Brixton Bwoy Read online

  ‘So, which is it? Staying here or returning to Jamaica?’

  The judge had spoken so kindly and his words about behaving himself persuaded Tee that he was going to be given a chance and set free. Although a part of him yearned for Jamaica, it was like a dream, for he barely remembered it. Brixton was his life now. ‘I’ll stay here, your Honour,’ he said.

  Tee heard Pearl sigh sadly.

  ‘So be it, Baccass,’ the judge said. ‘I am going to give you the chance to settle down and become a good boy by giving you two years of borstal training.’

  When Tee reached Wormwood Scrubs that night he wanted to cry for Mama and Pops, for the chance he had missed. But he couldn’t cry; he was too frightened. Everything he cared about was lost – the friends he had grown up with, the girl he loved, Richie and Roland, the clubs and parties and fine clothes. He had lost the world, and the world had lost him. All he had now was this big dirty jail with its never-ending iron bars and locked doors and the smell of Old Holborn tobacco everywhere. It was different from Stamford House. The officers reminded him of German soldiers in prisoner-of-war films, with their big bunches of keys, shouting at the inmates, ‘Tuck your shirt in, boy,’ or ‘Button up your jacket,’ or ‘Get your hand out of your pocket,’ or ‘No talking,’ or ‘You have been placed on report.’ There was no freedom of any sort. He had thought his life with Joe was tough, but now he realised how hard things could really be.

  He was put on the borstal allocation wing, along with all the other boys waiting to be sent off to Feltham or Huntercombe or Finnemore Wood.

  Sister Pearl and Roland visited him, as did sister Ivy. But his friends never came, and he sat in his cell both missing them and hating them for leading him into a life of crime. He never once thought to blame himself. All he wanted was to be back out there, clubbing and smoking a joint. But where the body cannot go, the mind can, and he spent hours dreaming of the streets; if he heard there was a party or a particular club going on, he would imagine himself there with his friends, smoking, drinking, dancing and romancing.

  That way he survived, and slowly he began to accept his situation, and to laugh and play and joke like the other borstal boys. He signed up for education to help him learn to write, and joined in with sports down at the gym. And so the days turned into weeks and the weeks into months.

  At night, there would be shouting out of the windows between the borstal boys and the older convicts.

  ‘Hey, cons,’ one of the borstal boys would shout, ‘who’s giving your missus one tonight, then?’

  ‘Someone with a bit more fucking sense than you, borstal boy,’ would come the reply.

  The same shouting went back and forth for half the night.

  Tee’s efforts to read and write frustrated him so much that he ended up shouting at the teachers and being kicked out of education. He was now down in the workshops, and it wasn’t long before he was getting into trouble there. One afternoon, when he was dying for a smoke, he saw a white boy take out his full baccy tin and make a nice fat roll-up. By this time Tee’s mouth was watering and he went over and said, ‘Spare us one till I get my pay, mate.’

  ‘No.’

  Tee got mad and snatched the roll-up out of the boy’s mouth. The boy grabbed Tee with both hands on his collar.

  ‘Give it back!’ he shouted.

  ‘Let go!’

  ‘Give it back!’

  Tee saw red and pulled his head back to give the boy an almighty head-butt that broke his nose, flattening it against his face. But he was a tough Northerner, and he kept his grip on Tee. They fell together to the floor, wrestling each other. Tee managed to get on top and he pulled back his clenched fist to hammer the boy’s head off with every bit of his strength, but his opponent saw it coming; he jerked his head sideways and Tee’s fist hit the floor with an almighty smack.

  The floor was made of solid concrete, and Tee felt his fist disintegrate. He tried to scream with pain, but nothing came out. The workshop officer had seen them now, and he pressed the alarm and pulled them apart. Officers ran through the corridors and dragged both of them to the block.

  The next day they told the governor they hadn’t been fighting, just messing about, and they were let off with a caution. On their way back to the wing, they smiled and shook hands. The boy mentioned something about his nose, which was all over his face, and Tee showed him his fist, with all the knuckles raw where the skin had been shredded by the workshop floor. They ended up at the sickbay together. The boy’s name was McNelly, and soon Tee and he were good friends. It was like Brixton, like boys in many places: first the fight, then the friendship.

  Finally, the day came for Tee’s allocation. He was given Feltham, known as Feltham Nut-house, the worst of all the borstals. He rode down there in a van with several other boys. It wasn’t a long journey from the Scrubs, and it was hard to see anything from the tiny window of the van. It felt odd travelling like that, sealed off from the world, but that was his life now.

  The van turned in through the gates of Feltham and the boys were dropped off at Centre House for induction. All new receptions spent a week here, before being assigned to one of the house blocks – North, South, East, West or the residential part of Centre itself. That week they were shown around and instructed on how to behave while at the borstal. Tee could have counted the number of other black boys on one hand, and half of them seemed to be already gone in the head. He soon understood that North House was mainly for boys with a history of drug abuse, East House was for violent boys, South House for sex offenders and West House for the saps who couldn’t fight their way out of a wet paper bag. Apart from the receptions, Centre House was for boys who had many, or all, of these faults.

  When the time came for house allocation, Tee was taken into an office with three members of staff – a fat man with a red face who looked friendly enough but didn’t say much, a big thug, and a mean-looking, rat-like one who did all the talking. He was asked if he took drugs, whether he was gay, whether he liked to fight, and many other questions. He replied no to almost everything, and was put in East House, allocated to a dormitory with fourteen others. The East House lads were the toughest at Feltham, but he wasn’t going to be afraid of that.

  What frightened him more was South House, which was separated from East only by a big gate with bars, through which the two lots of boys could see each other. Tee couldn’t believe his eyes. A number of the South House lot were dressed up like girls, wearing lipstick and make-up. If you hadn’t known they were boys you could have been fooled into thinking they were sexy, the way they walked around, wriggling their waists and backsides. Some of them were as dashing as any girl out on the street. They even talked in high voices and laughed like women. They were called queens, and each queen had a rougher-looking partner. These were the butches.

  The boys from East Wing would call the queens by their female nicknames, shouting over to them things like, ‘Show us your tits, Sally.’ The reply would be, ‘You’re not going to see anything, but I’ll show that hunk of a black man who just came in. He’s gorgeous, hasn’t he got strong muscles? I’ll bet he’s got a big one.’ To Tee’s surprise, they were talking about him and it was only his dark complexion that hid his embarrassment.

  On Tee’s first day, one of the toughest lads, called Hunter, sent a messenger to ask him for twenty pence protection money. The first time, Tee told the messenger he should be giving Tee money to protect him. The second time Tee pulled him up and growled at him that if he asked him a third time he would rip his head off his shoulders. ‘It’s not me, mate,’ the boy protested. ‘I’m only doing what I’ve been told, like.’ He walked off with a shrug, as if to say he had been warned, that Hunter was not to be messed with.

  Quite a lot of the boys, Tee included, were on medication to control their behaviour. They had to go down to the sickbay twice a day to take a liquid cosh which would make them less violent, but Tee learned to keep it in his mouth without swallowing, and spit it out as soon as
he could. It took a while to get used to the horrible taste, so for the first few days he would go straight to the bathroom to clean his teeth. On his way to get his toothbrush out of the locker, Tee would pass the big hall where they all ate and watched television. It was a big, echoing place, with three rows of chairs and tables set out in straight lines. The bathroom was the same. The first things you would see were a row of basins and a row of toilets, and if you turned left from there you came down a passage to the showers and baths, which were also in lines. At the end of the baths was an empty room which they said was supposed to be turned into a sauna, but it was used by the boys as a place to sort out fights.

  That first evening, Tee stored his toothbrush in his locker again and put the key in his pocket. The key was tied to a shoelace, which was attached to the belt loop above his pocket. After tea there was a film on television and he sat in the front row, so caught up by the action on the screen that he didn’t notice his key being lifted. It was only after the film when he went to get something from his locker that he realised his key had gone. He instantly started shouting that whoever had taken it was going to get knocked out. Most of the boys ignored him, but a group of them stood there laughing, including Hunter, the boy who ran the protection racket.

  Everyone was dispersing now to get things done before bedtime, some to see their friends in the record room, others to visit the matron. Tee searched around for suspects. The hall was closing down for the evening; the tables were all packed on top of each other, and the chairs in stacks. Boys were starting to head up to their sleeping quarters. They all avoided Tee, until a boy named Al passed him and said, ‘Hunter has your key, but don’t tell him I told you’.

  Tee found Hunter and demanded his key. Hunter was a thin, wiry boy with mean blue eyes.

  ‘What?’ said Hunter. ‘Go away, you’re not worth it.’

  Tee moved closer to him, clenching his fists.

  ‘OK try it then,’ he said. ‘You want to fight, do you? I told you you weren’t worth it.’

  Without warning Hunter threw a right to Tee’s face, catching him off guard, and landing him on his arse. Tee jumped up and was just steaming in with kicks and a punch when Mr J, the assistant wing governor, came in. ‘Stop it!’ he shouted. ‘Any more from you two and you’ll both be down the block.’ When they had separated, he asked what it was all about.

  Fuming, Tee said he just wanted his locker key.

  ‘Hunter, have you got his key?’ Mr J asked, folding his arms impatiently.

  The boy said nothing, but took the key out of his pocket and handed it to Tee. Mr J let them off with a warning. Tee went straight to his locker to make sure nothing had been nicked, and when he opened it he was greeted by the awful smell of shit. There was a cup of it in his locker, and a note saying, ‘Your family and you are made from this crap.’

  To add to Tee’s fury, there wasn’t anything he could do right now. He had to sweep up the dining-hall as punishment for being the last into bed on previous nights, and Mr J was waiting for him. Everyone else had gone. Tee fetched the broom from the cupboard under the stairs and was about to start sweeping when he heard a shout above him. He looked up and saw Hunter, split seconds before a blob of spit caught him flush in the face. Suddenly something snapped in him. He broke the broomstick against a post and charged up the stairs after Hunter’s blood. Half-way up he met Hunter and his gang coming down to meet him. He laid into them with the broken end of the broomstick, clubbing and swinging and stabbing. But there were too many of them, and they managed to get it off him. They all came at him at once. He ran back down and jumped over a table, intending to keep the gang off by firing punches at them from behind it, but Mr J and two other members of staff arrived to break up the fight.

  This time Hunter and Tee were taken down to the block. To Tee’s satisfaction, he had managed to rearrange Hunter’s face; his enemy’s eyes, nose, lips and cheeks were all bleeding. A couple of days later they were brought in front of the governor. Hunter was given another month on his sentence, but Tee got two months, because Hunter and the other boys were hurt, while he hadn’t sustained a single bruise.

  The governor also ordered that Tee be kept down in the block and it was another five weeks before the borstal doctor, a woman named Dr More, came to see him and recommended that he go back to the house again. As he walked down the passage where the assistant governor and matron had their offices, he saw the whole house at the end. They started running towards him and he thought: Oh no, not again. But when they got to him they lifted him up, laughing and joking, and welcoming him back.

  Even Hunter seemed glad to see him back from the block, telling him he was the chap now and giving him burn and a couple of spliffs. Tee felt like a hero.

  Tee was now in a single cell because the staff didn’t trust him to share. But the lads were all nice to him, and he got plenty of smoke and hash and money.

  Everyone had to go to work or training, and there were courses in painting and decorating, concrete moulding and bricklaying, as well as jobs in the kitchen, works, gardens and so on. Each morning they would leave the wings and line up in the yard until their names were called to join the work party. Tee chose bricklaying. He tried to improve his English so that he could be understood better. He was fed up with being laughed at because of his accent. Proper English was like another language to him. As he began to master it the boys mocked him less and soon he found he had two languages: his own and English. He began to settle down. But he had not forgotten those boys who had tried to hurt him. Their faces were a permanent picture in his mind. Deep inside, it was far from laid to rest, but now he was playing wise to catch wise.

  One day, after dinner, he called Hunter and they went round the back of the shower. ‘Hunter, you might have forgotten, but I have not forgotten,’ he said. Then – smack! – he chinned Hunter and dropped him to the ground. ‘Get up,’ he ordered him, and then landed a kick in Hunter’s chest that winded him for a minute. When Hunter could breathe again he begged Tee not to carry on. Tee felt great Hunter was frightened and wouldn’t even fight back. Tee pulled him to his feet and shook his hand, telling him never to cross him again.

  From that day on, Hunter was his biggest joke. A couple of days later, Tee pulled another of the gang, Nicky, who counted himself a Hell’s Angel. At the first punch to his chest, Nicky doubled up on the ground, and Tee kicked him a few times. He proved to be nothing on his own, and it was the same with Jeff. The rest of the gang had been discharged, but Tee had revenged himself.

  A few months later, a boy called Bob returned to Feltham. He had been in Hunter’s initial gang but left before Tee got out of the block. He had heard about his three mates being beaten up, and set about trying to be closer than a brother to Tee, laughing and joking and giving him roll-ups. But Tee remembered the night when Bob had ganged up against him in the fight.

  ‘Guess what, Bob,’ he said one day. It was the weekend and most of the others had gone to the borstal club, leaving them almost alone on the wing.

  ‘What?’

  ‘There is going to be a fight today. A big fight.’

  ‘Who? Tee, let me beat him up for you.’

  ‘Let’s go round the back of the shower where we can talk.’ Bob followed Tee keenly, wanting to know who he was going to fight.

  ‘Who, Tee? Let me knock him out, whoever he is.’

  You don’t understand Bob,’ he said. ‘You are going to need all your strength for yourself, cause it’s me and you who is going to fight.’

  Bob suddenly went grey, saying, ‘Leave it out, Tee, we’re mates.’ He slapped Tee in a friendly way, trying to joke it off.

  ‘Take your hands off me, Bob,’ said Tee. Bob looked worried and confused and frightened. ‘I’ll never forget how you tried hard to bash me and the rage in your face and your eyes. So I’m just going to give you the chance to fulfil your dream now, that’s all.’

  ‘Come on, Tee, that was a year ago.’

  ‘Maybe so, but I ha
ven’t forgotten. So let’s cut the talk and fight.’ Tee stood in front of him and said, ‘Throw your blow.’ Bob didn’t want to but eventually he said, ‘Well, if that’s what you want.’ He shook his shoulders and fired a left at Tee’s face. It rocked Tee, but in reply Tee let out a string of lefts and rights into Bob’s face and solar plexus, downing him.

  ‘Get up, you lazy git,’ he said, kicking him. Bob tugged at his foot and said, ‘Come on, Tee, let’s call it a day.’

  Reluctantly Tee backed off. Both Bob’s eyes were swollen; his lips were fat and his nose was bleeding. Tee felt his own lips. They were fat too. They cleaned themselves up and went back into the dining-hall, laughing and talking. They passed one of the officers who asked what had happened to their faces.

  ‘I knocked my face on the wall, guv,’ said Tee.

  ‘I slipped on a bar of soap in the shower,’ added Bob.

  ‘You expect me to believe that load of cock and bull?’

  ‘It’s the truth, guv.’

  The officer looked at them and said, ‘Go on, get out of my sight before I place the pair of you under investigation. You must think I was born yesterday.’

  Tee’s vendetta was over, but not the fighting. He would beat up anyone to take their money and their burn, but the more restless and bored he became, the more he took to bullying other boys simply for something to do. There was little else for entertainment, and in any case, Tee had got a taste for it. He enjoyed being top of the heap, and he enjoyed bending others to his will.

  On the occasions when his family came to see him Tee would not be such a tough guy. When he was first inside he sent out Visiting Orders as often as he was allowed. Pearl would come, or sister Ivy, and they would bring delicious home-cooked meals with them – rice and peas and chicken, or fried fish with hard dough bread, which he adored. Although he wasn’t supposed to eat this food, the officers always turned a blind eye while he gobbled it up. But it was hard seeing people from outside. They didn’t have much to say to him, and sat there looking as if they wanted to leave again. Tee was ashamed of his surroundings. He tried to joke with Roland about what was going on down the clubs, but hearing about it made him feel worse about what he was missing. Most of all, he found it hard seeing the hurt in sister Pearl’s eyes. After a while he stopped sending out VOs.