Essex Boy: My Story (10 page)

And he’d say, ‘Oh, all right, then,’ and he’d give me the money – and I’d give it straight to Mum.

I had conflicted feelings about doing this.
I didn’t want to lie to my dad, but in a way I liked the fact that I could do it, that I could help my mum out with something that she
couldn’t do herself.
I was robbing to help my mum, and I’d still do it today if I had to.
Besides, a bit of me felt like Dad had all this money, and I didn’t understand why he
wasn’t helping her more.
At one point he had loved her enough to marry her, and she was the woman looking after his kids.

As for me, I’d chop my arm off for my mum if it would help her.
I would die for her, I reckon.
She has been there for me through my whole life and I know she would do anything for me, and
that is exactly what I feel for her too.

I had other ways of getting money, too, that didn’t involve stealing off my dad.
In fact, over the years my mates and I developed all sorts of ways to get extra cash.
Not
huge amounts, and not through out and out stealing.
It was more a case of learning clever cons, ways to get hold of someone’s money without mugging or robbing them.
These are the things we
needed to know to survive where we grew up.

One pretty basic technique we developed early on was getting the spare money from sweetshops.
I’d go into one of the local newsagents that sold sweets, stand by the penny sweet counter
– not that they exist these days, it is more like five pence a sweet!
– and I’d drop a penny and let it roll under the counter.
Then I’d make a big fuss about the fact I had
dropped my money.
‘Oh no!
I’ve dropped all me money under the sweet stand!
Mister, can you move it for us?
It’s the only money I brought with me, so it’s the only way I can
pay you!’

And sure enough the obliging shopkeeper would come and heave at the stand, pulling at it until he could shift it enough that we could get in underneath.
And there would be my penny – along
with plenty of other coins that people had dropped over the weeks since we had last tried this trick.
Twenty-pence pieces, ten-pence pieces, and, if you were especially lucky, pound coins.
And
I’d scoop it all up as though it was all mine, rather than just the penny I had dropped under there, and walk out a few quid better off.
It wasn’t exactly proper theft – the
person who had dropped it had chosen to leave it there, but that didn’t make it the shopkeeper’s either.
Finders keepers!

Then we discovered phone boxes.
At this time people were starting to get mobile phones, but not everyone was lucky enough to have one.
So some people would still head to the phone box on the
corner of their road to make their calls.
We discovered that if you stuck something like a train ticket up inside the phone box it would stop the change coming out.
Most people thought nothing of
it if their twenty pence didn’t appear – they just thought their call must have eaten into that money, so they wouldn’t bother following it up.
By the end of the day, in a popular
phone box I could collect a couple of quid.
Do that in a few phone boxes, and you are starting to look at not bad money for a teenager.

Then one of my mates and I escalated to using the same trick in a pub.
His parents were the landlord and landlady of one that had an old flashing fruit machine in the corner.
We decided it might
work in a similar way to the phone box, so once when they weren’t looking we got an empty fag box and shoved it up the slot where the money comes out.
And, true enough, the first night we
went back to check, we walked away with a result that made penny-sweet counters and phone boxes look like nothing.

It worked like this: when people won on the machine but didn’t get their cash out, they would either think it was broken and accept that they had lost out on that money – rare,
let’s be honest – or they would go and complain, and my mate’s parents would have to pay them the cash.
No one ever thought to put their hand up inside the money shoot.
But at the
end of the day when the pub was shut and his parents weren’t around, the two of us would sneak back in and pull the box out, and a shitload of money would come out.

It wasn’t money that we had earned honestly, and of course I know that someone else was missing out for our benefit.
But we were pretty creative and ingenious, I have to give my teenage
self that.
Besides, we didn’t know what else to do.
Our families were all in the same boat, and that is pretty much what we had to do to get cash.

There was fuck all for young people to do in the area, though – especially for teenagers like us.
The minute we were out of school each day or on the weekend, we
didn’t have a clue what to do with ourselves.
We would hang around in the park, sit on the swings and have a fag and just chat.
It wasn’t exactly exciting, but it beat sitting in the
house staring at the television.

After a while the police started to come and have a go at us.
We had got quite big as a group, and the park was getting taken over by gangs of kids hanging around with nothing else to do.
I can
imagine it might have been a bit intimidating if a mum did actually want to take her little kid in there, but we were harmless really.
Or my friends were, at least – we never got into that
much trouble at the time, but other lads in the park did have fights, and we had even seen a few stabbings.

Someone would point to the other end of the park and shout, ‘Fuck, that fight looks like it’s proper kicking off.
That one lad is proper getting it!’

Then a minute later, someone else would say, ‘I think that’s a knife that guy on the left has got – shit, yeah, he just stabbed that guy.
Fuck, what if he killed
him?’

And we’d all sit staring from our end of the park.
We were too fascinated to run away, but not brave enough to go over and help.
And in the end the police and the ambulance would turn up
and it would all be sorted.

Stabbings round there at that time weren’t a rare thing.
Open the local
Gazette
every Friday and you would see a stabbing most weeks.
I don’t know if that was what made the
police pay attention to us, or if we’d have been moved on anyway, but they started coming over as we were chilling out, and saying, ‘There are too many of you hanging round in the
park.’

‘You know it’s not us causing trouble?’
we’d argue.

‘These places are for kids, not teenagers.’

‘Right, where would you like us to go?
There are fuck all other places for young people to hang out.’

But the Old Bill would just shrug and make us move, and we would wander around, not sure where to go.

Sometimes we would head down to this boat yard near ours where some people kept their own boats.
No fancy ones, and not owned by anyone in Seabrooke Rise, of course, but they made for a new
place to hang out.
There was a boathouse nearby where the posher boat owners would sometimes be, and they would go mad if they saw us.
So we would sneak in when no one was looking and set up home
in the boat of one unlucky owner for the evening.

We would raid the food cupboards, or if they were empty we’d put our own money together to get something, mainly bacon, and then cook food on the grill.
Most of the boats would have a mini
grill on board, and we quite fancied ourselves, sitting there making our meals.
Other times we would set off the flares that were kept on board for emergencies, but that generally spelt the end of
the evening, as it was a pretty obvious sign that we were there.

There was one wooden boat just over the wall from the boat yard, on the bank of the Thames, that was a wreck.
It had been there for years and we loved climbing over it.
It was still pretty
complete, and there was a crow’s nest up at the top with ropes hanging down that we would swing right out on.
I went back recently, though, and it has completely rotted away.
No chance of
finding the crow’s nest on it now, let alone the ropes, sadly!

When we weren’t climbing around some boat or other, we would set up camp in the stairs of the buildings around the estate and sit there having a smoke.
After a while we moved on from
smoking cigarettes to smoking pot.
It was the fashion at the time, even if it was a bad one.
We would all chip in a couple of quid, someone would be sent off to the flat of the guy who sold
marijuana, and we’d go and smoke it.

I never had a lot of money to put into the mix, but sometimes I’d raid a pot that Mum kept for spare pennies.
At the time I thought nothing of it, but now, knowing how little we had, I
feel bad I took even those couple of quid I gathered together to put towards me smoking pot.
But I never gave much thought to the bills that £2 could help with at that age.
I just wanted to
do my thing, and I thought I was fine to have some of that cash.

Luckily, though, marijuana was pretty cheap at the time.
For £10 we could buy a block of hash – the guy sold it in solid form – and so add that to the fags and a packet of
Rizlas, and we had an evening’s entertainment for £11.40.
Not that I would recommend that anyone spend their evenings smoking pot these days – it was just that it was the only
thing on offer for us then.

A Teenage Boy’s Dream

We spent two years in Seabrooke Rise, and all the time Mum was working hard, while Daniel and I were learning how to take care of ourselves.
By the time I was fourteen, Mum was
doing well in her job as a care worker, and was getting enough money that we were able to move out.
Not far, mind – only a couple of streets away – but to a terraced house that
wasn’t completely paid for by the council like Seabrooke Rise had been.
This time the council paid half the rent and Mum paid the other half.

It was called William Street, and we were at number 132.
Don’t imagine in any way that we were really moving up in the world, though.
It was tiny – the width of the house was as
small as the length of a car.
And we soon realized the neighbours were an interesting sort – just a few doors down the house had been turned into a brothel!

So, being honest, this home was still a total dump.
But it felt more like it was ours, and at least I could walk out the front door without being spat on from above.
We even had a tiny back
garden, although that was filled with tyres and mattresses, and whatever else people in the area dumped in all the gardens.
But still, it was ours.

Daniel didn’t move there with us.
He was eighteen now, and really grown-up.
He had been a bit of a wild boy in his own way as a teenager, getting on in the same way most of the lads around
our way did, but then he seemed to decide he was going down the wrong path.
So he put his nut down and got on with studying and then work.
Daniel trained in welding, like my Dad, and was starting
work for him at Delfini.
He had a long-term girlfriend called Gemma, who was lovely, and he just suddenly seemed like an adult to me.
Dad was really proud of him following in his footsteps, and was
keen to do anything he could to help him, so he sorted him out with one of his flats in another part of Grays.
It was one that he normally rented out, but instead he gave it to Daniel to live
in.

I was not getting on well with Dad at all by this time, and really didn’t see him that much.
I was old enough that no one told me I
had
to visit him, so I chose not to go round to
his place at weekends, and Dad didn’t really push me to.
I don’t think either of us knew how to save a relationship that was getting worse and worse.
I resented Dad, I still resented
Stacie, and I was probably jealous of Daniel’s relationship with him.

The move didn’t change my day-to-day life in a big way.
I was still hanging out with a group of mates in the stairwells, killing time.
But even that started to change, because the police
were trying to move us on from the staircases too, as if making the parks off limits hadn’t left kids like us struggling to find somewhere to go.
We tried to keep out of trouble, just doing
our thing, but it seemed we weren’t allowed to.
We’d be sitting on the stairs and they would come and tell us we had to move on.
That made us mad.

And I hold my hands up, that is when we did start being right little shits, just out of pure boredom.
I’m not proud of it, and I know it is a cliché, but we really did have fuck all
else to do, so we started running riot.
I don’t think we ever really thought about the consequences of everything we were getting up to – it was just something we did to pass the time
then and there, which was stupid of us.
So while I’d always had my ups and downs, it was now that I became a real pain in the arse, and not just for my mum, but society in general.

A few of us started standing by the roads, hiding behind bushes and stepping out at the last minute to throw stones at moving cars.
I don’t know what we got out of it, but somehow it was
satisfying and funny at the time.
We didn’t actually want to cause an accident, and stupidly we didn’t really think about the fact that it could be dangerous.

Then we moved on to smashing cars up, or breaking into them.
We never tried to drive or steal them – we only broke into parked cars that we would then sit in, so that we had somewhere to
be.
Other times we’d rob motorbikes, even though we didn’t know how to ride them, but we’d give it a go.
It was just something to do.
I know it wasn’t great – I knew
this even then, but I would ignore those feelings, as I simply didn’t know how else to spend my time.
And besides, everyone else was at it.

But worse than anything else was the fighting.
Some of us were always fighting.
We didn’t even care who with – most of the time it was just a stranger who walked past at the wrong
time, but afterwards the poor guy would wish he hadn’t.
We were nightmare kids.
If you were a decent person with a job, who had to walk through our area to get to work, you’d have hated
us.
We were the little shits who sat on the wall, spitting.
The idiot teens who would get up as you walked past and crowd around you, pushing you and giving you hassle for no reason, doing anything
to intimidate you.
Or other times we would get into proper fights, with other groups of boys from round the area.
I admit I even got a release out of it.
The pent-up anger and aggression that would
flare up in me as a kid was still there.
Put me on a street in these situations, and, well, it is too easy to just let it out.

And even though I know why I did it in a way – as well as my anger, we were young, bored and trying to assert ourselves as men – that is no excuse.
I am ashamed about what we did
– and that a poor person on their way to work couldn’t just get there without us kicking off and ruining their day.

This is one of the reasons why now I would love to work with kids from estates like Seabrooke Rise.
I understand what they are thinking and going through, and why they get angry and violent.
I
would like to go and talk to them, and find out what their hopes and dreams and talents are, and see if there is something that can be done to use their skills and make things happen for them.

People do always have another part of them that needs to be drawn out – no one is a completely violent little yob.
Despite the way I was out in the street, I had a very different side.
I
would still go round to my nan’s and bake cakes.
I was obsessed with it!
I loved making them with her while chatting away about life.
It was kind of therapeutic.

I also did one other thing that was completely at odds with the version of me that my friends saw.
I collected cat ornaments.
How weird does that sound?
I was obsessed with cats, and I’d
save my money to collect these cats and line them all up on my shelf in my bedroom.
I loved my collection!

So there I would be, fighting in the street, then coming in and cleaning my ornaments.
Shouting abuse at people in the street, then heading to my nan’s to bake a cake.
There is a reason I
have always said I am like Jekyll and Hyde with my double personality, and it was showing as much as ever at that age!

It would still come out at home as well, which is the one thing that I hated.
I didn’t like my mum seeing me when the anger would take over and I would lose it.
I could be fine one minute,
and the next I would go mad.
It makes me really ashamed.
But I wouldn’t go for Mum in our rows – I would take it out on our house instead.
The doors in William Street especially took a
beating from me.
Battering them was the only thing that would stop me in my rampage.
Once I ripped a door off its hinges.
Can you believe I did that?
It must have been quite a scary sight to see
this crazed teen tear a door away from the wall.
There were no doors left in the house after we had been there for a few months, not even a bedroom door.
Even the front door, which was the only one
still in place, didn’t work properly.
Once when I was going mad Mum had locked me out, tired of dealing with me.
She’d given up trying to talk to me, and thought if she left me outside
for a bit I would calm down and realize I needed to behave better.
But what did I do?
Boot the door off its hinges!
It was like I got super-human strength in my rage.
My mind was filled with anger,
and nothing else.
So that was that door bust.
Every night we had to screw it locked.

My poor mum’s house was fucked.
She was struggling to keep it nice and all I was doing was following in this crazy trail behind her and demolishing the place.
I was horrible to her when
she was trying her hardest.
That she stuck by me and kept on dealing with it is one of the amazing things about her.

I did have one friend who was a really positive influence and who, as I got to know him, gave me a new focus in life, which meant I wasn’t only hanging about in the street.
Around this
time I started becoming good friends with an old mate of my brother’s called Ashley Brown.
He was four years older than me, and I had looked up to him for a few years.
When he had been
friends with Daniel, back when we lived in Seabrooke Rise, my brother had not let me near him.
Daniel was a wannabe DJ at the time – he had a set of decks in his room that Dad had bought him,
and he was always practising on them.
Ashley was an MC called Skolla B, who was really famous around our area.
Even if you had never met him, you knew about him.
Everyone rated him and he did all
the parties, MC’d at local pubs, the under-eighteens parties, everything.
Drum and bass music was all the craze at the time, and I mean proper craze.
Kind of like Justin Bieber is to people
today!
Everyone wanted to be an MC, but Ashley was at the top of the tree in our area.
The rest of us had to make do with MP3 players with little speakers attached, which we would tuck inside our
hoods and walk down the street with it turned right up and the music blasting out.
Wudda wudda wudda!
Budda budda budda!

I’m sure we looked like thugs, but every generation has someone like that – before us it was people with their boom boxes and cassette tapes – which I had always thought was
cool when I was a little kid!

So we were obsessed with Ashley, as he was our main source of inspiration for that music.
But no matter how many times he was round our house, there was no way Daniel was letting me in his room,
so I never got to hang out with him.
To him I was just Daniel’s little brother.
So I had to sit in the next room, my bedroom, a proper fan, but not allowed to speak to him.

Once Daniel had left home and I was living in William Street, though, I got to be good friends with Ashley, finally!
And he would come round after school, and then it was me with my decks,
messing around with him.
Dad had got me a set of decks too by then – as we got older he became more generous with money, although there was still no moving him when it came to my mum.
Mum and
I still had no money, but life seemed a bit easier when he would buy me things like that to have at home.
It gave me encouragement, and made me feel like our money situation wasn’t so bad
after all.

And I think the whole MC’ing scene was great for me.
It gave me something to do after school other than just hang around, have fights and cause trouble.
And it was good as well because my
mum loves Ashley – they get on really well.
She even calls him her third son and he calls her ‘Mum’, and she gave him the spare key to our front door.
After that, a lot of the
time I would get home from school and he’d be in the house already.
He’s definitely my best pal, even today, and although he is four years older I’ve never noticed.
If I’m
upset he is the first person I’d call.

I started going out to parties with Ashley, which I loved.
Mum was always very chilled about me going places, getting the train around, staying late, coming home when I wanted, that kind of
thing.
She knew I could look out for myself – and that really there was no point her trying to stop me anyway.
If I wanted to go out, I would!

I was nearly fifteen years old, and had reached the age where I was desperate to have sex.
All the boys were apparently at it, and everyone but me seemed to have slept with
someone.
Looking back I’m sure most of them were making it up – I think I even claimed I had slept with someone too, even though I hadn’t, just to make myself sound hard.
But the
reality was, secretly I was desperate for it to happen so I could say it for real to my mates with my head held high, and so that I would know for myself what it was really like.
The problem was
– who with?