Dervla Murphy - Tales from Two Cities: Travels of Another Sort

The seed of this book was sown in the autumn of 1966. While cycling from London to Edinburgh I met many representatives of ethnic minorities, the majority then comparative newcomers to Britain. From Scotland I wrote to my publisher, describing this journey, and in response he suggested a book on Brown and Black immigrants. Although the subject tempted me, I doubted my ability to tackle it and not until 1983 did I find enough courage to accept the challenge. But my 1984 activities were curtailed first by a peculiarly debilitating form of hepatitis, acquired in Madagascar, and then by a frolicsome bullock who broke my back on a riverbank in Ireland. So the project was not begun until January 1985.

Nothing in my life had prepared me for residence in deprived urban areas, as distinct from reading about them or discussing them with involved friends. After a few months I began to feel slightly peculiar on edge, restless, in an odd way under stress despite the increasing fascination of my work. Only then did I realise that never before had I been confined for so long to a city, or even a big town. As a truly rural animal, this new experience in middle-age almost over-taxed my adaptability. Curiously enough, the obvious horrors of urban life traffic noise, crowds, polluted air, over-heated shops and offices bothered me no more than the many unnatural minutiae. Like taking clothes to a laundrette, full of baffling machines, instead of washing them in a tub and hanging them on a line between apple-trees. And swimming in a chlorine-flavoured indoor pool instead of a river. And using fire-lighters instead of kindling gathered in a wood. And never seeing the night-sky or being able to enjoy the weather. In the country, every sort of weather is pleasurable: gales, frost, heat, rain, snow. In cities, each weather mood merely exacerbates some nuisance litter blown in ones face, burst pipes, effluvia from rotting garbage, sprays of oily water, treacherous piles of dingy snow. At the end of my exile I was no longer puzzled by youthful vandalism, drug-addiction and despair.

As a newcomer in Manningham and Handsworth, I had to explain to some of my neighbours, and to local community leaders and Race Relations Industry (RRI) workers, that I am neither a journalist nor an academic, that I belong to no political party or pressure group and have no religious affiliations. This thumb-nail self-portrait baffled many. For some thirty years, race relations have been providing much grist for the mills of academics, journalists and politicians. Such people are familiar figures in multi-racial districts, but a pen-wielder belonging to none of those categories (and who chose to live in inner-city areas!) had a disconcerting effect. Among Browns and Blacks, my scribbling presence in their neighbourhoods provoked varied reactions. There was much uncomprehending indifference. There was an amount of explicit hostility We dont need any more studies of our problems, we need action! And there was occasional faint optimism Maybe your book can help us.

Many Whites imagine Britains ethnic minorities to be far more numerous, and therefore threatening, than they are; ten or fifteen per cent is a usual guesstimate. Yet the 1985 figure for the entire non-White population, including Chinese, was 2,376,000 4.4 per cent. It is therefore ridiculous to describe Britain as a multi-racial society; that description applies only to certain urban areas. Ironically, racists and anti-racists reinforce each others positions by over-emphasising the significance of the Brown and Black elements in contemporary Britain.

Despite the above figures, this is not a book for those in search of statistics, graphs and percentages. It is a personal record of daily life in multi-racial areas and those academics and race relations experts who dismiss it as anecdotal, impressionistic or subjective will be right. Much of it deals with perceptions with how people feel, and why.

The Councils race relations policies must make more progress if we are to meet the expectations of young Black Bradfordians. Some 62,000 in the District (out of 464,000) have their family origins in the New Commonwealth and Pakistan In two areas there will be a large measure of agreement among all three political parties on the Council. Firstly, there is the unique nature of Bradfords problems, facing the largest increase in population of any Metropolitan District in the country and facing it in the inner-city areas where our resources and land are already under severe pressure. Secondly, the changing face of Bradford will call for new ideas, new attitudes and ways of working, and new relationships from all of us, members as well as officers. In ten years the District has moved from full employment, a superficially healthy-looking economy and relative prosperity for virtually everyone, to massive factory closures, some 12,500 people who have been out of work for more than a year, 7000 of whom have been jobless for more than two years. Nearly 50,000 people in the District are drawing Supplementary Benefit, and more than a third of all families rely on some kind of State benefit Only 7 per cent of black school-leavers are finding work, compared with 37 per cent of white school-leavers. One in six of all unemployed people come from the black communities, though they make up only a tenth of the workforce