Page 13 - James Caan - The Real Deal

1 · Brick Lane

He didn’t have to pay rent until he found a job, but of course
the work available for immigrants was hard and poorly paid. He
started work in a leather garments factory and took all the
overtime he could get. I think he earned £7 or £8 a week and lived
on about £1.50. For him, working in London was no different
from working in Saudi or Iran: the aim was to make as much
money as possible and then go back home to Lahore. It must have
been very lonely for him, and he didn’t want to be apart from his
family for any longer than he had to. So he saved for the air fares
to fly us to London so we could be together. Although he had
started to think he might spend longer in Britain than he had
stayed anywhere else, there was still no doubt in his mind that the
move was temporary.
I am still amazed at what my father achieved in those years. Not
only did he save enough money by 1962 for our tickets and the
deposit for a house, but he also started his own business. He had
spotted that the market for leather was changing: thanks to
rock’n’roll and movie stars, leather jackets were hot property, and
he started making them directly for the West End boutiques. What
makes this all the more remarkable is that he still didn’t speak
much English and couldn’t read or write English either. To this
day, I don’t understand how you can run a successful business if
you can’t fill out an invoice, read the letter from the bank or write
a cheque. It was an incredible achievement.
At home in Brick Lane, my parents spoke Punjabi to each other
and mostly Urdu to the other Asians they met. I grew up
understanding both languages, but my parents always told us to
speak to them in English. With the three of us at school and
nursery, English quickly became the dominant language in our
house. These days, the Brick Lane area of the East End is known
for its sari shops and curry houses, but in the 1960s it was still a
predominantly Jewish neighbourhood (the mosque that’s there
now was a synagogue then), and integrating was so natural that

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