Listen to the author reading this piece:
Turning off the news, I sat in silence. Things had taken a turn for the worse, again. A memory came to me of that January in 1981 - the New Cross party fire – and how we found ourselves driving past that building not long after it had happened. From the back seat of the car, I’d craned my neck to look at the flowers left wrapped on the steps in front of the blackened facade. The building stood silent in its own dreadful mourning.
Next, there was ‘Brixton’, in April, the so-called ‘riots’. I was still at school. The night-time protests continued throughout that summer term – all around the country, in Toxteth, Handsworth, Moss Side – and in smouldering pockets around our corner of South-East London.
One morning, on our way to school, the bus lurched around the burned-out carcass of a Ford Transit van, tiny flakes of paint and ash still drifting from it, like quiet breath from the darkness, now revealed in the clear morning air. Schoolkids, we stared down from the bird’s-eye vantage point of our top-deck seats, faces pressed against the glass. The van’s back doors hung raggedly open; the interior gaping dark, a mouth in shock. Broken placards littered the road as the bus cautiously edged its way past hurriedly boarded-up shops; a single brown shoe and a black jacket, twisted into a spasm, lay abandoned on the pavement, amidst snapped wooden poles, bricks and grubby shards of glass.
Our bus pulled up alongside the carcass of a car, half mounted on the pavement, as if caught attempting to escape, and now, bonnet up, surprised by its own destruction. Windowless and blackened by the petrol-soaked flames which had engulfed it in the night, melting its plastic insides down to a bared steering-column and the metal springs of the seats.
There was so much we had to learn. We’d heard about the S.P.G, and the ‘Sus’ law. We knew the unease contained in those letters and that phrase. We knew they held a weight, created distrust and fear. As kids, walking the streets, we sensed that tension; knew we were expected to ‘steer clear’.
Of course, the red-tops were in their element. Daily, the tabloids continued to churn out of their presses, frantically gorging on the news and whipping up their latest headlines, the reels feverishly spinning throughout the night as the streets burned with injustice. They fanned their own fresh flames with carefully selected images, grainy half-page photos coupled with headlines chosen to breed suspicion and division; ‘rampage’, ‘frenzy, ‘fury’ and ‘ghetto’ spat and snarled at us from their angry covers.
And yet, forty-four years on now, I sit in silence, and I think how much there is that we still haven’t learned.
Tim Green is a London-based teacher and writer. He’s loved all things literary since as far back as he can remember. In any spare moments, you may find him in a theatre, gallery or music venue!