FROM DEAD END TO EAST END

Nigel Cousins left the

west for a new life in east London

THE voice of necessity tells people when they have to migrate. I first heard it in the oily tones of a Bristol head teacher to whom I had applied rather desperately for a job. He explained that many felt the call to join 'us' in Avon, that competition was keen and that I should not feel put out that, on this occasion, my application for the junior and temporary post at his school had been unsuccessful. His slight south- eastern commuter-belt drawl somehow emphasised the smugness of the proprieto- rial 'us'. This alien was expelling me from my home town. I had heard this sort of thing at too many interviews. What he said was true, there were no jobs for me in Bristol. I would have to migrate to London to find work.

Friends said I must be mad moving 'up there'. There was snorted laughter at the imagined Jack-the-Ripper horrors of East End life, at the thought of wild pupils ineffectually herded between industrial ac- tions by teachers who were either loony lefties or camp and hungry for converts. I put on a brave face, but their comments, being graphic restatements of my own fears, made me shudder. I arranged accommodation and landed a temporary job during the summer holidays at my first interview in a school in a north-east London borough. It was built in the 1890s as a grammar school and is now a girls' comprehensive with a multi-cultural intake. The hall still boasts honours boards listing the achievements of girls long since dead or become grandmothers or matrons. They stop abruptly in the early Sixties, presumably marking the time at which egalitarianism set in. In the pretty grounds is a miniature Greek theatre, a legacy from the Thirties when there was a rampant classicist on the staff. These details charmed me but did not cure my appre- hension at what the current intake of girls might be like, so different, I imagined, from those inscribed on the honours boards.

In the meantime I took immediately to living in the East End. I felt immensely at my ease. All the clichés about the East End as a cultural melting pot are true. Nobody stares at you if you are a stranger; they've seen it all before, and, besides, they all have too much to do. The shops, small businesses and market stalls present a Dickensian compendium of human types. The constant calm bustle imposes its own order on things and dampens potential rowdiness. The public telephones round here are in constant use by people speaking a perfect babel of tongues. Passionate Italians, tempestuous Spaniards, fantasti- cally dressed people speaking unrecognis- able languages. The other night I saw an African using the telephone in our street, his voice boomed and he laughed with his whole body in the way no Englishman can; he filled the rainy road with the expansive warmth of a jovial Zulu king.

The girls I was to teach amazed me. Polite, courteous, sparky, participative, sharp London girls with high expectations of what a teacher should be like. They seem to hail ultimately from virtually everywhere: England, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Turkey, Greece, North Afri- ca, Italy. One of the most successful subjects at A level is Urdu. The registers I call sound like perfumed litanies of names from the Arabian Nights: Shazia, Nazia, Zurka, Binnur, Kade, Panteletsa. But it is dangerous to exoticise, as I was crisply reminded when I spoke to a girl whose name I found particularly striking: `My goodness. What an unusual name,' I mumbled. 'Er, um how did you get that?'

`It's from Cyprus,' came the reply. 'And it isn't unusual to me.'

Each day I pick up bits about languages and cultures new to me. Muslim girls, who are mostly very religious, are particularly keen to talk about their way of life. The diversity of the girls I teach and the community in which I live is a constant challenge to fixed beliefs. It has opened my mind. But there are tensions beneath the surface. I've heard of Asian girls calling a black girl 'Mackie'. I've heard of black girls who hang around with white girls being called 'coconuts' (black on the outside, white on the inside). And it is true that girls tend to hang around in predominantly racial groups. But much mixing does go on. And the girls are perfectly aware of what racism is and quick to condemn it. Most children I've taught have disliked racism because it so fragrantly flies in the face of one of the strongest moral beliefs they have — the idea of fairness.

The school is orderly and the staff no different from any staff in any school, except that they are a little more open- minded. School uniform is enforced and gives the girls a smartness and homogenei- ty that somehow highlights the beautiful variety of facial types. The girls practice the amusing game of personalising the uniform by buying the most up-to-date clothes possible in the uniform colour. Flared trousers are 'in' at the moment.

Most Asian girls wear shalwar kameez in the school colours. The shalwar is a kind of loose pair of trousers and the kameez a sort of shirt of tunic. New styles, with endless names, are forever coming into fashion. Many originate in Pakistan, but some start off in Britain.

All the girls seem to drip with earrings and chains and clank with bangles. Asian girls wear elegant and becoming non-punk nose decorations in gold. It is a mixture of multi-cultural ornamentation and the tradi- tional cocky East End obsession with jewellery. There are a few stories about girls being mugged on their way home from school for their gems, but these might just be rumours fostered by staff who would prefer them to dress in plainer style.

There are girls here who are at home in two or three languages; who are as happy eating beans and chips as munching their way through Asian wedding feasts. They will keep Ramadan and join in with a knees-up at Christmas. In one first-year lesson I persuaded the girls to talk about their lives; stories about going to the local ice rink or McDonalds were effortlessly mixed in with folk tales involving ghosts, magic and poisonous snakes brought back from holidays in India and Pakistan.

The families of the girls I teach, and many of the people around me have all, like me, heard the voice of historical or economic necessity and migrated to Lon- don. And sometimes, such as when Amin expelled the Asians from Uganda, the voice has been infinitely harsher than the voice of the Bristol head teacher who sent me on my way. All of us are having to make a home for ourselves in the East End. No doubt as I live here longer I will become more aware of complexities and tensions. But my first feelings are of a kind of belonging and an upsurge of energy.

Something in a piece one of my GCSE students wrote struck a chord:

My mum when she had to come to London, was very afraid and lonely and didn't want to leave Nairobi. Now she has become used to London and says that she will never be able to live in Nairobi. . . .

There is so much time to spare in Nairobi and we Londoners are not used to sitting around.