A boy in a salwar kameez is playing cricket under a line of washing in the narrow backyard of a terraced house. He’s found a broken paling to use as a bat to hit a plastic football. The problem with England, he says in Urdu, is that there is not enough space. On the other hand, it’s good because there aren’t any goats.
Imran is 11 and has been living in rural Pakistan with his grandmother since he was 6; now he has come to a village near Peterborough in the East Midlands to join his mother and his new stepfather, whom he had not met before.
“I prayed: ‘Please let me go to England to be with my Mum’,” he says in his soft, husky voice. At his new home after the long flight from Lahore Imran’s mother strokes and kisses her son — “My boy, me happy!” — while her husband looks on from his position reclining on a couch, and her mother-in-law chews toothlessly and silently in the corner. The room is furnished in traditional Muslim style, and the family wear traditional dress.
Soon Imran will put on trousers and shirt and tie and start at a school with 1,000 pupils, half of them Muslim children born in England. He speaks Urdu and Punjabi but not a word of English. In the next few months, in the words of his headmaster, Imran will have to learn what it is to be a British boy.
Remember Seven Up!, the documentary that chronicled the lives of 14 English children at intervals of seven years? Imran is the subject of a similar, if less ambitious, Channel 4 documentary that will follow three immigrant children over the next five years until they are 16. It is shot, directed and narrated in hand-held style by a young independent film-maker, Daisy Asquith. In each case, the children travel to England alone to join mothers after a separation of several years, during which one mother has had another baby.
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“I missed my children so badly,” explains Josephine, a beautiful, statuesque black woman who came to England from Zimbabwe as a political refugee in 2001, leaving her son Marshal and daughter Memento with a cousin. “I just needed some company.”
“So you had another baby?” “Yes!” She lets out a gust of laughter. We are sitting in a café in York where Asquith has assembled the children and various family members for a day out before the first episode is screened. There are balloons and a bag of as yet unopened presents, plates of chips and chicken nuggets and glasses of Coke. Imran and Josephine’s son Marshal have tied balloons to their caps and are chasing each other round the room; 10-year-old Altynay, from Kyrgyzstan, the former Soviet state, is sitting quietly with her friend Kanykei watching a screening of the documentary on television. She was filmed before travelling to England, walking up a Kyrgyz hillside covered in wild flowers, singing a song: now she covers her face with her hands, giggling in embarrassment.
Like Imran, Altynay spoke no English when she arrived at her new home in Peniston, Yorkshire, and she was lucky to have Kanykei, who has lived in England for three years, to interpret for her. Even so, this self-possessed little girl who was top of her class and head girl at her old school, has found her first few months here very hard. Early in the film she is shown laughing and executing a dance routine with Kanykei; later, homesick, bewildered and frustrated by the language barrier at her village primary school, she has retreated into quiet depression. She doesn’t feel like dancing any more, Kanykei tells the camera. “She stays quiet and doesn’t say anything; I don’t know what to do with her.” But that was a few months ago; is she happier now? Kanykei nods: “Yes, now she has more language.”
Both Imran and Altynay miss their grandmothers: Altynay is filmed in an empty restaurant, waiting for her mother to finish her shift as a waitress, writing a letter in Russian to her gran — “Write back soon and tell me how everyone is.”
Imran’s mother is on the phone to Pakistan, fending him off as his hands grab at the receiver and finally handing it to him: “Hello? Hello, Mum,” he says eagerly. His mother looks up at the camera, smiling sadly: “He calls her Mum.” Imran has been in trouble at school: at a disadvantage among his confident second and third-generation English-born classmates who mock him for his lack of cool, he covers up his awkwardness by playing the fool. “His problem is he can’t speak English, innit?” explains his stepfather, who cannot read or write and works night shifts at a salad-packing factory.
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The family has high hopes for Imran’s education, planning his career as a lawyer or doctor. “I am going to the school tomorrow and if I hear bad things I am coming home and I am smacking you,” says his stepfather. Imran’s habitual grinning bravado has deserted him; he sits drawing a picture of himself with three big tears on each cheek.
Marshal has a huge advantage over the other two, having been educated at English-language schools in Zimbabwe. He is also buoyantly outgoing, a natural entertainer and comedian. Asked if it is hard for him settling into a new country, he shakes his head: “No, it was not hard for me. I am a brave person.” But inevitably his new life is not without its difficulties. He went to several different schools in Zimbabwe while his older sister, Memento, now 17, was at boarding school. “It is his reading I am worried about,” says his mother Josephine. “He didn’t have my support when he needed it. He cries when I try to read with him, he wants to read Michelle’s books and play with her toys.”
From the other side of the room, Marshal looks up: “You talking about me?” he demands, swaggering over. His Mum smiles, “Just saying how happy I am to have you home,” she says and he runs off, apparently satisfied.
Memento explains that Marshal is jealous of his baby sister, who at 3 is close to the age he was when his mother left: “You have to understand,” she says, “right now he is living the moments he didn’t get with his Mummy.”
At his new home in Tyneside Marshal is surrounded by strong women: Memento has come to England with eight A grades and four Bs in her GSCEs from Zimbabwe and plans economics, maths and science A levels, a degree in insurance sciences and a career as an actuary. Her mother Josephine was a nurse and midwife in Zimbabwe but, after years of struggling to get her qualifications recognised in England, has enrolled in a degree course and plans to work for an NGO helping refugees. “After nursing for 13 years, I’ve had to throw my whole profession in the bin,” she says, with a note of scorn. “So I’m aiming for a job that will enable me to speak out on behalf of others.”
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After lunch the children, now hyped up on Coke and chips and excitement, are taken outside to burn off some energy; on the way, three Japanese tourists take photographs of Imran, who is playing to the gallery, standing to attention and saluting, balloons waving above his head. Perhaps they think he is part of York city culture, like the Minster. In a park by the river, the two girls chase the boys, demanding their share of balloons, Altynay’s shiny dark hair streaming out behind her small, composed face. Office workers turn to watch them, these little foreigners, laughing and skittering about. What will become of them, I wonder, these young repositories of their mothers’ dreams?
“Coming to England, living here, everything is for my daughter,” says Altynay’s mother, Mazgul. “She will have many boyfriends, I think.” Does that worry her? She smiles: “I like English boys, very gentleman, very kind. Yes.”
Daisy Asquith has spent many hours with the families; can she predict how things will turn out for them? “You can’t, can you?” she says. “Wouldn’t it be fab if Imran, for example, was allowed to do something with music. He is forever singing. He says he wants to work with computers; perhaps he will be a DJ? Who knows, but I think these next five years will be formative.”
My New Home will screen on Channel 4 at 9pm tonight
Pitfalls of fly-on-the-wall documentaries
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Several of the participants in Michael Apted’s celebrated Seven Up! series claim that their lives were affected, even altered, by being regularly subjected to scrutiny on film. It is rare that a documentary does not become part of the action, however neutral the director resolves to be.
The Australian family in Sylvania Waters, a fly-on-the wall documentary by Paul Watson, claimed that the series had caused a serious family rift but they went on to become minor media celebrities.
Even before it has been shown, My New Home has had an effect on at least one of the participants’ lives. Marshal’s mother Josephine told us that at first he was bullied at school but once filming started, everyone wanted to be his new best friend. “I think they hoped to be on television,” she says.
Daisy Asquith, its director, says: “I’m glad if Marshal’s classmates are being nice to him because of the film, but I’m afraid it won’t last; it is his natural charm and wit that will make him lasting friends. He is no fool and is not taken in by false displays for the camera. His best friend is still the lad who was kind to him before I came along.”
What can a film-maker do to protect her subjects — especially vulnerable people such as children and refugees? Isn’t the process bound to influence them?
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“The best thing I can do is to choose contributors very carefully and then support them emotionally in whatever way they need,” Asquith says. “This can go on for years after the filming is done. In my experience the film is always cathartic. It provides a solid block of truth to lean on when it’s so easy to forget or rewrite your past. Having a way to express yourself and enable others to understand you is useful.”