A Beginner's Guide to Acting English Read online

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  PROLOGUE: NEW ARRIVALS

  PART 1 LONDON CALLING

  LONDON

  HYDE PARK

  BACK IN IRAN

  MARCOURT LAWNS

  A NEW GUEST AT THE PARTY

  PART 2 MONTPELIER SCHOOL

  CINEMA REX

  MASOOD

  16 JANUARY 1979

  ASGHAR AGHA

  JUST LIKE HER FATHER

  IRAN–IRAQ WAR

  MADELEY ROAD

  MADAR JAAN

  NATIVITY PLAY

  ASSEMBLY

  BEING ENGLISH

  ONSTAGE

  MAHSA

  PART 3 GETTING OLDER

  BRAINWASHING

  RANA DEAN

  THE PHONE CALL

  TERRORISTS IN MADELEY ROAD

  WITH ENEMIES LIKE THESE...

  SAFE AT HOME

  ROWS ABOUT CHEESE

  SCHOLARS

  RANA

  REFUGEES

  EPILOGUE: A NEW ARRIVAL

  POSTSCRIPT: MYKONOS

  Acknowledgements

  Shappi Khorsandi was born in 1973 in Tehran and moved to London with her family in 1976. They were exiled after the revolution of 1979. She studied Drama, Theatre and Television at King Alfred's College (now Winchester University). After graduating, she had several jobs in London, she worked in community theatre, she was a telephone fundraiser and had a job at a well-known sandwich shop chain where she was promoted to chief BLT-maker. Her most enduring job before stand-up comedy was life-modelling. She posed all over London and supported herself as a fledgling stand-up comedian. She has now been a stand-up for over ten years and has performed all over the world, including sell-out runs of her solo show at the Edinburgh Festival and the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. She has appeared on countless radio and television programmes, including Just a Minute, The News Quiz, The Now Show, Mock the Week, Live at the Apollo, Question Time and Newsnight Review and The Secret Policeman's Ball.

  She lives in west London with her husband and son.

  SHAPPI KHORSANDI

  A BEGINNER'S

  GUIDE TO

  ACTING

  ENGLISH

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  Published in 2009 by Ebury Press, an imprint of Ebury Publishing

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  Copyright © Shappi Khorsandi 2009

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  For my beloved boys Christian

  and C. Charlie Valentine

  Also for Maman, Baba and Peyvand

  and

  In Memory of Madar Jaan

  PROLOGUE: NEW ARRIVALS

  I held tightly on to Peyvand's hand as the blonde-haired girl stood in front of us and stared. Her finger was firmly up her nose. She had a good rummage, then she took her finger out and put it into her mouth, picking whatever she had found off with her teeth. Then, she lifted up her skirt, showed us her knickers and ran off to play in the sandpit. Peyvand and I didn't speak a word to anyone. What could we say? Nobody understood us here. They all spoke Englisee. I looked away when they spoke to me, or else buried my head in Peyvand's shoulder.

  The smell of the place was sharp and unfriendly, like some kind of stew that was made days ago but wouldn't go away. One of the teachers came over to Peyvand and me and spoke more gobbledegook. Peyvand must've understood a bit. He was a whole year and a bit older than me so he understood more things. 'C'mon,' he said, 'we've got to go and sit at the table.'

  I didn't want to. I wanted to stay huddled on the bench in the corner of the big room and smell my brother's jumper. I tried to get his smell up my nose to drive the other smells out. The teacher was pulling at my arm that was holding Peyvand's. If I didn't get up, she'd detach me. I clung on to Peyvand, who found us two seats next to each other at the table. A bowl of tomato soup was put in front of me with a plastic spoon next to it. I was expected to eat the source of this terrible smell. The blonde girl sat opposite us, bent her head down to the bowl and slurped the soup. I began to cry. Peyvand gently patted my hand.

  I couldn't eat the soup; Peyvand could. I knew he didn't like it, but he could eat anything. When we went for chelo kebab, I melted butter in my rice to moisten it but Peyvand always had a raw egg yolk like Baba, and would mix it in his rice, just like our dad. Baba would slap him on the back. 'Afareen, pesaram!' Well done, my boy!

  Baba did not believe children should be fussy about food, but he would understand about the soup. 'English food is amazing,' he often said. 'I once had steak and kidney pudding. It takes great effort to make something taste that bad.'

  I stared down into my bowl. A skin had formed on top of the soup.

  I thought of the time Baba made me try raw egg yolk in my rice and I ran to the bathroom and threw up in the hallway. I'd rather eat raw egg and rice than this. A teacher came over and leant over me. She smelled of coffee and dust. I didn't know what she was saying but it was obvious she wasn't happy I'd not touched my soup. Everyone else had finished and was playing again. The blonde girl was charging round the room and shouting.

  I tried to get down from the table. The teacher grabbed me by the underarms and plonked me back in my seat. She sounded stern and she wasn't smiling. She was pointing at the soup then wagging her finger at me. She wasn't going to let me leave the table without eating it. I pursed my lips in case she tried to force it in my mouth. Peyvand pulled my bowl towards him. He was going to help me eat it, but the teacher wasn't having that. She pulled the bowl back in front of me. She raised her voice a little and kept pointing. My throat ached with a sob that I was trying to keep down inside me. I couldn't look at the teacher. I stared down at the table, fat tears blurring my vision before one plopped down into my soup with a tiny splash.

  Suddenly the teacher's hand was under my chin; she gripped hard and yanked my head up. I looked up in terror. She had the spoon in her hand. The spoon was full of the putrid cold soup. Could she force me to eat it? She brought it down towards my mouth. I felt the plastic against my lips. There was nothing for it; I lashed out, knocking it out of her hand. The spoon flew up, its contents spraying over the table and crashing to the fl
oor. The teacher really shouted now. She grabbed my hand, held it out and smacked it hard. I howled properly. My cries were so loud that even the blonde girl stopped her shouting to turn around and look. Another teacher came to the table and the two women stood tutting and shaking their heads. I couldn't understand their words, but I knew they were saying what a terrible little girl I was.

  They left Peyvand to help me down from the table. He put his arm around my shoulders and led me back to our bench. He found me some Lego and although my hand stung and I hiccupped for the rest of the afternoon, I eventually stopped crying and helped Peyvand build a tower.

  'I don't know what they do to them in that place, but they hate it.'

  We were sitting at the dinner table in our Kensington flat. Peyvand and I had left the nursery hours ago but the stink of tomato soup lingered in my nostrils.

  The knot in my stomach had eased once we had gone out of the gates. It was dark outside now we were having dinner and after just one sleep I'd have to go there again, and the knot would come back.

  The soup incident was the last straw for Maman. She had picked us up in a black cab as usual and, as usual, was met by two children so relieved to see her that she shuffled back into the waiting cab with each clinging to a leg. The face of her little girl was streaked with dried tears and snot and both her children attacked the apples she had brought them for the journey home like starving chimps.

  'Every time I pick them up one of them is crying.'

  Maman heaped a ladleful of mint and cucumber yoghurt on my fluffy saffron rice. We did not have tinned soup at our house.

  'I have to practically drag them out of the taxi in the mornings to get them to go into nursery.'

  'Don't go on and on,' Baba said, helping himself to another kofteh. 'The matter is simply solved, they must never go there again. That's the end of that.'

  Our new nursery, the Kings' International Nursery School, was recommended to Baba by a diplomat friend of his in Tehran who had spent a year or so in London with his young family. It was privately run by Miss King and Miss King, elderly unmarried sisters. They called me 'poppet'. Iranians said 'jaan' or 'azizam', my darling, but I had never been a poppet before. When Baba and Maman took us in on the first day they made a fuss of me and Peyvand. 'What lovely thick shiny black hair! What gorgeous big black eyes they both have! What long thick lashes!' Peyvand's eyes were bigger than mine. Some people thought we were twins but we were different colours. My skin was lighter than Peyvand's, which was lucky because I was the girl. It didn't matter if boys were dark. Maman said that his skin was like milk chocolate and mine was like wheat. The Miss Kings cuddled me and Peyvand. It was my first time being cuddled by an Englisee. They didn't squeeze me until I couldn't breathe or grab my face and place great big smacking kisses on my cheeks again and again as a lot of Iroonis did but they were nice cuddles, a little bony but still nice.

  I hardly took the time to say goodbye to Maman now. I leapt out of the taxi and ran to the Kings' warm hot-chocolatey, biscuit smell and spent the days being a 'poppet', a 'sweetheart' and a 'love'.

  It is a lot easier to make friends when you are not crying all day.

  'My shoes are brand new,' I told a little Chinese girl in Farsi. She looked at me and looked at my shoes and said something to me that wasn't Farsi. It wasn't English either, so it must have been Chinese. Or she could have just made it up. That was fine. I understood made-up languages better than English.

  My new Chinese friend examined my blue-and-white chequered pumps and then allowed me to get acquainted with her pretty pink shoes which had tiny red flowers printed on them. After this solemn ritual, we cemented our friendship by holding hands and going off to play.

  Peyvand found a boy to play with called Marek. He was blond with big blue eyes and was Polish. Hardly anyone in the nursery was Englisee so it was much easier to make the other children understand me here. No one understood each other, which made for perfect understanding.

  Yumi, my new Chinese friend, dragged me around the big hall and showed me the sandpit and the plastic slide and the little toyshop and the story corner. There was no time to play at these new attractions; Yumi took full control and made it clear we were only looking for now. She chattered to me and I chattered back, neither understanding a word.

  Yumi would not let go of my hand. She grabbed it and kept it. I thought she'd only hold it for a little while and then give it back, but it turned out she needed my hand for the entire day. It stopped me doing anything else. When she finally decided to stop and play instead of dragging me around, I tried to pull my hand away. Yumi scrunched up her delicate features and snarled. She growled something in Chinese. Then she reinforced her hold, putting me in my place.

  It's very hard to build a Lego fortress one-handed, but I did as best I could. After all, Yumi was my friend and I was very glad to have a friend who wasn't Peyvand because Peyvand, when all was said and done, was a boy and liked to spend a great deal of time just whizzing around pretending to be an aeroplane or climbing up things just to jump off them. With girls I could look at books and clap hands and sing songs without worrying they might suddenly karate kick me from behind.

  Once or twice, my hand managed to escape but Yumi greedily snatched it back and glared at it as though scolding it for running away.

  I wanted to hold one of the Miss Kings' hands. They were grown-ups and Englisee and they called me 'poppet'. I tried to wrench my hand from Yumi's. There was a scuffle. I didn't mean to hurt her, I just needed my hand back and didn't know how to say it in Chinese so I kicked her. She screamed and howled and a Miss King came to see what was wrong.

  Yumi was crying her eyes out; I grabbed Miss King's hand and looked as small and as frightened as I could. They had not seen the kick. Yumi angrily tried to prise my hand out of Miss King's so I pushed her away with my other hand, which Yumi had shown no interest in.

  'Oh dear, oh dear! No fighting, please!' Miss King was shaking her head at me. I looked at her in desperation. Yumi's hand was still attacking mine. I held on tight to Miss King and shouted 'Na! Na! Na!'

  The other Miss King came to the rescue. Yumi was going for my hand again and screaming. The other Miss King picked her up clean off the floor and took her to the 'quiet area' where there were no toys, just big soft cushions.

  I got to hold my Miss King's hand for ages. I sat on her lap in the story corner and we looked at books. Even Peyvand paused for a moment from his running and whirling when he noticed my privileged position. Eventually Yumi and Miss King came over to the story corner. Miss King took my hand gently in hers and held it up for Yumi to see. 'That's Shaparak's hand, okay, poppet?'

  Yumi stared at my hand as though she might eat it.

  'It's Shaparak's hand and she might not want you to hold it, she's allowed to say "no" and you must leave her alone.'

  Yumi got the message so I was willing to give her a second chance. We sat and we played with Lego. I was wary though. I caught her staring at my hand a few times with a wild look in her eye, but she managed to control herself.

  'Teatime!' Miss King called out at exactly the same time every day.

  There was no tea at teatime, but there were jugs of orange squash and plates of biscuits.

  I had told Maman about orange squash but she did not buy it for us.

  'Orange juice? I'll make it for you at home.'

  She squeezed the juice out of a pile of oranges into tall glasses for us. I took a glass from her, disappointed. This was not orange squash. It had bits in it and tasted of oranges. Orange squash had no bits in it and tasted of very sweet cardboard. It was delicious.

  Maman didn't keep any of the English teatime delicacies in our cupboard at home. She bought her biscuits from Harrods, the big shop on the corner. The biscuits Maman bought were grown-up biscuits. There were no custard creams or rings of pink and yellow frosting that almost broke your teeth but tasted of heaven. Only Englisees knew about these things.

  Every morning, I planned m
y rush to the table. Some children, like Peyvand, didn't seem to care where in the room they were when the call for teatime came. They might not be anywhere near the table so didn't have a hope of sitting at the top where the plates of biscuits were. I, however, would keep my eye on the table all morning. I'd pretend I wasn't watching but, once I saw it being set, my secret shuffle began. I regularly had to elbow Marek the Polish boy out of the way as he liked the top seat, too. The good thing about being a small girl with big black eyes and long lashes is that no one ever really takes the side of the big blond Polish boy against you, even if he is crying and saying you pushed him, and especially if you are very quiet, make your eyes bigger and look a little frightened. No one ever suspected me of pushing anyone. I was more often noticed by the Miss Kings offering the biscuits around before I helped myself. Of course, then the plate of biscuits would end up in front of me and I could have as many as I could snatch and cram into my mouth, instead of just 'Two per person, if you please'.

  Once, I let my guard down and Marek saw me stealing a biscuit and so reached out his arm to help himself. Miss King's hand swooped the plate out of his reach. 'We do not just grab! We are not a pack of savages.'

  I offered him the untouched biscuit on my plate. Untouched because I'd managed to eat five or six when no one was looking and now felt almost too full for another.

  'How nice of you, Shaparak!' Miss King said. 'But I don't think Marek should have another one; he's had two, he's just being greedy.'

  I popped the biscuit into my mouth. Marek was one of those boys who wanted a biscuit one minute then made loud animal noises the next. He was no threat to me.

  'I'm the king of the castle, and you're the dirty rascal!' Peyvand would sing out on our way home every day. His English was better than mine, but I was a faster runner. Peyvand had flat feet so Maman said he could never join the army. I don't think Peyvand minded.