скачать книгу бесплатно
Street Boys: 7 Kids. 1 Estate. No Way Out. The True Story of a Lost Childhood
Tim Pritchard
The moving true story of 7 young kids and their struggle to escape a life of gangs and violence.‘Eight years old. That’s when life went downhill. From eight years old nobody looked after me. I just lived on the street and made do by myself. There was no one except me and my friends.’ SimonThis is the story of Elijah (JaJa), Simon (Phat Si), ‘Bloods’, Nathan (Inch), Michael (Birdie), Byron (Ribz), and Darren (Tempman). These 7 young boys each have one thing in common – they grew up on the Angell Town estate, south London.Phat Si comes home from school one day to find his mother gone, so he takes to the streets. He’s 8 years old.JaJa looks out of his kitchen window and sees drug dealers, pimps and whores. Overwhelmed by what he sees, JaJa slowly descends from petty theft to life as a kid in a street gang.Ribz’s mother sells crack and is sent to prison. He doesn’t know who his father is but is drawn to Angell Town, knowing that his dad has an unknown number of kids living on the estate. He’s determined to find some kind of family.Street Boys tells a powerful and important true story of courage, determination and hope – of creating a family from your friends and starting again when the world seems against you.
street boys
TIM PRITCHARD
7 kids. 1 estate. No way out. The true story of a lost childhood
Preface (#u4958fee0-4b0c-58a2-a286-ae06f1c0e877)
Everyone was out there and there were gunshots. Bang, bang, bang, bang. Young kids crying, everyone was scattering. It was hectic. Someone had been shot. I didn’t know the guy. We were all young. There was blood everywhere, man. The guy’d been shot in the face.
Inch
This is the story of JaJa, Phat Si, Inch, Birdie, Ribz, Bloods and Tempman. They are members of the PDC, one of the most feared and notorious street gangs in London. To some they are glamorous, gun-toting ‘gangstas’, with a bling-bling lifestyle. To others they are a group of criminal thugs who pose a danger to civilized society. This may turn you on, or it might put you off. But stay with it. Things may not be what they seem.
Tim Pritchard
Foreword (#u4958fee0-4b0c-58a2-a286-ae06f1c0e877)
by Elijah Kerr (aka JaJa)
This book is the voice of the streets. An unheard voice.
This is what happens when you leave those voices unheard, when you leave kids out there with no help and no support, and no choices or nothing.
This is what happens.
Your kids could be me. Your kids could go through the same things that I went through. I want you to understand what is out there, what young people like me are going through and why we are doing it.
It’s a big cry for help, now.
Contents
Title Page (#u8e116d31-7acf-5ca8-8421-b20d913b1ecf)Preface (#u025ec484-9cd7-5a50-a01a-ca96e73d6a46)Foreword (#ue54229b4-bd2d-5ff9-ae5f-526500b50fc6)Seven Kids (#uc915fe88-e9fd-59ad-9823-a54246a09ce8)Chapter One: The Raid (#u9f13b20c-fbf9-5929-8a69-847293dd85db)Chapter Two: Elijah (#u02c7aaa4-f538-5aed-8bf2-32dcf30075ee)Chapter Three: Simon (#ued16192b-c482-5c66-a4ea-30e310e135a9)Chapter Four: Nathan & Michael (#u1b33535d-1897-5223-82c6-cecf8f9b2ace)Chapter Five: Fat Si In ‘the Jungle’ (#u3b0ebccc-4bb8-5667-9018-6759280e6fd7)Chapter Six: Guns And Yardies (#ufe6e9471-3d88-5815-ba6d-5727b15b9ece)Chapter Seven: The 28s (#ue073079e-1209-5bd3-9e1a-e61949c87fba)Chapter Eight: The Younger 28s (#uf0470414-3f5b-507b-aa98-00878eb9f7c2)Chapter Nine: Back In ‘the Jungle’ (#u4b78faf4-f555-524f-8277-497932c00ca4)Chapter Ten: Ribz (#u669e52f8-441f-5821-ab99-62ebc8f39d4a)Chapter Eleven: A New Coldness (#uf25f4033-e577-57a9-8733-455d57cd98a3)Chapter Twelve: Steaming (#u78fab68e-0d77-5be1-8288-9bf3ad4fce28)Chapter Thirteen: Birdie (#u2fc3d3d0-4ba2-5713-a36d-c96a41f8d265)Chapter Fourteen: Feltham (#u036b3c16-5da6-5e9f-8ef9-eeb7deee3d91)Chapter Fifteen: Bloods (#ub195f583-fa2e-5bf4-87ac-b985c711c485)Chapter Sixteen: The Return Of Fat Si (#u2a722004-c05c-52b8-b308-78780da504c0)Chapter Seventeen: Customer Service (#u16a5ae6a-0d6c-58e8-b799-2d411c06a511)Chapter Eighteen: The Shooting (#uec719c38-00af-5883-876b-34ee677132f2)Chapter Nineteen: Inch And Ribz (#u97ad2732-64b5-5d5a-92e0-b721c13a18ea)Chapter Twenty: Hats, Nikes And Guns (#ua3c9714c-5f45-5b43-aa95-c6c38a78210d)Chapter Twenty-One: Inch Does Time (#ud687ba59-f157-5c4e-bbc0-e02a681f8d6e)Chapter Twenty-Two: Wanted (#uf780e9df-c448-5816-b737-aff2317d43e8)Chapter Twenty-Three: Angell Delight (#ua1f64cfd-c227-5ef6-8d5b-4543d252e16c)Chapter Twenty-Four: Guns And Ammunition (#u2c17cc25-a5fb-5e9f-9832-c08cdd1d2ff0)Chapter Twenty-Five: Rapping, Robbing And Shooting (#u6a715a1d-f20f-59d5-93d8-c5dcf189622c)Chapter Twenty-Six: The Pdc Come Together (#u168ec258-39c5-50fd-895f-1c625ecdfbe8)Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Raid On The Block (#u77c4e80c-8f0c-527e-a033-13943dd50c35)Chapter Twenty-Eight: On The Run (#u2f5b0788-3780-5d37-b2ba-99c2fd8e9db8)Chapter Twenty-Nine: Life Inside (#u94b3e242-9580-5351-93ce-9aa4aae6e15b)Chapter Thirty: Inch In Brixton (#ua3dc7c38-1840-5e26-88e0-f80d062eb4eb)Chapter Thirty-One: Islam (#u2b638c17-2012-5b8e-bea4-8b31f56e9eb8)Chapter Thirty-Two: Murder (#ue26cfa40-a518-5a3a-843d-45a384835b10)Chapter Thirty-Three: Tempman (#u08301db8-cda0-59a5-b830-d8ff6e7ff15b)Chapter Thirty-Four: The New Angell Town (#ub7f398cb-899b-5540-96d2-365908bd863d)Chapter Thirty-Five: Pray Days Change (#u3b9ab49d-563c-57cb-9d1c-2d0223b82dc1)Chapter Thirty-Six: The Shootout (#ud436bb0a-7da4-5142-9981-3aa98b4603d5)Chapter Thirty-Seven: The Shooting Of Blacker (#u21d78f21-9a69-5c52-8e8d-a7c739451f19)Chapter Thirty-Eight: The Business (#u22c7a09f-74d7-5f78-b25e-dc26bafcfc10)Chapter Thirty-Nine: Murder, Murder, Murder. Death, Death, Death. (#u792bc4c3-1e84-551c-81ce-6b5360207666)Chapter Forty: Shot In The Head (#u545af0f7-497a-5127-b88f-ea33986bd326)Chapter Forty-One: Police (#u39a98813-e2d4-56bf-b07c-3d365b09669e)Chapter Forty-Two: True Stories (#u74045516-008e-55ce-bcef-96be7cc4b7ed)Chapter Forty-Three: Return To Angell Town (#ud457651e-169e-5b0a-b11f-e34aa4b510f3)Chapter Forty-Four: Goodbye To Angell Town (#u622688a3-580e-5c22-8a4b-e918cc50cb4b)Epilogue (#ud9abfa54-2797-5df5-8e51-9a99dd82fe8b)Afterword (#u897e80d8-8194-5406-9ad8-857d1c8fa4c8)About the Author (#u07e88e98-9cce-5fd3-8076-9453b1a39962)Copyright (#u0445df6f-b5fb-5455-9e47-6c731bcb7a1a)About the Publisher (#ud615505f-6eda-57f9-ada2-ea569196eadc)
Seven Kids (#u4958fee0-4b0c-58a2-a286-ae06f1c0e877)
JaJa, real name: Elijah Kerr Born in Birmingham and arrives in Angell Town at the age of ten
Phat Si, real name: Simon Maitland Born on the Stockwell Park Estate, across the road from Angell Town
Bloods Born in Kingston, Jamaica, and arrives in Angell Town at the age of six
Inch, real name: Nathan Cross Born in Angell Town
Birdie, real name: Michael Deans Born in Angell Town
Ribz, real name: Byron Cole Born in Stockwell, down the road from Angell Town. Moves to Angell Town at the age of nine
Tempman, real name: Darren Samuels Born in Tulse Hill, just up the road from Angell Town
Chapter One (#u4958fee0-4b0c-58a2-a286-ae06f1c0e877)
The Raid (#u4958fee0-4b0c-58a2-a286-ae06f1c0e877)
Could I have gone through a different door? If I’d been told to be a plumber and could have made money, maybe I would have gone down that route. Or if I’d met a fireman first or been shown some other life maybe I wouldn’t be here now. But no one in the ’hood does those types of things. The people I met in Angell Town were drug dealers and burglars. That’s what I knew first. There’s not really no choice.
JaJa
It was Naja who first noticed that something was up. He saw a white police van reverse into the estate and then quickly drive out again. He didn’t quite know why but something told him that it might be a police dog unit. He looked around nervously at the others.
‘Something dodgy is going on.’
The others hadn’t seen it. Ribz, who had already been there for an hour, was smoking weed and ‘coching’, Angell Town speak for chilling.
‘Relax, Naj. It’s cool.’
Naja wasn’t so sure.
There were only five of them on the Marston House walkway that day. On any other day there would be eight or nine of them, but JaJa, Naja’s older brother, had gone off to Wandsworth prison to visit Blacker who was serving time, Birdie had taken off a couple of hours earlier and Phat Si was on Brixton Road buying some takeaway jerk chicken. That left Naja, Ribz, Inch, Sykes and Skippy pacing the council block’s second-floor corridor armed with small plastic bags of weed and heroin. They were waiting for the first ‘cats’, or punters, to arrive.
It was Tuesday 17 December 2002 at about 3 p.m. and it was bitterly cold.
None of them had any real reason to be alarmed. From their position on the second-floor walkway of Marston House they had a clear view over the whole estate. They would have plenty of warning if the ‘feds’ came. That’s what they called the police, a name taken from all the American gangster shows they’d watched on TV. And anyway, they were sure that most of the residents would tip them off if there were any signs of police activity. Even though what they were doing was illegal, they were still surrounded by friends and neighbours. All of the gang had grown up in Angell Town. Ever since they were tiny kids, they’d ridden their bikes, kicked a ball about and run around in the streets and concrete playground at the heart of Angell Town. JaJa and his younger brother Naja had even grown up in one of the flats in Marston House, just along the corridor from where they were now standing.
When it was built in the 1970s, Marston House was designed as a model of urban planning. Now the ugly, squat, concrete council block with its urine-stained and graffitied stairwells was mostly empty and derelict, earmarked for demolition as part of Lambeth Council’s scheme to regenerate the area. It was still the centre of their world, though. ‘The block’ was their fiefdom. Here they ruled the roost as the most feared or, depending on your allegiance, the most respected gang in the area. Their name, the PDC, the Peel Dem Crew, was taken from ‘peel dem’, Jamaican street slang for ‘rip them off’, ‘steal from them’.
And they had done plenty of that. They had all served time in young offenders’ institutions and prisons for muggings, armed robberies, gun crimes and ‘steaming’. It had been all the craze a couple of years earlier. A bunch of them would charge into a shop, such as a newsagent’s, a supermarket, or even a bank or building society, and just go for the till and take whatever they could. Often the shopkeepers or bank clerks had no time to react. Or if they did, the gang would just run them over and knock them to the ground. They’d have raided the till before anyone could raise the alarm.
From below came the sound of shouting. Something is about to godown. This time Naja kept the thought to himself. He stamped his feet to keep warm.
‘Go and find out what is going on.’
Inch was closest to the stairwell. He headed along the landing towards the stairs. He was small and stocky. That’s how he got his street name. He was sure that it was just some of the ‘cats’ causing a commotion. He suspected that there was another gang nearby trying to muscle in on the action by stirring up the punters to take their custom away from the PDC.
Too much noise was never good for business. On a good day they could each make several hundred pounds, but some days the punters just didn’t show up and they were left with unsold bags of weed or wraps of ‘B’ and rocks of crack cocaine. Those were the days when ‘shotting’, as they called it, felt like hard, boring and cold work. The laws of supply and demand for ‘B’ or ‘Brown’, more commonly known as heroin, were the hardest to predict. The customers for heroin tended to be real addicts who turned up at any time of the day or night demanding their fix. The money they used to buy the brown powder was always ‘dirty’ money, stolen generally, perhaps from a mugging that might have happened just a few hours previously. All the gang recognized that with addicts you could never be sure where the money came from. It came from ‘God knows where’. But as long as they got the cash they didn’t mind. The addicts preferred to operate in the shadows. That’s why Inch had to get the commotion sorted out. If necessary he could get hold of some pistols or a MAC 10 sub-machine gun stashed away with friends, but he didn’t believe it would come to that.
He headed down the stairwell of Marston House and got a waft of the familiar, bitter smell of dank concrete impregnated with ammonia and disinfectant. He was going to tell whoever it was to go away and that they didn’t want them standing around there. I’m going to tell them to breeze.
Above him, on the second-floor walkway, Ribz leaned against the wall and drew on a joint. He felt chilled and temporarily released from his main preoccupation. Recently he’d tried again to find out more about his dad whom he hadn’t seen since he was five years old. He’d heard that he was in America. Several years ago, when he’d visited his mum in prison, she had told him that his dad had fathered lots of children by different women and consequently Ribz had unknown numbers of brothers and sisters living on the estate. A constant anxiety of his when he was chatting up some girl was that she might be his sister. It was something he tried not to think about.
A car drove past, blasting out the beat of Sean Paul’s latest dance hall reggae hit, ‘Gimme the Light’.
Suddenly there were two loud bangs and an explosion of raucous yelling. Naja and Skippy looked round to see undercover cops appearing out of doors at either end of the block. Four cops were running towards them shouting and screaming.
‘Don’t move. Don’t move. Police.’
Naja was stunned. He was caught on both sides. Two of the cops jumped on him, pushed him against a wall and jerked his hands up behind his back. Sykes was thrown to the ground.
Ribz tried to run but was immediately surrounded. One of the cops grabbed him by the throat, hauled him along the block and pushed him to the floor. Ribz fell on his chest. He felt all the air being squeezed from his lungs and everything went black.
Skippy was pushed to the ground, a knee pressed into the small of his back, his arms yanked behind him and his wrists snapped into cuffs.
Inch was half way down the stairwell when he heard the shouts and the cries on the landing behind him.
‘Stay where you are.’
He saw everybody running in different directions. He didn’t stop to think. He blasted down the stairs and out into the road and just kept running. Out of doors and alleyways more plain-clothed and uniformed police appeared, but Inch wasn’t pulled over. He hurdled a police car and sprinted along Overton Road and disappeared out of Angell Town onto Brixton Road. He hardly noticed Phat Si walking towards him.
Phat Si was ambling back across Brixton Road towards Marston House carrying some takeaway jerk chicken for Inch when he got a call on his mobile phone that there was a dog unit hanging around Angell Town. He turned into the estate and saw the amazing sight of Inch sprinting away from Marston House chased by a posse of policemen. Phat Si stopped and watched in astonishment as Inch leapt over a police car and disappeared through an alleyway out of the estate with the group of desperate policemen pounding after him.
That’s when Phat Si realized how institutionalized he’d become. He was slow. He was so stuck on his feet. Nearly ten years of prison and young offenders’ institutions as well as the mind-numbing effects of years of drug taking had caught up with him.
He carried on walking up the road towards Marston House, his mind in such a daze that he nearly knocked over Pastor Samuels, Angell Town’s feared but respected Christian preacher, who was returning home with bags of shopping.
‘Simon. I wouldn’t go up there. The police are arresting all the kids.’
Phat Si nodded but didn’t stop.
‘Listen. Don’t get involved with what’s happening. Stay here with me. The police will get you too.’
Phat Si didn’t listen. It had been a long time since he’d listened to anybody. Ever since he was eight years old he had done just as he liked. That’s how old he’d been when his mum had walked out on him, leaving him in the care of a father who was rarely there. Since then the only person Phat Si listened to was Phat Si.
Even though the streets now seemed to be howling with the sound of police dogs and police sirens, he continued walking through the police cars and police cordons right up to Marston House. He climbed the stairs and emerged on the landing to discover his friends were getting handcuffed and twisted up. In his best voice he approached one of the cops.
‘What’s going on, officer?’
‘Go away.’
‘What do you mean go away? You go away.’
‘Just fuck off right now. Fuck off.’
Phat Si looked down on the ground to see one of his posse squirming under the grip of a hefty plain-clothed cop. Skippy was looking up at him, half mouthing, half whispering at him.
‘Blow, you dummy, blow.’
But Phat Si didn’t get out of there. Instead he looked down from the balcony at the commotion below. A policeman looked up, saw him and then looked at his colleague as if to say ‘You fucking idiot.’ That’s when both of them got up and ran for Phat Si. Phat Si was so slow that he had hardly moved before they jumped on him.
When Ribz came to he found himself sitting on the stairs, hands in cuffs with a sergeant yelling in his face.
He’d been out of it for about five minutes. Ribz still didn’t understand what was going on.
‘Look, I ain’t done nothin’.’
‘Shut it.’
‘What’s going on? Why are you holding my neck?’
‘The chief is coming down, he’ll explain to you.’
A cop was yelling in his face.
‘We saw you throw twenty rocks over the balcony.’
‘They never came out of my pocket.’
Another cop arrived.
‘It was you. I saw you. It was you.’
Ribz, Naja, Sykes and Skippy sat on the floor, dazed and handcuffed. It was as though the cops had come out of the doors and windows of every empty flat on the second floor of Marston House.
* * *
Neighbours were now congregating at windows and doorways watching the running battle. Chantelle, JaJa and Naja’s sister, came out of 124 Marston House, only ten doors down from where the PDC were getting handcuffed. She had heard the shouting and screaming and seen the police running up to the second-floor landing and grab her younger brother Naja.
Now she came out of the flat ready to ‘give the feds hell.’
She ran up to the policeman holding Naja and shouted in his face.
‘What’s he done? He wasn’t doin’ nufin’. He was just standing on the block.’
‘He was caught selling drugs. Now go away before I arrest you too.’
Chantelle just stood there shouting at the policeman, telling him to let her little brother go.
JaJa had left Wandsworth prison and was on his way back to Angell Town to meet the others. He was just congratulating himself that he wasn’t doing the drug selling shift at Marston House on such a cold day when he got a call from his mother.
‘The police have raided Marston House. They’ve taken Naja.’
She sounded frantic.
JaJa ran home. Naja was his younger brother and for years, ever since they were tiny kids, JaJa had been given the task of looking after him. His father had beaten up his mother and to stay alive she’d had to take her kids away from the family home. Since then, JaJa had taken the role of the man in the house and, although he’d been in and out of prison, he was expected to keep his younger brother out of trouble.
That’s why, when JaJa got home, his mother was furious with him.
‘They’ve taken Naja to Brixton police station. It’s your fault. You’re supposed to be looking after him.’
JaJa tried to remain calm. He knew that when he’d left the other members of the PDC earlier that day at Marston House none of them had any guns on them and the amount of gear they had could be passed off as drugs for their own use. He wasn’t worried. He believed they’d all be able to get off.
The doorbell rang. JaJa went to answer it. Standing in the hallway were three police officers.
‘Elijah Kerr. We are arresting you on suspicion of supplying class A drugs.’
JaJa wasn’t worried. I don’t have any drugs on me. I don’t haveany in the flat. They can’t get me for nothing. He treated the whole thing like a joke.
