This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780007225620

Version: 2020-08-14

Praise

‘Wheatle has a compelling prose style and the heady, dope-soaked, scarily aggressive atmosphere of south London is conveyed extremely well. Wheatle’s style and command of language and plot ensure he is a writer to watch’

Observer

‘Beautifully written, funny and full of insight, this is one of the best novels about post-war London to have been written in recent years’

The Times

‘Alex Wheatle weaves witty patois dialogue and cool, crisp narrative into a tone of playful irony, wholly free of rant or rancour’

Saturday Telegraph

‘A welcome trip down memory lane by the Brixton bard … the musical references make you jump and prance and the hard-edged dialogue brilliantly captures that London vibe’

Courttia Newland

‘In East of Acre Lane Alex Wheatle has managed far more than simply pulling off a fast, punchy morality tale centring on a young man’s dilemma about going straight or opting for a life of crime … Action packed, funny and filled with cocky banter between its teenage male characters, references to reggae music and street stye, it’s a cool, credible read’

Big Issue

‘The dialogue … has rhythm and inventiveness. And the violent climax is a cathartic one, the logical and positive first stage of a revolution’

Independent on Sunday

‘This gripping second novel by Wheatle gives a searing account of a young man’s attempt to do the right thing, set against the backdrop of one of the most explosive moments in London’s history – the Brixton Riot. You simply will not want to put this book down until you have finished reading it’

The Voice

‘Treading a Dubliners-esque terrain which swallows up the Brixton landscape, the novel spits out the simmering frustrations of being young, black and British during the Thatcher years … A trademark naturalistic style and a clarity of prose ensure that Wheatle retells a shaping episode in recent British history and tellingly, captures as much of today’s mood as he does of an unforgettable ‘81’

Pride

Dedication

This novel is dedicated to the life

and musical legacy of

Dennis Emmanuelle Brown

Cover

Title Page

Praise

Dedication

Introduction by Paul Gilroy

1 Heady Heights

2 Homestead

3 Roadblock

4 The Front Line

5 Oh Carol

6 Delivery

7 Sons of SW9

8 Sisters

9 Six Babylon

10 Crisis

11 The Wedding

12 Gunman Connection

13 The Teachings of Jah Nelson

14 Queen Majesty

15 Babylon Pressure

16 Bounty Hunting

17 Sister Love

18 Herb Man Hustling

19 The Shitstem

20 Brixtonian Females

21 Truths and Rights

22 Enter the Pimp Don

23 The Brixtoniad

24 Confrontation

25 The Blessing of Jah Nelson

P.S. Ideas, Interviews & Features …

About the Author

Unfinished Stories: Joanne Finney talks to Alex Wheatle

Life at a Glance

Top Ten Books

A Writing Life

About the Book

Brixton Hot! by Alex Wheatle

Read On

Have You Read?

If You Loved This, You Might Like …

Find Out More

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION BY PAUL GILROY

Alex Wheatle and I belong to the same small and highly exclusive club. Like him, I once livicated a book to the memory of Reggae’s crown prince, Dennis Brown – a philosophical hero and visionary. It is not a spoiler to tell you that his rootical anthem ‘Deliverance Will Come’ is among the tunes that feature in the story you’re holding. That particular Jamaican classic opened the epoch-making 1978 album Visions of Dennis Brown. It matched the honeyed anguish of Dennis’s melodious vocal to Lloyd Park’s rugged bass and some positively rude rockers drumming. ‘Deliverance Will Come’ remains a big tune because it captures the historical texture of the vexed period covered by this rich and rewarding novel. Even now, Dennis’s exquisite projection of the sufferers’ utopian imagining of a world transformed is powerfully evocative. His words offered an invitation to join a collective process of reasoning that promises to bring a better world closer and contribute to repairing all the damage done in this one by the works of Babylon. Alex Wheatle’s novel enacts the same upful possibility.

East of Acre Lane is not about music, but reggae music flows through it, supplying the vital fluid to its pressured veins. Wheatle uses that sound and song to open a spot in time and to identify the moral conflicts and boundaries of the community that provided him with this pageant of characters. During this pivotal period, Dub reached its creative peak. Music was still more than merely entertainment. It afforded ethical guidance and delivered precious, useful access to ancestral, I-thiopian truths that could be applied to the dilemmas and conflicts generated in and around black life by exploitation, marginalization and oppression. The social, cultural and moral roles of music became more significant as the bitterness that had built up over the previous decades eventually began to flare. The dance was a place of instruction, of healing, and potentially, of insurgency, constantly surveilled and regulated under the watchful eyes of the police, as corrupt as they were brutal.

This novel’s historical and geographical setting should be carefully specified. It can be defined by the immediate aftermath of the New Cross Massacre, which occurred 18 January 1981 and claimed the lives of thirteen young people. That terrible tragedy had been met with governmental indifference and judicial hostility. The traumatised victims were treated as criminals, and the stories callously spun about them in the press by the police studiously and provocatively ignored the history of racist attacks and fascist organizing in the area.

The New Cross Massacre Action Committee supported the victims and denounced the empty response of the authorities. They called the Black People’s Day of Action on 02 March and galvanized Britain’s black communities into action. They formed a unified political body that carried a welcome glimpse of positive future possibilities. Thousands marched northwards in the rain from New Cross Rd., through an attempted police blockade at Blackfriar’s Bridge, and headed up Fleet Street where they were showered with contempt and hostility delivered from the headquarters of the newspapers that had orchestrated the criminalization of a whole generation.

After that initial fightback, South London’s notorious ‘nigger-hunting’ police were determined to exact symbolic revenge upon the local youth who, we’re told, had been emboldened by the triumphant day of action. To put them back in their proper, lowly place, Brixton police launched their ‘stop-and-search’ response: Operation Swamp 81 on 06 April. Its heavy-handed aggression precipitated unprecedented outbreaks of collective violence that came eventually to express the bleak predicament of all of this country’s young people. The eruptions were certainly the culmination of a longer conflict between the police and the militant layer of rebel youth, an explosive instance of the black communities’ bitter struggles against the habitual racism of Britain’s criminal justice system.

The burning and looting extended from April until July. They spread from Brixton to encompass the whole country, which was changed in profound and lasting ways as a result of what the violence revealed. As we approach the fortieth anniversary of those riots, it is important to reflect upon the meaning, character and importance of them, especially given the current conditions are not always hospitable to historical sensibility. Wheatle’s tale is set in the recent past. His history links with present circumstances, which have in turn been shaped by it. Contemporary conditions are in some ways better and in some ways worse. We look at the present in relation to the past, which is recast here, in the words of Dennis Brown, as ‘the half that has never been told’.

The official statistics say that at that time there was 50 per cent youth unemployment among young black people in Lambeth. However, the nationwide arrest data from 1981 show that participation in the riots was far from narrowly confined to what were then called ‘ethnic minorities’. The Economist trumpeted that the scale of those events conclusively demonstrated the failure of Britain’s welfare-state settlement. In July, the New York Times published a notably more accurate and considered interpretation of the disturbances than any that the British press could muster:

Spreading urban violence erupted in more than a dozen cities and towns across England yesterday and early today as policemen and firemen fought to control thousands of black, white and Asian youths on a spree of rioting, burning and looting. A senior Government official said that the disturbances, which came as the epidemic of violence in the dilapidated inner cities entered its second week, were the most widespread to date. In some cities, he said, “we are facing anarchy.” By 5 A.M., most of the violence had been brought under control, but sirens and burglar alarms could still be heard through the streets of London, and palls of smoke rose from half a dozen districts. From Battersea and Brixton in the south to Stoke Newington in the north, and from Chiswick in the west to Walthamstow in the east, rocks and shattered glass littered at least ten multiracial neighborhoods.

(R. W. Apple, ‘New Riots Sweep England’s Cities; “Anarchy” Feared’, New York Times, 11 July 1981)

Mass antipolice violence clustered around the carnival in Ladbroke Grove had first exploded in 1976. Five years later, because the rioting continued for so long, and could apparently unfold anywhere, the national mood became increasingly anxious and fearful. Perhaps the race war so apocalyptically predicted by the populist Conservative politician Enoch Powell, in his 1968 bid to become party leader, appeared more plausible after the scale of rioting had shifted from smoldering quotidian resentment against police harassment to more spectacular varieties of resistance.

The riots were rooted in young people’s experiences of inequality and injustice. They were also configured by youth’s slowly dawning sense of the chronic character of the crisis that engulfed them and of the unholy forces unleashed by accelerating de-industrialization of urban zones. Once the flames and the adrenaline subsided, the sense of hopelessness was pervasive. Here again, music supplied healing, reparative therapy. There is a balm in Gilead. This was not a crisis of identity but rather the steady birth of a particular dissident culture assembled with love and care from fragments donated by Black Power, Rastafari livity and the combative, insolent resources found in local working-class life.

It is difficult now to judge whether those events should still be considered contemporary. Social life in Britain has evolved. Amplified by the internet, the gaudy dreamscape of consumer culture has discovered new value in iconized and celebrity-faced diversity. Convivial interaction across the axes of class, gender and marginality is often unremarkable. In sharp contrast, the political imagination of the most recent rioters has supposedly contracted to the point that their assaults on power and injustice brought only the transient pleasures of wholesale shopping without money. So we must ask whether changes in the politics of race, and in the way that racism conditions both culture and politics, have been sufficient to draw a line – to create a strong sense of a before and an after. That possibility is pending in this novel.

Remembering this period in the city’s life has become difficult not least because the neoliberal moods that hold sway these days require a disaggregation of the past. It deteriorates into an undifferentiated, abstract sense of history which can be glimpsed intermittently, in fragmentary form, on YouTube, but does not appear to be connected to the world we inhabit. If history reappears at all, it is likely to be no more than an aimless plethora of firmly localized ‘back stories’ that lack an overarching narrative apart from some half-articulated notion of inevitable progress towards a fairer and richer way of life enhanced perhaps by a new generation of technological toys. Those very mechanisms of mass distraction obstruct the insurgent operations of countermemory. This is where the imaginative work accomplished artfully by East of Acre Lane comes in.

It is sometimes easier, more popular and even remunerative for black writers to dwell on the injuries and injustices that result directly from racial downpression than to open up the difficult and painful questions that surround the hurt that downpressed people routinely do to one another. These different dimensions of racialized life in difficult circumstances are knotted together. It takes a special bravery and responsibility imaginatively to enter and explore their entanglement. In his poetic, Fanonian surveys of the conditions that gave rise to bitterness and violence, another Brixtonian, Linton Kwesi Johnson, has described the lateral violence found among racism’s victims as merely the first, transitional phase of their reaction against the institutional power that demeans and confines them. They turn on those they love and vent the effects of racial stress into the vulnerable lives of their nearest and dearest. Wheatle heads straight into the unforgiving territory located beyond the options of protest and affirmation. Armed with an ear for the language of the streets and a refined appreciation of its comic aspects, he mines that unsettling space and has unearthed a gem.

1 Heady Heights

27 January 1981

It was 3am and Biscuit found himself being driven through the bad lands of South London. He was in the back seat, his heartbeat accelerating, flanked on the right by this big grizzly thing called Muttley, who looked like a young George Foreman with untamed facial hair. On Biscuit’s left was the evil cackling dread nicknamed Ratmout’, whose face would crease into a mask of sadism if anything humoured him. Nunchaks, the Brixtonian crime lord, was behind the wheel, displaying perfect calm. How de fuck am I gonna get out of this? Biscuit thought.

He wondered what he’d done to warm Nunchaks’ wrath, and regretted leaving the party without Coffin Head and Floyd. It had been a dread rave. Plenty girls to dance with, strong lagers free flowing, and Winston, the top notch selector of Crucial Rocker sound, spinning some dangerous tunes.

‘Jus’ ah liccle drive to tek in de sights,’ Nunchaks said, smiling.

‘Forget ’bout de herb, man,’ Biscuit suggested, ‘I’m too busy nex’ week to do any selling, an’ I was riding a serious crub wid a fit girl at de party.’

‘De bitch can wait,’ Nunchaks responded grimly.

‘Don’t fuck about, Chaks,’ Biscuit fretted. ‘Lemme outta de car, man, I ain’t in de mood for one of your jokes.’

‘Who de rarse says I’m joking. An’, more time, I don’t like yout’ who joke wid me.’

The Cortina Mark Two pulled up at the foot of a cloud-seeking tower block, somewhere behind Stockwell Tube Station. The thick-necked Muttley yanked Biscuit out of the car as Nunchaks, in his cashmere coat and beaver-skinned hat, observed the skyline. He looked like a character from Shaft.

‘What de fuck ’ave I done, man?’ Biscuit panicked. ‘I beg you. I ain’t done nutten to you. Dis has gone too far.’

‘You made ah wrong move, yout’,’ Chaks growled. ‘If you can’t listen good, den you mus’ feel pain.’

‘Wha’ wrong move, Chaks, man? Wha’ ’ave I done? I’m one of your best customers. My brethrens will be wondering where I am. Gi’ me a chance to explain whatever I’ve done.’

‘Stop grovelling, yout’, you sound like weak-heart bwai inna beast cell.’

Ratmout’ and Muttley dragged Biscuit towards the lift of the tower block. Before him Biscuit read the graffiti that decorated the bruised, hardwood swing doors of the entrance. Che Guevara, you’re wanted in Brixton, demanded one line. Biscuit looked up and saw hundreds of windows embedded in dark concrete reflecting the blackness of the night. He wanted to scream, but knew that if he did, his forehead would kiss Chak’s steel-studded Nunchakoos. Ghetto youths, especially in Brixton, flocked to the late-night Ace cinema to watch the latest Martial Arts films, and they all considered the top ranking scene of all time was when Bruce Lee wielded his Nunchakoos in Enter the Dragon, mincing the brains of five assailants. The scene was not lost on Nunchaks.

How did I ever get hook up wid dis bad man? Biscuit thought. A cold sweat snaked down from his temples. He thought of his hard-working mother and his younger sister and brother, wondering if he would see them again. Only half an hour ago he was smoking a spliff and enjoying a serious smooch with a fit girl. Now he felt like he was approaching the end of his short life.

Muttley, wondering if the lift was in order, thumbed for the top floor and then ran his eyes over Biscuit, as if he was sizing up which part of the body he should eat first. As the mechanism of the lift echoed into a downward motion, Ratmout’ emitted a throaty cackle, displaying his black gums and two missing front teeth. To add to Biscuit’s torment, and to pass the time, he slowly ran his right index finger along his throat. Nunchaks was flicking his lighter on and off, cursing that it had run out of gas.

When the lift arrived and the steel doors had juddered open, Biscuit caught the scent of something a dog had left in the corner of the cramped compartment. They entered the confined cabin, Biscuit scouring Nunchaks’ coat for any glint of custom-built brain scrambler. On the back wall of the lift was more graffiti in bold, red letters: legalise it.

A red-lit circle indicated that the lift had reached the 25th floor. The two flunkies shunted Biscuit through a wire-meshed door that led the way to the balcony. Biscuit ran the scene through his mind in trepidation. This was the end; he could see his eighteen-year-old body crumpled upon the concrete forecourt below, as lifeless as a black bag of rubbish. He felt an asthma attack gathering force in his chest and his fear rendered him speechless. Nunchaks was still fiddling with his lighter.

‘Wha’ yard number did you raid the uder day?’ Nunchaks demanded.

‘You can ’ave all de t’ings, man. Stereo, telly, everyt’ing. You can ’ave de lot, man. Jus’ lemme go. Der’s dis yard I’m working on nex’ week an’ you can ’ave all de t’ings we t’ief from der as well.’

‘Wha’ number!’

‘Er, you told me twenty-seven, innit.’

Nunchaks turned to his cronies. ‘My mudder always teach me dat if me can’t hear, I mus’ feel.’

‘Don’t frig about, Chaks, you’ll get de t’ings back, no worries.’

Nunchaks managed to get his lighter working. He paused, took out a cigarette and lit it. ‘Twenty-seven, you say?’

‘Yeah, man. Dat’s de number you gave me.’

‘Can you remember me saying twenty-seven?’ Nunchaks asked his goons.

‘No, boss,’ Muttley answered gleefully.

‘I swear you told me twenty-seven. I swear, man.’

‘You calling me a liar, yout’? You already raised your voice to me once. Do it again and you’re flying t’rough de air.’

Biscuit glanced behind him and saw the communication towers of Crystal Palace blinking away on the horizon, overlooking the myriad of tiny illuminations that peppered South London. He could just make out the grey, flat tops of his home estate along Brixton Road. His eyes went eastwards and he took in the Oval cricket ground, backdropped by huge round gas tanks that looked like the crowns of poor giants. Surrounding all this were cousins upon cousins of council blocks. Biscuit wondered if there was anybody around to hear him scream. Maybe someone who lived below had witnessed his plight and would come to the rescue.

‘I told you seventy-seven, yout’,’ Nunchaks said coldly.

‘Does it matter?’ Biscuit asked. ‘De yard ’ad a top of de range JVC system, an’ you can ’ave it, man. Free of charge wid nuff compliments an’ t’ing.’

‘Do you know who lives at twenty-seven?’ Nunchaks asked eerily.

Biscuit hadn’t a clue and wondered why it mattered so much to Chaks. He sensed his knees were buckling under the weight of his body, as if they knew he was going to die. My days are fucked, he thought. Knowing my luck I burgled a dealer’s yard.

‘My brudder’s woman lives der,’ Nunchaks revealed. ‘When I sight her she was ah liccle upset. She couldn’t believe dat while she was sleeping, some bastard bruk into her yard an’ tek away her t’ings dem. You even t’ieved de friggin’ ornaments!’

‘Sorry, Chaks, man. If we did know we wouldn’t ’ave gone near her yard. I’m sorry, man.’

‘Shall we bruk him up, boss?’ the smirking Ratmout’ suggested, eager to earn his money for the night.

‘Yeah, mon,’ Muttley added, pulling up his sleeves and preparing his right fist. ‘Mash up his knee cap to rarted.’

Nunchaks was more concerned with his lighter. He threw it over the balcony and into the night. Biscuit turned his head to watch it spiral towards the ground. He closed his eyes at the moment of impact.

‘Fockin’ wort’less piece of rubbish. I’m gonna drapes de bwai who sold me dat.’

He studied Biscuit and sensed the fear in the boy’s lean body. Biscuit’s petrified, narrow eyes were trained on Nunchaks’ coat, yet Nunchaks knew that if he revealed what was concealed inside he would get an altogether different reaction from the youth. He looked at Biscuit’s rangy legs and had to admit that he would never catch him in a long chase. He searched the teenager’s features again. Biscuit’s brown eyes were set in a diamond-shaped, chocolate-mousse-coloured face that showed the hint of a moustache. His top lip bore the scar of a recent spliff and infant sideburns lined his jawbone. Nunchaks had Biscuit cornered now; he could really frighten him.

Biscuit awaited his fate, breathing heavily and wondering if it wouldn’t look too pitiful if he used his inhaler.

‘Me ’ave ah liccle business in Handswort’ to attend to,’ Nunchaks announced. ‘I should be back by de end ah nex’ week. An’ when I reach, if me don’t see de t’ings dat you t’iefed, I’m gonna personally peel your fingers like raw carrot wid my machete to rarted. Y’hear me, yout’?’

‘De t’ings will be back before your ’pon de motorway, man. Considered done.’

Nunchaks glared at Biscuit for five seconds, before reaching into the inside pocket of his coat. He pulled out a polythene bag of top-range cannabis, rubbing the fingers of his free hand together. ‘You ’ave de corn, yout’?’

‘Yeah, course.’

Biscuit took out the wad of notes, totalling £250, from the back pocket of his Farahs and made the exchange. Nunchaks about turned and made his way to the lift, tailed by his minders.

‘By de end ah nex’ week, yout’.’

Biscuit watched them enter the lift and sighed heavily as the door closed. He shuddered at what might have been and tried to get the image of Nunchaks’ lighter dropping to the ground out of his mind. ‘Fuck my days,’ he whispered. ‘Dat was close.’ He felt a ridiculous urge to peer down to the concrete below, but stopped himself. ‘Fuck my days.’ He attempted to compose himself, and after a few minutes of trying to get his breathing together, he decided he would have to step back to the party and alert Coffin Head. ‘Shit! A one mile trod in my crocs.’

He made tentative steps to the lift, afraid that Nunchaks and his crew were lurking about in the shadows. Impatiently, he pressed the button, then wondered if it would be a better idea to run down the concrete steps. Before he made his mind up the lift arrived. He stepped inside, comparing the metal box to a square coffin. On reaching the ground floor, he made a quick check to see who was about before sprinting to Stockwell Tube Station. He remembered the many times he had partied and smoked good herb with his crew in the buildings adjacent to the tower block. Now the place had an altogether different atmosphere. He wondered if this was Nunchaks’ regular site for scaring the shit out of youths. Perhaps he had killed someone here. He looked behind at the great monolith and raised his sight to its highest point. ‘Fuck my days.’ He christened the building mentally, calling it Nunchaks’ killing block.

He turned right into Clapham Road, only too aware of the dangers that might come from any lane, shadow or building, but this was a hazard he had come to accept as a natural aspect of living in the ghetto. He passed a supermarket on his right and noticed ten or so trolleys keeled over on their side. Vandalism touches everything around here, he thought. He pondered on taking a short cut through a council estate but decided against it; he had seen enough council blocks on this night. On his way, he mentally cursed the boarded-up housing, the rubbish on the streets, the graffiti that covered the railway bridges that made up his habitat. Nevertheless, it was home, and he was a part of his environment just as much as the rundown church he now passed by.

Cars were parked and double parked around him as Biscuit heard the music thumping out to greet the morning. Gregory Isaacs’ ‘Soon Forward’ filtered through the snappy Brixton air, the smooth and delicate vocals riding over a slow, murderous bass-line with a one-drop drum.

He knocked on the door of the house, its windows covered by blockboard.

‘Pound fe come in, an’ if you nah have the entrance fee, I will cuss your behind for wasting my time.’

‘Paid my pound already, man. You don’t recognise me?’

‘Don’t boder try fool me. One pound fifty fe come in, especially for you. I don’t like ginall.’

‘Crook your ear, man. I entered de dance wid Nunchaks.’

The doorman thought for a moment.

‘Alright, enter, yout’.’

The stench of Mary Jane made Biscuit’s nostrils flare as he made his way to the jam-packed room he had left with Nunchaks, his sight aided only by a blue light-bulb. Girls were dressed in thin, ankle-length, pleated dresses. Most of them sported hot-combed hairstyles; black sculptured art finished off with lacquer. By this time of night, a generous share of the girls found themselves enveloped by their men, smooching away to the dub version of ‘Soon Forward’. Sweet-bwais were dressed in loose-fitting shirts that were often unbuttoned to reveal gold rope chains. The latest hairstyle was semi-afro which was shampooed and ‘blown out’, giving an appearance of carved black candyfloss. No one calling themselves a sweet-bwai would go to a party without their Farah slacks and reptile skin shoes.

As Biscuit threaded his way to the room in which he’d last seen Coffin Head, the ghetto messenger Yardman Irie grabbed hold of the Crucial Rocker sound system microphone, ready to deliver his sermon. Dressed in green army garb and topped by a black cloth beret, Yardman Irie waited for the selector, Winston, to spin the rabble-rousing instrumental ‘Johnny Dollar’.

‘Crowd ah people, de Private Yardman Irie is ’ere ’pon de scene. Dis one special request to all ghetto foot soldier.’

Me seh life inna Brixton nah easy

Me daddy cannot afford de money fe me tea

Me mudder cannot pay de electricity

12 3 4 5 İz.

East of Acre Lane

Bu kitabı arayanlar okuyor

EAST OF ACRE LANEAlex Wheatle

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

Contents

INTRODUCTION BY PAUL GILROY

1 Heady Heights

EAST OF ACRE LANE
Alex Wheatle