Street Boys: 7 Kids. 1 Estate. No Way Out. The True Story of a Lost Childhood. Tim Pritchard
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To this day he’s still suffering from shock. To this day he has never got over the fact that we just walked out. We had to walk out. I had to protect me and my kids.
It was only a year or so later, when Sharon thought they were finally safe from being hassled by her former partner, that she told her mum where they were.
The hostel in Tulse Hill was small and dingy. But the next hostel they moved to was even worse. The room was even smaller and more cramped. There were six other families – Moroccan people and a white woman with mixed-race kids. Sharon was happier though. She began to talk to the other families and discovered that they’d all been through the same thing. JaJa too was happier. Gradually he got into the vibe and started playing with the other kids. On occasions he even managed to forget that they had come to a new place and that he would never go back to Birmingham.
By the time they were moved to temporary accommodation in Streatham Vale, JaJa even managed to feel as though he was blending in. He got put into a primary school in Brixton called Effra, and every morning he would take his brother and two sisters to school on the bus. Or rather buses. It took three buses and forty-five minutes to get to school. He hardly saw his mum. She had taken two jobs, one at McDonalds, the other a cleaning job. Most nights she wasn’t back till very late, when he was already in bed. Sometimes he didn’t see her for three days.
‘Can you look after the others?’
‘Yeah, don’t worry, I can do it.’
He knew he was young but he believed he was sensible. It was a way of helping his mum. Sometimes he’d catch her in the morning and she’d ask how his day had been and he’d have to tell her that Naja had lost his bus pass or his lunch money, or that there had been some other mishap. She’d leave some money for him the next day and tell him to make sure that he looked after the younger ones. He grew up quickly. He could see how much his mum was doing for them and was determined to help her out. Help out, help out. That’s the thought that went round and round his head.
One day he went up to his mum.
‘Why do we live so far from school?’
Even from a young age he realized how much more difficult life was for them all if they had to travel an hour and a half to school and back every day.
‘Don’t worry; we’ll get another flat closer by.’
His mum’s promise, that they would soon be moving on, made life more bearable for JaJa.
Most of the time he and his brother and sisters just stayed indoors. His mum’s friend had driven her back to Birmingham and they’d returned loaded up with clothes, a television and a computer. They’d stolen into the Crompton Road house while his father had been out and taken what they could fit in the van. With a television and a computer JaJa and his brother and sisters felt happier about staying inside.
At the weekends and on summer evenings they would play with the two white kids, Luke and Perry, who lived next door, sometimes borrowing their bikes to ride up to the gypsy camp in the park. The Irish people there, intrigued by JaJa’s strong Brummie accent, always had questions for him.
‘You sound different. Where you from?’
He started getting nosier and nosier, venturing further and further afield. And then one day, Ross, a friend from the Effra School, asked him if he wanted to hang out at his house after school. That evening, JaJa asked his mum and she said it was OK.
A week later, when the bell rang at the end of the school day, Ross and JaJa walked out of the school gates, through the streets of Brixton to an estate just off the Brixton Road. JaJa was amazed. He had never been on an estate before. It was not the sort of thing he’d ever seen in Birmingham. But he immediately liked the area. There were raised pedestrian walkways connecting blocks of flats. There was a small park and a football pitch where other kids hung out. This is OK here. This is a whole new area. It’s totally different. He liked the vibe. The atmosphere felt better, as though there was more going on. He felt he could fit in. He went back home and told his mum.
‘We should try and live in Brixton. It’s a good area for us. Streatham Vale is too full of grannies. Let’s go and live in Brixton. It’s our kind of place.’
A month later his mum said they were going to look at a flat. They got off the bus and started walking along a road and into an estate. It took him some time to realize that the estate they had entered was the one where his friend Ross lived.
‘This is where I come the other day.’
‘Well, this is where we’ve got our new flat.’
They went to a large block of council flats called Marston House. They stood outside number 124.
‘This is where we are going to live as soon as they’ve finished painting it.’
JaJa was so happy. There was music on the streets. Reggae and ragga music was blasting out from cars and open windows. Musicians called Shabba Ranks and Ninja Man rapped about sex and guns and violence. Kids were running around. It was a totally different atmosphere from the streets of Streatham Vale.
‘What’s this place called?’
‘This is Angell Town.’
If Streatham Vale was a kid’s nightmare, Angell Town, London SW9, was a kid’s dream.
JaJa’s mum hadn’t picked Angell Town out. The truth was she didn’t have a choice. The flat in Angell Town was the only one that came up and she had to take it. Life in Streatham Vale had become unbearable. The furniture there was from the 1970s, and the neighbours, particularly the old couple who lived next door, soon began to object to the presence of a single black mum with four noisy kids. They were always complaining that JaJa and his brother and sisters were making too much noise, that they played their music too loud, that they didn’t belong there.
I don’t blame them coz they bought their nice house in a residential area and the people next door rented it out to any Tom, Dick and Harry. That was us, a single mum with four rough kids from Handsworth in Birmingham and she had two nice little boys with blond hair. I don’t blame them at all.
But soon the complaints turned into abuse. Sometimes Chantelle, JaJa’s sister, would come home and tell Sharon that there were some kids who were spitting on her brother. When Sharon walked up to collect her kids from the park at the end of the road, curtains would twitch and people would throw things at her. One day there was a message written in black paint on her door.
‘Go back home.’
She went straight to the housing department.
‘Please move us. You got to move us. I don’t care where you move me, just move me.’
It was one of the worst times of her life. Every week she went to the housing department at Lambeth Town Hall. There was always a queue of people waiting in line just to get a ticket. Sometimes the queue went right round the block. When she finally got a ticket she would find that she had number 105 and there were still fifty people in front of her. She would sit in a bare-walled waiting room with hard chairs and wait for hours for her number to be called. It was better when the kids finally got into school, but in the early days, while she was still in the hostel, she had to take them with her. After hours of hanging around in a boring waiting room they would get increasingly frustrated and Sharon would lose her temper.
‘Elijah, stop that. Chantelle, stop crying.’
The four kids would start running around the waiting room, climbing on chairs and crawling around on the floor, making a racket. She would try and shut them up with food from packed lunches that she’d brought with her, but once the crisps and the Curly Wurly chocolate bars were gone the kids would go back to causing havoc. That’s when the sly glances from other people in the waiting room would start and the muffled mutterings. The glances from other mothers in the waiting room would turn nasty and the huffing and puffing would become