More Than A Bundle Story

A One-Year Plan, Forty Years Later

During the holidays my dad would tell me to work for him at his tailor shop in Ankara, but I had no interest at all. It was when I moved to Istanbul to study; I needed the extra cash, so I found a local tailor’s shop and within two days I was promoted as a kalfa– a journeyman. During this time, I was receiving letters from my older brother who worked for a Jewish factory in Dalston. He was the owner’s son-in-law who came to Türkiye and did all the paperwork and provided us all with a work permit. I thought this would be a good opportunity, I’d work for a year save enough money and return to Istanbul to my studies. 

Although all my paperwork was in place when I arrived to London Heathrow, they still kept me behind for an extra 2 hours to go over several checks. One officer asked if I spoke English, I replied ‘Yes!’ with an over enthusiastically exaggerated confidence. I’d learnt some English at high school and with the officer looking at me patiently I had verbs, adjectives, past, present and future tenses flying through my head. Then I remembered a phrase my teacher taught me and with the same exaggerated enthusiasm responded–‘The cat is walking on the wall.’ Shifting my mouth and twisting my tongue to correct the best pronunciation of the sounds ‘th’ and ‘w’ which were as foreign to me as I was to this country. 

I was lucky enough to live with my brother and his family, so I never experienced the difficult circumstances fellow migrants experienced in shared accommodation. We worked extremely hard, and the conditions weren’t great, badly built factories with damp walls most definitely had an adverse effect on our health. We worked from the early hours of the day till late, and on the bus journey home we pulled back jacket pockets to square off the corners preparing them to sew on the machine we bought home. The quarrels over who gets the bigger bundles wasn’t for me, we’d witnessed many heated altercations and sometimes pushing and shoving to get to the biggest bundle, so I moved on to a factory that specialised in leather which we never experienced any bundle fights. 

The social atmosphere was unforgettable, There were the late-night cinemas, showing two Turkish films, one after another, the first to pull at the heartstrings and the one that followed would have us in tears of joy. I went to the all men’s café every now and again but it was mainly the older boys that spent their free time there. The cafés were good for meeting other Turks, but it was in those café’s where some of our friends who’d never seen a deck of cards prior to these places had picked up gambling addictions and even lost their families to this.

For me it was the nightclubs. The confidence you gained from the flashing lights and the beat of the music was a lot more than what others experienced at the café. Whilst we’d work every hour sent to us mid-week, I’d make up with partying till the early hours of the morning at the weekend. I remember many occasions where I’d walk from Hammersmith night club all the way back to Walthamstow, again it must have been the confidence I gained from my youth. 

I first arrived with the idea that I’d work for a year or two and save enough money to return to Türkiye and continue with my studies. The first few years went past, then a few more followed. I hadn’t gone back at all. Whilst my peers were going back to the motherland on holiday, I would be faced with being detained at the airport and sent straight to completing my military service. This wasn’t something I was prepared to do, and the only other alternative was to pay an obscene amount of money which I didn’t have. So as the years went by letters were written to loved ones, phone calls were made, and several government policies had gone through. Along with the many years that had passed. It was after 40 years when I returned home which now if I may, was no longer home. My friends say they were boys when they arrived to this country and returned home as men, in my case this was not metaphorical I arrived at the age of 17 and was 57 when I returned to the streets I grew up in. Hardly anyone was where I had left them, I managed to get in touch with a few childhood friends and have stayed in touch thanks to social media. Now I go back every year with my family, visiting areas I never had the chance to and even now I can’t walk through the Turkish border without a lump in my throat and a sting in my heart.