BOOK REVIEW

Mr Chips meets the feral children

Bernard Hare mixes compelling reportage with deeply personal memoir in Urban Grimshaw and the Shed Crew, says Toby Lichtig.

Bernard Hare's involvement with a gang of feral children in Nineties Leeds is the basis for Urban Grimshaw and the Shed Crew. Hare grew up on Leeds's tough East End Park estate, fostered by a culture of boozing and scrapping. But when he left his job as a London social worker to return home, his youth seemed positively pastoral compared with what he found.
Hare meets pre-pubescent Urban sniffing glue by the sewers and is introduced to Urban's gang, who most of the time live in a shed. In and out of care, these kids have slipped out of the gaze of the authorities. Abandoned by their parents, they have since been abandoned by society. In its place, they have formed one of their own, complete with a charter preaching sharing and denouncing 'grasses' and 'nonces'. In theory, Rousseau might have approved, but little is noble about their squalid lives.

They are the product of an environment in which everyone is 'on' something: crack, the game, the run. More broadly, Hare has little doubt that they are 'the product of 20 years of Tory government'. They will replicate the degradation suffered by their parents, but will do so younger and harder. Fending for themselves, they do not even have access to the dole, let alone a doctor or a dentist.
Tory spending cuts might have played their part, but Hare sees other crucial differences between his childhood and theirs. Deindustrialisation has shattered his community, while the 'traditional drink culture' has since developed into a culture of both drink and drugs. Meanwhile, children have become increasingly sexual. 'It had been hard work to get a girl into bed when I was a lad,' Hare avers. Now 'the girls gave it away and asked nothing in return'. They are getting wasted and pregnant in equal measure.

Urban Grimshaw is a compelling piece of ethnography, but it is also a deeply personal memoir tracing Hare's own development. Having been sacked for a minor criminal conviction, he has descended into heavy drug abuse and, at times, petty thieving. 'I developed a wonderfully insouciant technique whereby I followed the store detectives around until they nicked someone. Then, while they were preoccupied, I cleaned up.'
He does his best to help the kids, providing them with a safe house, teaching them to read and to play chess. But his own lifestyle is no model and suddenly he realises that he has become a disturbing mix of Fagin and 'Mr Chips on smack'.
Hare's prose is punchy, his anecdotes entertaining, from brawls on bouncy castles to the chess-playing Yardie dealers who insist on choosing the disadvantaged black pieces every time. 'Beating white, despite the odds, was part of the game as far as they were concerned.' But Urban Grimshaw is most memorable for its tenderness: the moments when the kids briefly become kids again, discovering the alphabet, playing Monopoly, or Urban's sheer boyish joy when Hare takes him to the countryside.

When Fergal Keane turned up to do a report on East End Park, Hare knew that things had become serious: 'The BBC always sent him to the worst troublespots in the world. Now here he was.'
This gave Hare the impetus to write his book.
Moving but never sanctimonious, it is another City of God, this time for Britain rather than Brazil.

Read an extract: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/Books/extracts/story/0,6761,1498702,00.html

Urban Grimshaw and the Shed Crew by Bernard Hare Sceptre £14.99,

26 June 2005
The Observer

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,6903,1514640,00.html

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