Transcript for: Experiences of Fartown High School

Interviewee: Mehboob Khan

Subject: Schools

Suddenly from being in a school where there was never more than two of us in any class, and in fact that was very rare as well, I was always the only Asian in the whole class, to finding out that there was a large numbers of us. We were never in the majority at Fartown High school there were classes where a third of us were Asian and I thought that was really different, because I'd never been in that environment where there was more Asians, so I think that for the first few weeks we were just trying to come to terms with the lots of Asians around me. They were also speaking Punjabi as well, amongst themselves, which we found a bit odd, because we only spoke Punjabi at home, and everywhere else English. Their English was slang as well and in those days there was the beginning of influence from American rap music on Asian communities. Some of them were speaking slang and were really in to that kind of rap music and rap words were starting to become a part of common language, but there was no one to tell us not to. And also I'd never met, apart from my relatives, an Asian female before. It just felt odd, that there were girls there who weren't my cousins or my sister, or somebody who I'd go to mosque with and grew up with. It was different in that way.

I also felt that the Asian community there weren't mixing that well in 1984, with white pupils. There was segregation, and I wasn't actually at school long enough to have seen that over a 4-5 year period, but it was certainly that Asian communities tend to keep themselves to themselves even at that age, which again struck me as a bit odd. One of the other changes was that at Brooksbank I was just an average pupil, I was interested in science and whatever, but at Fartown when we did the first mock exams in December or January '84/5 I suddenly found out when the results came that I was in the top 5 in each of the subjects. I was just a normal lad, I wasn't really bothered about studies all that much, I was just getting myself to school and having a good time. There was a drop in the standard of education between Brooksbank and this school here, but at that time Fartown was considered by Huddersfield standards a good school. I made friends pretty quickly with the Asians communities and white students there. My father had a shop in Fartown on Bradford Road, so I met a lot of people through that as well.