We once made the local paper after a minor adventure not far from our house. There was a derelict pub at the end of our road that we used as one of our dens, where we would mess about and learn how to smoke cigarettes. One day a whole gang of us went in there and crept down into the cellar and, like a scene out of a kids’ adventure story, we found a couple of old-fashioned swag bags full of money. Somebody had robbed a post office and left three sacks of money there. Trevor and I took £20 in £1 notes, which to small kids back then seemed like a fortune. We ran down to the bicycle shop at Lichfield Road and spent the money decorating our bikes with transfers featuring red dragons and words like ‘cool’ and ‘easy rider’ and ‘speed monster’. We also got some fancy mirrors and horns and we felt pretty special riding back into town.
When we got home Pastor went mad and started to administer beatings to everyone. Poor Trevor got it the worst. Not because we took the money, but because of what we did with the money. He kept going on about this lawless family we hung out with, who’d been with us when we found the cash, saying, ‘You see what the white kids did. They took the money and gave it to their dad. You took twenty pounds and went to the bicycle shop! Look how poor we are. Next time bring it all to me.’
A lot of parents would have said, ‘You naughty children, you shouldn’t have taken that money.’ But we got into trouble because we didn’t take enough, and we didn’t bring it home. Pastor was like that. His approach was, if you’re gonna do it, do it good. That’s what poverty does to you.
The lawless family took much more money than we did. They bought clothes and food and presents for their girlfriends and gave the rest to their dad. Word spread, the police came, and the money was quickly removed. The next day that family had a big cake with their dinner, and their associated ladies came out onto the streets adorned in the nicest cheap dresses we had ever seen. We just had cool-looking bikes that we couldn’t ride because our bottoms were so sore.
9
LEARNING TO HUSTLE
Pastor’s house was crowded. We slept three or four to a bed: two up and two down, or two up and one down if you were lucky. Different kids had different levels of smelly feet, so there were always tough negotiations over who would sleep where. Me and Trevor would steal Pastor’s talcum powder to put on our feet, so we thought of ourselves as a sweeter brand of stink than those who were simply sweaty with no talc.
As I’ve said, Pastor could be a great laugh. He was full of jokes and stories from back in Jamaica, but when he got mad he really got mad and, like all Jamaican men of that generation, when he gave his kids a beating you knew about it. I was lucky; after the bike incident he only tried to beat me once. We had all done wrong, so Trevor had to go and get the strap and, one by one, he beat them all, starting with the youngest, Stanley, and working his way up. When he had done with Trevor, he came towards me but I stood there defiant and said, ‘You can’t hit me, you’re not my dad.’
It saved my backside but I’ve always felt it was a horrible thing to say; after all, he was more like a dad to me than my own dad was, and he treated me no different from the others. I saw the sadness in his eyes, and then I felt like apologising and offering up by backside for some bruising, but I could hear the others crying and I wasn’t man enough. After that, Pastor never tried to beat me again, which sometimes made me feel bad when I was told to sit down and watch the others getting a thrashing.
In other ways, Pastor was incredibly relaxed and a real sport. For instance, there was this girl called Anthea; she was bigger than me, and she fancied me. I was about twelve and she was older, thirteen or fourteen. She said to me one day, ‘Can I come to your house and see you?’
I said okay and she came to the house one night when my mum was working late. I can’t remember how it happened, but she started kissing me and said, ‘We should find somewhere we can be alone.’
Somehow we found our way upstairs. Pastor Burris saw what was going on and then locked us in the bedroom and said, ‘Gwan boy, do yer ting.’
I sat frozen on the bed while the very forward Anthea said, ‘Do you know what roaming hands are? Come here, I’ll show you.’
I was going, ‘Get away from me! Get me out of here!’ I was freaking out. But nothing happened, and Pastor let me out soon enough. It was a sudden introduction to girls and ‘heavy petting’. I wasn’t ready then, but I’d be ready soon enough.
As bad as the beatings were, and as hard as life was, the most important thing for me and my circle of friends was the pursuit of happiness. Trevor and I had a couple of really good friends, one of whom was a guy called Philip Evans, a white kid who seemed even blacker than we were. He had this real love of black culture and a massive collection of reggae and ska records. In the days before skinheads were associated with racism, the original skins were into ska music, and Philip was like a skinhead without the skin head; he liked his hair too much.
By this time we had heard the music of Bob Marley in our homes – at that time he was just another ska musician – but Philip knew Marley was much more than that. He sat us down and made us listen to the lyrics, and then he got us up and made us move to the beat.
We couldn’t afford many new clothes of our own; we had to make do with whatever Pastor or Mum bought us. When we did pick up some new threads we’d try and get clothes that made us look like skinheads. We were desperate to look cool, so sometimes we took extreme measures to achieve that. If we saw something we liked, we’d liberate it from a washing line. Ben Sherman shirts were the shirts to be seen in; Wranglers or Levi jeans if you were going for casual/hard, or Sta Prest two-tone trousers if you wanted to look hard and smart. The white skinheads were trying to look like black rude boys, and here were some black rude boys trying to look like hard skinheads. And over the back of where we lived was an entire family of what we called ‘greasers’. None of us wanted to look like them.
Ska had evolved into reggae, and occasionally a reggae record would get in the charts, like ‘Montego Bay’ or ‘Double Barrel’ in 1970, or a novelty one like ‘Skenga’ later on, but some lyrics had started to get very rude. Us young ’uns were already aware of songs like ‘Wet Dream’ by Max Romeo and ‘Wreck a Buddy’ by the Soul Sisters, both of which were released at the end of the 1960s. Another song had lyrics like: ‘White pum-pum, black pum-pum, every pum is the same pum-pum.’ My parents wouldn’t have been playing this, although even Prince Buster sang suggestive songs, like ‘Rough Rider’.
Judge Dread was around too at this time – a larger-than-life beardy white guy who every year released one of his ‘Big’ 45s, like ‘Big 5’, ‘Big 6’ and so on, and he would chat naughty rhymes about ‘pussy’ and ‘playing the horn’. His records were banned from radio but word would get round schools and the young rudies, white and black, would find places selling them and then play them at home, dancing in their tonic suits and Harrington jackets.
People have asked me if I think Judge Dread was an exploiter, taking the piss. I say no, he was a real lover of reggae. His own stage name was a reference to a Prince Buster song. Years later I saw some footage of a show he did at a festival in the ’70s. Dennis Alcapone is there. Judge Dread introduces him and you can see the artists have love for him.
We were starting to grow up. Some of it was positive, some of it negative. We would imitate some of the older boys around us and I soon found myself in court. Philip Evans, Trevor and me started doing burglaries together. Our parents thought we were at school, but we weren’t. We’d go to the nicer parts of Birmingham, find a house, knock on the door and see if anyone was in. If someone came out we’d ask for a person who obviously wasn’t there, but if nobody came out one of us would go round the back. A minute later the front door would be open and we’d be in.
By the time I was halfway through my teens, the path to me becoming a full-time hustler was well established. From an early age we knew that if we wanted money we had to get it ourselves. Our parents didn’t give us money, and the wrongs and rights of how we g
ot it weren’t that important. If we didn’t get our own, we wouldn’t have any.
In those days most houses had television meters and gas meters. We would break into them and get the 50ps out of them. I was expert at getting into all kinds of meters and putting them back as I’d found them. We didn’t go for goods that much; we usually wanted quick cash that we could spend on pinball machines or buying a 50p draw of weed.
There was always shoplifting, and we’d mostly go for clothes. We even went in for a bit of ram-raiding – someone would have a car and smash through a shop window and we’d have the goods away in a flash. One time we took some material and got suits made up from it. Or we’d get women’s clothes, coats and things, and sell them to girls in our neighbourhood.
One of the more exciting robberies I found myself doing involved me sneaking into a department store in the Bullring in Birmingham city centre. I did this twice, once with a kid called Paul Davis, who not long afterwards died in the Birmingham pub bombings. We walked into the shop near to closing time, found a place to hide and stayed overnight, filling our bags with everything we wanted. Next morning, when they’d opened and customers were milling about, we strolled out with the swag. You couldn’t do that now, of course, as they have sensors and CCTV and everything is monitored.
We were always listening out for opportunities. On one occasion we heard that a local couple had won the ‘spot the ball’ competition in the newspaper. There were rumours in the neighbourhood that they’d cashed in the money and stashed it in their bedroom wardrobe. They threw a party downstairs and Trevor and I climbed in the back way over fences and through the bedroom window. We were searching the wardrobe and had to hide really quickly when the couple came in to have a smooch.
They were saying stuff like, ‘I’m so happy, darling’, and having a good, long snog. We were holding our breath and sweating. We didn’t find the money and we beat a quick exit once the coast was clear. I was okay, but Trevor fell through the roof of an outhouse and there was a commotion. We got caught after the fact, and then had to admit to loads we didn’t do.
In 1972 I appeared in court on one charge of burglary and one of receiving stolen goods. I was given two years’ probation and twenty-four hours at an attendance centre. These were places where you had to go for two hours every Saturday morning to make things that could be useful – like an early form of community service. The next year the police caught us robbing a house and they managed to trick us in the station by using what everyone now knows is an old con. We were arrested for one burglary but the police could see by our style that we had done many more. So an officer went to Trevor and said Philip has told us everything. He named all the jobs Philip has ‘confessed’ to and showed him a false statement. Then Trevor got angry and said, ‘Okay. Now what?’ Then they went and did the same to Philip and me. So we all ended up confessing to all the charges, even jobs we didn’t do because we each felt that one of the others had grassed us up.
A move was on the cards, and we were all soon living in a house on Normandy Road, in another part of Aston. Pugh Road as we’d known it didn’t last much longer anyway; it was flattened like so many streets at that time to make way for flimsy new council houses. My mum and Pastor were still together, although Pastor had another house in Aston.
My dad’s grip on my brothers and sisters was much looser now; sometimes they would come and see us, and when Dad wasn’t around we would go and see them. Now there were two families in three houses, and we would move between them (almost) as we pleased.
Normandy Road was much ‘nicer’ than Pugh Road. In Pugh Road people quite literally seemed to live out on the streets, which I liked because it made it feel like a community. Normandy Road was completely different. Houses had lawns, the street had trees, and the trees had birds singing in them. There was a semblance of order, but no community. I started going to Canterbury Cross School, which later changed its name to Broadway Comprehensive. It felt as if we had arrived on the good side of town, but the problem was we were still bad.
The kids I hung around with would threaten the local grammar school boys, as they weren’t very streetwise. All we had to do was go, ‘Boo, gis your watch’, and they would whimper and hand it over. Anyone with a slight weakness was fair game. Some of my friends would go gay bashing, or ‘queer bashing’, as they called it back then, and I was with them one time when they started kicking this gay guy, expecting me to join in. I thought, He ain’t done nothing to me. I didn’t want to touch him. I stood there while the others were going, ‘Come on, Benjamin, kick the bloodclaat boy.’
I did this token kick that was really soft. I feel terrible about it now, but if I hadn’t done that kick they would have made my life hell, saying, ‘What? The batty man your friend? Or is you batty man too?’ That would have been it for a long time. I’m sure, if you did the statistics, that somebody doing the kicking was probably gay himself, but they had to go along with the aggro to fit in with the crowd.
I’m so glad I never really got stuck in, or did anything to old people. Even in the fair fights I had, where I could’ve laid into an opponent and possibly killed him, I’m so glad I didn’t.
There were lighter moments of bravado, however. Pastor now had a beautiful Morris Oxford car. It was his pride and joy. He looked after it as if it was another member of the family, but it got no beating. He would always park it right outside the house, but little did he know that Trevor and me used to take it in the middle of the night when he was sleeping; we’d pick up some girls and go driving for the night. The method was thus: the family would go to bed, we would wait until everyone fell asleep, and then we’d get up, take a spare key that we secretly kept, push the car away from the house and go party. We would go dancing or just drive around all night, stopping every now and then for a kiss and a cuddle, or a party in the car. Then, as morning approached, we would take our loved-up friends home, before topping the car up with petrol and putting it back. Then we would creep back to bed as if nothing had happened, and wake up late like lazy kids.
One night we messed up really badly. Everything had gone to plan until we went to top up the petrol. We couldn’t. Pastor had bought a fancy new fuel cap with a lock and, of course, we didn’t have a key, so we were sure we’d be rumbled. There was nothing we could do, so we parked the car with a couple of gallons missing. The next morning when we came down for breakfast we could sense something was wrong. By now Trevor was as big as his dad, but he could still get a beating, and I was waiting for the fireworks.
Pastor came down the stairs, sat in his chair and said, ‘You know, it’s so strange. I’m sure I had more petrol than that . . . and my car, it smells of chips.’
Trevor and I stood there waiting for him to start questioning us, but he never did. Eventually, about thirty-five years later, we told him what we used to get up to. He said, ‘I knew it!’ And laughed.
10
ANIMAL LIBERATION TIME
By now I’d become a vegetarian. I’d always been an animal lover and a very reluctant meat eater. Sometimes I hid a bag under the dinner table. I would take the meat off the plate and put it into the bag or, if my mother was watching, I would put the meat in my mouth for a couple of seconds and then it would go in the bag when she turned away. Then I would either throw it away or give it to some wild dogs.
Everything changed the day I had a boy-to-woman talk with my mother across the dinner table around the age of eleven. At first it was genuine curiosity. I asked her where she’d got the meat from and she said the butcher. So I asked where the butcher had got it from, and she said the farmer. So I asked where the farmer got it from, and she said he got it from the cow. I thought, what a clever cow, and then I asked, ‘What is the cow doing with meat?’
She said, ‘You silly boy, this is the cow!’
I was horrified. I had never connected the meat on the plate with the cow in the field. I pushed all the meat in my reach away from me and said, ‘I won’t eat my friends’, and that was the
last day I ate meat. I subsequently learned that George Bernard Shaw had said exactly the same thing, but at the time I’d never heard of him. I wanted to express my disgust at eating dead bodies, and my love of animals.
Imagine a school playground. I think the general sound that comes from a playground is fantastic: the joyous noise of hundreds of kids playing, having fun and seeking pleasure. But if you are alone in a corner of that playground because none of the other kids will play with you, it’s the loneliest place in the world. When I was in that place I made friends with animals. A cat came along one day, and we hung out together. He came the next day and we played a little catch, then the next day he brought a few friends along. I also made friends with caterpillars, and by the pond I talked to frogs. They didn’t judge me because of the colour of my skin, and they weren’t planning to fight me after school.
Although I said I wasn’t going to eat animals, people still tried to feed me meat. At school I’d have just potatoes and veg (usually peas), and the dinner ladies would attempt to pour meaty gravy all over it, saying, ‘It’s only gravy, it’s not the actual animal.’ But I wouldn’t have any of it. I stuck to my principles and only accepted the carbs and veg. I don’t remember that as being such a struggle. What I do remember is when I went vegan at the age of thirteen.
I worked it out for myself that mothers produced milk for their children, and not for the children of others, especially others of another species. As soon as I’d sussed that out I stopped drinking milk and consuming all dairy products. I hadn’t been to any meetings; I hadn’t read any vegan magazines – there weren’t any. I just didn’t want to take from animals. I didn’t realise at the time that the term for my stance was ‘vegan’. That knowledge came soon after, when somebody asked me if I wanted an ice cream. I told them I didn’t eat ice cream because I didn’t eat any animal products. And this other kid said, ‘You’re a vegan.’
The Life and Rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah Page 6