Speaking English doesn’t protect you against bigotry – just ask my Syrian friend

Ihadn’t noticed the man eavesdropping in the cafe at York station until he took it upon himself to interrupt. I was having a quiet cup of tea with my Syrian friend Adnan, who was acting as an interpreter for me on a story that afternoon. He was telling me about his journey to Britain via Russia when the man stood up from his chair, leaned over and barked: “Don’t believe a word he’s telling you.”

I looked up, eyebrows raised, and asked if he was talking to me. “Yes,” he said. “Don’t be taken in by this sob story. You can’t believe a word these people say.” I lost my temper. I told him this was my friend, he had no right to talk about him like that, that I did not appreciate his rudeness and ordered him to take his bigotry elsewhere. Everyone else in the cafe was listening, but he didn’t care, and as he backed out towards the exit, he carried on shouting about how there “are too many of them”.

Adnan said nothing, his head bowed. Our train was halfway to Newcastle when he thought of what he would have liked to say to the man: “I speak four languages, am studying for a masters, I saved lives in my home country, I work full time and claim no benefits. What have you done in your life?”

We were going to interview a Syrian teenager who had just moved to Newcastle.Muzoon Almellehan, 17, had spent two years living in a dusty refugee camp in Jordan, where she campaigned for girls’ education, trying to persuade her classmates to value their studies over early marriages. In November, she and her family became some of the first Syrians to be offered sanctuary in Britain as part of the government’s programme to resettle 20,000 people from the camps.

We talked about her new house and school, about the difficulty in understanding a word of what geordies say. After the interview, a council press officer asked me not to mention the name of the suburb where the family lived. There had been some nastiness on social media, he explained, and they needed to protect them and other families from negative elements in the community.