Читать книгу Street Boys: 7 Kids. 1 Estate. No Way Out. The True Story of a Lost Childhood - Tim Pritchard - Страница 10
ОглавлениеEight years old. That’s when my life went downhill. From eight years old nobody looked after me. I just lived on the streets and made do by myself. There was no one except me and my friends.
Phat Si
Phat Si wasn’t always Phat Si. That nickname came later. His first nickname was Fat Si. Fat because he was tubby, Si because he was born Simon Maitland from Stockwell, south London. His family lived on the west side of the Brixton Road, in a council house on the Stockwell Park Estate. He felt lucky that he’d been born into a happy and protective family. He was spoiled by his five sisters and loved by his mum and dad. He admired his dad. He was tall and big and good-looking and, unlike most of his friends’ dads, he wore a suit and carried a briefcase like a proper businessman. Everyone loved his dad and wanted to hang out with him. But Si was most proud of his mum. She was beautiful. That’s what he remembered most about her. Beautiful, and, to his young eyes, elegant and statuesque.
He felt he was lucky to have such good parents. They threw birthday parties for him every year until he was eight years old. They were big parties, with cake and jelly and presents and all his friends and family around him. Life was good. Life was how it should be for little kids. That’s when things began to change.
Eight years old.
One afternoon he came home from his school, St Helen’s, which was just up the road from his house, and pushed open the back garden door which was always unlocked so that friends and neighbours could come and go without having to ring the doorbell. He expected to see the house full of fun and action. That’s how it usually was.
This time it was different. He didn’t hear the usual noise of kids running around, or his mum shouting at them to keep them quiet. He couldn’t hear the clanging of pots in the kitchen or smell the waft of rice and beans being prepared for dinner. He knew then something was wrong. He just couldn’t tell what. He pushed open the door, a sense of panic rising inside him.
I came home from school and there was no sign of my mum and my sisters. I had no idea. I was young. I didn’t know whatwas going on. I pushed open the door and there was nothing in the house. There was no one. I was petrified. I was shocked, innit? One minute there was a family there and the next minute no one. It was a difficult stage for someone as young as me to go through. D’you get me?
Gripped by panic he ran through the house shouting for his mum. But there was nothing. There was no one. The TV was there and the sofa. But there were no records or books on the shelves. There were no clothes in his mum’s wardrobe, no toys in his sisters’ rooms. He didn’t understand. Terrified by the empty house he ran up the road towards Brixton where his dad had a shop. It was a designer clothes store in Granville Arcade, just inside Brixton market. He ran breathlessly through the market bumping into disgruntled passers-by and found his dad slumped behind the till of the shop.
‘Dad, there’s no one in the house. Mum’s not there.’
His dad gave him a sad, resigned look.
‘I know. Your mum’s gone.’
His dad already knew. He’d gone home earlier in the day and discovered it was empty. He told his son that he wouldn’t be able to stay with him, that he didn’t have the means to look after him and that Simon would have to live with his grandmother in John Ruskin Street in Camberwell. It was that simple. There was nothing else his father said. Maybe there was nothing else his father could say.
That evening his father led him by the hand to his grandma’s house. And that’s where Fat Si spent the first night the day his mum left.
My grandma explained my mum and dad got split up. She didn’t explain why. She said my mum and sisters had gone to live in another country. It wasn’t the same no more after
that. I never understood why I’d been left behind. But I didunderstand that I was on my own.
From the moment that his mum left, Fat Si’s life became more difficult. He found himself constantly angry and frustrated. At school he dropped his studies and did dumb stuff, like getting into fights and talking back to teachers. He was suspended. When he went back he fought some more. Then he was kicked out again. In the end he stopped going to that school altogether. His new school sent a letter to his father saying that his son’s behaviour was so bad that from then on he was required to accompany his son to school and sit at the back of the class to keep him under control. His dad tried a couple of times and then gave up. Fat Si didn’t mind. Instead of going to school he used to cross into the estate that was on the east side of Brixton Road. There were more kids there. Kids that he could hang out with, kids like Fat Chris, Michael Deans and the Cross brothers. There was more fun to be had there. The estate was called Angell Town.