Denis James, Slough’s planning committee chairman, told me that people from Coventry had recently arrived in town to sell pictures made from silver paper door-to-door. From Coventry! The symbol of Britain’s post-war resurgence, with its modern shopping precincts, its cathedral rising next to the ruins of the one that Hitler’s bombers gutted, its once invincible car industry. That’s where the unemployed of Durham moved in the thirties, the generation of the grandfathers of the boys who were now coming to Slough. Councillor James is just old enough to remember the pre-war unemployed, bringing their baked-bean tins, threaded with a piece of wire to serve as a handle, to the backdoor of his childhood home to beg for a cup of tea. The Coventrians with their silver paper pictures had transported him back to his childhood. The have-nots are once again at the backdoors of the haves. Harold Macmillan said very shortly before he died in December 1986 that when he was MP for Stockton in the twenties the unemployment rate was 29 per cent; when he returned as a nonagenarian in the mid-eighties for a reunion, the figure stood at 28 per cent. It made him, he said, ‘very sad’.
Chapter 4
It’s No Go the Milkman
Mrs ‘Smith’ hadn’t been out after dark for five years unless accompanied by her son – and that only rarely, since he was almost as frightened as she of the long walkways with their dark hiding places and of the lounging teenagers. Five years ago, returning with four other women at ten o’clock at night from ‘a little bingo’, Mrs Smith had been set upon a few yards from her front door by three ‘muggers’. The youths snatched their handbags and kicked the one woman who had hung on and resisted, severely injuring her wrist. Mrs Smith, then sixty-two, who had already twice been burgled, became a hermit, scuttling out when necessary during daylight hours, but for the most part living a claustrophobic life of siege in her small maisonette – ‘I have never been out at night since, never been to bingo,’ she said. She gave up her work for the tenants’ association, knocking on people’s doors and delivering leaflets. ‘I wouldn’t do it now.’
Her home is in the heart of one of Britain’s ill-famed inner-city housing estates – those that have been dubbed ‘no go’ in the popular press – the North Peckham estate in the London borough of Southwark. The milkman has long since given up his milk round, the police move hesitantly in pairs, and, from time to time, doctors, postmen, social workers, deliverymen, repairmen and taxi drivers decline to venture inside. When Mrs Smith’s husband was dying from lung cancer, a taxi driver refused to bring them home from the hospital. The estate was built in the mid-seventies, home to six thousand people, its flats linked by mile upon mile of asphalt walkway, and connected by bridges to other estates of equally formidable reputation. From one office, staff administer eleven thousand of the least desirable homes in the country. Seven years after Mrs Thatcher had boosted the ideal of a property-owning democracy by compelling local authorities to offer council houses for sale, not a single one of those eleven thousand tenants had bought the roof over his head. Between them the residents owed the borough five million pounds in rent arrears. Well over three-quarters of them fervently wanted to go elsewhere, a wish that will be fulfilled for only a tiny minority.
On the ground floor many windows are permanently boarded, the occupants preferring life in a half-light to the near certainty of being burgled when they go out. There are people on the North Peckham estate who have been broken into a dozen times. Other flats are gutted and/or blackened by fire, too derelict even for the squatters who often seize an empty property within half an hour of tenants moving out. In the mornings the caretakers find the abandoned syringes, and the matches and tinfoil – the paraphernalia of ‘chasing the dragon’ – which betray the widespread drug habit on the estate. Graffiti is ubiquitous, even some front doors are totally covered in daubings; there is dog mess every few yards. The council had recently contributed five thousand pounds for development work on a fortified milk float – which will look like a cross between an armoured personnel carrier and a bullion lorry. However, because of the faulty design of the estates, milk still cannot be delivered right to the door, and residents like Mrs Smith have to pluck up enough courage to leave their homes and descend to the roads beneath. To most Britons, North Peckham would be a glimpse of hell, one of those places that confirms the deep fissure in our society between ‘comfortable’ Britain and the increasingly abandoned and feared world beyond. Even the none too scrupulous avoid the estate assiduously. In an Old Kent Road pub a man with a string of criminal convictions stated emphatically: ‘I wouldn’t go near the place; it’s like a foreign land.’
Mrs Smith was not a frail ‘little old lady’ of popular imagination. She was still robust, keeping house for two people, and, when I called, was wearing a smart blue dress and had clearly just had her grey hair crisply permed. She lived with a series of comparisons in her head: life before North Peckham, life at the beginning of North Peckham, and life away from North Peckham. She had been brought up in Worcester, but had spent most of her married life in the intimate terraced streets of Bermondsey, ‘Cockney’ territory, where many of the men made their then good living in the Surrey docks. For most elderly people in the inner city, life thirty years ago, whatever the privations and the reality, had become the ‘good old days’. Mrs Smith said: ‘We never seemed to get that sort of thing [meaning burglary or mugging] then. It was a friendly atmosphere.’ Her forty-year-old divorced son, who had moved back with his twelve-year-old daughter to live with mum, as much because he was frightened of living alone as to protect her, added: ‘It was your own community. If you went away for the weekend, everyone kept an eye.’ He had, he said, drunk coffee and listened to the jukebox with another Bermondsey lad, Tommy Steele, a memory which – since he must have been considerably younger than Mr Steele – may have been part of the myth.
But the early days in their new home had matched the Smiths’ optimistic expectations. ‘We really liked it. It was more like a holiday camp. It was very, very good,’ said Mrs Smith. And certainly the interiors of the North Peckham homes, with central heating and hot water and spacious kitchens, were, as residents said frequently, ‘little palaces’ compared to the ancient terraced houses they had replaced. After a few years, said Mrs Smith and others, North Peckham ‘deteriorated’, when ‘we got the class of person we have now’ – a description which is in part, though not entirely, a code for ‘Afro-Caribbeans’. ‘I have,’ she added hastily, although the subject had not been explicitly broached, ‘good coloured neighbours, who said to tell them if the music is too loud.’ But the good years on the estate ended nearly a decade ago, and the comparison Mrs Smith now cherishes is the life led by her daughter in a small Sussex village near Brighton. Although Mrs Smith is fearful to go away in case her home is burgled, once with her daughter she is transported to near paradise. ‘It was amazing,’ she said of a recent visit, ‘we went out for dinner on Saturday night with no fear or thought of anything. It seemed as if we were in a different world. There’s no fear there at all. My daughter can go down to the village and not even lock her door.’
Back home, at least two of her friends no longer visit, refusing to enter an estate with a ‘no go’ reputation. Her deceased husband’s one surviving brother, now in his seventies, will visit only at Sunday lunchtime. ‘He likes to keep in touch, but he makes sure he leaves his wallet behind,’ said Mrs Smith, who walks her granddaughter across the footbridge where a man had been murdered recently and through the neighbouring Camden estate each morning to put her on a bus for school, and waits anxiously at the bus stop each afternoon for her return. The girl was not allowed (nor wished) to go outside her front door alone. Mrs Smith is on sleeping tablets, and her son sleeps fitfully, conscious of the noises on the walkways. Twice in his own flat he had been surprised by intruders on his balcony in the middle of the night. On other nights there is worse noise from the all-night parties. The weekend before, it had gone on until a quarter to seven in the morning. Mrs Smith did not dare do anything about
it – even call the council – for fear of reprisals. It was dangerous, she said, to draw attention to oneself, which is why she remains anonymous here. ‘The police say “don’t be afraid to call us,” but they are short-winded in coming round,’ she said. After her ‘mugging’, the police did not bother to interview her. Her son discovered ‘bullet holes’ in his bedroom window, but the police never came. They both thought the police had grown soft: her son remembered being frequently stopped and checked when he was a teenager roaming the streets with his friends. Now, he suggested, the police were too frightened, particularly of black youths.
Mrs Smith bitterly resented the squatters, and the non-payers of rent: ‘I pay half my pension in rent. I’m very proud of the fact that I have always held a clear rent book. A very small percentage round here can say that. I was brought up that even if you hadn’t got a meal on the table, you always paid for the roof over your head.’ Rents were about to go up, which simply meant, said Mrs Smith matter-of-factly, that arrears would go up. She blamed the general deterioration of the estate on ‘ignorance’, people who didn’t know how to keep themselves or their homes clean, didn’t use the chutes for rubbish, and allowed their children to spray-paint the walls. On her walkway, the kids had been back within days of a major repainting operation – ‘Daryl wos ’ere’ mocking the ‘wet paint’ sign left by the contractors.
It was almost dark as I left Mrs Smith, and the walkways were deserted. At the next corner, a few yards from her front door, a beer can rattled into sight – kicked? thrown? blown? Who was lurking there? I nearly turned and walked the other way, but at the corner there was no one. I was crazily relieved, and glad that I hadn’t made a fool of myself to myself by retreating. The fear locked behind the doors had seeped its way on to the empty passages. Why else would a rolling beer can make the heart race? I also left my wallet at home when visiting North Peckham.
‘Pattie’ until recently had lived alone on the neighbouring Camden estate, a few yards across the footbridge from Mrs Smith. She was a schoolteacher, a rare case for these parts of someone who had ‘made good’. Walking in broad daylight with a friend, she had been grabbed from behind by a man, who appeared, she said, ‘to want a grope’. The friend seized a broom that was lying by and drove the man away. Each night when Pattie came home, she parked her car in the dark labyrinth beneath the flats, and waited to see if any shadowy figures lurked amongst the cars or on the steps she had to climb to her flat. Then she ran, phoning her mother as soon as she got through the door. Her mother would call her at 8.00 a.m. before Pattie left for work to make sure her daughter had survived the night. ‘At twenty-eight it was a bit off, wasn’t it?’ she said. She carried a mental map of where her friends’ homes were, so she would know where to bolt if attacked. In the end it was the squatters who drove her away: one night a television came crashing on to her balcony at 3.00 a.m. They would knock in the early hours asking for a loaf of bread: the evidence of drug-taking was all around – ‘you knew what was going on, but you didn’t ask any questions,’ she said. ‘You just learn as a female that it’s frightening.’ After a while, she said, you even stop commiserating with people who have been burgled. Normality is changed when crime is so prevalent.
That had certainly been my experience in the United States. I had been surprised by how quickly I came to accept the American valuation of crimes that the British would consider to be quite horrific. Murders which, if committed in London, would have dominated the evening papers for days, were tucked away in the Washington Post ‘Metro’ section. One summer when I visited Detroit, murders in the city were running at four or five a night, and all teenagers had been curfewed. The first time that I wrote about handgun laws, I took a figure for the annual number of murders in America from a newspaper cutting – it was something like 24,000. I woke in the middle of the night, and did some mental arithmetic. That came out at 460 a week, which was more than the annual total in Britain. I called the FBI in the morning to say I was sure I had it wrong and could they check for me. ‘You sure have,’ came the reply. ‘That figure’s a year out of date. It’s up a thousand since then.’
Such violence – much of it almost as casual as illegal parking – is justifiably held against American society. I could never get over the cheapness of human life – it took a really exceptional murder to raise public concern – nor the easy way in which politicians were bought off by the gun lobby from enacting gun controls that would have gone some way towards disarming hoodlums and disturbed citizens alike. But while I was away, Britain’s crime figures rose inexorably, numbing the public with meaningless statistics of the ‘serious crime every nine seconds’ variety that eventually make any subject as incomprehensible as economics. More concretely, the head of Brixton CID announced: ‘We are now dealing with more serious crimes than the busiest precinct in New York.’ Individual criminals were showing a wanton contempt for their victims that could scarcely have been matched in Los Angeles.
In the few days I was in North Peckham, an attacker elsewhere in London threw a two-year-old girl strapped in a pushchair into a canal, having first knocked out and robbed her mother; a few miles away in Deptford burglars tortured a sixty-year-old man for forty minutes, repeatedly hitting him in the face with a hammer, driving a nail file into his eye and eardrum, and slashing his body with a knife. In the months after my return there had been some reported story of violence to file every day, ranging from ‘Bored boys tortured gerbils to death’ to ‘Rugby match PC “bit off ear of opponent”’. Stabbings, attacks on transport staff, sexual assaults, even the ‘bombing’ of punters on the River Cam rolled on day by day. I had once almost been a ‘mugging’ victim myself, when I was attacked by two youths after I had inadvertently stopped them robbing from a woman’s handbag on the Underground, so I knew a little of the fear and the impotence felt by people on the receiving end. My attackers ran off when another man – by great good fortune – appeared round the corner.
The use of knives in south London was beginning to rival the American use of guns. Dr Robert Ware, head of the intensive care unit at King’s College Hospital, Denmark Hill, which lies between Brixton and Peckham, told me that the lives of cancer and heart patients were at risk because of the amount of operating-theatre time occupied by the victims of stabbings. Even when stab victims’ lives were not at risk, patients awaiting operations frequently had to be sent home – often deeply distressed – for a further wait. ‘It seems the macho thing to carry a knife, and the bigger the knife the more macho. They are going round now with eight-inch knives’ – and he demonstrated their wicked length with his hands – ‘and there are not many places in the body where you can push that without causing serious injury,’ he said. He told me that when he had been a young casualty officer fifteen years ago, knife injuries were rather messy slashings by drunken Irishmen; now they were systematic through and through stabbings, mainly of and by people engaged in the drugs business. The hospital, he estimated, received seven stab victims a day, at least one of whom would require major surgery. One a week had to be admitted to intensive care, where the mortality rate was almost one in three. The victims – sometimes brought to casualty in stolen cars – were fortunate in that King’s College has a cardiac unit, which saved several lives that would have been lost in less well-supported accident hospitals.
By the late 1980s, this avidly reported violence had convinced politicians, commentators and the public that society had undergone a moral sea-change. The basic social contract, whereby citizens enjoy certain rights – including health care, decent education and housing, and a job – in return for which they observe the rule of law, was breaking down. As a consequence, an underclass was evolving – football hooligans, muggers, inner-city rioters – somewhat more frightening than their Dickensian forebears because they were mobile and all too visible. The victims of poor schooling, poor upbringing, economic blight (you take your pick of explanations according to your prejudices) were beyond the pale, a danger to be feared at th
e best of times and contained at the worst.
The week in which I returned to Britain, the worst occurred. The country was suddenly pitched into a series of conflagrations, sparked by some maladroit policing, which illustrated just how stark the divide had become between these young people and the rest of society. Serious rioting broke out in several inner-city areas – Handsworth in Birmingham, Brixton in south London, and the Broadwater Farm estate in north London, where a policeman was hacked to death by a mob. Petrol bombs were thrown at the police, and – for the first time in a civil disturbance – shots were fired. Two Asians were burned to death in a Birmingham Post Office. Coming only a few months after the Heysel Stadium carnage, these riots appeared to signal the disintegration of urban society. The alien hordes – football hooligans and rioters – were at the door. A few streets away from gentrified terraces, there was a world where the Queen’s writ ran but fitfully. The disorders buried any misconceived notions that the suppressed anger and bleak despair of Britain’s inner cities had somehow melted away in the four years since the petrol bombers and looters had last taken to the streets.
But to me, returning home, what was almost as terrifying as the glimpse of mayhem round the corner were the knee-jerk reactions of national and local political leaders. Each spoke sad volumes about how polarized Britain had become after six years of inner-city recession and an essentially uncaring national government. The right picked on the consequences of permissive child-raising by parents who had been brought up in the free-wheeling sixties; while the left concentrated on economic devastation wrought by Thatcherism on already deprived communities. Neither side in the polarized political environment of Britain was prepared to concede that there was some justice on the other side: the riots became just another opportunity for political abuse.
When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain Page 13