Jane and I went to a bar. It was a cross between a pub and a night-club. At the entrance the bouncer laid his hands on my shoulders and told me I could not go in.
‘Why not?’ I asked.
‘You’re not wearing any trousers.’
I looked down at my legs in astonishment.
‘Are you sure?’ I asked.
‘No trousers,’ he said, ‘no entry.’
Jeans, it seems, were not acceptable.
We walked on to another place. This time we got in. It too was very smart and entirely white. The young men had dressed up in open-necked shirts, Topshop grey slacks and Ravel loafers. They stood around quietly in groups. The young women had also gone to a lot of trouble: some of them looked like models, in their extravagant dresses and high heels. But the women and the men were not talking to each other. We had a drink and left. Jane said she wanted me to see a working men’s club.
The working men’s club turned out to be near an estate, populated, like most Bradford estates, mostly by whites. The Asians tended to own their homes. They had difficulty acquiring council houses or flats, and were harassed and abused when they moved on to white estates.
The estate was scruffy: some of the flats were boarded up, rubbish blew about; the balconies looked as if they were about to crash off the side of the building. The club itself was in a large modern building. We weren’t members of course, but the man on the door agreed to let us in.
There were three large rooms. One was like a pub; another was a snooker room. In the largest room at least 150 people sat around tables in families. At one end was a stage. A white man in evening dress was banging furiously at a drum-kit. Another played the organ. The noise was unbearable.
At the bar, it was mostly elderly men. They sat beside each other. But they didn’t talk. They had drawn, pale faces and thin, narrow bodies that expanded dramatically at the stomach and then disappeared into the massive jutting band of their trousers. They had little legs. They wore suits, the men. They had dressed up for the evening.
Here there were no Asians either, and I wanted to go to an Asian bar, but it was getting late and the bars were closing, at ten-thirty as they do outside London. We got a taxi and drove across town. The streets got rougher and rougher. We left the main road and suddenly were in a leafy, almost suburban area. The houses here were large, occupied I imagined by clerks, insurance salesmen, business people. We stopped outside a detached three-storey house that seemed to be surrounded by an extraordinary amount of darkness and shadow. There was one light on, in the kitchen, and the woman inside was Sonia Sutcliffe, the wife of the Yorkshire Ripper, an ex-schoolteacher. I thought of Peter Sutcliffe telling his wife he was the Yorkshire Ripper. He had wanted to tell her himself; he insisted on it. Many of his victims had come from the surrounding area.
The surrounding area was mostly an Asian district and here the pubs stayed open late, sometimes until two in the morning. There were no trouser rules.
During the day in this part of town the Asian kids would be playing in the streets. The women, most of them uneducated, illiterate, unable to speak English, would talk in doorways as they did where I was staying.
It was around midnight, and men were only now leaving their houses — the women remaining behind with the children — and walking down the street to the pub. Jane said it stayed open late with police permission. It gave the police an opportunity to find out what was going on: their spies and informers could keep an eye on people. Wherever you went in Bradford, people talked about spies and informers: who was and who wasn’t. I’d never known anything like it, but then I’d never known any other city, except perhaps Karachi, in which politics was such a dominant part of daily life. Apparently there was money to be made working for the police and reporting what was going on: what the Asian militants were doing; what the racists were doing; who the journalists were talking to; what attacks or demonstrations were planned; what vigilante groups were being formed.
The pub was packed with Asian men and they still kept arriving. They knew each other and embraced enthusiastically. There were few women and all but three were white. Asian men and white women kissed in corners. As we squeezed in, Jane said she knew several white women who were having affairs with Asian men, affairs that had sometimes gone on for years. The men had married Pakistani women, often out of family pressure, and frequently the women were from the villages. The Asian women had a terrible time in Bradford.
The music was loud and some people were dancing, elbow to elbow, only able in the crush to shake their heads and shuffle their feet. There was a lot of very un-Islamic drinking. I noticed two Asian girls. They stood out, with their bright jewellery and pretty clothes. They were with Asian men. Their men looked inhibited and the girls left early. Jane, who was a journalist, recognised a number of prostitutes in the pub. She’d interviewed them at the time of the Ripper. One stood by Jane and kept pulling at her jumper. ‘Where did you get that jumper? How much was it?’ she kept saying. Jane said the prostitutes hadn’t stopped work during the time of the Ripper. They couldn’t afford to. Instead, they’d worked in pairs, one girl fucking the man, while the other stood by with a knife in her hand.
In 1993, when J. B. Priestley was preparing his English Journey, he found three Englands. There was guide-book England, of palaces and forests; nineteenth-century industrial England of factories and suburbs; and contemporary England of by-passes and suburbs. Now, half a century later, there is another England as welclass="underline" the inner city.
In front of me, in this pub, there were five or six gay men and two lesbian couples. Three white kids wore black leather jackets and had mohicans: their mauve, red and yellow hair stood up straight for a good twelve inches and curved across their heads like a feather glued on its thin edge to a billiard ball. And there were the Asians. This was not one large solid community with a shared outlook, common beliefs and an established form of life; not Orwell’s ‘one family with the wrong members in control’. It was diverse, disparate, strikingly various.
Jane introduced me to a young Asian man, an activist and local political star from his time of being on trial as one of the Bradford Twelve. I was pleased to meet him. In 1981, a group of twelve youths, fearing a racial attack in the aftermath of the terrible assault on Asians by skinheads in Southall in London, had made a number of petrol bombs. But they were caught and charged under the Explosives Act with conspiracy — a charge normally intended for urban terrorists. It was eleven months before they were acquitted.
I greeted him enthusiastically. He, with less enthusiasm, asked me if I’d written a film called My Beautiful Laundrette. I said yes, I had, and he started to curse me: I was a fascist, a reactionary. He was shouting. Then he seemed to run out of words and pulled back to hit me. But just as he raised his fist, his companions grabbed his arm and dragged him away.
I said to Jane that I thought the next day we should do something less exhausting. We could visit a school.
*
I had heard that there was to be a ceremony for a new school that was opening, the Zakariya Girls School. The large community hall was already packed with three hundred Asian men when I arrived. Then someone took my arm, to eject me, I thought. But instead I was led to the front row, where I found myself sitting next to three white policemen and assorted white dignitaries, both women and men, in smart Sunday-school clothes.