The Tech Refugee

On the family shop, the people who came through it, and the five years I spent trying to get out.

About a year after we arrived in England, my father decided he needed to start a business.

In theory, he had options. In Iran, he had been VP of purchasing for a large company and had run a business of his own alongside it. None of that transferred. A career does not come through customs with you. What came through was a man in his late forties with a family to look after and a CV that, as far as anyone in England was concerned, began when he landed.

So he bought a run-down supermarket and named it after my eldest sister. Leyla Foods.

We fixed the place ourselves, all of us, because that was the only labour available. We opened it as a supermarket focused on Iranian food, which, at that point in that part of England, wasn’t a crowded market. I was just about to start my A-levels, which in Britain means two years of study on three or four subjects, and which determines where and whether you go to university. The shop was open until two in the morning.

Those two facts did not fit together, and nobody pretended otherwise. They just both had to be true at the same time.

The work itself was dull in a way that is hard to convey. Stacking shelves, then restacking them. Working out what to buy and what to charge for it. Pricing things by hand. Every so often one of us would do the four in the morning run to the fruit and vegetable market, which meant that sleeping in the room at the back of the shop was sometimes more sensible than going home.

I did five years of this, through A-levels and an early part of university.

And honestly, the shelves were the easy part. The customers were the job.

There were rude ones, which you expect. There were the racist ones, which in England in the late eighties you also expect, though expecting a thing does not do much for you when it is standing at your till. The drunks came after eleven and were more manageable than people assume. They wanted junk food, and they wanted to tell you something.

The worst were the hagglers.

These were not people in difficulty. These were people who would stand at the counter and argue with a teenager over the price of a bag of rice or a bunch of parsley, grinding away for three or four percent. Not to save money in any way that would register in their lives. For the pleasure of it. It was a sport, and I was the pitch.

What I did not fully appreciate at the time is that some of them, having failed with me, would try my father.

This was a man who had negotiated purchasing for a large company as his actual profession. Haggling was not a thing that happened to him. He did it daily, at volume, with people whose job was also to do it. He gave genuine discounts to regulars and better ones to anyone buying in large quantity. Beyond that, he was not interested, yet very pleasant about it.

My father’s English in those years was a few steps behind his sense of humor, and the gap between the two made him genuinely hazardous.

A customer once came in and asked for condoms. My father misheard and offered him candles.

There was a young man who lived in the flats above the shop and came to the shop fairly regularly. He would wear heavy mascara, had jet-black dyed hair, and wore black all the time. One evening in early November he came to the shop, my father looked at him and, in a tone of mild helpfulness, said that Halloween was finished.

He was not being cruel. He would have been baffled by the suggestion. He had noticed something, and he said it, which was his approach to the English language and life.

And then there were the pets. The poodle that bit me for simply handing her owner a carton of milk, the dogs that would want to pee next to the produce outside the store, and then there was the time a dog set the whole shop into chaos. A man and his dog were standing by the door of the store and apparently another customer already in the store had a fear of dogs. The scared customer was running around the shop and screaming while the other one was trying to show the dog was friendly; this created a bizarre and comedic scene that set off my sister into a fit of laughter, to the point that she had to hide behind the counter. The dog, the screaming customer and I carried on without her.

One regular customer that did not haggle was the homeless man that slept by the church across the road from the shop. He would come in to buy food and most of the time we would not charge him, but he wanted to pay for his items; perhaps that gave him a sense of normality. He would pay and then put some of his change in the charity box next to the register. He did it every time.

After a while, the shop began to take its toll on all of us. My siblings and I were fed up with working the long hours after a day of school/work. There was almost no social life as the shop was the priority. My dad was also getting tired.

When I look back at the period we owned the shop, I feel a sense of sadness. There was a lot of time and energy wasted that I never got back. It also left a bitter taste in my mouth and changed the way I feel about people. One of the saddest things that happened was when my dad was mugged on the way home.

Normally there’ll be a couple of us at the shop, but that night he was walking home by himself. The house was only a 10-minute walk, but along the way two men grabbed him, put a knife to his throat, and took all his money.

I’ll never forget the look of stress and anxiety on his face as he walked through the door. He was shaking and could barely walk, he had to lean against the wall to walk into the house. There was a scratch on his neck where the thief placed the knife.

I HATED THE SHOP!

A couple of years into owning the shop, he was diagnosed with type two diabetes. After that, he started to complain of chest pains. He had an angiogram which showed he required a quadruple bypass and a long recovery with complications from an MRSA infection that he got from the hospital.

After six years, we sold the shop. I was glad. I did not miss it one bit. I got my hours back.

My dad never talked about it, but I knew he was also happy to sell the shop. It took a lot out of him. He went from a VP-level employee with a profitable side business to an ordinary shopkeeper. That had to feel like a gut punch, and he got on with it.

The recipe for this issue is a coconut cake, and the reason is the Crème pâtissière.

When we arrived in England, the sweets were wrong. Not bad, wrong. The cream inside a cream puff was barely sweetened, which to a boy raised on Iranian pastries was close to an insult, and everything in the bakery window tasted roughly as unfamiliar as the streets outside the bakery. I was thirteen and finding the whole country mildly incorrect, and the pastries were part of it.

Except for the Crème pâtissière. That tasted the same as it did in the Napoleon cake I used to eat in Tehran. Same custard, same thickness. One thing had come through the move without being altered.

So this cake is a coconut cake with coconut pastry cream between the layers. It takes most of the day, and it is worth it.

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The pastry cream recipe I used was from this cake by Kitchen-By-The-Sea and the cake and the buttercream are from Sally’s Baking

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