Back in his cell JaJa thought about the effect it would have on the others. It was Phat Si he felt most sorry for. Naja, Sykes and Ribz were young offenders so they’d probably get a year in some young offenders’ institution. Skippy had only ever received minor convictions. JaJa had managed to stay out of prison for a couple of years so the court might be lenient on him. But Phat Si had just come out of a long prison sentence. He’d been suspected of attempted murder but, in the end, was found guilty of firing a gun into a crowd. He’d only been out a matter of weeks and now he was going back in again. The only good thing was that somehow Inch had slipped the police net.
As soon as he’d got out of Angell Town and onto the Brixton Road after the police raid, Inch knew that he was on the run and he wasn’t sure where it would end. From Brixton Road he fled to his girl’s place. He had to avoid the ‘feds’. He was panicking. Fucking hell. At least JaJa isn’t nicked. That makes it better. He had no idea that, at that very moment, JaJa was also being led in handcuffs to Brixton police station. He didn’t tell his girlfriend what was going on but he knew that she realized that something was up.
She could see the way I was and I knew I can’t get nicked but I was stuck and I couldn’t think properly, innit? It was crazy, man. I was thinking of getting out of the country. I was dumb, I should have breezed but I was too scared. I thought no way am I going to the airport. What if they nick me there? I’ll be mad.
Inch called some of his friends, who told him not to worry and tried to calm him down. He decided then that he would hang out and stay with friends in different places. That way he would never be in one place for too long. That way the police wouldn’t be able to track him down.
It would be two months before he was caught.
A month after the Marston House raid, Ribz, Sykes and Naja were taken to the Inner London Crown Court in Camberwell and sentenced, under their real names, Byron Cole, aged 19, Michael Payne, aged 21 and Naja Kerr, aged 18, to twenty-one months in Feltham. Later that same day, Skippy aka Errol Cole, aged 23, was given three and a half years. Phat Si and JaJa, real names, Simon Maitland and Elijah Kerr, both aged 22, got three years and nine months.
By the time he got out two years later, Elijah Kerr, aka JaJa, was a changed man. But the world outside had also changed. Marston House, the council block he’d grown up in, had been demolished to make way for brand new, award-winning housing. The Angell Town estate had been redeveloped. Brixton had been yuppified. Britain had gone to war in Iraq.
Within three months of his release, JaJa’s fellow PDC gang members Blacker, Ham and Justyn would be gunned down in the streets around Brixton. Phat Si would be shot in the leg outside JaJa’s flat. A new, radical Islam would be preached on the streets outside JaJa’s local mosques in Stockwell and Brixton. Four suicide bombers would kill scores of people in the heart of London. An innocent Brazilian would be shot in the head at the local tube station. Things were changing, and changing fast.
I often wonder whether it would have been different. If I hadn’t been abused and beaten by my partner. If I hadn’t taken them out of their school and if we’d stayed in Birmingham, I wonder whether Elijah would have turned out different.
Sharon Kerr
JaJa’s dreadlocks: that’s what first got him into trouble. His father was a Rastafarian and as soon as JaJa’s hair was long enough he wore it in ever-expanding knots of matted hair. It was fine at home where his two younger sisters, his younger brother Naja and his mother and father also wore dreadlocks, but at school there was one kid who kept pulling his hair during fights in the playground. It made JaJa fight even more furiously and soon got him into trouble with the school authorities. One evening, when he was seven years old, he went back to his small family home at 97 Crompton Road in Handsworth, Birmingham, ready for a confrontation.
JaJa’s mum was in the kitchen. He told her that he wanted to have normal hair like other kids. They argued about it all night, but the next day she relented and took JaJa to have his dreads cut off. He knew she didn’t approve of his request because she kept calling him ‘Elijah’. That was his real name: Elijah Kerr, born in 1979 at Dudley Royal Hospital in Birmingham to parents who had left Jamaica as kids to start a new life in England. Most people, though, except schoolteachers and angry parents, just called him JaJa.
JaJa’s parents, Sharon and Delroy, had met when they were young, during their third year at school in Birmingham. They started off just hanging around together as friends but it wasn’t long before they started going out as boyfriend and girlfriend. The trouble was their relationship didn’t go down well with either set of parents. Delroy’s parents objected because they didn’t want him to be distracted from his ambition of joining the army. Sharon’s parents objected because Delroy was a Rasta. In the end, all it did was throw Sharon and Delroy even closer together.
When Sharon became pregnant at 14, it was Delroy’s mum who took control. She grabbed Delroy by the arm and took him round to see Sharon’s parents.
When everyone was sitting down she came straight to the point.
‘Sharon’s pregnant and Delroy’s the father. What shall we do about it?’
Sharon’s dad couldn’t believe it. When Delroy and his mum had gone he glared accusingly at his wife.
‘This is all your fault.’
Then he started slapping his wife around the face.
‘I won’t have a daughter like that living under my roof.’
It was too much for Sharon. The worst thing was seeing her mum submit to the beating. Sharon decided to act. She went upstairs, packed a suitcase, walked out of the family home and never went back.
Sharon moved straight into a squat with Delroy. It was a struggle at first, but her mum used to come round and sneak £10 notes to her without her father noticing. It was only when Elijah was born that her father started to pay any attention to her. Before that, her father had always treated her as the black sheep of the family. Elijah was his first grandson and he started to come round more often, but by then, for Sharon, it was too late.
Sharon and Delroy had their second child, Chantelle, and moved into a house in Crompton Road, Handsworth. They were cosy together and Delroy got work on various building sites. He was a strict vegetarian and cooked delicious dinners for her and the kids. A third child, Saffiya, was born. Every evening they would sit down together over a steaming hot meal of fish and rice and he would tell her all about Rasta culture and her roots in Africa. For Sharon it was an eye-opener. No one had ever told her about slavery, about Africa, about where she came from. For the first time in her life she felt that she was part of a proper family.
But then it started to go wrong. Delroy mentioned a building project he’d been offered in Africa. He began to disappear for weeks on end. Their fourth child, Naja, was born. Then one day Delroy announced he’d signed up for a short contract job in Ghana.
‘I’ll be back in six months.’
It was two years before he returned.
JaJa wasn’t quite sure exactly when he noticed that his dad stopped being around. The biggest sign was when the music on the stereo changed. It had always been a familiar voice that floated down the street as he made his way home after school.
‘Let’s get together and feel all