VIDEO: Manju, 81, is the newest Spice Girl in town

If you’d have told her 60 years ago she would be running her own restaurant in Brighton, you would have heard that distinctive chuckle of hers loud and clear.

“For a long, long time I said I wanted to do a restaurant,” she said, unaware her children had a surprise up their sleeves.

“My children said ‘OK Mummy’ and they bought it for me and I didn’t know anything about it.

“They say to me, Mummy your dream is realised, you have a restaurant, and I cried.”

If you don’t know who she is, you should.

You may not have met her but lovers of Indian food will probably have sampled her cooking.

She is the owner of Manju’s restaurant in Trafalgar Street. Her job title is pretty broad – owner, cook, cleaner, host, you name it, Manju does it.

And every job is completed with a smile on her face as wide as the chapattis they serve.

“I am here every day,” she said. “We start early preparing the food, I sit in the evenings and help my daughter-in-law. I never get tired.”

The life of young Manju was a far cry from today.

She was born in Gujarat, India, and her family moved to Uganda when she was two years old as work prospects were better there at the time.

She was raised in a modest family home with her mother, father and four siblings within an Indian community settled in East Africa.

When she was 12, her father died so her mother had to find a way to bring money into the household and keep the family afloat.

Manju’s eldest son, Jaymin Patel, 53, picks up the story: “At that time it was really only the men who worked and the women were at home cooking and looking after the children, so it was hard for them.

“Mum went to school for a little while, but she had to leave to help her mother keep a roof over their heads.”

Manju was taught to cook at the age of 14 and, throughout her teens she and her mother would make up to 35 containers of food a day filled with delicious rice, curries and chapattis.

Little did the teenager know, but this was her first step on a journey that would see her doing almost exactly the same thing decades later.

Back then, the customers were hungry Indians living in Uganda. Fast forward more than 60 years and those buying the food may have changed, but the quality and recipes are just the same.

“My brother was small, my sisters were small,” said the grandmother of four.

“I made money. I ran the house.”

This early version of an Indian takeaway business was enough to keep food on their own table and, at the same time, taught Manju the outstanding culinary skills she has carried with her all these years.

Her situation changed quite dramatically when she met and married her husband Shirish Patel, as he was a successful coffee producer and money became less of a concern.

They had two sons, Jaymin and Naimesh, 48. Jaymin remembers getting into mischief while his father was at work.

He said: “Dad’s factory was at the end of a long stretch of road and I was always roaming around on my own so, to keep me safe, he paid local police to sit at either end of the road to slow the traffic down to ten miles an hour.”

Life was fairly uncomplicated for this young family. But that soon changed.

The year was 1972 and the reason for upheaval and heartache that followed was down to one man, Ugandan dictator Idi Amin.

He ordered the mass deportation of all Asian people in the East African country, who had been settled there for more than 100 years.

“We’d moved to my cousin’s flat over a shop in Kampala,” said Jaymin.

“I remember looking out of their very tiny window and seeing a massive tank coming round the corner, firing shells. The whole building shook.

“Then a couple of days later we heard we all had to leave the country within 90 days, so we arrived in London in 1972 with nothing.”

The family’s belongings had been shipped over but became lost in the chaos of thousands of Asian families arriving at Heathrow at once.

Manju and her husband were now in an unfamiliar country.

They found themselves with nowhere to call home, not able to undstand the language being spoken, two children to care for and with just £12 in their pockets.

Thankfully Manju’s brother was already in the city and was able to put them up for a couple of weeks.

This gave the Patels the chance to get their lives together and start building the foundations for a future.

Manju started a job at a factory making electrical switches and, once again, became the main breadwinner as her husband suffered from kidney problems and was unable to work.

No matter how many hours Manju put in at the factory, she still managed to prepare a huge, nutritious family meal at the end of each day, a tradition she maintains to this day.

As the years passed and her sons grew, they built up businesses together, first owning a newsagent in Hampstead and then, having moved the whole family to Brighton in 2004 to raise their own children, a party supplies shop in London Road.

Despite their successes, they couldn’t shake the niggling feeling that their mother, Manju, should be sharing her incredible culinary abilities with the rest of the world.

Inspired by Naimesh’s wife Dipali Patel, 41, who is a chef herself and has worked in many of Brighton’s best loved Indian restaurants, the brothers decided to take the plunge.

They quickly fell in love with a former greasy spoon in Trafalgar Street and went ahead and bought it early last year, keeping the whole thing secret from their mother.

It’s the first time the family have been in the catering trade and, so far, Manju’s has been a huge hit with locals and visitors to the city.

Everything on the menu, from starters to desserts, is made using the same recipes Manju was taught by mother back in the 1940s.

She oversees every dish prepared by daughter-in-law Dipali and, at barely 5ft tall, is a tiny whirlwind in the kitchen, making sure everything is just right.

Adorning the walls of her venue are constant reminders of days gone by and the struggles she has overcome to get to where she is today.

To the untrained eye, the metal containers on the wall may just look like any other pots and pans. Nothing could be further from the truth.

These are the original “tiffins” used by Manju to keep and transfer her food while cooking in Africa all those years before.

Eating at her restaurant is a family affair. You may not know Manju personally but with every bite of her food you enjoy, you get a taste of the life she has led and the journey travelled to fulfil her dream.

She said: “I don’t do anything differently here to how I cook at home, all of the vegetarian food I make here is exactly the same as the food I feed my family.”

Manjula Patel was born in the village of Nar in the Wester regional of Gujarat in 1936.

As 2018 begins, she’s finally found home.

Not in Africa, India or London but in a small kitchen below her very own restauarant in Brighton.

There she cooks up a storm and shows age is no barrier to being a Spice Girl.