A bar with no hats

Roy Kerridge

Handsworth, Birmingham Most people have an instinctive liking for their own kind' is a remark that is often heard nowadays. Well, all I can say is that 'most people' must seriously be lacking in a sense of adventure! I have never been able to discover who my own kind are, so on the day that I arrived at Handsworth, the immigrant district of Birmingham, I came prepared to meet any kind of person who happened to be there. Behind a gaudy strip of ramshackle mini- cab offices and night clubs I found a house where 'Rooms for Working Men' were advertised.

`Once you've paid, there's no refund,' my landlady told me nervously, as I gave her my rent. She was a middle-aged woman in glasses, with a 'matey' attitude, and soon she was calling me by my first name. Lodging houses such as hers thrived in the early Sixties, when migrant labour- ers were in their heyday. Now she was content with her four regular lodgers and the odd stray like myself. It was an odd house, with tall creaky stairways, cup- boards, landings, kitchen sinks and trap doors in unexpected places, and a strong musty smell. Nearly everything was painted in institutional creamy yellow, flaking in some places, and there were very few windows. My room was windowless, but a hatchway in the high ceiling let in some stale air from the corridor. The Victorian furniture was attractive but flimsy with age, and the sheets on the enormous bed were very clean.

When I had unpacked, I went in search of the lounge. One door opened onto the mini-cab office, where a busy group of Indians sat gathered round a switchboard taking messages. At length I found my destination, down some stairs, through the kitchen, and up another stair. It was a tiny bare room with a wooden table, chairs and a television set. All the lodgers were watching television in the dark. When my eyes had grown accustomed to the light from the screen, I found my fellow lodgers consisted of a tall young man with long hair, a long nose and a shallow, petulant expression; a seedy, simple but kind- hearted middle-aged couple, and a stout brown-skinned man of indeterminate race called Mr Awad. A merry-faced man, he may have been a Sudanese. They all seemed to get on very well together. Next morning, as I greeted my landlady, who now wielded a sizzling frying pan, I found that the lounge was also the break- fast room. Although the rooms were sup- posed to be for working men, nobody there seemed to work. All were preoccupied with horse racing, and propped newspal," ers open in front of them, mentally placing bets as they ate. Mr Awad wore a bright orange hat with a feather in it, and seemed quite knowledgeable about 'form'. ' `Roll-ups' or `roll,-up bets' seemed to be much favoured by everyone, to my inYsti" fication. I had always thought roll-ups were cigarettes. But then my knowledge of horse racing is in a primitive, undeveloped stage, as I still can't make out how a horse can be backed 'each way' when it can only run one way at a time. Unless, of course, it's a pushme-pullyou, from Doctor Dolittle. Clive, the tall young man, seemed to dominate the company, and his complaints, of ill-health were met with murmurs of sympathy. He appeared to live by betting; and prefaced some remarks with 'when was in the nick.' Importantly, he made a long-distance call from the telephone be- hind my chair, and booked some col- leagues into a lodging house at Shepherd's Bush, London.

`It's a DHSS house,' he reassured them' Outside, in the blessed fresh air of Soho Road, I made for the public library, where I am well-known, as I do much of MY writing there. A dark-panelled Victorian building, it has a jolly, informal atmos- phere, a home-from-home for Handsworth youth, who are mostly of Indian or West Indian origin. Slogans about Khalistan are painted outside. In a corner of one of the enormous bookshelves, I found a cheeky' looking Indian girl of 15 or so, curled uP comfortably between the books as she chatted to a friend.

`You're a funny-looking book!' I addres- sed the shelf-dweller.

`Yes, aren't I?' she replied in a Birming- ham accent.

'Can I take you out?' In reply, the 'book' only giggled, but in any case I am not a card-carrying member of this library. At the table where I was writing, I fell into conversation with a boy of eleven called Mohammed. We had met before.

'Please call at my house,' he said, writing down the address. 'My parents will give You nice food.'

'Thank you,' I said. 'What is that lan- guage you are talking with your friends?' At once a hurt, stunned look came upon his face, there was a pause and he answered 'French, I think.' However, I am inclined to think it was Urdu. Being an `English foreigner' can be very difficult for some children, who may yearn to be completely English and yet wish to remain loyal members of a non-English family. Over in the children's library, three hefty, cheerful girls of West Indian origin were loudly practising their Jamaican accents. Their normal speech was pure 'rum, but as some other Brummies re- garded them as 'foreign' they may have felt obliged to have an accent to match. However, whenever one of them said a word or two, the others would break down laughing and shout, 'You sound like me Mum, you know!'

A long street of little shops, with Edwar- dian terraces branching off on either side, S°110 Road is a Punjabi district, where greybeard Sikhs converse loudly in shop d°01-ways and West Indians hurry in and out of the many pubs. Whether you go in the Barrel, the Ivy Tree or the Frighted Horse, the barmaid is sure to be of West Indian descent, and the barman to be a Middle-aged West Indian. Some of these barmen seemed rather gangster-like to me. On Thursday 8 November 1984, there had been an enormous fight, almost a riot, in the middle of Soho Road, stopping traffic. west side had been Indian youths, the other West Indian. The incident was not re- Potted in the national press, perhaps be- cause it made no sense to the Guardian mind.

Musing on this, I heard a voice call my name, and looked up to see Clive from the lodging house. He invited me for a drink, along with two stumpy little old men who hung around with him. To my surprise, the ,conversation in the pub was all about petting slips and bookies' runners. Bets were written on pieces of paper and drop- ped surreptitiously into a black cauldron in the mock-rustic pub fireplace. Clive fished out one to show me. Why anyone bothered With this elaborate blend of a KGB letter- box and a Celtic Cauldron of Plenty when betting shops have long been legal, I am still at a loss to understand. As Clive's conversation was way above my head, I turned instead to a middle-aged Jamaican in an impeccable black suit, and said how much I liked his tie.

`That's a Falklands tie, my son in the Royal Navy give it me,' he told me. 'He went there with his ship after the war, but he's at Portsmouth now. You see this pub? It not always posh like this, you know. Back in 1956 when I first come here from Jamaica, it a real rough place. Now back home, you don't buy rum by the glass. You buy a bockle [bottle] for the evening, and ask for three glasses to share it with the other drinkers. So when I come in here, I ask for a bockle of rum and three glasses, and the landlord asks what the glasses dem are for? He explains you can't do that, an' I had to take the bockle to me friend's room and drink it! Tse! At that time, Jamaica under the British flag, so they ought to do things just the same, isn't it? Why the same flag and different behaviour?'

The poor man seemed still to be disillu- sioned with England over this misunder- standing. At the time he had probably been disillusioned with the rum also. Jamaican rum is 120 per cent proof, so powerful that it can turn fruit juice back into fruit, an alchemist's dream come true. Such rum cannot be put in mango or orange juice, as the juice curdles into a hard fruit-like ball. It has to be drunk with milk, and if it were one per cent stronger it would turn the milk into a cow.

Escaping from Clive, and declining a ticket for a reggae dance from the Jamaican, I decided to call on young Mohammed's family and pay my respects. It was growing dark when I found the terraced street where he lived, and I couldn't see the numbers on the houses. An Englishman in his fifties greeted me as an old friend, a companion in misfortune, an attitude often encountered where white people are few. When he heard I was looking for an Indian family, he seemed hurt and disappointed.

I have a Jamaican friend who drives me through Handsworth as fast as he can, in disgust at the sight of all the Indians. `There are no white people at all here,' he once commented in scandalised tones.

Finding the house, I was embarrassed to see, through the net curtain, a white figure rising and falling in prayer to Allah. When prayers at last seemed to be over, I knocked and was made very welcome by the kindly Bashir family. Soon I was sitting in their cosy front room eating hot chapat- tis from a rolled-up towel. The towel kept the second chapatti warm while I was eating the first one and dipping it into a dish of meat, oily but delicious. Moham- med seemed rather shy in front of his family. His father, who was out of work, was a thin anxious man with a moustache, and Mohammed's mother seemed hard- working and hollow-eyed. Both appeared delighted to see me, all smiles. The other three children were a small boy called Nadeem, and two sparkling-eyed teenage girls, Tasveer and Tasleen. All asked me questions about London. They had been to Pakistan on family visits, but preferred England.

Tasleen, the eldest girl, who wore a purple sari and looked like a young prin- cess, proudly introduced me to her grand- mother. At once I recognised the figure I had seen through the window. A gentle, frail old lady, the grandmother appeared to be dressed in swaddling clothes of white lace, the dress of an elderly widow. Know- ing no English, she smiled and bobbed, a bride-like veil falling away from her face.

• 'She is very religious,' Tasleeen said approvingly. 'Now she's doing her rosary.'

The old lady told the beads with energy, counting the Suras she had learned from the Koran. At last it was time for me to go.

`I don't think I'll stay in the same boarding house again,' I said, for my room had been airless.

`Why, are there black people there?' Tasleen inquired.

Back at the Rooms for Working Men, I found that Clive and the married couple were holding a conference in the lounge. Mr Awad was not there.

`Twenty Indians came into the bar after you'd gone,' Clive told me. 'They spoilt everything. God, I really hate Indians, they make me feel sick!'

I was surprised, as I had left him talking cheerfully to the Jamaican, in spite of his having told me that a gang of West Indian youths had held a knife to his throat one night and robbed him. Another man I had met who had been robbed in the same w4, probably by the same gang, had developed a hatred for all West Indians as a result. Clive, however, reserved his rancour for Indians.

'I tell you what,' said the middle-aged man; inspired. 'Why not have a bar where no hats are allowed, and call a turban a hat? There would be nothing colour pre- judiced about it. Anyone could come in if they had no hat on, so all the Sikhs in turbans would stay outside, and all the white people could go in. How's that for an idea?'

`Brilliant!' cried Clive. 'Yes, not colour prejudiced, but no hats. I like it! Mind you, Mr Awad here is all right. Someone ought to tell him it's a woman's hat he's wearing. Never mind, he could take it off if he came in our bar. Yes, a bar with no hats, and a turban is a hat, that's got possibilities . .

I went up to bed, leaving them rhapso- dising far into the night on Whites Only bars with no hats, the walls no doubt papered with betting slips. Personally, I would be sorry to see Mr Awad lose his hat.