Success was the best revenge

You couldn't find two places further apart than Chelsea, where I live now, and the working-class suburb of Leeds called Seacroft, where I grew up. Now, at 32, I have my own flat in west London, a law degree and an incredibly fulfilling job managing a £2 million budget within the London Fire Service.

As a child I lived in a council house next door to a family who belonged to the National Front. It's easy to forget how tough life was for ethnic minority families in England 25 years ago. Throughout the 1970s, we were the only Asian family on our council estate, and all of us - my two sisters, two brothers, my mother and father - experienced incredible racism on a daily basis.

Abuse became part of our everyday lives - we came to expect it immediately we stepped out the front door. We would return home to find NF leaflets piled on the doormat, demanding that "non-whites go home".

Racism was institutionalised in Seacroft and many families belonged to far-Right movements. Often those same leaflets were handed out by the younger sisters or brothers of NF members at my school: I would find them stuffed into my classroom drawer, and once caught a teacher sitting at his desk carefully reading one through.

Verbal humiliation was the least of it though. Racism bred violence, and my family lived in an atmosphere of constant intimidation. I can't count the number of times our windows were smashed. The mere sight of us was enough to provoke violence: gangs would chase us down the street throwing bricks and yelling insults. With the exception of my eldest sister, who was born in Pakistan, all of us children were Yorkshire-born and bred - but of course that didn't matter to the racists.

Sure, we had white friends and neighbours who looked out for us, and as a family we stuck closely together. But there were always occasions when you found yourself alone - and then you were vulnerable not only to name-calling but to physical attack as well.

Two incidents particularly stick in my mind. Once, when I was six years old, a notorious gang of racist youths - 19 and 20-year-olds - dangled me by my arms from the York Road bridge, over busy traffic, and threatened to drop me because I was Pakistani.

Obviously I was petrified. I didn't tell anyone what had happened because there didn't seem much point: I had become so inured to racism that this terrible treatment seemed inevitable and unalterable. Now, of course, that passive acceptance seems extraordinary to me, but my six-year-old self saw no way out of it.

Then there was the day my eldest brother, then 11, came home from school with human bites on his back. My mother counted them and there were 52. We did tell the police, but they weren't interested. As for our teachers, they shrugged their shoulders and said that my brother was always getting into fights and perhaps he provoked his attackers. The attitude in those days was to close ranks, to protect the existing culture from investigation.

And in a sense, they won - albeit temporarily. On another occasion, every single one of the windows at our home were broken by a gang of kids, the police took two days to come out and file a report. My father, who ran grocery stores and post offices, took a decision never to call them again. In those days, the police didn't take racist attacks seriously and didn't know how to handle them. My parents were strong enough to simply weather the storm. When I think of what they went through then, I can't believe how resilient and brave they were.

What they believed in was education. That was the key for us. We regarded academic achievement as our ticket out of Seacroft, and we all studied hard. It's true that I felt like a second-class citizen for a long time, and that I had no confidence as a child. But after years of feeling like a victim, there came a point when I realised I could rise above the crassness of the racists, and that success would be the best form of revenge.

After passing my O-levels I left school at 16 and moved to London to do voluntary work in a refuge for battered Asian women. A year later, I went to Glasgow to work for an anti-racist organisation, which ran a helpline for victims.

My own experience helped me to help them - but for the first time I also started to learn about human rights and the ways in which we could have forced the police to help us. When I went home two years later to do my A-levels, my eyes had been opened. I had changed.

Like a sponge I had absorbed information from the people who were working at the forefront of anti-racist movements. But Seacroft was different, too. It was no longer so cool to be racist, and most of the kids were into drugs instead.

Once school was finished, I went to study law at King's College London and then won an internship in the legal department of Amnesty International. Using contacts there, I moved to Bangkok to work on an anti-child slavery project with street children from all over south-east Asia who, in some cases, had been trafficked and sold into prostitution.

Meanwhile, my brothers and sisters were all doing incredibly well, too; my eldest brother, the one who had been bitten, was completing his PhD and becoming a scientist. He's 34 now, and lives and works in America. My eldest sister is a doctor, and the other a graphic designer, while my youngest brother works in IT.

After a period of backpacking, I returned to Britain and went straight back into the voluntary sector, working first for the Northern Refugee Council, then for the Commission for Racial Equality and for local racial equality councils. I bought a house in Cheshire near my parents, who had thankfully moved out of Seacroft by then. Finally, 10 months ago, I seized the opportunity to return to London as head of recruitment and development for the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority.

I now manage a staff of 33 and work on Home Office targets to recruit more black, minority ethnic and women firefighters. The fire service is very committed to diversity issues, which are really important to me.

With hindsight I can see that our experience in Seacroft undeniably gave my brothers, sisters and me an inner strength that we have all drawn upon as we forge our careers. I still find it astonishing to think that the people who attacked us were the same people we grew up with: not strangers, but neighbours and classmates. But I stopped resenting them a long time ago. Once, halfway through my law course, I went home to visit my parents, and bumped into one of the lads who hung me over the bridge when I was little.

I asked him if he remembered what he had done, and told him that for years I hadn't been able to forget his cruelty. In the meantime, his life had gone downhill: he explained that he had spent time in prison and been through a string of failed relationships. Bizarrely, he had once lived with an African-Caribbean woman.

In reply, he said: compare our lives, see how you have moved on and got out, and I haven't. And all my anger suddenly transformed itself into pity for him. It was an incredibly cathartic experience.

Receiving racial abuse makes you first question yourself, and then, when you realise it's not your fault, ask questions of the abusers. Fundamentally, the most important and productive thing I've been able to do with my life so far is to help change the attitudes I encountered as a child. And being named Asian Young Achiever of the Year shows my work can really make a difference.