Sour: My Story - Part 1 of 3: A troubled girl from a broken home. The Brixton gang she nearly died for. The baby she fought to live for.

By Tracey Miller and Lucy Bannerman

Sour can either be read as a full-length eBook or in 3 serialised eBook-only parts.

This is PART 1 of 3.

They call me Sour. The opposite of sweet. Shanking, stabbing, 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 is the true story of a former Brixton gang girl, drug dealer and full-time criminal. A member of the Younger 28s, a notorious gang that terrorised the postcodes around Brixton in the 90s, Sour escapes a troubled family life to immerse herself in the street life of likking and linking. She never leaves her house without a knife. At the age of fifteen, she stabs an innocent man in the street, earning her unrivalled respect and ‘Top-Dog’ status amongst her crew. She believes she is invincible.

But the consequences of her actions are soon to catch up with her. Waking for the second time in two weeks in a hospital bed, to the news that she is pregnant, she realises it’s time to turn her life around. Motherhood will be a rude awakening, but it may also be her saving grace.

Told with raw emotions and ferocious honesty, this is the real, on-the-record, story of one woman’s descent down the rabbit hole of gangland, and her efforts, as a daughter, mother and girlfriend, to claw herself out.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins UK
• Release date: Aug 28, 2014
• ISBN: 9780007576944

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Copyright

Certain details in this book, including names, places and dates, have been changed to protect those concerned. Some events have been dramatised

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First published by HarperElement 2014

FIRST EDITION

© Tracey Miller and Lucy Bannerman 2014

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available from the British Library

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Cover photograph © Kazunori Nagashima/Getty Images (posed by model)

Tracey Miller and Lucy Bannerman assert the moral

right to be identified as the authors of this work

A catalogue record for this book is

available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007565047

Ebook Edition © August 2014 ISBN: 9780007576944

Version 2014-07-29

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Mum and Dad

The Estate

Gangland

Islam

I’m Gonna Be a Name

Dick Shits

Steaming

Real Gangs

Meeting the Youngers

Welcome to the Younger 28s

The Secret

Entertainment

High Life

Kitchen Drawer

Mysteries

Moving Memoirs eNewsletter

About the Publisher

Acknowledgements

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.

Introduction

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.

Mum and Dad

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, as all those suited-and-tied BBC broadcasters like to call ’em, she always shakes her head and mutters, Yuh pickney haffi learn to rass.

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.