I went to the trial by myself, by bus. Dad had wanted to take me but, as ever, his job came first. Before going off to work, Mum got up early and made me a packed lunch of corned beef sandwiches, but I was so nervous I knew I was never going to eat them. The trial was being held on a windy training pitch near the club’s stadium in Leytonstone. I arrived an hour early, partly to create the right impression with the coaching staff, partly to give myself time to get a feel for the set up, but mostly because I was impatient to get going. I’d hardly slept the night before and was up and dressed before dawn. Unsure as to what the arrangements would be with regards to the changing facilities, I’d come kitted out and ready for action. What the other trialists were wearing I don’t remember, but I had on my favourite Spurs replica shirt, the one with Glenn Hoddle’s name stitched on the back. I had been looking forward to showing it off, so I was disappointed when, just before the trial began, we were issued with coloured bibs.
After much standing around, the trial finally got underway. Once we had run around the pitch a few times to warm up, the youth-team coach gathered us in the centre circle. He said we would be playing a straight eleven-a-side match, lasting an hour. He then gave us our positions – he put me up front – and told us to relax and play our natural game. ‘Don’t try too hard to impress, just enjoy it.’ There we were on the threshold of realising the ambition of almost every schoolboy in the country. This was the biggest moment of our lives. Our futures hung in the balance. Relax and play your natural game. Fat chance. The pressure I felt to perform was almost crippling. During the match, I couldn’t even get the basics right. My first touch went completely. I couldn’t pass the ball two yards. My shooting lacked not only accuracy but power, as though my legs were made of straw. Because of my height, the midfield players kept lumping the ball up to me, in true English style, but I can’t remember winning a single-header. Basically, I had a stinker. At the end of the game, the coach was so embarrassed for me he couldn’t look me in the eye. The fact that I’d scored quite a decent goal, an instinctive finish on the half-volley, made no difference. The coach told us that those who had been successful would be contacted, by letter, within a couple of weeks and that if we hadn’t heard back by then, we should assume we wouldn’t be.
Those two weeks felt like the longest of my life. Each morning I’d run downstairs to see if the postman had brought anything for me. While I was waiting for news I played again for my school team. In the changing room before the game Mr. Ludlow asked me how the trial had gone. ‘I played shit.’ My teammates started laughing. Deadly Darren said, ‘So what’s new?’ I told him to go fuck himself and we almost came to blows. Mr. Ludlow had to step between us. Before we ran out to play, he took me to one side and did his best to put me back together. ‘I’m sure you didn’t do as bad as all that. You just never know with these people. Best to stay positive.’
A fortnight passed and still I hadn’t heard anything. I waited another week, just to be sure, before accepting that I’d missed out. I was so downhearted I don’t think I ever fully recovered. Outwardly I tried to give the impression that I hadn’t been affected, that I had only suffered a flesh wound, when in truth the cut had been deep. I went through the motions, in case I was accused of giving up after the first setback. On Mr. Ludlow’s advice I started attending open trials, concentrating on the lower leagues where I felt I had more chance of success; none of the clubs showed any interest. With each new rejection I sank further into myself, becoming so silent and withdrawn that my parents thought seriously about consulting a child psychologist, but their sympathy and understanding only went so far.
The day they received a letter from school to say that I’d only shown up for twelve lessons in the last month and that I’d be prevented from taken my exams if I didn’t significantly improve my attendance record, they reverted to type. Dad, who always lapsed into patois when he became angry, called me ‘wutless’ and said I was destined to turn out like Theodore. Mum’s forecast for my future was even more dire. Instead of Theodore, she used Mitch as an example of where I was headed. Mitch had now left home and set up in a squat and started signing on. Mum was trying to scare me but the picture she painted seemed very attractive. I was fifteen years old and felt it was time I got out from under my parents. Mitch had shown me a way. I ran into Benjy one day after school and we started talking excitedly about a time when the three of us would share a place, free from parental controls, where we could do what the hell we liked, when we liked. By the time we got home we had all but made the decision to move in with Mitch, but a few days later Benjy said he’d been having second thoughts. ‘It’s Mum. I can’t leave her. She’s getting worse, Si.’ ‘But can’t your old man look after her?’ He shook his head. ‘You seen him lately?’ ‘Not in a while, no.’ ‘He’s on smack.’
I moved in with Mitch. We didn’t come to any formal arrangement. I started hanging out at his place and sort of stayed. For a week I didn’t go home. I knew that Mum and Dad must have been sick with worry but I wanted to prove to myself that I could live independently of them. When my conscience became too heavy I went to see them. I made sure to call them first, to avoid any surprises and to give us all a chance to prepare, and it worked. Mum cried but she didn’t get angry. Relieved to see that I looked well-fed, clean and that I wasn’t going about in rags, she asked me how I’d been surviving for money. ‘I’m signing on.’ She shook her head, knowing full well what this meant. Dad, as I had expected, couldn’t resist being condescending. ‘You think you is a man? Well now you will learn what it is to live like one.’ He then offered me money, I refused it and he smiled: ‘You learn fast, I say that for you.’
Once the novelty had worn off, I realised that living in a squat wasn’t quite what I had imagined. We didn’t have to pay rent, but everything else about the experience was a pain. We had regular run-ins with Hackney Council, who used various bullying tactics to try to evict us. We once came home to find the place boarded up back and front. It took us almost the entire day to remove the boards, nail-by-nail, plank-by-plank, and re-occupy the house. They then served us an eviction notice and threatened legal action if we didn’t vacate the property by the specified date. Mitch consulted the Citizens Advice Bureau and was told that we couldn’t be evicted without being re-housed. We wrote back to the council to say that after taking legal advice, we were asserting our rights as squatters and would not be moving out unless we were offered a suitable alternative. After that their letters dried up. We thought we’d heard the last of them but then one morning an official came by, a young white guy with gelled ginger hair, claiming that he needed to inspect the place to make sure it was legally habitable. Stupidly we let him in, hoping to convince him that we were not running the place down, but almost as soon as he got in he started making notes and never spoke to us again except to ask directions to this room or that.
As was usually the case when visitors came calling, I saw nothing but defects in the property: the peeling masonry, the missing floorboards, the exposed circuitry. Mitch, suspicious as ever, followed the inspector around, standing over his shoulder while he scribbled into his notepad. Feeling worn out from a lack of sleep – we’d been out the night before – I went and sat on the collapsed settee. In front of me, on the milk crate-cum-coffee table was a bag of weed and some Rizlas and an ashtray overflowing with spliff roaches. It suddenly occurred to me that the inspector must have seen it all and that he had probably noticed the smell too. I quickly gathered up the evidence and hid them away. Moments later I heard Mitch’s voice coming from the bathroom. He sounded angry so I went to investigate. When I got there I saw that he had the inspector by the throat.
‘Get my blade, Si. I’m gonna mark my man for his fuckry talk.’
I panicked. The inspector’s eyes were bloodshot and bulging. He was struggling to get free but though he was a grown man, and Mitch only a sixteen-year-old boy, he couldn’t get away.
‘What the fuck, Mitch!’ I screamed. ‘What’s
happened?’
‘This guy’s gotta be taught a lesson,’ he growled, ‘he can’t chat to people like that. Who the fuck does he think he his?’
The inspector, his back against the wall, was going blue in the face and seemed on the brink of passing out.
‘What did he say?’ I asked. Mitch nodded towards the toilet bowl. I looked in it and saw a couple of fat turds. I couldn’t understand it. I had used the toilet only that morning and had flushed it and I knew that Mitch hadn’t used it since.
‘It’s blocked,’ I said.
‘Yeah,’ said Mitch. He tightened his grip on the inspector’s throat. ‘That’s what I told hombre here. Told him we’d get it sorted as soon as. But the racist cunt says,’ and here he mimicked the inspector’s voice, ‘“I don’t know how you people can live like this. You’re no better than animals.”’ He kissed his teeth and added, ‘What you waiting for, Si? Go get my tings, bredren. My man has to get two juk today.’
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. ‘Mitch, let the guy go. What the fuck you doing? Think, man. Use your head. You can’t just go round stabbing people for no reason.’
He gave me a look of disgust, as if he was about to spit in my face, then turned back to the inspector. Jabbing his finger in the man’s face, he said, ‘You’re one lucky bredda, you know that?’ He dropped his hand and the inspector collapsed to the ground, coughing and spluttering and gasping for air. Mitch was about to kick him but I stepped in.
‘Just get the fuck out of here, Mitch. You’re a nutter, I swear.’
‘Fuck you too,’ he barked, then stormed out.
I tried to help the inspector up but he shoved me away and swore that he was going straight to the police. I advised him not to do that, strongly, saying that Mitch would come after him, no matter how long it took and whatever the consequences and I meant it. If he was scared, the inspector didn’t show it. He eventually got to his feet, told me to go ‘stuff’ myself and, holding his throat, staggered out. We never saw him or any other council official again and we heard nothing from the police. It seemed that we, or rather Mitch, had scared them off. But that wasn’t the end of our troubles. We couldn’t relax. Too many people had it in for us.
The two-storey, three-bedroom house was on a fairly smart, residential street near Victoria Park, tree-lined and quiet. Our neighbours included GPs and estate agents. They saw us as little more than scum and would make their feelings known by scrawling graffiti on our front door: Squatters Out! Once they even got up a petition. It was signed by virtually every household in the street and delivered to the council. When that didn’t work, they formed themselves into a residents group and started giving interviews to the Hackney Gazette, claiming that they didn’t necessarily object to us squatting, only to the drugs and the loud music and the coming and going at all hours and to the way we had allowed the house to fall into disrepair. For almost a year, they kept at us. I wouldn’t say they wore us down, but we decided to do something to get them off our backs.
We gathered up a work gang, including Benjy, who’d been hanging out at the house so much he was as good as living there, and spent about two weeks painting the place, inside and out. It made a noticeable difference to the appearance of the property and to how we felt about living in it. We also tried, as best as teenagers can, to tone down the noise, especially at night, and out of respect to the young children in the street, we never smoked weed or drank alcohol in their presence. The neighbours didn’t thank us, and we didn’t expect them to, but gradually they came to accept us. We weren’t going anywhere, so unless they moved, and given that the law was on our side, they had little choice. After that, the only issue we had was with the electricity suppliers. Aware that we were squatting, they insisted on installing a meter, which meant many an interrupted TV programme and some very gloomy candle-lit nights.
I should have been happy. I had left home, was living an independent life, but the truth was my self-esteem had never been lower. Surviving on the dole robbed me of my pride, my self-respect. Mitch didn’t see it that way. ‘Black people have suffered plenty at the hands of the white man. They owe us.’ That was one way of looking at it but it was not a view I shared. Every time I went to sign on I felt worthless, a scrounger, a leech. I started looking for work. Without any qualifications I struggled, but eventually I landed a job working at Wimpy in Piccadilly Circus. The manager, Neil, a fitness fanatic with muscles in his face, made life very difficult for the black workers, all teenagers like myself. He would put us on the worst jobs – cleaning the toilets, emptying the rubbish, clearing and wiping down the tables, mopping the floor – whilst reserving the cashier duties for himself and the other white staff. A strict timekeeper, he would tap his watch if you showed up even a minute late for your shift and he expected you to make up the time before you left. Career advancement opportunities were non-existent. It would have taken me years just to become a supervisor, without any additional pay, and to become a manager meant being white and connected to the people who made the promotions. Speaking of pay, I was working an average of fifty hours a week with over-time and barely getting by. When I factored in the cost of commuting from Hackney to the west end, I worked out that I was actually better off on the dole. And so, after six months, I quit and went back to signing on.
While I’d been getting up early every morning and going to work, Mitch had been out thieving and had turned the squat into an Aladdin’s Cave of stolen goods. Benjy had dropped out of school, too. He still hadn’t officially moved in but he slept over most nights, only going home occasionally to see how his mum was getting on and to bring her some money. His dad had gone from chasing the dragon to mainlining and was now in no fit state to take care of himself, let alone his wife.
Because it contained so many valuables, we had to protect the squat against break-ins. The back and front doors were grilled and padlocked and there were burglar-bars on all the lower-floor windows. As well as securing our things, this level of protection proofed us against police raids and made dealing much easier, something Benjy had started doing in imitation of his father. We had always smoked weed, even at school, so it made sense to now be selling the stuff. But we couldn’t really get going on it. Our customers came by in dribs and drabs, their numbers were not sufficient for us to make any real money. We were too out of the way in Victoria Park. We needed to be closer to the action, we needed to be on the Frontline.
* * *
Sandringham Road – aka the Frontline or the Front – had a reputation to rival Railton Road in Brixton and All Saints Road in Ladbroke Grove. With its West Indian takeaway shops and makeshift poolrooms, dingy basement shebeens and dilapidated dope dens, it attracted people from all sections of Hackney’s black community and beyond. We first went there to buy weed wholesale, from a contact Benjy had made through his father, but once we saw the level of street trade that was going on, we set up shop. It was a man’s world, which is to say there were very few women, but it was cross-generational. Teenagers rubbed shoulders with men in their forties and fifties, with us youngsters cast in the role of ‘cadets’. We regulars came to be known as the Sandringham Massive, and I take no pride in saying that our in-your-face, couldn’t-give-a-shit, fuckyou attitude won us few friends in the wider community. This was especially true of the police. To them we were not only a bunch of criminals but also the enemy. We had no love for them either. To provoke us, they would post sentries at either end of the Front and all the roads leading off it, making it easier for them to spot who was coming and going and to carry out ‘stop and search’. They had us under siege. Occasionally we’d rise to the bait and lob a few bricks and bottles at them, and maybe the odd Molotov cocktail, but they were always careful not to engage us in running battles. This was 1983, two years after the Brixton Riots. They were scared.
Selling weed on the Frontline was not, and had never been, my idea of a life. As time passed I began to lose interest in it and started casting around for something to do that would f
ree me from what I had now come to see as a kind of prison. I was growing up, mentally and physically, I was becoming a man, but what did that mean exactly? I thought a lot about what my father had said. ‘You think you is a man? Well you will now learn what it is to live like one.’
There were some contradictions I needed to figure out. My parents worked hard, too hard in my opinion, yet they could only dream about taking a holiday or buying a car or even eating out now and then. They longed to own their own home. For as long as I could remember they’d been putting money aside for a down payment on a mortgage, but as quickly as it went into their savings account it came back out again to pay off hire-purchase debts or to help some relative or another in Jamaica. The begging letters arrived almost by the week.
They were still relatively young, my parents, barely into their forties, but already the pressure of keeping their lives afloat had given Dad grey hairs and Mum psoriasis, well-known as a stress-related skin condition. I might not have wanted to become a career weed dealer, but I didn’t want my parents’ life either. The gap between these two alternatives seemed so wide as to be unbridgeable. I felt confused. I simply didn’t know what to do with myself. I started eavesdropping on the conversations of those handful of Rastas who always seemed to be knocking about on the Front. I say conversations but they actually called it ‘reasoning’. One guy in particular, Ras Malachi, a Jamaican who’d been in the country since the early seventies and whose grey-flecked dreads went down to his calves, became almost like a spiritual guide to me. His mantra was ‘Peace and Love’, but no one mistook him for being passive. He would defend himself against all forms of attack, mental or physical, and was especially aggressive when it came to protecting the reputation and legacy of Haile Selassie.
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