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During the long flight to England, little Shirin tried to imagine what
her new life would be like. She was determined to do well at
school and she told herself that she would make her parents
very proud. ‘I can do this,’ she thought. ‘I can do this as
easily as picking flowers.’

Then, the little girl fell asleep and dreamed of what

London would be like. She dreamed about tall clocks and
wide rivers; she pictured old men in bowler hats, ladies
with umbrellas, bright red buses, and the big house where
the Queen lived with all of her guards in their tall fuzzy
hats and long boots.

But when she arrived at the airport in London it was not
quite as she had imagined at all. The sky was a horrible grey
colour and it was windy and raining. Shirin wished that she

had not decided to wear her sandals because her toes were very
cold. And worst of all…worst of all was the feeling that everybody
was looking at her as if she was an alien with a big head and three eyes.

Shirin noticed with surprise that she was the only one wearing a chador. A girl standing
close by pointed and laughed and asked her mummy: ‘Why is she wearing a big cloth
wrapped around her, like that?’

The mother pulled the little girl away and told her that it was rude to point. Shirin
wanted to tell the little girl that it was not a big cloth, it was a chador, and in Tehran,
many of the girls and their mothers and grandmothers wore a chador because it was a
part of their culture.

Of course, Shirin wanted to take her chador off because she did not like being stared at in
such a way, and she wished that she was back in Tehran where it was sunny and her toes

would be warm once more.
‘Let’s get you home,’ said her aunty as she hurried the young girl into a big black taxi with
an orange light on its roof.

Shirin thought that the taxi driver sounded very funny. Not at all like her English
teacher, Mr Rahimi. He said things like ‘Blimey’ and ‘Awright love, where to?’ Little

Shirin did not understand these words, but luckily her aunty seemed to understand and
they were soon whizzing through the city towards her new home.
Shirin wanted to ask her aunty why she did not wear bowler hats: men’s hard hats made of felt

a chador in England even though she always wore one with a round dome-shaped crown
when she visited her mother in Tehran. ‘She must be fuzzy: having a woolly or soft texture
whizzing: moving quickly
in disguise,’ thought the young girl. disguise: a means of changing one’s
appearance to hide one’s true identity

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