7 - Volunteering

But you must not think that this sad episode with the landlord was representative of my interactions with the Asian community in Bradford. Far from it. If anything, the landlord's attitude was a reminder of what it had been like everywhere for most women, up to a few decades back. I could even remember how my own parents had first reacted when they learnt of my first boyfriend. It was not such a long time ago when western women were expected not to leave the family home until they married. But to go back to my connections with Asians in Bradford, I had actually started to get quite involved, a few months earlier, in doing some voluntary work within Bradford's Asian community. A few of my English friends, including Tony, were also involved in teaching English to Asian immigrants. Devoting some of their time to do something worthwhile was common among English young people. I had immediately liked this generosity and wanted to do my bit. Looking back, what strikes me is that, despite our utter poverty -we managed to eat properly but we didn't have enough money for new clothes; luckily there were quite a few second-hand shops in Bradford where one could buy a jumper for 50 pence, I remember wearing one of those, a purple one, for months, if not years- we felt privileged enough to want to help those in need. And, there is no doubt that we were privileged. Think of it: we had access to higher education for free! What an amazing privilege compared to what is happening in today's Britain.

The Home Office had set up a nationwide programme of teaching English to immigrant adults who did not master the language. Women were a special target because because it was a known fact that a lot of them were homebound while their children went to school, which put them at risk of being quickly disconnected both from the new society in which they had settled, but also from their own children. I was quite impressed at the time by the efforts made by the British government to ease the Asian immigrants into British society; I had not witnessed anything of that scale in France. In Britain, for a few decades, they recruited teachers who made a career out of teaching English as a second language, rather than as a foreign language. Methods were developed, linguists wrote books about it and it provided jobs to many people who liked the idea of teaching well-behaved and subdued adults in small groups rather than classrooms full of unruly teenagers who could send one on the edge of a nervous breakdown in not time. Obviously, the methods had to be very different from those applying to the teaching of a foreign language to kids who spoke the same language as their teacher. In a word, a whole set of devices and procedures had to be developed in order to meet the needs of non-English speakers now residents in the UK. Those needs were huge and one way to achieve more was to resort to volunteer workers, especially from the student population, which was, generally speaking, in those days, at least so far as I could tell, a generous lot, aware that the state was being generous with them. This volunteering was organized by qualified teachers who provided a training to volunteers and guided them. At first, I imagined my application would be turned down given that my own English was far from perfect and that I used to speak with a heavy French accent. But when I expressed my anxieties to Pam, my trainer, she only burst out laughing and exclaimed: "Don't worry, you'll teach them to speak English with a respectable accent!" Of course that comment was not to be taken at face value. I had already understood that Pam, like most other teachers who had chosen that field of work, could not have been more politically correct than she already was. But her comment reflected the mainstream opinion in the British population towards accents. The crux of the matter however was that the issue of accents was the least of their problems given that, most of the women stuck at home, some of whom under strict orders from their husbands not to leave the house, did not speak a word of English. Indeed, learning some basic Urdu was necessary for qualified teachers and volunteers alike in order to manage to get some explanations across to the potential students.

To this day, some twenty-five years later, I still remember a few set phrases in Urdu and I occasionally show off whenever I go to a Pakistani or Indian restaurant. I still remember the 'student' I had been allotted. On our first meeting, I felt as shy as she seemed to be, an intruder in her home. She smiled a lot and offered me Indian tea and biscuits. What struck me was how unsuited for the bitter cold of the north of England her flimsy sari seemed to be. The bright colours, yellow, red, orange or blue, of Asian women's striking saris dotting the dark-grey cityscape were in themselves emblematic of a clash of cultures.

I will never know how much English I managed to teach that lady through my twice-weekly visits, although I do remember that she ended up understanding a post-office form and the value of the coins in her purse. Once, while we were looking at a pound-note, I remember being struck when I realized that the portrait of the Queen did not mean anything to her. Meanwhile, her children attended schools in Bradford and were learning fast to speak English with a yorkshire accent. The gap between her and them would not cease widening. I couldn't help thinking that there lied the root of much turmoil to come. What I remember clearly is my unease and my feeling somewhat daunted by the sheer scale of the task: I was never going to teach her more than a few fragments of English. The irony of the situation was that we were both, her and me, on the same boat so to speak, at least linguistically speaking: on a quest to grasp the subtleties of Shakespeare's language, only I was a few steps ahead of her...