Saturday, September 8, 2007

The Past

I don't live in the past but the past lives in me. Sometimes, for the most obscure of reasons, an image from long ago flashes across my mind. Often a place. For a lot of people the place where they were born and spent their childhood comes to have special emotional, even dreamlike, significance in later life. My childhood place, where I spent the first 20 years of my life, was Southall. As soon as you say the name it asserts its current political and cultural bone fides: an Asian centre; the riot and the target of white racism.

First, let me say I am white, but I am not a racist and I do not intend to contribute to the ongoing racist rant about the changes which have taken place in Southall. Sadly, there are plenty of other opportunities for that on the web. Hell, now you hear complaints by Southall-born Punjabis about Somalis and, no doubt, the Somalis or someone else are are giving out about the latest arrivals - Albanians or whoever.

What is true for me, though, is that, as a white person who grew up in Southall in the 1950s and 1960s and was in or around the area for some of the 1970s, I would find it very hard to find my younger self, or my family, reflected in its new reality - not that that would stop me from getting involved in its newer incarnation. Over the years I had many friends there who came from many places. But it is there that I was born, four generations of my family have lived and, like it or not, it will always be what the Irish call my 'homeplace'. My connection to the past of the place now, like many other white 'moved aways', as well as the shrinking minority of older white people who still live thereabouts, is very much to a past now covered over by the healthy cultural and economic expression of the communities who have lived there since the immigration began in earnest, in the 1960s. The ethnic British (plus Irish and Polish) cultural history of Southall up to, say, 1980, to take an arbitrary point, carried in the memory of those who grew up and lived there, is dispersing and dying.

For many years I was intolerant of the problems faced by my own relatives: working class people who, living in their own place, the place where they had been born and raised, were unable to live their own kind of lives without feeling an increasing sense of difficulty or a sense of displacement. I argued that all this was a product itself of intolerance, xenophobia and narrowness, born of the imperial shadows. I was wrong, the problem is more complex.

There are many innacuracies out there about post-war Southall. Take Wikipedia, for example, which says in its entry on Southall, "1950 was when the first group of Asians arrived in Southall, due to the closeness of Heathrow airport". Perhaps some Asians came in 1950, but very few and the proximity of Heathrow was a marginal factor. Where did Wikipedia get its facts from? Has the person who wrote that any source for it? Have they any idea of the world in 1950? The kind of people who came to work in the R.Woolf Rubber factory, (which was pretty much the first to source labour abroad, and nowhere near as early as 1950 in numbers) could not have afforded a plane ticket, perhaps the Woolf brothers paid for plane tickets but I doubt it. Cheap air trips for ordinary people weren't even a gleam in Freddie Laker's eye in 1950.

The real immigration to the Southall area started only towards the end of the 1950s and included a good proportion of Afro-Caribbean people, who came by boat. Only in the early 1960s did immigrants from the Indian sub-continent come to have numbers sufficient to predominate in one part of Southall - the bit bounded by South Road on one side and Hamborough Road on the other and between the Broadway and Beaconsfield Road - and it was work that brought them. When I was in primary school in the mid-1950s, in Tudor Road, in the heart of what is now the 'Asian' area, there were no more than a few Asian born children. I remember the first south-Asian boy into my secondary school in or around 1962. It took some time for the men who came to work in the factories to be joined by wives and children and longer for Southall born Asians to come on stream.

I also remember, well into the 1960s, pubs like the Beaconsfield Arms and the Three Horseshoes having a strong Afro-Caribbean presence in some bars. The Beaconsfield used to have a tiny bar in the middle, which no doubt was the 'snug' before that, where Caribbean guys used to play dominoes in their own way. Don't forget the contribution that was later to be made to music by Southall based sound systems and groups like Misty in Roots. But, go back further, to the 1950 mentioned in Wikipedia and who were the real immigrants already in Southall or arriving then? They were Polish and Irish and people from Wales and Scotland. The street where I grew up had families like those. What few people from the Sub-Continent and West Indies there were, were living in sporadic rented houses, separated from each other and the predominantly white town. It took a while for groups like the Indian Workers Association to get off the ground and find places for people to socialize. For years - well into the 60s - Indian films were shown only on Sundays in a rented local cinema. Getting permanent places of worship took even longer, shops nearly as long. Even in the mid 1960s the 'Pak Butchers' and shops like it were the exception not the rule.
In 1950 Southall still had something between a suburban and a semi-rural feel. There were fields nearby, the remains of the brickfields and kilns were there in the Hayes direction, there were market gardens as well as many factories and workplaces. In the 1950s employment did not centre on Heathrow, hardly anyone from Southall worked there. You could more or less stroll into the edges of the airport and see planes parked on grass verges; (I did as a boy when I was planespotting). Electric trolleybuses ran up and down the Uxbridge Road - the successors to the trams - and Hillingdon was the local hospital, not the Ealing Hospital, (which was still a playing field behind a high brick wall on the edge of St Bernard's), or the King Edward Hospital in West Ealing which was later to move westwards and become the Ealing Hospital. In the early1950s, in some parts of Southall, houses still had no electricity and street lamps were gas and lit by a lamplighter. I remember them going around on bikes and I remember gaslight in the council house where I lived.

Massive fogs often hung over the place and factory sirens could be heard marking the beginning and end of the working day. Large numbers of people walked and cycled to work with lunch boxes and flasks and white working class allotment culture could be found in various corners, as well as fishing in the canal. Bread was delivered from Fowler's bakery by horsedrawn wagon and George, the travelling greengrocer, used the same means of transport. The football pitches in the various parks and recs were well used at the weekend and a good crowd turned out to watch Southall play in the Athenian League, if they weren't up the road to QPR, Fulham or Brentford.

Despite what my son says I'm not old yet and all this and a lot more lies within my lifetime. This is what I'll try to write about, to bring out of my mind the people, places and moods of the Southall I remember and can never go back to, not only because of time and distance but because the human and cultural landscape has altered so much. I view with interest the cultural commentaries now coming from Asian Southallians-Hownslovians-Haysians about an age when they grew up in the area, really not that long after me.

If there is regret let it be the normal and trivial personal regret of times past and lost, but also, let those of us who come a little longer ago from Southall's past, it's English past, be able to write about it and remember it without the patina of racism.