by Simon Reeve
I was obsessed with fire, burning and explosives as a kid. One time I was by the side of the main road in Ealing setting fire to a rubbish bin at dusk, in the rush hour. There was a line of stationary traffic right alongside. A group of us poured a can of petrol into the bin before lighting it with matches. Nobody yelled at us from the cars. The traffic was nose-to-tail but nobody did anything, and nobody said anything, except for an incredulous young French couple walking by.
‘What are you doing?’ they said in thick French accents. ‘Why are you doing this? Don’t be so destructive.’
We would steal petrol from pumps and cars and start fires. We would nick fireworks from shops or steal money to buy them, then take bangers apart to make larger devices. I remember unscrewing the bottom of a CCTV camera in a stairwell of Ealing Broadway Shopping Centre and packing a small device inside and then watching it blow up before racing off laughing. Why? It was just a stupid, destructive thrill. We ran down the stairs and outside to the back of the shopping centre and I lined up a huge rocket I’d made to fire low across the ground. There was nobody around when I lit it, but at that exact moment a policeman came storming out of an exit looking for us. Everything happened in slow motion. I saw him and looked down at the fuse, which was burning. The policeman was perhaps 25 metres away. I tried to kick the firework away, but it launched. I watched in horror as it spiralled through the air towards him, fizzing and burning. The poor guy tried to leap out of the way, but it hit him in the leg, sickeningly hard, and he went down screaming. We took off, running as fast as we could. He must have put out an ‘officer down’ distress call, because within moments there were dozens of sirens wailing and the police swamped the whole area. I still feel terribly guilty about that moment. I hope to God he was all right.
I was a rebellious kid at school and on our streets, and at the same time at home my relationship with Dad was collapsing. I was cheeky and naughty, and he wasn’t sure how to deal with it. I can’t remember what had happened or what I’d done but one day during a row Dad was trying to get me to come out from around the table I was hiding behind.
‘Come here, Simon,’ he was saying through gritted teeth. ‘I want to talk to you.’
I hesitated. I knew what a talking to from my father could mean.
‘I’m not going to smack you.’
Still I hesitated.
‘I said, I’m not going to smack you. I just want to talk to you.’
I crossed the room to him, and he whacked me.
I stood there staring at him, tears brimming, feeling a colossal sense of betrayal. My dad had given his word and broken it. Who do you trust after that?
Both my parents were only children brought up by single mothers. My dad had lost his father figure as a lad. With no role model to guide him, he only really knew how to relate to me as a teacher.
The school where our dad taught was one of the toughest in London. It had a terrible reputation as a place that was traumatising for the staff as well as the pupils. In those days teachers had more power than they do today. They were able to enforce discipline physically, and sometimes that was echoed at home. Dad was a competitive man, quick to anger, who often didn’t think twice before ranting and shouting. His life was the battlefield of the classroom or the competition of the tennis court. Confrontation was often his parenting style.
It wasn’t all bad, and I don’t feel like I suffered terribly. Dad certainly had a softer side and when James and I were smaller he was fantastic at rough and tumbles. But the relationships in our family became hugely destructive. More than once James and I begged our mum to divorce our father.
At school Dad was used to being obeyed, but at home you can’t so easily boss or control a stroppy, confused thirteen-year-old. You have to guide and inspire. Dad wasn’t the easiest person to get along with and ours was a tense and sometimes violent relationship. Throughout my early teens we were at loggerheads. We fought verbally and sometimes physically and it was pretty one-sided. Perhaps I would do something stupid or not do something helpful and my dad would fly off the handle. But it wasn’t just my father. We all fought. Mum turned the kitchen table over. I had a fiery temper and put my foot through a door and my fist into a wall. The house bore the scars. I bashed my brother and he threw knives at me. There was endless shouting, lots of crashing and banging, and a few times it was so violent we or our neighbours called the police to come and break us up.
As a child the rows were all incredibly upsetting. They dominated my feelings and emotions. Over the years of my middle teens the arguments and upheaval at home fed a sense of despair and depression that slowly grew within me. Now I’m an adult, I blame Dad less, of course. I feel sorry for him. I just think he lacked the skills of compromise and resolution. We fought because we didn’t know how to communicate. Too much time, and too many opportunities for happiness, were completely wasted with pointless rows and arguments.
Only later did James and I realise our childhood experiences made us better communicators in relationships as adults. Dad didn’t have the wiring to talk issues and arguments through to resolution, but gradually, through the mistakes of others, James and I learned the skills.
My immediate response to our family rows was to skulk upstairs to my room, close the door and simmer and sulk on the bed. Above me was a poster of Whitney Houston, the usual Lamborghini and Ferrari car posters that were obligatory for kids in the 1980s, and on the ceiling directly above my pillow was a poster of an idyllic tropical beach, fringed by palm trees. Whenever I rowed with my dad, which was often, I’d lie on that bed afterwards and immerse myself in the poster, sensing the sun, feeling the sand between my toes. It was a place to escape. That poster was the ultimate contrast with the grey streets of West London. I never imagined, in my wildest dreams, that my feet would ever crunch onto a beach anywhere similar.
Dad’s response to our arguments, and me staying out late and sometimes coming home a little blood-stained, was to buy me a couple of books that were supposed to encourage me to stick to the straight and narrow. First the autobiography of my hero, Mr T, which was a jaw-dropping account of his life in a neighbourhood that made mine sound like Windsor. Almost every page was littered with extreme swearing. Dad can’t have even opened the book.
The second was Run Baby Run by Nicky Cruz, a famous account of gang life by a man who found Christianity and turned his life around. Cruz spent much of his childhood locked in a pigeon loft. His dad would shut him in and leave him with the birds flying around his head. It terrified him to the point that birds dominated his nightmares for years to come. He fled to New York to live with his sister and joined the notorious Mau Maus, rising to become president of the gang. I will never forget the details of his gang initiation. Cruz and another guy were offered the choice of either a savage beating from three or four gang members or they could stand against a target wall, not moving a single muscle, while a knife was thrown. If anyone chose the knife and then so much as flinched they would be jumped and thumped. Nicky decided to take the beating. The other initiate plumped for the knife, but then flinched and cowered in tears against the wall. As a consequence, the Mau Maus grabbed him, spread his arms out in a crucifix, and stabbed him in both armpits. I was just starting my teens when I read that and I couldn’t imagine anything worse. I developed a complete phobia of anyone touching or stabbing anything into my armpits. My wife thought I was joking about it when we met, but to this day only my son can tickle me under the arms without fearing an involuntary attack.
I was thirteen when I started carrying a knife. As a kid in Acton hanging out on the streets and even walking home from school I often felt at risk of a random act of violence. Over a few years I was mugged for pocket money, was punched hard in the face by a youth wearing a knuckleduster medallion ring, and was chased by a gang of older boys who threatened to kill me. I was also nearly lured into a car by two men, threatened by another boy with a knife, and had my beloved bike stolen by a gang. My school and streets certainly
weren’t the most dangerous, it was just an average part of the city. But we were in competition and rivalry with others close by and kids from my school would organise fights with youngsters from nearby Acton High School that would turn into mini brawls. I bought a small flick knife from a friend for pocket money and carried it for protection, or so I thought. It was more for bravado and a sense of power.
Back then you could buy ludicrous weapons by mail order just by ticking a box to say you were over sixteen. I stole money from my dad, used some more cash from a paper round I was doing for less than £2 a week, bought postal orders and sent off for a small combat blade I had seen advertised in a classified-ad paper called Gun Mart, even enclosing a letter saying I was a squaddie about to be deployed abroad and so needed it immediately. They wrote back a few days later saying my choice was out of stock, but they thanked me for serving and enclosed an alternative Rambo blade the size of a machete that only just fitted in my school bag.
What the hell was I doing? Right now the news is full of horrific stories of knife crime in London and kids stabbing each other in petty feuds and drug deals. Parents and victims are pleading with youngsters to see sense. Back then, for me, it was mainly about ego.
I revelled in the secret feeling of power and respect carrying a knife gave me. Nobody looks up to a thirteen-year-old. At that age you’re on a path to adulthood but you’re not respected. People hardly listen to you. Nobody takes you seriously. I thought carrying a knife would give me authority. In the years since I’ve been held up at chaotic guerrilla checkpoints abroad by kids the age I was back then, carrying Kalashnikovs rather than knives. I’ve seen the look in their eyes and sensed how they gloried in a feeling of power. It’s terrible, and it can result in tragedy. I was a young fool who thought a weapon helped to make me a man. If we want to stop teenagers carrying knives we need to devote resources, school and community attention, to boosting their confidence, self-belief and self-worth.
I also carried a knife partly because of consequences. Or the lack of them. My parents never found my weapons because I was clever at hiding them. I was never stopped and searched by the police, even when I was once caught in a stolen car. Teachers at school never checked our bags. And I never found myself in a situation where I pulled a knife in anger. Thankfully. Because more likely than not it would have been turned around and used against me. There were no dramatic or dire consequences for me. I was never caught carrying a knife. I got away with it. Many, many others were not so fortunate. People I knew ended up committing a crime, were sucked into a serious gang, stabbed someone, or had their own blade pushed into their chest, and bled out in a street and died pathetically early. I was lucky. I used to hang out near a community centre in Acton that was a notorious dive for dealers and trouble. I started smoking at eleven and used to sit around outside on the periphery, puffing away and trying to look hard. Then a bouncer at the centre was shot in the head by a drugged-out guy he turned away at the door. Even I realised it wasn’t a good place for a kid to spend their spare time.
I was never a gang member, or a really bad lad, I don’t think. I was never a brutal, hard kid. I was never deliberately violent and nobody feared me. I was never hungry, cold, or without a shelter or a bed. But I was very aware of poverty in the lives of friends from broken families, junkie homes, and kids who had fled from towns up north devastated by unemployment. I knew people living seven or eight to a room. My life, even my family life, was cosy by comparison. But ultimately I still managed to sink pretty low.
I’m not proud of everything I did in my early teens, but I mention it now as evidence of what I was and eventually where I was able to get to. In many ways the teenage me is a far cry from the guy on TV. But I’m still much the same person, with most of the same failings and still some of the old fears. I can still see how circumstances could have changed and pushed or led me down alternative paths. Too many people think it’s just hard work, study, mindset and focus that determines your journey in life. They’re certainly all important, but just a small nudge can throw you off course and change everything. Life, often, is about luck.
The 1980s were a very different era. There were no camera phones, no social media, and our actions were never as visible or informed as they are now. I carried knives, and I’m sorry to say I also sold them to other kids. Then I used the money I made to buy a replica handgun and a covert holster by mail order. It was an identical heavy-metal copy, loaded with blanks, the sort of device that confuses armed police officers, and leads to the idiots and the unstable who are wielding it being shot. I was a child. It was ridiculous. The only time I ever remember pulling it out was when a group of us got into a fight with an older group of travellers in a local park. They were young adults, and fists and anything else were flying around. It was immediately madness. Everyone was screaming abuse, hurling stones and punches, but the other guys got the shock of their lives when I pulled the replica. They scattered, immediately. I might even have fired into the air. It was chaotic and I can’t remember. I had an incredible rush of adrenalin. But again I got away with my stupidity. I ducked into a nearby estate, took a longer route home, and hid the gun back in a secret space I had hollowed out under my bedroom floorboards. Eventually I forgot it was there and years later, long after I had left home, my poor mum found it while redecorating.
‘Simon,’ she said calmly when finally confronting me. ‘Do you have any idea what it was like for me to find a gun underneath the floorboards?’
CHAPTER FOUR
The Boy on the Bridge
Eventually I was caught doing something stupid. Finally. James and I were hanging around some abandoned tennis courts just a few streets from our home with a group of younger kids, when among the tall weeds and overgrowth we found a stretch of high brick boundary wall punctured by a small hole. Some of us had started kicking a ball around, and some were standing around chatting. One of us must have idly tapped their foot at the loose bricks in the wall and knocked one of them out. That inspired me to kick a few more of the bricks out as well. Then a few kids piled in and rather than talking or knocking the football around we began to completely focus on destruction. We kicked and pushed so more and more bricks came tumbling out. After half an hour or so all that remained was a huge, unsupported arch maybe 8 feet long. It looked precarious, and we stopped to admire our work. Then we crept close and kicked a few more bricks until, in a great cloud of dust, it came thundering down. The noise and dust were terrible. We cheered, knocked out some more bricks, and then wandered away to find our bikes and skateboards. Most of the wall had been knocked down. If any of us had been underneath when the arch fell we would have been crushed or badly injured, but we rarely thought about risk as kids.
For some reason it never crossed my mind that it was a wall belonging to a garden. We left, went home, and I didn’t think any more about it until there was a knock on the door. Glancing out of my bedroom window I saw a woman I thought I recognised and instinctively I knew it had been her wall. It was an awful moment. A real chill went through me, like a spider walking on my spine. I knew exactly why she was there and what it meant. After years of shoplifting, setting fires and selling knives, I had never been caught or had to fess up before. And I hated it.
Dad listened calmly to what the woman was saying, apologised, then made me come downstairs to say I was very, very sorry. I cringed. It was crushingly embarrassing. The woman said she would rather avoid calling the police, but we would need to pay to rebuild the wall. There was no bravado from me. Nothing gangster. It was the moment I realised that even if I was trying to be a tougher lad, it was all a front. I had been the oldest kid present when the arch came crashing down, so the burden of paying fell heavily on me. Rebuilding that bloody wall cost me £147, a fortune that I had to pay off with pocket money and cash I had under my floorboards from knife dealing. It wasn’t just the money, though; it was the fact that I’d been caught and humiliated. That was what I really hated. I felt like an idiot. And rather t
han feeling like a big lad who could knock down a wall, I felt like a pathetic little boy. I thought everyone else would think the same, seeing me for what I really was. Ultimately it was the public wounding of my ego that helped bring me to heel, and a painful accident that then knocked my confidence sideways.
Just a few weeks after knocking down the wall I was playing around with my brother and friends in a park near our house. I was behaving a little better already, but some of the other kids were chucking grass at each other and then sods of earth and chunks of stone and rocks. One of the boys grabbed a handful of grass, came up with an old half-brick and lobbed it towards me. I was crouched and facing the other direction when my brother shouted a warning.
‘Si!’ he screamed. ‘Look out!’
I stood up, turned around and at the last millisecond saw the half-brick as it hit me full in the face. The edge of the brick raked right across my pupil, scraping my eyeball. I was knocked out. When I came around my crying brother was cradling my bleeding head. In A&E at Hammersmith Hospital I spent a fearful few hours as doctors warned us I could lose my eye. The accident was bad enough, but specialists had to scrape and pick bits of brick, grit and stone out of my eyeball. The pain was excruciating. I had to lie, petrifyingly still, to avoid further damage, even while I could see what the doctors were doing to my own eyeball with tweezers and scalpels. I wince at the memory even while writing this now. For years after the accident anything that was pointed towards my eyes would make me physically recoil. I couldn’t even face sitting opposite the corner of a table or a length of wood.
