Street Boys: 7 Kids. 1 Estate. No Way Out. The True Story of a Lost Childhood. Tim Pritchard
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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 go down. 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