Street Boys: 7 Kids. 1 Estate. No Way Out. The True Story of a Lost Childhood
The moving true story of 7 young kids and their struggle to escape a life of gangs and violence.‘Eight years old. That’s when life went downhill. From eight years old nobody looked after me. I just lived on the street and made do by myself. There was no one except me and my friends.’ SimonThis is the story of Elijah (JaJa), Simon (Phat Si), ‘Bloods’, Nathan (Inch), Michael (Birdie), Byron (Ribz), and Darren (Tempman). These 7 young boys each have one thing in common – they grew up on the Angell Town estate, south London.Phat Si comes home from school one day to find his mother gone, so he takes to the streets. He’s 8 years old.JaJa looks out of his kitchen window and sees drug dealers, pimps and whores. Overwhelmed by what he sees, JaJa slowly descends from petty theft to life as a kid in a street gang.Ribz’s mother sells crack and is sent to prison. He doesn’t know who his father is but is drawn to Angell Town, knowing that his dad has an unknown number of kids living on the estate. He’s determined to find some kind of family.Street Boys tells a powerful and important true story of courage, determination and hope – of creating a family from your friends and starting again when the world seems against you.
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street boys
TIM PRITCHARD
7 kids. 1 estate. No way out. The true story of a lost childhood
Everyone was out there and there were gunshots. Bang, bang, bang, bang. Young kids crying, everyone was scattering. It was hectic. Someone had been shot. I didn’t know the guy. We were all young. There was blood everywhere, man. The guy’d been shot in the face.
Inch
This is the story of JaJa, Phat Si, Inch, Birdie, Ribz, Bloods and Tempman. They are members of the PDC, one of the most feared and notorious street gangs in London. To some they are glamorous, gun-toting ‘gangstas’, with a bling-bling lifestyle. To others they are a group of criminal thugs who pose a danger to civilized society. This may turn you on, or it might put you off. But stay with it. Things may not be what they seem.
Tim Pritchard
by Elijah Kerr (aka JaJa)
This book is the voice of the streets. An unheard voice.
This is what happens when you leave those voices unheard, when you leave kids out there with no help and no support, and no choices or nothing.
This is what happens.
Your kids could be me. Your kids could go through the same things that I went through. I want you to understand what is out there, what young people like me are going through and why we are doing it.
It’s a big cry for help, now.
Contents
Title PagePrefaceForewordSeven KidsChapter One: The RaidChapter Two: ElijahChapter Three: SimonChapter Four: Nathan & MichaelChapter Five: Fat Si In ‘the Jungle’Chapter Six: Guns And YardiesChapter Seven: The 28sChapter Eight: The Younger 28sChapter Nine: Back In ‘the Jungle’Chapter Ten: RibzChapter Eleven: A New ColdnessChapter Twelve: SteamingChapter Thirteen: BirdieChapter Fourteen: FelthamChapter Fifteen: BloodsChapter Sixteen: The Return Of Fat SiChapter Seventeen: Customer ServiceChapter Eighteen: The ShootingChapter Nineteen: Inch And RibzChapter Twenty: Hats, Nikes And GunsChapter Twenty-One: Inch Does TimeChapter Twenty-Two: WantedChapter Twenty-Three: Angell DelightChapter Twenty-Four: Guns And AmmunitionChapter Twenty-Five: Rapping, Robbing And ShootingChapter Twenty-Six: The Pdc Come TogetherChapter Twenty-Seven: The Raid On The BlockChapter Twenty-Eight: On The RunChapter Twenty-Nine: Life InsideChapter Thirty: Inch In BrixtonChapter Thirty-One: IslamChapter Thirty-Two: MurderChapter Thirty-Three: TempmanChapter Thirty-Four: The New Angell TownChapter Thirty-Five: Pray Days ChangeChapter Thirty-Six: The ShootoutChapter Thirty-Seven: The Shooting Of BlackerChapter Thirty-Eight: The BusinessChapter Thirty-Nine: Murder, Murder, Murder. Death, Death, Death.Chapter Forty: Shot In The HeadChapter Forty-One: PoliceChapter Forty-Two: True StoriesChapter Forty-Three: Return To Angell TownChapter Forty-Four: Goodbye To Angell TownEpilogueAfterwordAbout the AuthorCopyrightAbout the Publisher
JaJa, real name: Elijah Kerr Born in Birmingham and arrives in Angell Town at the age of ten
Phat Si, real name: Simon Maitland Born on the Stockwell Park Estate, across the road from Angell Town
Bloods Born in Kingston, Jamaica, and arrives in Angell Town at the age of six
Inch, real name: Nathan Cross Born in Angell Town
Birdie, real name: Michael Deans Born in Angell Town
Ribz, real name: Byron Cole Born in Stockwell, down the road from Angell Town. Moves to Angell Town at the age of nine
Tempman, real name: Darren Samuels Born in Tulse Hill, just up the road from Angell Town
Could I have gone through a different door? If I’d been told to be a plumber and could have made money, maybe I would have gone down that route. Or if I’d met a fireman first or been shown some other life maybe I wouldn’t be here now. But no one in the ’hood does those types of things. The people I met in Angell Town were drug dealers and burglars. That’s what I knew first. There’s not really no choice.
JaJa
It was Naja who first noticed that something was up. He saw a white police van reverse into the estate and then quickly drive out again. He didn’t quite know why but something told him that it might be a police dog unit. He looked around nervously at the others.
‘Something dodgy is going on.’
The others hadn’t seen it. Ribz, who had already been there for an hour, was smoking weed and ‘coching’, Angell Town speak for chilling.
‘Relax, Naj. It’s cool.’
Naja wasn’t so sure.
There were only five of them on the Marston House walkway that day. On any other day there would be eight or nine of them, but JaJa, Naja’s older brother, had gone off to Wandsworth prison to visit Blacker who was serving time, Birdie had taken off a couple of hours earlier and Phat Si was on Brixton Road buying some takeaway jerk chicken. That left Naja, Ribz, Inch, Sykes and Skippy pacing the council block’s second-floor corridor armed with small plastic bags of weed and heroin. They were waiting for the first ‘cats’, or punters, to arrive.
It was Tuesday 17 December 2002 at about 3 p.m. and it was bitterly cold.
None of them had any real reason to be alarmed. From their position on the second-floor walkway of Marston House they had a clear view over the whole estate. They would have plenty of warning if the ‘feds’ came. That’s what they called the police, a name taken from all the American gangster shows they’d watched on TV. And anyway, they were sure that most of the residents would tip them off if there were any signs of police activity. Even though what they were doing was illegal, they were still surrounded by friends and neighbours. All of the gang had grown up in Angell Town. Ever since they were tiny kids, they’d ridden their bikes, kicked a ball about and run around in the streets and concrete playground at the heart of Angell Town. JaJa and his younger brother Naja had even grown up in one of the flats in Marston House, just along the corridor from where they were now standing.
