‘It’s cruel letting a child wear her hair so long!’ she exclaimed to Mum. ‘It must be so much work.’
Mum just stuck her nose in the air as if she didn’t care. I don’t know what the woman’s problem was. I loved the fact my hair was so long I could sit on it. It made me feel special, like Rapunzel.
It wasn’t just my hair Mum fussed over; she also made all my clothes herself. She shopped around for different fabrics and ran them up into outfits on her little sewing machine. I had tops and trousers in every colour of the rainbow. My favourite dress was a sunshine yellow one with a zig-zag red trim along the bottom of the hem. It was bright and beautiful.
Whenever she did my hair Mum would be sure to match the colour of the ribbon with the outfit I was wearing. She threaded the ribbons inside my plaits and the colour streaked through, making them look even longer.
Dad said that the reason why Mum dressed me like a doll was because she’d waited so long for a little girl. When I was finally born, she couldn’t believe it. She had almost died during the pregnancy. She’d been working in our family’s shop when she began to feel really ill and collapsed. Dad called for the doctor, who diagnosed tuberculosis – a horrible word that stuck in my head. The GP warned them that even if the baby was born alive, it would be horribly deformed.
In fact, the doctor was so convinced of this that he insisted on being present at my birth, ready to comfort my parents when they saw me. But against all odds I arrived perfectly healthy and with a full head of black hair!
Dad was so delighted that he jumped around the room with joy. Mum just sat and wept quietly.
‘Why was she sad?’ I asked.
Dad shook his head. ‘Not sad, Nabila. She cried because she was so happy. You were all she ever wanted.’
He explained that he’d chosen the name Nabila as soon as the midwife placed me in his arms. ‘We chose it because it means happiness, and after your four brothers your mum was happy to finally have her little girl.’
He told me that I’d had a fifth brother called Aaban, but he’d died when he was only six hours old. His lungs weren’t strong enough to breathe outside Mummy’s tummy. My parents held his tiny hand and cried whilst they watched his life ebb away. Dad said losing Aaban broke Mum’s heart, but that I’d mended it.
‘That’s why you are so precious to us. You mean the world to us,’ he said, kissing me tenderly on my forehead.
My father’s family had rescued Mum from a horrible life as an orphan back in Pakistan. Her mother had died when she was three years old, then her dad died when she was seven. My mother, whose name was Shazia, her brother Sawad, then aged twelve, and her nine-year-old sister were split up and farmed out to different relatives. Mum was taken in by her grandmother but the family were cruel and treated her like a slave. My dad’s mother, who lived close by, realised what was going on and took Shazia in and gave her shelter, then my dad, Mohammed, the eldest son of the family, decided to marry her when he was twenty-eight and she was just thirteen years old. I loved hearing the story of how my parents met. I imagined Dad as a dashing prince, saving Mum from her wicked relatives.
Dad decided to move to England to make a better life for his family. He told me he’d driven all the way to Britain from Pakistan in his car.
‘I did it for me, your mum – all of us.’
He only stopped driving when he needed to sleep, except from time to time he had to stop and do some work so that he could afford another tankful of petrol.
I shut my eyes and tried to imagine my dad driving across the desert in his battered old car, like Lawrence of Arabia. It all seemed very exciting.
It took him almost six months to make the journey but he finally arrived in England at the beginning of the 1960s.
‘Things were very different then,’ he told me, his eyes widening at the memory. ‘Women wore these very short skirts, and men – well, they wore their hair really long, like girls!’
I pulled at my own hair. ‘What, like mine?’
‘No, not as long as yours, but too long for a man. I’d never seen anything like it!’
Eventually, when he’d saved up enough money, Dad bought a shop in the Midlands, a typical grocery store with a butcher’s shop at the back. He could turn his hand to most things, but he was a particularly skilled butcher.
Mum gave birth to my eldest brother Habib in 1968; he was followed by Saeed, Tariq and Asif, then I came along in 1976.
Habib was a typical eldest brother, eight years older than me but it might as well have been twenty. He was bossy and always telling me what to do. I hated Habib. He was moody and mean. He resented being the oldest because it meant he had to help more around the house and, in particular, he was often told to babysit for the rest of us.
Each night, Mum would chop and prepare all the food in the flat above the shop. We spent most of our time up there as youngsters, while Mum and Dad were working downstairs. At mealtimes, Habib had to turn on the cooker and heat up the food Mum had prepared earlier. It was his job to feed us.
‘You should be the one cooking,’ he complained to me. ‘You’re the girl, not me. This is a girl’s job.’
That’s how Habib was. He was clever and he knew it, but he also thought he was too important to look after the rest of us.
My second-eldest brother Saeed was a year younger than Habib, but he wasn’t as smart. Saeed was good with his hands. He loved taking things apart just to see how they worked. One day he took one of my dolls to bits. First he pulled her head off and then her arms and legs until there was nothing left apart from a stumpy body. He tried to put her back together again but it didn’t work so she remained an amputee.
He did this with all our toys and his own as well, which made my parents despair. When we were older and got bikes of our own we didn’t dare leave them in the garden in case Saeed got his hands on them.
Tariq was the tough one, a typical boy, who used to beat me up all the time. He loved to fight and nothing or no one would ever be able to hurt him back. He was mad on wrestling and boxing and used me as his very own punchbag.
‘Just stand there while I hit you,’ he instructed.
‘But I don’t want to be hit. You’ll hurt me!’
‘I need to practise my moves and if you don’t stand still I’ll hurt you more.’
Seconds later I was lying in a crumpled heap on the floor, with Tariq standing over me.
‘Get up, Nabila. I need to do it again.’
Sometimes he was so rough that he crossed the line and our so-called ‘play fighting’ became something more akin to torture, with me as the unwilling victim.
Asif was my youngest brother, and although he teased me constantly he was also the kindest one. There were only three years between us so we often played together, which annoyed Habib no end. He teased Asif for playing with a girl, but secretly I think he was jealous of our friendship because no one liked Habib.
I adored Asif. He was my favourite brother, and even if he teased me he always stuck up for me if need be. We spent lots of time together, making up games. My favourite was one in which Asif pushed me round the garden in my dolls’ pram, like a baby. We’d giggle away until we felt sick.
As we grew older, though, Asif began to spend less and less time with me. He discovered football, his head was turned and he was off, leaving me far behind.
Our house was just a few streets away from my parents’ shop. We’d moved there not long after I was born so that we’d have more room, but it was still small and cramped inside. There were three