Sarfraz Manzoor celebrating a childhood birthday
(Picture: Sarfraz Manzoor)It is the summer of 1982. Adam Ant is at No 1, Margaret Thatcher is in 10 Downing Street and I am turning 11. I celebrate my birthday the same way as I marked all my previous birthdays: a dining table with a sponge cake, a few samosas, a plate of crisps and surrounded by my immediate family. We live in Luton, my dad works on the production line in a car factory and money is tight. I don’t complain about not having presents on my birthday but that does not stop me envying my white friends and their freedoms. I am in my final year of junior school where I am one of only a handful of brown kids in my year. We live in a very white part of town but my parents are forever warning me to stay away from white people. I am told that they have different values from us, they have a different culture and they will never accept us. They are white people. That is why I am not allowed to invite any of my friends to my birthday party because my friends are white. Birthdays are boring and birthdays are scary because with each passing year I get closer to being an adult and all the grown-up horrors that await me: a sensible job and an arranged marriage. I want to travel the world, do something interesting with my life and marry someone I actually love but those things don’t happen to working-class Luton boys from Pakistani Muslim backgrounds. Those are the things I secretly wish for when I close my eyes and blow out the candles in the summer of 1982 on my 11th birthday.
One of the privileges of getting older is that one can chart how the story turned out and compare the hopes and fears of youth with the reality. It is now 40 years since the summer of 1982. In many ways the reality turned out so much better than what I feared. I did not follow my father on to the car production line. I left Luton, moved to London and established a career in the media. That would have been thoroughly unimaginable to my younger self. I remember visiting Luton Central Library as a young boy and browsing the biography section, wondering where the stories of folks like me were. Today my memoir, Greetings from Bury Park, is stocked in the same library I used to visit as a child. These personal successes were only possible because of the ways that Britain was changing. The election of a Labour govern - ment in 1997 was pivotal in promoting a more tolerant and progressive version of Britain. The bad old days felt con - signed to the past and by the time I was in my 30s in the early 00s Britain increasingly felt like a nation that not only tolerated but actually celebrated differences. It was towards the end of that decade, in the summer of 2008, that I met a woman. We started dating and two years later we were mar - ried, the following year we had our first child and five years later a second. I had grown up resigned to having an arranged marriage but again life had turned out better than I had feared: this was a love marriage and, even more aston - ishingly, it was to a woman who was not a Muslim. It was easy to believe, raising our children in our liberal, north London bubble that the progress that had been made in the past four decades was permanent. It was tempting to take it all for granted. Tempting, but dangerous.
