Pakistanis

Or, if I’m being politically incorrect, bloody Pakistanis!

Of course, it’s not permitted nowadays to be politically incorrect. Everybody is equal, everybody is the same, everybody has a right to live the life they want to live, even if it has nothing to do with the values of the country they live in.

Today is Christmas day.

So, what are the “thought Police” going to do to me at the age of 73? Throw me into jail for being politically incorrect? Make me read The Guardian every day instead of the Daily Telegraph, until finally I start think like a pinko leftie teacher in a comprehensive school?

No, probably not, I’m just an old dinosaur walking around in a new multiethnic world and nobody cares too much what I think.

I’ve been living here in Bingley, near Bradford, which is near Leeds, since I was just a boy.

I spent my first five years living in Singapore where my father was a Captain in the Army. I spent my days chasing lizards and butterflies, hanging around outside the army camp with my friends, all of them the sons of other “army men”.

A few years after the Second World War we moved “home” to Bingley and my new English life started, without the lizards but still with butterflies, at least in the summer. My father was promoted to Major and continued as a career soldier. He bought a house for us in Bingley, the house I still live in, my mother didn’t even know we were going to buy a house – I think she would have liked to have been consulted on this big decision, but she smiled weakly and set about creating a home for my two sisters and I.

In 1966 I got married to Sonia, the same year that my father finally retired from the Army, by this time he was a full Colonel.

Father originally came from Ireland, he was what is known as “Anglo Irish”, from an old Anglo-Irish family which had a long history of service in the British Empire. The year that I got married to Sonia, my Granny Fitzmaurice in Ireland passed away, having spent many years making the lives of her long suffering servants miserable. In spite of that, she had loved them and they had loved her. My parents went ‘home” to West Cork to manage the family estate and they gave the family home in Bingley to Sonia and I. There was an arrangement that, because I had been given the family house, my sisters, both already married would each be given cash equal to the value of their share of the house. My parents were always scrupulously fair and decent about everything – none of us siblings was ever made to feel we were less important than the others.

So Sonia and I moved into a solidly middle class red brick house in a leafy area of Bingley, beside the park.

I hadn’t wanted to go into the army like my father, there seemed to be far too high a likelihood of getting shot at for things I didn’t believe in enough to be shot at for. My father’s best friend Ralph was a solicitor, they played golf together every Saturday. One Saturday Father invited Ralph home for dinner after golf, and Ralph, completely out of the blue asked me if I’d like to be his new “solicitors clerk”. Largely out of embarrassment, but primarily because I didn’t have a better plan myself, I jumped at the chance, and so, two weeks later at the age of 18, straight out of school, I had joined Avery & Avery as the new and very green solicitor’s clerk.

As if fate had ordained it to be so, I then encountered a young and very pretty secretary called Sonia, the niece of Ralph Avery’s wife Muriel. I was so taken by Sonia that I blushed whenever I saw her, and she then took every opportunity to make me feel even more embarrassed, until one day, mainly to break an embarrassed silence, I asked her if she’s like to go to the cinema to see a new “James Bond” film which I had already seen twice, and she (although I didn’t realise at the time) had already been to see with her boyfriend (who I also didn’t realise the time actually existed). Suffice it to say that her boyfriend soon became an ex-boyfriend and a year later we were married in All Saints Church in Bingley.

After a few years we had the twins, James and Louisa and settled into a happy family life, me working (not too hard) at Avery & Avery, and Sonia at home as a housewife.

And then the unthinkable happened.

The house two doors to the right of us had been put up for sale by the Parkers, who were moving down to Cambridge where he had just secured a new job as a history lecturer. We had always gotten along famously with the Parkers, but suddenly they became very reserved. When they moved out and the new owners moved in, we understood the reason, the new owners were from Pakistan.

Of course we were used to seeing “Asians” as we drove through Bradford, they had started to become quite commonplace in the poor areas, renting and then buying small terraced houses – but this was a shock for us, the Shahs were the first Pakistanis to move into leafy and prosperous Bingley. Our neighbours and ourselves,, being middle class and respectable, were not happy, and expressed our unhappiness over cups of tea in each other’s sitting rooms. We couldn’t really even express why we were so uncomfortable with this new situation, but it was fundamentally about immigrants “climbing above their station”. Of course, we, the Fitzmaurice family, the Anglo-Irish living in England, were blissfully unaware of the irony of our sitting with our English neighbours and complaining about an “Asian invasion”.

When you think about it, this “Asian” term that English people use to describe Indians and Pakistanis is very incorrect. What about the Chinese and the Japanese and the Malaysians and the Indonesians? They are “Asian” too…

Over the months, the Shah’s, with children around the same age as our own, just got on with their lives. We didn’t confront them, we just regarded them with casual indifference, giving them an occasional nod. My own children were intrigued by these children living next door to us. I gently encouraged my children to associate with our brown-skinned neighbours, which met with somewhat limited success.

I think that in some ways the behavior of the Shah family was quite a relief for us. We all expected to have 20 people living in a four-bedroom house.

Instead Mr Shah retained the services of a gardener to maintain the grounds, and then changed his Ford saloon for a Mercedes.

Over the years, as families sold their homes along the road some of them were acquired by other Pakistanis and Indians, so that 15 years later, by the time our twins were flying the nest to go to university, the street had become much more “mixed”. The English families followed their old routines and the new Asian neighbours brought their own very different routines, most of which we gently disapproved of. They followed their different religions, kept their own company, and ensured that their children and especially their daughters were married off young.

Although I didn’t really like the changes that had happened in the area, I moved from nodding at the new neighbours to the point of occasionally bidding them a “Good morning”, but it never went beyond that.

Three years ago, suddenly, Sonia passed away. She had always been very fit, but one night in her sleep she had a heart attack. We had a few minutes to say goodbye, perhaps not even realising it was really goodbye.

The next week flew by in a rush, you don’t even have time to feel anything and anyway you are numb. The children came home, the funeral came and went, and then after five or six days they both had to leave – Louisa to go back to London to her husband and children, and her accountancy firm, James to go back to his job in the army. Actually it was the first time I had seen either of the children for almost 6 months.

The day after the funeral I was at home in the afternoon and the door bell rang. I opened the door to find that the Shah’s were standing outside. They said that they were sorry to hear about Sonia and sorry to disturb me, but they were concerned that I might not have anything to eat and Mrs Shah had cooked something for me. I didn’t quite know what to say, this was the first time I had had any kind of conversation with them. I invited them in and we had a brief conversation which I can’t remember at all, and then they left me with a basket full of food. The food smelled very foreign and I put it in the refrigerator and forgot all about it. The next day I threw the food in the bin, washed out the Tupperware containers, put them back in the basket and brought them back to the Shah’s. Mrs Shah asked whether I had enjoyed the food and somewhat unprepared for the question, I said that I had.

This seemed at the time to be a big mistake because Mrs Shah then proceeded to drop a basket of food to the house every second day. Every time I threw the food in the bin I felt more and more guilty about the waste of food, until one day, after about 10 days, I braced myself and re-heated a curry and some rice and tried it. I thought I would hate it, but instead it re-awakened memories of my childhood in Singapore, where we had a cook from Sri Lanka. I actually enjoyed the meal, more than I had enjoyed a meal for weeks.

I felt guilty about all the time and money that the Shah family were spending to cook food for me but they said that It was Ramadan, and they had a religious responsibility to help people during this time.

The thing is though – their kindness didn’t stop after Ramadan, it continued for weeks. One Friday afternoon, when I was bringing back the Tupperware to the Shah’s, Mr Shah started to joke about the England-Pakistan cricket match, which was going to be played that evening. We were both sure that our teams would beat the other, and Mrs Shah suddenly said;

“Why don’t you come and have dinner with us and watch the match?”

I didn’t want to, it was a step too far for me, but they had been so kind and I didn’t want to offend them by refusing. And so it was that I arrived on their doorstep at 6 pm, with a bottle of wine in my hand – a rather badly thought out gift.

We sat down together and had a short dinner. The conversation was short and then we settled down to watch the match, their children arrived, one by one, with their own children, and everybody sat down to watch the match.

Predictably Pakistan had a great victory and the family was jubilant.

Mr Shah couldn’t resist teasing me about their great win, to which I responded with “Bloody Pakistani’s!”. There was a brief silence where you could hear a pin thinking about dropping, and then Mr Shah, Mohammed, replied; “Bloody English!”

Another long pause while the pin finally drops, and then we were all laughing, laughing until the tears rolled down our faces.

Now three years have passed. I see my Pakistani neighbours almost every day, sometimes just a hello in the street, sometimes they drop around for a cup of tea, often bringing food, and sometimes I call round to them. I don’t want our relationship to be one sided, so I try to help where I can – I taught three of their grandchildren to play the piano, I helped their oldest granddaughter get her first job, as a solicitor at my old law firm, Avery & Avery.

My own children come to visit more often than they did, maybe once every two or three months, and they too have become friends with my Pakistani neighbours.

And so today is Christmas Day. My own children are not here, my son is in Afghanistan with the army and my daughter is with her husband and children at his parents’ home. They both called me this morning.

I have been invited round for Christmas lunch. Mrs Shah invited me several weeks ago, she said that she wanted to cook for me on my “special Christian day”, she has been hinting that turkey might be on the menu.

When I think about the path I have followed these past few years I am full of amazement. The Muslim neighbours that I ignored for years have in the end been kinder and more “Christian” than any of my Christian friends, more so even than my own family. They continue as a family, supporting each other, finding time to support me, often arguing with each other, but still a family.

This was the beginning of my second life, adopted in the midst of my grief by my “bloody Pakistani” neighbours and their children and grandchildren – now an honourary Shah – with white skin, an English accent and an Irish name.

For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn? – Jane Austin