Sometimes I went to the seaside – Southend, Ramsgate, Margate with friends, four or five of us by train. I take them because they didn’t know underground. London Zoo and Madame Tussauds as well. Later I took my wife and children.
I was helping people, as well, fill up a form or write a letter but never take any money. Free, okay. At that time the only correspondence was letters. We couldn’t telephone in Bangladesh. Everybody send money to our families, £5, £6, £3, to buy land for paddy fields, rice fields. They were poor.
Taslim Ali bought three, four storeys building and made a mosque in Stepney. Sometimes, like Eid, we’d go. We can’t put our cap on the head, otherwise the skinhead fight with us. About 30 years ago Taslim Ali moved from there to East London. We call it East London Mosque. Three, four thousand people can pray together. Not only Bangladeshi, not only from Pakistan, from everywhere.
In 1971 the fighting started with Pakistan. Our area [in Syhlet] was little bit safe but in the other places they kill a lot of people. I was collecting money, blankets and every Sunday, Saturday we went to Hyde Park. Mr Abu Sayeed and Mr. Peter Shore our MP, he was also helping. When we independent in 1971 I make a Bangladesh passport.
After ten years I went home to see my family and also to marry. Everybody come to see me. In 1973, I make British passport and about 1978 I brought my son here with my wife. I got more children born here.
I like social work. When I was a boy I collect bamboo from every house for the primary school. I was a teacher here in the community school from 1992 until about two or three years ago. And I was a school governor in Canon Barnett for 20 years. In Bangladesh, we help poor people – orphans who haven’t got enough money and are good student.
My father died and mother is alive, but she is about 90 years old so sometimes I go to see her. My brothers cultivate the land. We’ve got jackfruit, coconut, pineapple, banana and mango trees. So many fruit – blackberries, lychees, melon. Vegetables as well – potatoes, tomato, beans, cabbage, cauliflower, carrot. Everything we’ve got ourselves. Now they got machines. Nobody else came, ‘til now, only myself.