Brief Extracts from The Invisible Village
From Still Polish
Acme Meats: it’s factory making meat, hams, bacons, and inside it’s very cold and very wet. Who is working there? Pakistani, Polish, Czech, Slovakian, Russian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian: there is no English. Big percent of workers are people from Eastern Europe. English younger people, they are too proud to do the job, they want to be given easier way, they’ve got benefits, they’ve got money, lager is quite cheap here, everything is available for them, and they are British.
From Rattles
When I was five years old my mother passed away. When I was seventeen my father passed away. I started smoking weed. It became a gateway to heroin. When I first started experimenting with it I didn’t know where it was going to take me. It took ten–eleven years off my life. I look back on it now and thank God that I’m out of it.
From Naturalisation
My son was killed. When we started to protest, my husband, they caught him, put him in prison. They released him and two days after they come to our house and kill him in front of children. Maybe they were thinking that if he were dead in prison it will make big, big political things.
From Cuddles
My daughter feels it: about three when he left. Three is the age that my dad died. It is a big thing in your life. Thankfully their dad is still there, and they do have a good bond, but I don’t think she sees enough of him. She is a very clingy child, and she needs a lot of cuddles, attention and love and stuff. Girls get that from their dad, and if they don’t it can leave them in a bit of a vulnerable state. A massive problem in my life was not having that.
From I Thought Everybody Was Equal
When parents come to pick you up from school, my mum would have her Ukrainian headscarf wrapped round her head, and she would look like a peasant but everybody else had just their head bouffanted up. They were dressed up, whereas my mum would have a big coat, boots on and the headscarf. Not that I was conscious of it at the time, but I was starting to notice the difference with other parents.
From Tension
There were some white lads and there were some Asian lads who were kind of eyeballing each other and one of the white lads had a knife. One of these Asian lads tried to stop it, tried to calm it down and he was the one that got killed.
From Watching MTV Illegally
Seeing what people have to live through in Iran has definitely made me realise people in this country don’t know what they are complaining about when they complain that their freedom is limited. They complain about the government and they complain about the society. They have no idea what other people have to live through. Comparatively speaking you can do anything in this country.
From Feud
You know why we came to England? Because my mother and mother-in-law family have a blood feud. You know what that means? It means that one family kill somebody and my family have to kill somebody too. Then the first family have to kill another one. It is a long time and that’s why we came out. My husband say, ‘I have only got one son, when he is growing up, I don’t want anyone to kill him.’ About forty-five people in our families killed. My six uncles: all dead by blood feud. When we told Home Office, they didn’t believe us.
From Boss Man
We work, we come home, we make food, we eat food and we sleep. Then we wake and if we have work, we go work. If no work, then we look for work. Everything is about work.