I learned a huge amount about Islam and about barriers/ semi-permeable membrane between cultures from Osman Yousefzada’s frank and thoughtful memoir whose strap is “a portrait of growing up between different worlds”. In some ways it reminded me of Sathnam Sanghera’s The Boy with the Topknot although, of course, the detail is different.

Osman’s father had Pakistani heritage and came to Britain as an immigrant. His mother’s heritage is Afghan. The family lived, both parents illiterate, in a small house in a Birmingham ghetto later getting better off and buying a bigger house.  His mother was not allowed out unchaperoned and had to wear a burqa – as did his sisters, thereafter not allowed to attend school, as soon as they hit puberty.

As a young boy, Osman was the go-beween who was allowed to sit with the women in one room or the men in the other. Later, when he inched away from the rigidity of his culture and began to integrate he became a go-between in another sense. Like most people who grew up in white, liberal Britain I find this religious, cultural segregation very hard to fathom and I am grateful to Osman, a very thoughtful and accessible writer, for describing it so informatively. I shall never understand it fully but I now know a little more about it than I did.

Today, and in his 40s, Osman is a successful artist and fashion designer whose eponymous label, Osman, was launched in 2008. His first yearnings towards the trade came from watching and helping his talented mother who ran a flourishing tailoring business from the confines of her purdah. Later he studied at School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and at St Martins.

He is fascinating on the way that life revolved around the mosque, prayers and ablutions. And his account of what some of the Imams routinely said about “infidels”, honour, sin, hellfire and all the rest makes chilling reading. The young Osman, however, accepted most of it unquestioningly, churning with guilt over things like enjoying sweets made with gelatine, being  sexually aroused by images or people and other serious sins. And incidentally, I had no idea, until I read this that orthodox Muslim men are required to shave arm pits and pubic hair in order to stay “clean”. The lists of rules, Osman quotes or refers to in passing are, indeed, fascinating.

At school Osman was bullied. An especially dreadful incident occurred when a group of slightly older boys forced him to the ground and pulled off his trousers. No, it wasn’t rape but given the level of shame and horror it left, it might just as well have been.

How sad too that when one of his sisters eventually “escaped” she didn’t see her father for a very long time because she was estranged, disowned and dishonoured. Happily she reappeared at the very end of the old man’s life and there was a reconciliation of sorts. Osman’s father, incidentally, a carpenter who beat his wife and children a lot, died (dementia) when he was probably between 80 and 90. No one knew his exact age because his birth wasn’t regarded as important enough to record back  “home” where he was born all those decades earlier. And Osman’s community didn’t celebrate birthdays.

In reading this book, published earlier this year,  with a lot of respect along with the horror and surprise –  I feel that I too have, in a very tiny way, straddled the gap between strict Muslims and the other faiths or none they live amongst.

Agatha Christie was the first grown-up author I ever read. My mother was keen on her books and one day I picked one up, simply because it was lying about. I started to read it and discovered it was no more difficult then the Chalet School or Blue Door Theatre books which were my usual fare. Thus a bridge was crossed. I was probably 13. Thereafter I read most of AC’s novels and it would be another decade and a half before Dame Agatha died aged 86, in 1976 and the books stopped coming.

Of course there have been countless TV adaptations, films and stage plays, sequels and spin-offs based on the works of the woman who was outsold only by The Bible and Shakespeare and holds the record for being the best selling author of all time. But I hadn’t actually read an Agatha Christie book since I was a teenager. Time, then, to revisit one.

Published in 1957, 4.50 from Paddington, is based on the intriguing premise that in the few seconds two trains are level on parallel lines, an elderly woman witnesses a murder in the other train. I often think about it when, briefly, I can see into an adjacent train.

The plotting (which I had, of course, completely forgotten) is neat and tight. The witness tells her friend, Miss Marple what she has seen, and with the help of a nicely characterised young major domo (is there a female term for that?), who takes a job at a nearby big house, the search for a body is on. Most of the characters and suspects are part of, or connected to, the Crakenthorpe family who own said big house. They are, on the whole, a bunch of self-interested schemers although the long suffering daughter, Emma is nice and you hope desperately that she won’t turn out to be the “one what dunnit.” I’m not giving anything away for obvious reasons. Suffice it to say that, as nearly always with Dame Agatha – I worked out the formula very early in my reading journey –  the murderer turns out to be the least likely person. She’s very good at smoke screens, unexpected twists, suspense and attention-holding.

I read this book partly with the intention of assessing the quality of the writing which I wouldn’t have noticed at all at 13 or 14. Today I come to it with a life time of reading – for pleasure, for study and for teaching purposes – behind me. My reading lens has changed.

And my goodness, what a pleasant surprise! She is almost as succinct and direct as Hemingway with lots of lovely short sentences and scant use of subordinate clauses.  “Lucy obeyed the imperative finger. Old Mr Crakenthorpe took hold of her arm and pulled her inside the door and shut it.” Or: “Dr Quimper walked upstairs to his bedroom and started throwing off his clothes. He glanced at his watch. Five minutes past three. It had proved an unexpectedly tricky business bringing those twins into the world but all had gone well. He yawned. He was tired – very tired. He looked appreciatively at his bed.”

Her dialogue is pacey and free flowing too. Agatha Christie was also a successful (and some – witness The Mousetrap) and it shines clearly through the dynamic, rhythmic way she gets her characters talking.

She can also be very funny. I think my favourite sentence in the whole book is “Madame Joilet was a brisk business-like Frenchwoman with a shrewd eye, a small moustache, and a great deal of adipose tissue”. That’s a good example, Chaps, of zeugma and of the literary uses of a list of three. Oh sorry – I’m not in the classroom any more. Sometimes, I wish I were.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves:  The Go-Between by Osman Yousefzada

In 1968 I went to teach in a challenging inner London boys’ secondary school. The journey from my refined grammar school to dusty Deptford, via a college in leafy Sussex was something of a culture shock. It’s all detailed in my 2019 memoir, Please Miss We’re Boys.

Anyway, on arrival at South East London Secondary School for Boys I cautiously explored the English department stock cupboard. Therein I found a lot of “boy” literature and very little that I’d ever read before. Well, Treasure Island and its ilk never did much for me but I was intrigued by Norman Collins’s 1948 adventure story, Black Ivory. I knew Collins’s work because I’d read and enjoyed  a number of his adult novels such as London Belongs to Me and Penang Appointment. I didn’t learn, until recently, though, that he was a BBC man responsible for the genesis of Dick Barton Special Agent and Woman’s Hour. Later he defected to ITV and, as a major executive, was a key figure in its launch and development.

I pounced eagerly on Black Ivory. Here, maybe, was a novel I could make work with my hard-to-quell classes of teenage boys. Well some classes actually liked this 1820s adventure story and I got to know it pretty well. I’ve just reread it for the first time in half a century knowing that books often seem to have changed a lot when you return to them after a long absence.

It’s a first person narrative which tells the story of  Ralph Rudd, a lad obliged to go to sea because his farming family have lost everything. Naïve and easily duped, he finds himself on the Nero, crewed by well characterised ugly brutes.  Now, this is the 1820s and slave trading had been banned in the British Empire since 1807. Inevitably there must have been ongoing illegal trading for a while and that is what the Nero is involved in – to Ralph’s horror. He does his best to scupper it when he realises what’s happening but of course it isn’t simple.

So how do we feel about such a novel now? The story telling is strong and Collins’s pacy style keeps you turning the pages. From a literary point of view, it’s rooted in one of the world’s seven stories: voyage and return. It feels very odd now to read a novel in which there are no female characters apart from Ralph’s mother and sister who feature peripherally at the beginning and end.

Inevitably the unspeakable people who are running this trade (and all trying to double cross each other) use what is now taboo language when speaking of their “cargo”. Ralph himself neutrally uses the word “negro” and it is absolutely clear that the author and his narrator are appalled by what is going on and expect the reader to be too. Justice eventually prevails and all the men trying to traffic slaves get their comeuppance at the end.

I don’t think, when I was in my 20s that I had heard of the Zong massacre of 1781 in which 130 slaves were killed by being thrown overboard leading to an insurance claim by a Liverpool-based syndicate. It must, however, surely have been in Collins’s mind when he has the beleaguered Captain Swing giving the order to unshackle the slaves and drive them overboard in order to destroy the evidence of his trafficking crime? Even now, thinking about this is chilling, nauseating and profoundly shocking. Fortunately in the novel – eleventh hour and all that – it doesn’t actually happen.

It amazes me now that I used to teach this book quite cheerfully to the most diverse classes I have ever taught. Some of those boys would have known far more – from family history – about slavery and man’s inhumanity to man than I ever will but I don’t remember much in the way of in-depth discussion.  I doubt very much that any teacher would offer this novel to students now – it’s actually a pretty moral tale in a derring-do sort of way but could easily be misconstrued by anyone who didn’t read it thoughtfully.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: The 4.50 from Paddington by Agatha Christie