A Beginner's Guide to Acting English Read online

  'You've got to stop crying now,' he told me, giving me a little, uncomfortable cuddle. He smiled at the dinner lady and Mrs Wybrow apologetically and patted my back. He couldn't really do anything to help me. I was being a baby and he wanted to be in his own class with the big boys instead of here, getting his sister's snot all over his shoulder.

  'I haven't got a best friend,' I whined to my brother. 'Have you?'

  'Yes,' he told me. 'Andrew Nelson. He's got a twin brother, Christopher, so really I've got two best friends. I've got to go now because they're waiting for me to play a game.'

  Later, I found Peyvand out in the playground and ran to him, but one of the twins shouted, 'No girls! Go away!' and Peyvand shrugged his shoulders at me and ran off with them.

  At school, Peyvand had no use for a little sister. I tried to talk to him when he was behind a tree by himself in the middle of a game of hide and seek. 'Go away!' he hissed. 'Play with your own friends.'

  I walked off biting my lip and trying not to cry. I had really wanted to kick him but I was scared I'd get told off. I didn't have any friends; all I had was Peyvand. One of the dinner ladies saw I was on my own and let me hold her hand until the end of playtime.

  On the way home that day, after Baba picked us up in the car from the staff car park even though he wasn't allowed to park there, I put my arms around Baba's neck and told him I didn't want to go to school any more.

  'My school is too big,' I told him. 'No one can say my name and Peyvand has two best friends and I don't even have one.'

  Baba changed his route and took us to Ealing Broadway where all the shops were.

  'Where are we going, Baba?' I asked him.

  'I will not have my daughter upset,' Baba said.

  Baba bought me a pink bicycle with a basket on it and he bought Peyvand a blue one with very thick wheels. My bike had stabiliser wheels on it. Peyvand didn't need them; he could ride a bike properly.

  Rebecca stuck her tongue out at me every day. I started to stick my tongue out back at her and that's how we became friends, though not 'best friends'.

  'Mrs Gadd says I say my alphabet perfectly.' I was pleased because I was speaking English now.

  'So?' Susie Hampton said. 'I could say the alphabet when I was two.'

  I stuck my tongue out at Susie.

  There is a big difference between 'd' and 'b' when you say them, but they look the same when you write them down. My dogs were bogs and my boys, doys.

  'I'm worried this is a little more than simple mistakes. Shaparak gets her letters so confused. She does mirror writing half the time!' Mrs Gadd had called Maman in to speak with her about 'Shaparak's progress'.

  Peyvand could spell really well but no one really understood what I wrote down. I started my sentences from right to the left and sort of wrote backwards, though I couldn't see anything wrong with it at all.

  'We are teaching the children to write Farsi at home,' Maman explained.

  This was true. Baba had made us all the Farsi letters out of matchsticks and mounted them up on our bedroom wall. In Farsi there are several letters for 'S' and 'T' and you have to write joined up, not like in English where you learn one letter then another.

  'Perhaps she is confusing the two languages,' Maman told the teacher.

  It was decided that I was and no further action was taken regarding my inability to tell a 'd' from a 'b'. I carried on throughout school knowing that if I made a guess, there was a fifty per cent chance of getting it right.

  Peyvand and I had special lessons with Mrs Gadd on Tuesday afternoons to give us extra help with our English. We sat in a sectioned-off area of the school's big hallway.

  We learned about cats that sat on mats right beside the Home Economics room so learning English smelled of cakes. In our cosy little corner, Mrs Gadd said, 'Put your tongue between your teeth.' She showed us: 'teeth-th-th-th-th'. There is no 'th' in Farsi. Maman and Baba said 'I tink so' or 'we are all togeder'

  'Wa-wa-wa-wa-wa'. When Mrs Gadd made this sound she got deep creases all around her mouth so she looked even older. She was the wrinkliest person I had ever seen.

  We didn't have 'W' in Farsi either. Maman and Baba were not very well, they 'vere very vell'.

  Mrs Gadd wasn't a proper teacher. By that I mean she didn't have a room and class of her own. She was an extra teacher who took the foreign kids like me and Peyvand and helped them catch up with the Susies and Rebeccas. I can't remember the exact point when Peyvand and I stopped speaking to each other in Farsi, but soon after we started Montpelier School it was as though we had only ever spoken to each other in English. Maman and Baba told us off. 'Beh Farsi! Beh Farsi!' they called when they heard us. But it was hard. We talked about stuff at school and stuff on TV and it sounded silly if we talked about these things in Farsi. English belonged to our other world.

  When Maman and Baba spoke English now, their accents made us laugh and sometimes embarrassed us. 'Maman, it's not "Tot-en-ham Court road",' Peyvand sighed. 'It's Tot-nem Court Road. Maman, you don't know anything!'

  Zenith was from India but she didn't need to see Mrs Gadd because she was born in England and spoke just like all the English kids. Her skin was darker than mine, darker than Peyvand's even, and she had two long dark plaits down the sides of her head. Zenith could colour in more neatly than anyone else in the class and the inside of her desk was tidier than even Tanya Forward's.

  We were learning about the Tudors and in pairs had to paint a Tudor picture. Rebecca and Susie were partners. Then Tanya Forward and Grace McAvoy; Katie Ayling and Samantha Thoms. The girls all came in twos. I was only one. I couldn't pair with a boy because I was not very good at talking to them, except Peyvand, and he only wanted to talk to me sometimes now.

  My cheeks began to get hot as all the girls found their pairs like creatures in the ark. Ela Novak wasn't in a pair but that's because everyone said she picked her nose and ate it. I had never see her do this but was disgusted nevertheless. Everyone said Ela smelled and held their noses when they were near her, even me. Mrs Wybrow once put her nose right up to Ela's neck and smelled her then said, 'She doesn't smell at all, so please all stop being so ridiculous.'

  It was Tina Hills who started the 'Ela smells' thing. If Tina Hills called you something like that or decided that no one was to like you, then that was that. I was lucky; Tina just ignored me.

  I was about to start to cry when Zenith put her small warm, incredibly soft hand in mine and said, 'Will you be my partner?' Then that was that. I knew I finally had a best friend and it was the best feeling in the world.

  The paper we were drawing our pictures on was huge so Zenith and I had to take ours into the corridor, spread out our paper and paint on the floor there. We were painting a huge Tudor house, copied from a book Miss had given us. Tudor houses were black and white and Zenith painted all her bits without smudging once. We worked quietly together. Zenith didn't talk all that much, but it was nice. I just loved to paint quietly with her. It was a big job and was going to take up most of our art classes for the term. Our house was black and white with several triangle roofs. I wanted to paint a dinner table on the lawn, with the king and queen sat at it. Zenith said that kings and queens didn't live in houses like that and I said they must have done because the house was so big. This was the only disagreement I and my friend from India ever had. Even though she was sure that the king and queen would not have lived there, she let me paint them anyway. She said we can pretend they had just come to visit for tea.

  At lunchtime I ate my packed lunch in the big school hall. Rebecca's mum and Susie's mum and all the other children's mums made proper lunches. White bread sandwiches with thin slices of ham with butter, an apple, a packet of Monster Munch and a little flask of orange squash.

  Maman gave us whatever was left over from our dinner the night before. We had pots of rice with fish or big, thick pieces of kotlet which made the other kids go 'Errrrr! What's that?'

  'Maman, can you make us normal lunch?' we begged
her.

  'What is "normal lunch"?'

  'You're supposed to make sandwiches with square bread, not pitta and put English stuff in them like egg or Dairylea.'

  Maman said sandwich bread was just like foam and she didn't know how we could like it. But we insisted and so Maman did her best to make us more English lunches.

  Once, Maman didn't have anything at all to put in our lunch boxes so Baba arrived at the school just as the dinner bell went, with McDonald's for me and Peyvand. We sat eating our hamburgers and fries while Mrs Davenport, our headmistress 'had a word' with Baba and told him he wasn't allowed to do that again.

  After the first term, Maman decided that making packed lunch every day was causing too many problems so Peyvand and I switched to school dinners, which cost twenty-five pence a day but Maman said it was worth it because then we couldn't blame her if we got something we didn't like.

  So Peyvand and I sat in the big hall and had shepherd's pie with sponge and custard pudding.

  One day Baba strode in and switched the television off. 'Put your shoes on, I have a surprise!'

  You had to be wary with Baba and his surprises. Sometimes he would tell us we were going out somewhere fun but it would end up being at a boring family's house who didn't even have kids.

  But if Maman had cooked a big pan of loobiya polo (rice with green beans and lamb cooked with saffron and cinnamon, one of my favourites) and let it go cold and was packing carrier bags full of fruit, we knew we were going on a picnic. We had a lot of picnics, usually with a heap of other people. Iranians didn't pack sandwiches at a picnic. We had big pots of rice and trays of kotlet. We took pitta bread and yoghurt and big bowls of salad Shirazi, my favourite. It was just made from cucumber, tomato and onion chopped up into tiny pieces, as small as you can make them, in a lemon juice and olive-oil dressing which I drank from the bowl when it was finished.

  When we found ourselves standing outside the cinema in High Street Kensington, Peyvand and I jumped and whooped with excitement. Star Wars was on.

  'I don't think Shaparak would like it, I think she might be too little. It looks like a boys' film.'

  'I will like it, I will! I like boys' films.'

  'There's a cartoon on too, look, at the same time,' Maman said. 'Maybe we should go to that?'

  Peyvand didn't shout or cry or scream the way I did when I really wanted something. He just looked at Maman and Baba with his huge black eyes and said simply, 'She will like it, I know she will. Please, please can we just go!'

  Baba bought a big bag of popcorn and we sat near the back. I watched Peyvand to make sure he didn't take more popcorn than me. His hands were bigger than mine.

  The lights went down. The music came up. Some writing appeared on the screen, then some more, the words travelled slowly across the blackness. I couldn't read them properly. Peyvand leaned in my ear and whispered, 'A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away...'

  Maman poked Baba to stop him snoring.

  Even though Baba fell asleep when he watched films and almost never watched TV except for Mind Your Language, he bought us something nobody else in the whole school had.

  He came home one day with a big box. It wasn't wrapped up in wrapping paper, it was just in a cardboard box with lots of bubble wrap, the kind Peyvand and I loved to pop. Baba never looked this excited for no reason. He was not one of those babas who said he had something really wonderful for you and got you all excited but then you found out it wasn't that wonderful after all. Baba's eyes were shining and he almost ran into the living room calling 'Shaparak! Peyvand! Come! Come and see what we have!'

  Peyvand and I almost whooped with excitement just at the tone of his voice and we flew into the living room. 'Do you know what this is?'

  We stared at the machine Baba had taken out of the box. It looked like a giant cassette recorder. 'It's a cassette recorder!' I shouted.

  Why did it need to be so big? I had never seen anything so modern. It looked as if it was from the future.

  Baba took out some wires that led from the machine to the TV, plugged them into the sockets and said, 'Almost right, it's a video recorder. We can tape shows on the TV and watch them later.'

  Peyvand laughed. He thought it was one of Baba's jokes. But Baba was serious. He showed us the big chunky tape and put it in the machine. He turned on the TV. There was a lady cooking things. Baba pressed a button. 'Shhhh, be quiet for a minute.' I stared at the TV while the machined clicked and whirled. After a moment, Baba pressed some buttons on the TV and the machine and the very bit of the programme we had just watched, where she cracked eggs into a bowl and said 'Be ever so careful not to get any of the shell in' played again on the recorder!

  Maman clasped her hands together and said, 'Did you just record that Hadi? Just this second?'

  'Yes, we can record whatever we want now.'

  That Christmas, we recorded The King and I and I watched it again and again. I never got bored and learned every song, every word by heart.

  Anna had come to Siam to teach the King how to be better, how to be more English. She was posh and she was beautiful. I began to talk like her. I put on a very posh accent and tried to be as calm as Anna when I fought with Peyvand. 'I am most certainly not your servant,' I told him when he told me to do things like tidy up his side of our room.

  When Peyvand was busy playing boys' games, I dressed up in Maman's prettiest clothes and pretended I was Anna, dancing with the King of Siam and teaching him how to be English.

  Having a best friend meant you were never alone at break time. Zenith and I linked arms and skipped around the playground. Usually, when we played kiss-chase, no one ever chased me and Zenith, so we just chased and kissed each other, but we still kept an eye on the main game where the boys chased Tina Hills, Katie Ayling and Tanya Forward.

  One day, Tina and Katie started a game in the usual way. They linked arms and skipped around the playground chanting 'Who wants to play? Kiss chase! Who wants to play? Kiss chase!' I linked arms with them immediately and so did Tanya, Zenith, Ela and Hannah.

  Then, to our surprise, one of the Nelson twins, Andrew, linked arms to join in. When people saw that Andrew was part of the game, grinning and skipping with us, they all wanted to join in. He was an older boy, one of the Nelson Twins, no less, the most popular boys in school! Tina and Tanya and Katie were giggling like mad and I knew that each girl thought he fancied her. That playtime, the kiss-chase game was huge. Everyone was allowed to play, even Ela Novak, and no one hardly ever played with her. We called her 'rubber lips'.

  After a few boys were 'it' and several girls were kissed, Andrew declared himself to be 'it'. All the girls squealed in excitement, except for me, because Andrew was my brother's friend and I already knew he wouldn't chase me.

  'He comes to our house to play all the time, he's my brother's best friend,' I boasted to Tina Hills. Tina didn't listen. She only listened to her own very select friends. And to the boys. Tina Hills was the most popular girl because her mum was American and she had a tennis court in her back garden. Tina was squealing and giggling and staying right up close to Andrew. Even though he wasn't chasing her, she was acting as if he was and kept screaming all the time.

  Andrew chased Ela. Ela! She got chased less often than even me. Ela loved it and let him catch her under the fire escape. I don't know what happened to make us all run up to the fire escape, but we did. A big bunch of us stood around and shouted while Andrew tickled Ela. She was bent double, giggling. His hands were going up her skirt and she was laughing hard as she tried to smack them away. When Ela's laughing turned to screaming, the crowd closed in on her and Andrew so none of the dinner ladies could see what was happening. Andrew was pulling her skirt right up; we could see her knickers. 'Gerrumoff!' someone shouted, then we all did. Ela was on the ground, a bunch of kids leapt on her and pinned down her arms. She was kicking out, spitting and hissing, but we were all sort of helping Andrew. I didn't touch her, but I did stay there and watch. Andrew yanked her
knickers down, past her knees and past her ankles, then completely off. The crowd of kids clapped and cheered as he waved them in the air. But the kids on the ground with Ela didn't let her go, they pulled up her skirt high up to her tummy so we could all see everything. Ela was crying and snot was coming out of her nose.

  I felt a hand grab the back of my neck, a grown-up's hand. It practically lifted me up in the air and threw me to one side. It did the same to several kids before Mrs Oliver, the youngest of the dinner ladies, who was tall and thin with orange hair, was crouched on the ground next to Ela and smoothed her skirt back down over her legs. Zenith was behind her. Zenith had run to call her. Everyone ran off except me and Zenith. We helped Mrs Oliver look after Ela. I picked her knickers up from the ground. They were from Marks and Spencer's. I knew that because Maman had got me the same pair.

  Zenith and I went to Mrs Davenport's office with Ela and Mrs Oliver. 'You two are witnesses. I saw quite a few of the children who ran off, but I didn't see who did it. You two must tell Mrs Davenport everything you saw, okay?'

  We nodded. I didn't understand why I wasn't in trouble; it was Zenith who got help, not me. I was watching and cheering with everyone else. I felt horrible about it now. Poor Ela. She had never been mean to anyone but she was just, well, she was just Ela. No one ever thought about it; everyone picked on her. Except for Zenith.

  I had never been into Mrs Davenport's office. Usually you only went in there if you had been especially naughty and Mrs Davenport herself had to deal with you. I was never naughty, not in a way that people would see anyway.

  Mrs Davenport's office was small and very warm and smelled of peppermints. Her desk was huge and took up most of the room and the window overlooked the playground. I never knew Mrs Davenport could watch us playing from her office. I hoped she had never seen the times I had kicked one of the boys or the time I ran on to the 'out of bounds' area. I'd got into trouble for that with Mrs Oliver. She had asked me why I'd gone there, even though I knew it wasn't allowed. 'Rebecca told me to,' I'd explained. 'If Rebecca told you to jump off a cliff, would you do it?' was her stern reply. I told her I wouldn't and said I was sorry. The thing was, none of the teachers or dinner ladies knew what it was like when your friend told you to do something. You sort of had to do it if it was a friend like Rebecca because if you didn't she might send you to Coventry and not be your friend any more and you might end up like Ela.