By YASMIN HAI

Last updated at 23:37 21 March 2008

Yasmin Hai is an award-winning journalist who has worked on BBC2's Newsnight and documentaries for Channel 4. In a brilliant new book - by turns funny, poignant and unsettling - she recalls the challenges and tensions of growing up as a young British Asian in the Seventies and Eighties. This is the first of three extracts ...

Our parents might have ordered us not to leave the house, but we still found a way to sneak out.

Giggling, we scrambled through the kitchen window, clambered over the garden fence and into the side alley.

Alerted by the noise, our mother appeared at the window. Battling through huge swathes of white net curtains, which kept on getting caught in her sari, she shouted at us to come back.

And did we listen? Well, usually we would have, but not today. Today we were on a mission.

We ran and ran, serenaded by bursts of excited TV commentary wafting out of the houses on our road.

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English rose: Yasmin pictured as a baby with her parents Syed and Noorjehan

When we turned the last bend, the full spectacle, what we had been waiting months to see, finally revealed itself.

Our mouths dropped in awe. A sea of brightly-coloured banners, waves of red and white crashing into shores of blue and white, was rolling off the motorway, driving right past us.

The noise was deafening, a cacophony of car horns, drumbeats and sirens; men whistling, chanting, shouting - it was like Disneyland (not that we had ever been there) and the Queen's Silver Jubilee celebrations all rolled into one.

Except that this ecstatic parade was making its way to Wembley Stadium - the great sporting arena in whose shadow we lived.

"ARRRRRSSSSSENAL!" a spotty guy with long sideburns suddenly cried out drunkenly at us from his car, as his friend exposed his big hairy bottom from the window.

"Did you see that - did you see it?" cried my brother, Yasir. Of course we had - it was the rudest thing we had ever witnessed.

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Childhood memories: Yasmin (right) in the garden with her brother Yasir and sister Farah

Those match days had a special place in our memories - days when people from mysterious faraway places with strange names like Huddersfield, Liverpool, Sheffield and Cardiff came to Wembley to celebrate their team.

It looked like really good fun, we thought, to belong and care for something, even if it was just a football team.

But for us, that was as far as it went. Just watching. Never for one minute did we dream of joining in, for we knew it wasn't our party to join. Football was an English people's game, and we were not English.

But what were we? I would spend much of my early life trying to find out.

My father, Syed Samsamul Hai, a former professor of English in Karachi, came to London in 1964, shortly before his 50th birthday.

Like many other immigrants, he had grown up with an incredibly romantic idea of what Britain was all about. He arrived in England loaded with facts and figures to help him adjust to his new country.

He knew all the words of the national anthem, he could reel off all the bank holidays (and give the historical reasons as to why they came about) and he knew, inside out and back to front, English sayings such as "'fair play" or "an Englishman's home is his castle".

His first home was a cramped bedsit in Holloway, North London, in a house filled with other Asian men like himself.

There was Dr Hasan, training to be an eye surgeon. Mr Ali, a leading Bengal journalist. Dr Patel, a heart specialist.

My father found a job as a teacher and in 1969 - after much whispering and match-making by eager in-laws - he travelled back to Pakistan to marry my mother, Noorjehan Begum. She arrived to join him in Holloway that winter.

I was born a year later at the London Hospital, followed a year after that by my brother. In 1972, with a third baby on the way, our family moved from the bedsit in Holloway to a proper house in Wembley.

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Baby Yasmin, pictured with her proud father in 1972

With its just-about-affordable terrace houses and postage-stamp front lawns, the area was a much sought-after location for aspirational immigrants.

Moving to Wembley said: "Hello, I've arrived." It was a major step on the road to becoming English.

"Ahh!" my father and his friends would say admiringly to each other whenever English manners, English clothes, English education or English toys were mentioned.

"English", it seemed to me as a little girl, was something good, something to be proud of.

In fact, "English" sounded so nice that when I imagined what it could look like, I would see a bright, white light and I would hear the comforting sound of children laughing and playing.

I once told my mother my description of "English". She looked at me slightly bemused, before returning her attentions to Farah, my newly-born baby sister.

The discovery that the neighbours on both sides of our house in Wembley were white delighted me. Perhaps, if I observed them carefully, I might learn what "being English" meant exactly.

Mrs Campbell lived in the house next door to the left, and demonstrated all the signs of being a real English person. She had grey hair like everyone white in my area, and a beautiful garden full of flowers.

This was very unlike our own garden-which was soon shaping up perfectly as model Asian garden of the year: unkempt, scattered with discarded furniture and strewn with sad roots, a legacy of my mother's sole attempt to grow some tomatoes.

Mrs Campbell also had a piano - the most important single thing that established her in my mind as English.

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Growing up English: A 14-year-old Yasmin soaks up some sun while lying in grass in Camden

Every Sunday morning, our house would be flooded with Mozart and Beethoven wafting through the adjoining walls. I would dance around our living room, pretending I was a fairy.

I later found out that Mrs Campbell was not really English. She was Scottish. Every now and then her husband, William, wore a skirt when he went out.

"Hello Jazmine," he'd cry whenever he saw me. I'd wave back. For some reason I never bothered to correct him about the pronunciation of my name.

Mr Campbell was really nice. But Mrs Campbell quite clearly did not like us, often telling us that we were an example of how the neighbourhood was going downhill, pointing to our garden as evidence of this.

As we grew a bit older and more spirited, we frequently became the focus of her wrath. This would often end with her having a full-scale argument with my mother over the garden fence or banging on our walls with a stick to show her displeasure.

My father told us to just ignore her. But my mother would not let matters lie.

We would often find her, the folds of her sari falling off her shoulder, her hair bun starting to unravel, smashing her biggest cooking spoon against the wall, in response to Mrs Campbell's banging.

My brother, my sister and I would stand watching her in silence, not daring to distract her. Only when the banging from Mrs Campbell's side finished would my mother stop and calmly return to her cooking.

Mrs Sherman, from further down the street, could not have been more different. She would always smile whenever she saw us.

She was the mother of a very pretty little girl, whose shiny blonde hair always made my mother and her friend Mrs Khan go weak at the knees.

"Like gold thread," they would say dreamily to each other. The girl's name was Britt, after Britt Ekland. My mother and Mrs Khan named Mrs Sherman, "Jean Wali". The Jeans One.

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Yasmin in her early days on the job interviewing for TV Asia

Jeans, for them, as for many other Asians, were synonymous with being rebellious, modern, sexually permissive and risque.

They were something only rebels and teenagers wore - bad people. Asian girls were banned from wearing them.

But here was Mrs Sherman, a responsible mother who always smiled at them, wearing jeans. Perhaps all those people who wore jeans were not such bad people after all. It was a revelation to my mother and Mrs Khan.

"I am telling you," Mrs Khan would cry at my mother (though only when my father was out of earshot, for she had figured out that he would not always share all her opinions), "English people are dirty. All they think is sex filth! Sex filth, sex filth!" My mother would nod uneasily at Mrs Khan.

Sex was one of those things that she never discussed in public. Who talked about sex so openly, anyway? Well, the English did, according to Mrs Khan, and all the time.

"And they bathe in their own dirty water," Mrs Khan would say with contempt. "English, dirty people."

Mrs Khan's comments about the English never failed to shock me. She was the first person I had ever come across who had anything bad to say about them.

And while I felt uneasy listening to her, part of me was intrigued by what she had to say.

"Oh yes, I saw it on TV. Yes, sitting in bathtub in dirty water. Have you ever heard of anything so disgusting?" continued Mrs Khan, her body writhing in disgust. "I made Ali stand in front of the TV."

"Standing in front of the TV" was something I had often seen Ali do whenever I was over at the Khans' watching television.

Whenever a lewd scene came on the screen - and this encompassed everything from a mild kiss to a woman having a baby - three-year-old Ali would be instructed to jump up and dance in front of the screen, his arms flapping madly to ensure our vision was truly obstructed.

Why no one ever thought of just changing channels, I don't know.

That was the strange thing about Mrs Khan. While she desperately wanted to be modern and emulate the English, at the same time she couldn't help getting all worked up whenever the issue of Western hygiene or morality came up.

You can just imagine the heart attack she nearly had when she saw Fiona McGuinness lean against her garden fence and snog her boyfriend. (The McGuinnesses lived on the other side of us, and, according to Mrs Campbell, had an even worse garden than ours).

Mrs Khan's net curtains were literally quivering with rage. In fact, once Fiona and her paramour moved on, Mrs Khan felt obliged to go out and inspect the spot where they had done "it".

Yasmin only wore 'traditional' clothes on special occasions such as when she was visiting Pakistan as a 20-year-old woman

I suppose, looking back, we didn't necessarily have the best British role models in Wembley. But our family was lucky. We always had Uncle Aslam and Aunt Hilda to show us the right way to do things.

Uncle Aslam, a former professor and Indian diplomat, was a great friend of my father's who had married Hilda Hulme, a lecturer at London University and one of Britain's leading authorities on Shakespeare.

Aunt Hilda and Uncle Aslam lived in a big house in Highgate, and came to lunch with us every fortnight, on Sundays.

On those special days we would wake to the sound of a Hoover whirring somewhere in the background and the musty smell of frying ghee - the clarified butter used in Asian cooking.

While my mother prepared the feast, my father busied himself making the house look nice even though, like most Asian homes of the time, there was not much to show off.

Our living room was papered in yellow-green flock with yellow nylon curtains to match. The furniture was all second-hand, and filled the room.

On one side was a tired-looking red nylon-upholstered sofabed. When guests came to visit, we kids had been well trained to hastily direct them to the mustard-coloured fake leather three-piece suite instead.

To get to there, they had to negotiate the brown Formica coffee table. Still, once seated, they could admire from the settee my father's much-cherished book collection; works by Shakespeare, Dickens and Milton jostling for space on the shelf, alongside more practical books like the Urdu/English dictionary, or the hardback guide on How To Write An English Letter.

The centrepiece of the living room was an enormous wardrobe, a must-have for all Asian houses.

Inside, one would find all the family's belongings: clothes, sheets, pillowcases, an ironing board, books, paperwork, matches, sacks of spare coal and more.

If you still needed space to store away your possessions, then you could always put them into one of the suitcases that permanently resided on top of the wardrobe.

After the vacuuming, my father would arrange the plastic flowers, dust the bookshelves, puff up the cushions and hammer in the red sofa's springs - all before throwing us into the bathroom so that we were nice and clean for when the honoured guests arrived.

Uncle Aslam and Aunt Hilda were obviously very much in love. I knew this because whenever they spoke to each other, they always called each other "darling": "Darling, what do you think?" "Will you pass the salt, darling?" "I agree, darling."

I didn't know any Asian adult who spoke to their spouse in such a manner. Well, not in public, anyway. I must admit that whenever I heard them say the "d" word, I would go red with embarrassment.

But then that was the thing about Uncle Aslam and Aunt Hilda: whenever they came, they brought the English world with them.

Through them we were introduced to a whole host of fun activities: going to the panto at the Old Vic, visiting Windsor Castle during summer holidays, watching Punch and Judy on Brighton beach, making daisy chains in Hyde Park and tossing pancakes on Shrove Tuesday.

I remember how privileged I felt to have an Uncle Aslam and an Aunt Hilda to help us out.

I mean, who did the families at No 15 and No 7 or even Mrs Khan's daughter Afshan (even though she was meant to be modern) have to show them the finer details of being English? No one.

Who was going to teach them about Christmas stockings, Enid Blyton, tea and cakes, tiddlywinks, poppy day, table manners? No one.

One Sunday, my sister Farah and I carefully laid the table out. Not the way my mother did it - self-service, Asian style - but in the English way that Aunt Hilda had taught us. Knives on the right, forks on the left, spoons on top and napkins by the side.

We even laid out a set for my mother who usually ate with her hands. The table looked proper - to my mind our small kitchen had an air of grace that it had never enjoyed before.

"The table looks so nice, girls," Aunt Hilda said as she entered the kitchen. "Oh, and what lovely flowers," she added, looking at our carefully arranged centrepiece.

Once everyone was seated, we took our cue from Aunt Hilda and put our napkins on our laps. My uncle tucked his into his neckline, so that it looked like a bib. But we'd been told that this was fine, too.

My aunt was served first, and then us three children. But that day, for some reason, instead of picking up the knife and fork that I had so carefully arranged on either side of my plate, I plunged my right hand straight into my food.

My fingers nimbly cut into a piece of chicken, which I then mixed into a bit of rice, just how my mother (and Uncle Aslam) often did.

Then I dipped it into the dish of raita - yoghurt, mint, cucumber and spices - before shoving the whole delicious morsel into my mouth.

To my horror, I suddenly heard Aunt Hilda's voice: "Yasmin, what exactly do you think you are doing?"

The room had gone silent. I didn't need to look up to realise what I had just done. My fingers were coated in bits of rice and chicken.

"You know, only Pakis eat with their hands," said Aunt Hilda very calmly, without looking up.

My world turned upside down. I didn't want my Aunt Hilda to think that I was a Paki. Young as I was, I knew that "Paki" was a bad word, a very upsetting word, that made you scared when you heard it.

I also knew that it had become synonymous with being uncivilised, primitive, savage, ignorant, backwards, uneducated, illiterate and uncultured. In other words, not English.

Still no one had spoken. Maybe everyone was reeling with shock at the utterance of that dreaded word at the dinner table.

I felt deeply ashamed. But Aunt Hilda hadn't finished. "Are you a Paki?" she asked me. Her watery blue eyes locked into mine.

I shook my head. From the corner of my eyes, I could see my father shaking his head in despair. The word didn't offend him one bit. I could see he even agreed with her.

"Only Pakis eat with their hands, don't they?" my aunt continued. "I think, madam, that you should go and wash your hands."

When I returned to the table, Aunt Hilda smiled encouragingly at me. I smiled back and warmth flooded through me.

Aunt Hilda was so kind - all she really wanted was the best for me, I thought.

When I next looked up again from my food, I noticed that my uncle and mother were using their cutlery, too.

Despite my unfortunate little lapse at the kitchen table, I was soon growing into the perfect little English child.

"It's a case of when in Rome do as the Romans do," my father now took to saying to us. And I began to see things that way, too. What use were Indian ways in England, anyway?

Soon I was even trying to look English. My sister and I stopped wearing Asian clothes unless it was a special occasion.

And to perfect our English look, my father suggested to my mother that she should keep our hair short.

My mother agreed. She didn't want her daughters to look as if they had been plucked out of some Indian village. So, one Saturday, off went my long, wiry curls.

When my mother had finished snipping I looked in the mirror and saw a perfect little bob, just like Milly-Molly-Mandy, the English heroine of the book I was reading. I looked like a proper English girl.

That Saturday, I followed my mother to the shops, desperate to show off my new hairstyle. Mr Campbell said that it looked really nice.

Afshan asked her mother if she could have her hair cut, too, and Gary McGuinness, Fiona's brother, burped in my face, which meant he had also noticed.

Someone else seemed to have noticed my transformation. One day, Mrs Sherman, Jean Wali, invited my mother and me to her house for tea.

I was thrilled. Britt was the most English girl I had ever seen. The next day my mother, all dressed up in her best red sari and carrying a box of Quality Street Gold, took me to Mrs Sherman's house.

"Come in, come in," our hostess cried, ushering us through the door and greeting my mother like a long-lost best friend.

As we entered Britt's hallway it suddenly occurred to me that this was the first time that either of us had ever been inside an English home.

Britt's living room was perfect. There was no creaky sofa-bed for Mrs Sherman to quickly guide us away from. There was no clashing colour scheme to give you an instant headache.

And, most notably, there was no wardrobe dominating the centre of the room. Instead, the whole place was tastefully done up in primrose and maroon, with soft furniture that had been bought new.

"Please, sit down," Mrs Sherman said, pointing vaguely into the room, so that my mother could make her own choice about where she wanted to sit.

She glanced around the room and chose a mock-Georgian paisley armchair. But then, suddenly realising that she had forgotten to give Jean Wali the chocolates, she quickly got up again.

"Mrs Sherman," she announced, presenting her with the box of chocolates as if participating in an elaborate ceremonial ritual. "Oh, thank you," said Mrs Sherman. "But please, call me Faye."

My mother smiled shyly back, and sat back down on the armchair. "So what shall I call you, Mrs Hai?" Faye said.

My mother looked at her, puzzled. "Mrs Hai," she said abruptly.

"Oh," Faye replied, quickly sitting up, as if she had just been caught off guard. Then, jollying things along: "So, Mrs Hai, where are you from? India?"

"Pakistan," my mother replied, just a bit too fast. I could feel that she knew that she had just made a blunder, but wasn't sure what it was.

"Oh, sounds lovely," Faye enthused. "My top is Indian," she said, pointing to it.

My mother nodded, unsure of what to say next. Those tops were one a penny back in Pakistan. An awkward silence followed.

"Do you have any other family here?" Mrs Sherman asked enthusiastically. I could feel my mother looking at me. It was my cue to give a translation.

I often had to do this. It wasn't that my mother didn't understand English. It was just that sometimes the English accent confused her - especially when she got nervous.

So I repeated what Mrs Sherman had just asked. Before I had a chance to finish, Mrs Sherman was oohing and ahhing at my Urdu language skills. And then my mother suddenly burst out laughing.

"Oh, silly me," she now piped up, laughing, having finally figured out her earlier mistake. "My name is Noor."'

My mother's laugh was so infectious that soon Faye was laughing too, which made Britt and me fall about as well. I suddenly felt very proud of my mother's ability to entertain.

That evening, my mother and I returned home full of inspiration. "Mr Hai, you should have seen their kitchen. It was beautiful, like TV," my mother chirped. "We could do that to ours."

The following Sunday I eagerly recounted the details of our visit to Uncle Aslam and Aunt Hilda.

"Slow down, slow down," they cried out, as I raced through the high points. "And don't eat with your mouth open!"

Later on that afternoon, when we were in the living room, I overheard my uncle mention Britt's name again, followed soon afterwards by the words "mother tongue".

I instantly sat up. Mother tongue was a thing that I often heard my father and his friends talk about and it always seemed to get them very worked up.

From them I had come to understand that mother tongue wasn't a proper language as such; it was something that Asian people spoke, especially Asian mothers, because they didn't know how to speak English.

I sensed that the conversation that was about to take place was not really for my ears.

My mother came in with some tea and halwa - a traditional sweet - and my father asked her to sit down. He had something to ask her.

My ears strained to make out what the elders were talking about. I missed something and then I heard my mother say in English: "This isn't my country. I not know."

Then it was Aunt Hilda's voice. "The children could always pick Urdu up later - that is, if they are still interested in speaking it.

"Just think about Mrs Sherman. What must she have thought when Yasmin started speaking in Urdu and then English and then back in Urdu again?"

My mother began to explain how much Mrs Sherman really liked my Urdu. But Aunt Hilda interrupted her. "The problem is not now. It will be later," she said.

"Yasmin starts school next autumn - we can't allow her to be confused,"' Uncle Aslam added. My mother nodded understandingly. Uncle Aslam did have a point.

Suddenly, my father sat bolt upright, looking very excited. He said he had a solution: my mother should carry on speaking to us in Urdu, but we children should only speak to her in English.

By doing this, he explained, my mother could still communicate with her children, but our English - and also her English - would improve.

My mother liked this idea. Everyone relaxed and the halwa was passed around. It was settled. Urdu had to go.

Over the next few months we did indeed gradually stop speaking Urdu. It wasn't hard - I didn't even miss it. If we ever did slip up, my father was always on hand.

"

Ahh uh, not in Urdu, in English please," he would say. We would quickly correct ourselves.

My father was right - our English did improve. My mother's English got better, too. She was very pleased with her progress. And so were we.

But something else changed once we dropped Urdu, something quite fundamental.

It just became too frustrating trying to explain complex matters of the head and heart to my mother in English. After dropping Urdu, sadly, she became lost to me for years.

I hadn't even started school yet - but learning to be English was already coming at a high price.

• Extracted from The Making Of Mr Hai's Daughter, published by Virago on 3rd April at £14.99. ° 2008 Yasmin Hai. To order a copy p&p free call 0845 606 4206.