We Are OPEN

Hello and welcome to Open with me, Angie and me, Patsy, on Women's Radio station. As this is our first show, we really wanted to share with you our own personal life stories, the experiences that have made us who we are. You may at times find some of our own personal testimonies to be quite emotional and harrowing. However, we wanted to be very open and honest with you because it's our belief that only by being open and honest with you, you're able to trust and reflect on your own personal journey. And please remember, we're both here to help and never to judge. So if you feel over the coming weeks you've got any questions on anything you've heard us discuss or you'd like to share your own personal journey with us, we would be delighted to hear from you. You can send us a tweet and. Or drop us an email presentersomensradiostation.com so, Patsy, tell me a bit about your early life with your family. Well, my parents came over from India and Pakistan in the 60s, and my dad didn't have any skills or anything that he could do, so he found a job in. In a cotton mill in Manchester, which is where I was born. And at the time, my birth mother was looking after my two brothers who were a lot older than me, and she was at home. And at the mill he met the woman who would become my adopted mother, because after the war she happened to be working there as well. And cotton in Manchester in the 60s, it was. That was where everybody worked. You know, there was lots of work going on and that was just something that he felt he could do. And then I came along. I was born in 1970, and I think I was a bit of a shock to my parents because I don't think they were expecting to have any more children and they certainly weren't expecting to have a girl. So it created a division, I think, in the family that they were expecting to have and the family that they finished up with. So it was a power dynamic there. And then what happened was that my. It's quite difficult to explain because it's. It's convoluted, but it turned out that the woman who was my adopted mother came to live with us in the house, essentially to help bring me up, because my birth mother just. She couldn't cope with having another child. So you never bonded with your mother? No, I didn't. I didn't. I bonded with my adoptive mother because she was there, she was warm, she loved, looked after me. She wanted me. She wanted me because actually, is that the reason you didn't bond? Because in the culture, the Muslim culture, girls were seen as not an asset and the boys were seen as an asset. I think that's right. I think that if I had been born a boy, I would have been welcomed into the family much more than I was as a girl. And as a girl, I think I was seen as somebody who could just fend for themselves. And also the economic issues about having a girl, because they start to say for a dowry, especially in the Muslim religion. Yeah, but for me, that wasn't really. It wasn't really. Well, you wouldn't have been aware of that because you were a child. However, in that dynamic of your family, they would have been very aware of that. Yeah. And I think they saw me as the child that was going to cost them money, rather than maybe bringing money in. Anyway, I had an upbringing that was very creative. It was very. My adopted mother allowed me to have, within the confines of our little room that we shared at the top of the house, I shared a room with her for nearly 20 years. But within that room, she allowed me to be creative. I had books and music and all those sorts of things that weren't allowed in the rest of the house. So, Patsy, can I ask you, where did you ever realize, consciously, that there was a problem with the rest of your family unit? I think that happened when my parents and my brothers left to go back to Pakistan and India. And when they came back, they had developed incredible, incredibly rigid ideas of being a Muslim and how we all then had to behave. And so I went from having an upbringing where I was allowed to be creative and live as all the other kids at school did, but then when they came back, I had to switch into being what they expected a Muslim girl to be. And it was incredibly difficult because in that room where we were, that was. It was almost like that was our little part of England. And the rest of the house was a cultural minefield of. So how did you cope, Patsy? Well, I coped by compartmentalizing what I could and could not do. So within that room, I could do certain things, but in the rest of the house, I couldn't. So you're saying to me that your birth mother gave you negative feedback and your adopted mother was more encouraging and enabling in a way. But I think they were both. It was just very different. They were both wanting me to be different people, and it was impossible to please both sides. But I tried. That's what I tried to do as a kid. Well, you're vulnerable. So we want to be loved and, you know, revered by our caregivers. Yeah, absolutely. So that's, you know, that's what I was trying to do. So you learned, it sounds to me, that you learned from a very young age how to survive and also embellish and model yourself to conform to the ideologies of each parent. Yeah, yeah, that's what it was like. But school was incredibly hard. So tell us a bit about your primary school. What were the experiences like there? Primary school was hilarious because there were no other brown children at the school whatsoever. And I hadn't ever really noticed that I was brown and that everybody else wasn't until one day after school, a kid came up to me and said, how come you're brown and your mum's white? Because my adopted mum was English and I hadn't ever really noticed that difference. And he said to me, if you scrub all that brown off, you're probably white underneath. And I was about five or six and I actually thought, yeah, hang on, this is a really good idea, because I. I wanted to be like all the other kids at school. I wanted to be like the teachers, I wanted to be like everybody else. So you wanted to fit in? Exactly. And I remember running home that night and I sat in the bath with a nail brush and I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed at my skin because I wanted to get the brown off so that I could be white like everybody else. So what happened when you realized that it wasn't coming off? I was gutted. I was absolutely gutted. Who did you go to? Well, my mum. My adopted mum had noticed what I was doing and she told me that I was being ridiculous and that wasn't going to work. But for years after that, I was desperate to not be the skin colour that I was. So what did you do to not be the color you were? Well, there was nothing I could do. You have to accept it, don't you? You just have to accept that that is the difference. But I never really felt that I belonged in one camp or the other. So you realised then that you were an outsider. You were made to feel like an outsider not only at home, but also at school? A little bit, yeah. A little bit. Well, Patsy, thank you for sharing with us. So join us after the break when Patsy will be asking me about my own personal early life. But most importantly, we will go back to Patsy's life story throughout our series on Open. Welcome to women's radio station the voice of women worldwide. So I do glitter for a living. Coming up next on women's radio station, wrs. Women's radio station. Hey, this is Jessie and I'm a life architect. So what has made you say effort in rage or effort enjoy this week. I love listening to women's radio whilst driving in my car, my sport and me. 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My mum and dad actually got married, eloped within 15 days. My mother came from a very upper middle class Italian family. And my father was very working class. His family were what you called peasants or worked the land, because that's how it was. It was after the war, the Finnish. So there was a lot of poverty around. My mother was one of five daughters. And in that sort of social and economic construct, all the girls were sent off to an orphanage. No, sorry, a convent to be educated. Yes. And that's how it was. And everyone was actually picked a suitor and then married off. That's how it was. It was so controlled. It was a patriarchal marriage was seen as a contract. So because my mother's elder sister was about two years older than her, she was already being wanted to be ordained to become a nun. And my mother had to make that decision herself. But also my grandmother was very, very ill and she had to have a hysterectomy. And because she was older than the younger siblings, she had to go back home to the family home to nurse and look after my mother. Her mother, after she had a hysterectomy. And it was while she was there that she actually encountered my father. Cause he used to, you know, clean the grounds and all the rest of it, worked in the garden. And I remember her words when she said to me, she goes, I knew then, Ang, that, you know, I could never be married to God. I knew when I met your father, he made me feel things that I've never felt before. So they met and married after 15 days. Yeah, well, actually, my dad went to the local. You have to go to the notary to get a license to get married. Yeah. And then they faked the agreement. You see, they wrote on the paper that they agreed, the parents agreed that they could get married, but nobody knew. So your mother was at the convent and she left the convent to marry your father. And that must have been, at the time, an incredibly scandalous thing to do. I don't think my mother thought of it like that. I'm sure in years later that she did. But at the time, she was just basically, she was a very stubborn woman. It was her way or hit the highway. And that's how she was throughout all of her life. So for her, she'd made a decision. She'd met the man she was going to marry and no one was going to stop her. And so what happened? What happened next? So then they couldn't stay around there because obviously it created such a drama and there would have been friction. So my dad decided to come to England because there was no work. It was after the war, so they had heard from other people that had left the villages around there or left the towns to seek better lives in America, New York and London. So my dad decided to come to London and back in the day, there was no. There was no planes. It was all like about. I mean, even the boat, my mum said it was wooden. And then she said to me, I remember arriving at Victoria Station and they still had steam trains, you know, the old choo choos. And it was really dirty and dark and dingy and rainy. She goes, I mean, she said, all I could remember was it was always raining and cold and. And, you know, they arrived here not knowing anyone and so what did they do? They said they arrived at Victoria Station. What was the next step of. Of them trying to build a life. So what my dad, luckily, thinking about him, next to Victoria Station, there's Westminster Cathedral, I think it is, in Victoria. So my dad went along there and it transpired there was an Italian community that had all also come over. So he got immersed into the Italian community. They were, you know, embraced and everything. Nobody asked any questions. However, they got work, they ended up working in service, you know, for a big house in Belgravia. So they were housekeepers and. Yeah. Is that what you mean? Originally, yeah. But my dad and my mother, it was very alien for them because my mother was. She had servants. She was never a servant herself, so for her she was. She hated it. So my dad obviously started working really, really hard, doing lots of odd jobs on the side, getting money together and obviously they wanted to have a family. So my dad planned and he purchased a house outside of London, in Essex. He bought the house and they planned my brother, the first child, and then my brother came along and everything was going along smoothly. They had. It was. Your parents were living in this house and your brother came along and then you came along and things changed. So what? Well, I mean, my mother was always the rose and my dad was the gardener. And ultimately it was a very patriarchal family unit. My dad ruled the roost. And my mother's role was to just be the caregiver and the provider and do all the family things as such. And then I came along by accident, actually, as my mother always had delight in telling me, whenever I was naughty or didn't behave. You were an accident, she'd say to me. She would say that to you as a child. How did that make you feel? What was it like growing up in a household where you were made to feel as though you were unwanted? Well, it was so obvious because my dad really Bonded with my older brother and I was the accident and the. The odd one out. Don't forget my brother was very fair and I was very, very dark. So even just to look at each other, we didn't look as if we were related anyway because I was very Italian looking and my brother was very German looking. So automatic just on visuals, we didn't look right. And how did that translate into your home life and your relationship with your parents and your brother? I think what happened was I actually withdrew and I went into my own little world and I just. Cause don't forget, we lived in the country then and we had gard and we had like, you know, the family before us had a, you know, a home, cottagey thing and I'd play with all the little dolly things and things like that. So how did that fit in with the religious beliefs that your parents had? Well, I was an abomination, obviously. I mean, my mother was brought up as a strict Catholic and my dad was very patriarchal. So when I. This thing arrived, it was like, my God, what have we got here? And that's how I was. That's how I felt. I felt as if I was being under a microscope because I was so different to my older brother. And how did that impact on you going to school? What was? I just think that going to school actually heightened it even more because I felt. In what way? Well, it was a primary school and it was a mixed primary school school. And I just felt like I didn't belong with the boys and I didn't belong with the girls. So I just thought, well, where do I belong? Who do I talk to? I was so alone. Nobody talked to me because I was seen as the. The freak or the outsider. So you didn't have any friends at school? You didn't have any friends that came back to the house that you played with? My dad wouldn't allow any friends to come back to the house. Why not? Because he was a very private person. And also as well, don't forget, we're talking in the late 50s, early 60s. And you know, in that time England was quite racist and very xenophobic and we were the outsiders going into a very English village. So you can imagine the hostility that our family faced. So my mother was too busy trying to fit in and my dad was too busy trying to make money because obviously they realized that to be liked in England they have to, you know, become one of the locals and also be seen to be financially providing. We were the iteyes. So when would you Say, looking back now was the first time you were aware that as a child you were different. I think it wasn't a day as such. It was just a steady, progressive thing that I realized that I had no support at home and I had no support at school. So I became very self destructive. I thought to myself, what's going on? Who am I? Where do I go from here? And I knew that if I was going to flourish and be true to myself, it would never be in that environment. Did you reach out to anyone? I mean, was there anybody at all that you could share what was going on with? Well, my parents had Mr. And Mrs. Street. Mr. Street did the gardening and the chauffeuring and Mrs. Street was the cook and the housekeeper. And she was the one that used to let me do the cakey things and sit in the kitchen while she used to bake cakes and, you know, do needlepoint and repair socks and things like that. And she was very loving towards me, Alice Street. She was adorable to me. So she facilitated me. Did your parents know how you were feeling at the time? Did they have any inkling of how much you were struggling with who you were and their effects of, you know, what they had made you go through? The first time I was made aware that I was not right was when I actually was. I was diagnosed with peritonitis. I was rushed to hospital with a burst appendix. And that's the first time in my life when I was, I think I was at four and a half, five years old and I realized that I suddenly became medicalized. So they thought that they could fix you? Well, they thought, well, clearly this is going to sort out everything because something's not quite right. Thank you, Ang. Listen, I want to know more about this story. So we're going to be catching up with both our stories as we go through the weeks and we also want to hear your thoughts on what you've heard today. So do phone in, do tweet us or send us an email and we'll be sharing more with you over the weeks as we go along. You've been listening to open on Women's Radio Station. 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