Sour: My Story: A troubled girl from a broken home. The Brixton gang she nearly died for. The baby she fought to live for.. Tracey Miller
Or, in other words, people’s kids need to learn to behave.
She loves baking, and makes a mean Jamaican punch. Oh my days! Nestlé milk mixed with pineapple juice, nutmeg, vanilla, ice cubes. Mix in rum or brandy and you’ve got a wicked pineapple punch. And a good chance of getting Type 2 diabetes, just like her.
I know I shouldn’t laugh, because of her illness, but there were wild times too.
Like that time she insisted on driving me and my brother to school in her speedy little Ford Capri, instead of letting us take the bus.
“Hold on!” she screamed, leaning back and putting one arm across my brother in the front seat and one arm on the steering wheel, as she slammed down her foot on the accelerator.
“Me taking di kids to school!”
She whizzed down Coldharbour Lane that day like she was bloody Nigel Mansell, cutting up cars and swerving wildly down the street. I remember screaming as we jumped the red lights and brought a big-assed bus screeching to a halt. She crashed into a van and folded up the front of the car. Mum didn’t even notice.
She just turned the radio up full volume and started chanting whatever weird shit came into her head. Oh my days, it was like Mrs Doubtfire meets Grand Theft Auto.
Yusuf and I clung on to our seatbelts and just prayed to God to get there safely. I swear I’ve never been so happy to get to school.
“Me go pick yuh up later,” she shouted, depositing the pair of us, shaking, traumatised heaps at the no-parking zone by the gates. “Make sure yuh did deh when me reach at tree tirty!”
With that, we heard the wheels spin, the engine roar, then she was gone.
Lo and behold, 3.30pm came and went, but Mum and her Ford Capri were nowhere to be seen.
The policeman told us later they had to give high-speed chase through Brixton.
“Rassclat!” she said, when we told her what happened. “Me did what? Yuh sure? I just remember seh me ah drive tru traffic, me put dung me foot annah drive fast, one minute me ah get weh, next minute dem got me.”
We tried not to giggle.
“Den I had to fight a whole heap ah policeman, and dem fling me down inna dem bloodclart van and take me down the station, bastards. Den dem take me go ahahspital.”
That was my first day at a police station. We spent the whole day there. They fed us, showed us the horses, the police cars. I’m not gonna lie – it was like a fun day out.
It was less fun, I imagine, for that poor Ford Capri.
She was remorseful about some things. Like the time she dangled my sister off the balcony.
“Me can’t believe seh mi woulda do dat to yuh,” she told Althea, once she came back down to earth. “I’m so sorry, girl, please forgive me, yuh mum wasn’t well.”
Althea and her always had problems after that.
Then there were the afternoons she used to pick up her baseball bat and walk through the streets, speaking to herself. Or the time she stripped stark naked and walked calmly down the road at rush hour. Or the time – this is my favourite – when she brought an elderly Russian lady home, and held her hostage.
How many other kids come home from school to find a confused and frail old woman perched on the settee, saying they’ve been kidnapped by your mum?
“Mum, what you doing?” we screamed.
“Me ah ask de woman, where ye live? And she come with me. Me haffi look after her.”
I looked at the frail old woman, clutching an untouched plate of rice and peas in her trembling hands.
Mum came into the front room, brandishing more food.
“Yuh hungry? Eat dis cake, it’s nice. Drink some tea. If yuh want, gwarn go sleep and drink.”
The sweet old lady reached up for my hand.
“Please,” she whispered, “I want to go home.”
Yusuf helped her escape, while I kept Mum distracted. She was horrified when she found the front room empty.
“Which one ah yuh let her out? Where’s she gaarn? I’m looking after her!”
Oh yeah, every year it was something, and it always seemed to be round Christmas.
You know that song, “Love and only love will solve your problems” by Fred Locks?
That’s the one she liked to listen to during her episodes. That’s the one she’d listen to over and over again and all through the night. The bass would shake the house.
Whenever that came on, and the volume was turned up, we knew to brace ourselves.
As for my dad, well, he was a proper little bad boy.
Mum’s first two babydaddies had been and gone before she met the man I have the misfortune to call my dad.
I’ve only ever known my mum as a medicated woman but she must have been an attractive lady. She could get the boys.
Althea’s dad was young too. His family were having none of it, and he soon scarpered.
Melanie’s dad, he was rich. He had money, but he was married, so Mum was his sidepiece. Not that she knew that at the time. He left her heartbroken and went back to the wife.
But me and Yusuf’s dad? Woah, Mum really hit the jackpot there.
In Brixton they called his crowd the “Dirty Dozen”. They travelled in a pack.
Marmite liked to play dominoes. Runner, Sanchez and the rest liked drinking. Irie was a school bus driver by day, getaway driver by night. There were rumours he used to lock up girls in the bathroom at parties and assault them. Charmer. Monk was sweet, the quietest of the lot, so it took them by surprise when he ran his babymother down and stabbed her one night on the way home.
Then there was ’Mingo. Short for Flamingo – when things got naughty, that man could fly away and never get caught. And, finally, in his knitted Rasta hat and moccasins was Pedro, aka Wellington Augustus Miller. Or, as I no longer call him: Dad.
He’d break Mum’s nose and black out her eyes, gamble away the wages she earned as an admin clerk in an office. He lost me a baby sister too. Kicked Mum in the belly till she dropped her in a toilet. She once ended up jumping through a glass door to escape him. Doctors said she only had a 50–50 chance if they tried to remove the shards from her skull, so they left them inside. They must have done the right thing, coz she’s still here.
The X-rays revealed a freshly fractured skull, and a long, unhappy marriage’s worth of broken bones and damaged organs. I was six weeks old.
Oh yeah, he was a proper nuisance, my dad. And you know the irony? With the stepdads who followed, I still remember Mum as being the violent one.
She was working in two jobs – clerk during the day, a cleaner in the evenings – living for the weekends when she and her friends would follow the sound systems round south London, stealing drinks and befriending bouncers.
The Dirty Dozen weren’t Yardies. They weren’t in that league. Sure, they’d beat up an ice-cream van man with a chain, but their crime wasn’t organised, not in the way the Yardies’ was.
Still, anywhere they got to was pure war.
The first night my parents met, Mum watched Dad beat up a bouncer so bad they took him to the hospital. He had taken offence at being asked to pay an entry fee.
Next time they met in the Four Aces nightclub in north London.
“He had cut off his locks, he looked like a proper gentleman,” she recalled.
Not quite gentlemanly enough, of course, to hang around for my birth.
“Not