to-backs remains.