Read Online The Palace of Strange Girls by Sallie Day - Free Book Online Page B

waiting for a tackler to fix the mess. It’s why I won’t take
     on Pakis, I wouldn’t even let them sweep the mill yard. They’re all the same. More trouble than they’re worth.”
    “They’re not all the same.”
    “Well, they look it. Can you tell the difference between one Paki and another? It’s beyond me.”
    “They’re not all Pakistanis. Some of them are Sikhs from the Punjab or Muslims from Bangladesh.”
    “There’s no difference. They were all swinging in trees before they came here and made a beeline for the National Assistance.
     Fuckin’ Fosters—they draft in all these wogs and expect the British workers to lay out the welcoming mat. Buggers that were
     happy to work all hours for a bowl of rice back in India—no wonder they think they’re well off when they get here. And once
     they are here, this bloody country will keep them for the rest of their lives, one way or another. No wonder the minute they
     get here they’re filling in the forms to bring across their whole bloody tribe.”
    Jack has heard this argument countless times and it never fails to annoy him. “There’s nothing wrong with the Pakistanis.
     I’ve not had any bother with them. They’re quiet, they work hard and keep themselves to themselves. Our weavers aren’t beyond
     sabotaging their looms before the night shift comes on and they don’t complain. And I’ve yet to see a Pakistani turn up to
     work still drunk from the night before.”
    “But that’s just it. They don’t kick up. Management can do anything it likes, and that bunch will roll over and ask for more.
     Seven quid nine and ten a week and they aren’t complaining. It’s a fortune to them.”
    “Aye, and how long does it last when landlords are charging them the earth just for a roof over their heads? And any money
     they do manage to save is sent back abroad to feed their families. They’re no different from you and me—they’re trying to
     do their best for their families just like us.”
    Jack has firsthand experience of the sort of squalor that immigrants have to cope with. There’s so much prejudice locally
     that the only accommodation they can find is in houses that should have been pulled down years ago in the worst part of town.
     Last month there’d been a mix-up with the wages and Jack had ended up going round to drop off Ahmed Khan’s overtime money.
     He’d found Ahmed along with a dozen fellow Pakistanis sharing the same house. No furniture—just mattresses on the floor of
     every room. No curtains, just blankets flapping with the draft. They’d had a bunch of local lads round a couple of nights
     before shouting abuse and smashing the windows. The landlord was charging them twenty-five bob each a week. Despite this he
     refused to get the windows repaired. Claimed it was a waste of time—they’d just get broken again. No heating whatsoever and
     the back gate had been kicked in. Jack has read about the West Indian riots in London a year ago and he reckons that Lancashire’s
     Asian community won’t be far behind.
    “I blame the government,” Harry says. “They’re saying there’ll be another election before the end of the year. The Tories
     have been a bloody waste of time. They behave as if we still had an empire. It’s not two minutes since they were showing bloody
     Gandhi around the Lancashire mill towns. They should have kicked his chocolate arse and sent him home. No sooner have we given
     these darkies their independence than the buggers are getting on the nearest banana boat and coming here. And it’s not just
     these wogs turning up on our doorstep; there are thousands of them brown bastards back in India flooding our markets with
     cheap, coarse staple cotton.”
    Jack sighs with frustration. Lancashire cotton has been threatened by foreign competition before, but it has always risen
     to the challenge. The industry has invented new fabrics like Fabriflex—a combed cotton weave bonded to a plastic