A big thank-you to my editors Vicky Eribo and Carolyn Thorne; my literary agent Jessie Botterill; my wonderful co-author Lucy Bannerman and the rest of the team at HarperCollins.
A special thank-you to my mum, for giving me life – I Love You! My brother, my sisters, my nieces, my family, who have always been there for me. My two daughters who keep me focused – I love you both dearly. Not forgetting my close friends who have kept me strong in one way or another.
A final thank-you to Brooke Kinsella, Hellie Ogden, Temi Mwale, Elijah ‘Jaja’ Kerr and Saadiya Ahmed.
They call me Sour. The opposite of sweet. Shanking, steaming, robbing – I did it all, rolling with the Man Dem.
I did it because I was bad. I did it because I had heart. And the reason I reckon I got away with it for so long? Because I was a girl.
Sour was my brand-name. How should I put this? I was quite influential round my endz. In my tiny, warped world, where rude boys were the good boys and exit routes non-existent, I was top dog. I want to give people outside the lifestyle some insight into lives like mine. I want parents to think about what their kids really get up to. For them, let this be an education, an eye-opener.
I want to lay myself bare to all the people who knew me when I was bad. I am not offering this as an excuse. I’m offering an explanation.
Above all, for all the youngers like me, the kids without a home who become kids without a conscience, the ones living the streetlife who know the thrill of likking the tills or steaming a shop, the young bucks who don’t need to be told how easily a blade slides out of punctured flesh, let this be a warning.
Youth workers could argue I had no chance. Politicians could blame my parents. Others might say the choices I made were mine and mine alone. Maybe they’re all right.
Me? I think badness is genetic. With a manic depressive for a mother and a convicted rapist for a father, I ain’t never gonna be Little Bo Peep.
So this is my story, the real story of how I fell down the rabbit hole of gangland. There are no real excuses. I did what I did and I live with what happened. I have a lot to be thankful for.
The hard part is not working out where it all went wrong. The hard part is making it right.
My mum’s first memory of her childhood in Jamaica begins with a broom. Mum was eight; her little sister, Rosie, must have been five. They lived in Kingston, in a one-bedroom shack with their nana.
“Yuh pickney have tings easy,” she always used to tell us. “When we did young we had to work fucking hard to keep the yard clean bwoy, wash fi we own clothes and dem ting dere, cook our own food and ting. None ah dis mordern shit, yuh ah gwarn wid.”
It was the day before Christmas. Mum was outside, scrubbing the yard. She had left Rosie dancing in the dust by the stove, a skinny girl grappling with a broom twice her size. Mum was down on her knees with a scrubbing brush, when she heard the screams.
She’d knocked over the pot of bubbling oil that had been cooking on the stove.
“Burned all the hair clean aff her head,” she’d say. “Her little dress stuck to her skin.”
Mum, still such a small child herself, rushed for scissors to cut the cotton from the blistering skin and tried to calm the hysterical girl, but it was too late. Boiling oil is too strong an adversary for five-year-old girls.
At the funeral, she arranged the pillow in her coffin to make sure she was comfortable.
“Me did do her hair real nice fi church, well, what was left ah it,” she said.
They buried her on Christmas Day.
Her own mother didn’t make it to the church that day. She had already long left Kingston, leaving behind her daughters with their grandmother, to chase the tailwinds of the Windrush Generation to the UK.
No one had heard from her mother, but there was a rumour she’d found a job in an office. Mum said she spent years in that old, broken-down yard, waiting for the day she would send for her to join her.
While she waited, her grandmother started taking on lodgers.
That’s her other memory – of the lodger. He worked in the garage during the day, and drank beer from his bed by night. He persuaded her to go away with him one afternoon after school, and took her to the cemetery.
“The bloodclart smelled of grease and chicken fat. Laid me on a tombstone and put his finger up me.”
Lord have mercy, things weren’t right in that house. I never met Mum’s grandmother, but maybe that’s for the best – I have a feeling me and her wouldn’t have got on.
She was too strict for a start. No loitering after school, no free time, no fun.
She would tell my poor mum, “When school done, if mi spit pon de floor, yuh better reach home before it dry.”
If not, a beating was waiting. I didn’t believe Mum when she told me about the grater.
“She put a grater in the yard, till it got hot, hot, hot in di sun.”
Then she’d make Mum kneel on it. Oh my days, what a wicked witch! I’d have put that grater where the sun don’t shine.
Weird thing is, my mum still sticks up for the woman who raised her.
“Cha man, her heart did inna di right place.”
And where exactly would that be?
Still, I’ll give her something. She taught my mum to cook all the hardcore soul food that me and my brother love. Chicken, rice and peas, all the meats – no one cooks it better than my mum.
Aged 12, Mum finally got the call. Her mother finally sent a plane ticket for London. She said in the letter she was doing well and life was good. Mum dreamed of a big house with servants. She dreamed of the high life, in a country where people drove shining cars, girls wore short skirts and their wallets overflowed with Queen’s head.
But Brixton in the early 1970s wasn’t quite the paradise she’d imagined. For starters, she stepped off the plane in a cheap, yellow dress and was welcomed by snow. It pretty much got worse from there.
“In Jamaica we went to church because we suffered so much,” she said. “When we came to London, nobody went to church no more.”
“Me did know seh dere was a God in Kingston, becah he used to answer my prayers. Nobody nah answer no prayers inna Brixton.”
Oh yeah, quite a character, my mum. On her good days, she likes watching EastEnders, Coronation Street and Al Jazeera.
Whenever there’s something on the news about “feral youths”,