I was born in Pakistan. We lived between Rawalpindi and Jhelum in a village called Morgah, which growing up everyone says, “chicken town, chicken town, chicken village”, and then I find out Morgah means peacock town! I came to England when I was three. But to be honest most of my family's still back in Pakistan. I’ve got two older sisters that are married there. They’ve got their kids and grandkids there. I’ve got my aunts, my uncles, my in-laws, my first cousins, my second cousins removed – the whole shenanigans are back in Pakistan! So there's only a few members of my family here. I mean, here I’ve got my mum, dad, four sisters, one brother. Then I’ve got me, my husband, one of my sister-in-laws, her children, my husband's uncle, his children. So I would say there's about 10 or 15 houses that belong to our family from back home that live here, not even that many actually.

I think that's quite unusual for us in that we didn't bring everybody across, like some of the communities. With some of the other communities I can understand with the level of poverty and situation they existed in, like if you look at the Mirpur community, you had the whole Mangla Dam episode. You had displacement of people, whole villages, and so people had to go somewhere, and you know Britain was the ideal opportunity and that's what happened. In our village, my grandparents were educated. My dad's dad was a sergeant in the army and he used to write letters to me in English as I was growing up. My father-in-law used to write letters for everybody and stuff so the men folk in our village were educated. They were poor, no doubt about it. They were poor in the way that my father did come out of Pakistan looking to support his family. Poverty was common among Pakistanis that came in the early days.