by Craig Taylor
He’s got this tremendous sense of confidence. He feels that he is part of a world full of possibility and opportunity. So he takes advantage of things that are on offer, so he does a lot of stuff. There’s a climbing centre down the road he goes to. We had an equestrian centre ten minutes down the road from us and for years he rode. He also goes to Ministry of Sound club nights and stays out till five o’clock in the morning and then gets the Tube home.
In the secondary school he was at in Bethnal Green, there were lots of kids of black African origin. His best friend there was from a Nigerian family of like ten kids who kept going back and forth to Nigeria. He had Sikh friends, and friends from all over the place and he still does, you know, they come from different places and they go to different places and they want different things, but there is something about being central. And even things like the food. We’re surrounded by Turkish shops and Indian shops.
He’s really confident to take on the world as it is. I mean, I worry about things that he refuses to worry about to do with teenagehood. You hear about all the stabbings, and I think that there is a media storm about that, but I also think there are kids who are being seriously hurt and killed. That’s terrible, but I don’t know that moving to the country is the solution. I don’t think that middle-class families saying, ‘Well, we don’t want our kids growing up in these neighbourhoods so we’ll take them out of here’ is actually the solution to any of the kinds of social problems that need addressing. I’m not saying that I’m staying as some kind of social martyr. We love being here because it is so diverse and so interesting and it seems to be the meeting place of so many cultures: there’s the mosque at the top of our street, there’s the big Turkish community, just up the road is one of the largest Hasidic Jewish communities in London, and then there’s the African community which is split between Muslim and Christian faiths. All those communities actually all work together peaceably and I think there’s something really important about that.
The other thing that happens when you grow up in London, and maybe Hackney in particular, is that you learn how to manage social tensions or cope with them or deal with them or avoid them. There are all sorts of signals that he will pick up that I wouldn’t pick up. There are all sorts of coded things that I would be oblivious to. Simple things like where people are standing in relation to other people, for instance, and not getting too close. Or like what it is to disrespect someone and who it is you mustn’t disrespect. Making eye contact or not making eye contact. There’s all sorts of things that he just knows. It seems innate, but obviously it’s learned through many years. I think it is a real skill and it’s something that children who grow up here have a particular gift for or understanding of. It’s a survival mechanism, of course, but it is transferable.
The other thing people don’t realize is that the outside world is really accessible in London and particularly in Hackney where we’ve got the marshes and the canal and everything is at the end of our street. He grew up riding horses and he shared a pony so he was there three or four days a week, ten minutes’ walk away. Sometimes I think it would be nice to get to the country more often but he also grew up doing Woodcraft Folk from when he was six. It’s kind of like a hippy scouts, pacifist, left-wing, non-religious. Kind of an anti-Baden Powell equivalent, set up in order for kids in the city to get out into the country and do camping, build shelters, find edible berries, all those kinds of things. So it was all a bit different to the scouts, which was just like the training ground for the military.
Although everyone will tell you otherwise, there certainly is a class system, but here the class system is much more profound and deep-rooted and significant. I think accent is fundamentally attached to that, and that although regional dialects have become acceptable and in fact desirable in many ways, that London accent, with the wivs and whatevas, still connotes a lack of facility with language or something, which in itself then suggests that you’re not as intellectually adept. Of course that’s not true, I know absolutely that’s not true, but I think that that’s how it’s perceived. That’s how it’s heard. So with Duncan, what I found difficult was when he started picking up those bad habits, the v instead of the th and things. Because that, to me, signalled that he wouldn’t be taken seriously as he got older. And so I just made this deal with him and he’s kind of stuck to it, although he still needs prompting, but much less than he used to. He can talk however heneeds to with his friends, but he also has to learn to talk more correctly so that he can be taken seriously when he’s older. Whatever the rights and wrongs, it just seems to me the facts as they are. He’s very bright and he wants to do engineering or possibly something in politics, not be a politician, but something, you know, like political commentary or political science. Just to pronounce his ths, that’ll do. That’s all.
KEEPING THE PEACE
PAUL JONES
Home security expert
There’s like 28,500 streets in London, and there’s very few of them that I haven’t been to. Some streets you go to again and again and again and again. Some houses you go to again and again. A lot of the time it’s the tenant’s fault. He’s just had his big plasma TV stolen, so he goes out and buys another one, and leaves the box in the front garden. Common sense. Stuff like that. Or the police know it’s a house full of ratbags and they raid it on a regular basis. Or you see the handiwork of the other engineers who may have been there time and time again. You think, why didn’t they do that properly? There’s no limit to it. Every door that gets kicked in, it gets replaced. You can kick it in again. That’s why this company has been going nearly twenty years.
We are in a pub in Homerton, the sound from the Chelsea match nearly drowning out his soft Liverpudlian accent. He was a builder for years before switching to motorcycle delivery and then damage control. He drinks Fosters as the Friday night disco is assembled around us, complete with flashing lights.
We get a lot of people saying, can you come and fit me a new door? All right, madam. How much is that going to be? Depends what door you want. There’s thousands of types of doors. From a security point of view, you can go for the flat door blank, solid timber, which is safe and secure but doesn’t have any lights through it. If you’re going to go with a door with panels, go for very small panels. Because a door with bigger panels can easily admit access to a skinny junky. Hardwood is what it says, it’s hard wood. But it’s very brittle. No one tells you that. So one kick on a hardwood door and they’ve broken it. People in this city are paying £300,000 for a one-bedroom flat, and don’t realize that the door is made of the same stuff as their kitchen cabinets. And they will never know until that door’s broken.
Some of them are like, I’d never have thought of that. Cor blimey, now you mention it, guvnor. Most of it’s just blatantly obvious but only to people in the security industry. You could reduce burglary in London, especially during the night, by about 50 per cent at least, if insurance companies insisted on a better standard for doors.
A lot of people don’t want to spend £100 when they get a new lock fitted. For a lot of people money is tight. Even the ones that own their own house, when they’ve been burgled, essentially they’re not paying for it. The insurance does. Their insurance company will generally only pay like for like, so if they’ve got a cheap door with two locks on, that’s what their insurance company’s going to pay for. That’s the ideal time to do an upgrade, but they don’t want to spend that money. You can’t make them spend it.
The older houses are generally protected, because the doors are made of a seasoned wood and properly constructed. But most of the doors in Docklands on the expensive flats, they’re basically made of cheese. One kick, and they’ll split in one of two ways: the door hinges will come off the side or they’ll split in half. They’ll say, ‘Somebody’s sawn my door off!’ I’m sorry to tell you this, but no, they haven’t. You have an incredibly cheap door. It’s basically all built to minimum fire regulations, which state that an internal door needs t
o hold back fire for only thirty minutes.
Some of the richest people in London have the cheapest doors. I think that’s called karma. A lot of these people are just so stupid. They live in a £2 million house in Islington, thirty yards up the road you’ve got one of the roughest council estates, so what’s a really good idea? To have your keys visible on a rack in the hallway, all marked: back door, front door, windows. Within easy reach of the letterbox, with a little bit of bamboo with a hook on. Alternatively, the keys are in the kitchen drawer, the most obvious kitchen drawer, the one above the cleaning cupboard. They’re too posh to have curtains. So you sit in your bay window with your £1,200 laptop on the desk, and someone can just look through the window …
There’s a lot of converted Victorian houses with a little grey box on the inside with a wire so people can buzz you in. It’s very popular. But even brand new, the little key thing has got about 3 or 4 millimetres of movement. One push and you’re in. I have to tell these people that you were burgled because of that thing on the door downstairs. You can upgrade it. You can change the whole thing. Get a big grey lock rather than this weak little thing on your door frame. You’ll be more safe. That’s to the people who are nice. To the people who are not so nice … well, as a general rule if people weren’t so fucking lazy that they couldn’t walk down the stairs and open the door, they wouldn’t have this problem.
COLIN HENDRICKS
Police officer
It’s 2:30 p.m. in the parking lot of a North London police station. Two officers get into the front of a grey-green Ford Mondeo, an unmarked car well recognized in the estates of North London. There’s a bit of tape stretched across the glove compartment, blue lights embedded in the grille – ‘And this,’ says Colin from the driver’s seat, as he holds up the portable revolving halogen light he can affix to the car’s roof.
‘What’s it called?’ I ask him from the back seat.
‘Kojak light,’ he says.
The first call is a disturbance at a fried chicken restaurant in Swiss Cottage. There’s no rush, so it’s only later that he puts on the siren and the blue lights flash against the shopfronts. The traffic parts and for the first time I witness unfurling London streets free of impediment.
*
It’ll be fifteen years full-time in September. I did two years before with the voluntary police – the special constables. I think I was about 13 when I decided I wanted to join. A lot of people grow out of it, don’t they, but I was adamant I didn’t want to go to university.
When you joined up, you’d go out with a very experienced police officer – an old sweat, an old crusty – who had probably been in fifteen years, twenty years, and knew everything and wouldn’t even carry a pen. You’d be his bitch for ten weeks. They would deliberately take you to any grief that happened and you could guarantee he or she wouldn’t get off late at the end of the day. They would stitch you up so you’d be doing horrendously long hours dealing with all the rubbish that no one else wants.
When I was 19 I was already turning up at people’s houses, dealing with disputes. In those situations most of the time you’re with experienced police officers, but you are just left to deal with it. You don’t know what’s going to happen when you go into that address. It could be a marital dispute and you’re telling the bloke, you’ve got to leave or you’re going to get nicked. And he says, really? I’ve got kids older than you, mate.
Now I’ve instructed young officers and I’ve been that experienced officer. We’ve found people hanging and I’ve gone in and said, OK, he’s definitely dead. We’re going to do this slow and I’m going to talk you through it. They’ve just gone green, turned round, gone outside and thrown their guts up all over the patio with all the neighbours looking and thinking, hmmm. People forget you are human and a lot of the time you go into situations and you’re shitting yourself. You’re scared, but when you’ve got the uniform on, you deal with it. You haven’t got any choice. If there’s someone in a house saying, if you come in here, you’re going to get it, most people would like to call the police and then just step back and wait for the police to turn up. Can we do that?
The uniform is a bit of a shield. We’ve got these smart trousers and long sleeves. If you’re a male officer you have to wear a long-sleeved shirt and a tie and your hat at every ceremonial event in London, regardless of the weather. Even when it’s hot we often wear yellow jackets. Anywhere else in the world, they’d wear polo shirts and lightweight combat trousers and trainers and still look smart and official and efficient, but we’re the Queen’s police service, with the world’s media on us. It’s a big stage, as it were.
The Ford Mondeo comes to a stop on Euston Road. We inch forward. He honks his horn lightly and the woman in the car next to us looks over. ‘Off. Your. Phone,’ he mouths and the woman, with a guilty smile, takes the mobile from her ear.
I worked in Islington and dealt with a lot of horrible stuff. When I was out at parties with friends they’d say, Islington, what a lovely place, very posh. I’d just look at them. We’ve got two extremes – affluence and poverty – and there isn’t the separation people might imagine. If I had the money now, I wouldn’t live there if you gave me the house for half the price. I know what’s on the doorstep. I’ve seen it.
Someone once said to me, three years in the Met and you’ll get more experience than someone who stays in the Counties for ten years. Out there they could go through a night shift with maybe one, two, three calls, whereas in some boroughs it’s just non-stop. You have to try not to be blasé when you turn up at calls, as if it’s just another road accident where someone died, or it’s just another dead person in a flat, but you do lapse into automatic mode: you turn up, your feelings are detached from it, you just do what you’ve got to do.
Police work isn’t hard. You learn as you go along and bring your experiences from other parts of your life. Do what you honestly think is right or best for the victim, or what you think will make them feel like they’ve been helped. You turn up to a robbery victim who’s just been mugged, who’s been grabbed round the throat, dragged backwards in a dark street, had all her rings bitten off her fingers, which is quite a common thing in London. Do you stand there showing no empathy towards the person, not offering them an ambulance, not trying to get them off the street? No, you get them in somewhere warm, even it’s a caff, tell the owner, I’m closing the caff, get all your customers out. That’s just common sense. But some people would leave her sitting in the street on the pavement crying her eyes out, thinking, shit, what do I do now? She may just want an arm round her. You say, are you comfortable? And if she responds badly to that, then you adapt.
But then there’s the unknown in London. One sleepy Sunday morning I wasn’t really interested in being at work. I was with the guy who is now my best friend, who’s quite a tough lad, does a lot of training, he’s now a firearms officer and I dread to think what would have happened if he’d have had a gun on this day – in fact I know what would have happened. We get this call, a girl calls up and says, I’ve been assaulted by my boyfriend. We pulled up outside; she’s there saying, my finger’s hurting. I look at her finger and think it’s nothing. It’s a finger. Sunday morning, we thought, this is just rubbish. If it was a Friday night, I’d have been on more of a guard. I knocked on the door and a young black lad answers, very athletic, just in boxer shorts and not wearing anything else. He goes, what? We were in uniform, so he knew who we were. I said, hello, mate, we’re from blah, blah, blah police station. We’ve been called here because your girlfriend says she’s been attacked. He goes, well, that didn’t happen, and tried to close the door. Straightaway, foot in the door. I said, hold on, mate, we’re here to investigate. She’s standing behind me going, uh, huh, my finger. I was thinking, I don’t want to be here. We just need to deal with this and go back and have a coffee somewhere. Nothing else is happening. The streets are dead. We said to her, do you want to press charges? That’s the phrase everyone knows. Do you want to m
ake a statement? Do you want him arrested? She says, yes I do, and I want him out of my house. We said, right, we’re coming in mate, got a Power of Entry now. He says, you’re not coming in here. If you come in here, I’ll kill you. I said, there’s no need for that, mate. I’ve still got my hands in my pockets so I’m thinking, look at him, he’s tiny. If he wants to have a go at us two, fine. So I’m standing in front and at this point I thought, I’ve had enough of this, so I push the door open and say, we’re coming in, mate, and he says, I told you, I’ll kill you. He starts walking backwards down a narrow hallway. At the end is a door. So we’re walking down the hallway and I say, don’t walk away from me, mate. I told you, I’ll kill you, he says. I say, show me your hands, mate, and I’m still thinking, this is rubbish. He walks towards me and says, I fucking told you, I’ll kill you, now get out. Then he pulls a gun and puts it straight to my head. Where did he pull it out from? I could feel it on my skin. I suddenly have a gun to my head. That was the one time I’ve ever had a firearm pulled on me. All I remember doing was saying, all right, mate, all right. I just slapped him as hard as I could with an open hand, the gun went flying and I punched him and it was all off.
