Not long ago, three teenagers boarded the No. 12 bus in south London: Cleo, Mandy, and Mandy’s brother Brian. At the top of her voice, Cleo said: “I’m going to mess someone up on this bus.” And the three of them started robbing passengers.
[ Hi, this is a story I wrote for The Financial Times magazine. ]
Cleo saw an attractive ring on one woman’s finger. She went over and started tugging at it, trying to get it off. In response to this, the woman behaved extremely unusually. She didn’t seem scared, for a start. She said, “You clearly need help.”
She told them she wouldn’t allow them to carry on robbing people and asked them to get off the bus with her. They were scornful, but did as she asked. Then she told them about a place where they could find help.
Most people, encountering such children, would be too wrapped up in fear to venture such a compassionate insight into their antisocial behaviour (nor would that necessarily be recommended).
But the woman with the ring, Suzanne Harding, happened to work for a remarkable children’s charity, Kids Company. As head of education, she was able to guess correctly the dreadful condition of these children’s lives.
As investigations would later show, the children were living together in a dismal home in Camberwell, surviving entirely on their own. There were five of them. Mandy, the second child in her family, looked after the others. (Her father had died of an overdose, her mother was a heavy drug user.) Cleo had moved in with them after her own mother threw her out when she was 12.
They lived without chairs or tables. They shared two broken beds. They had no functioning cupboards, using bin liners instead. Having only three plates, two forks and one spoon, they took turns to eat. Or just used their fingers to scoff items they had stolen from supermarkets and high street bakers.
When they weren’t robbing bus passengers, they often picked on people their own age, seeming friendly, taking them around a quiet corner, then grabbing their belongings. Sometimes they robbed drunks in the West End. For fun, they jumped on trains and went to the seaside. But they stopped going to Brighton after one of their friends was raped there. None had attended school for a very long time.
Perhaps predictably, their response to Suzanne’s offer of help was abusive. “No one can cope with us,” they boasted.
All the same, they came to have a look at the place she described. They found cosy nooks and chairs covered in drapes. There were kitchens, an office and art rooms. Children of all ages ran around or sat quietly, alone or in pairs to play or to read. Here and there, adults stood chatting with them.
To Mandy, Brian and Cleo, this seemed a wonderful opportunity for creating mayhem. Shouting and swearing, they opened all the doors and overturned all the tables. They threw all the books off the bookshelves.
Having done that, they went away. Over the following days and weeks they came back and did much the same, again and again. But one day they arrived covered in blood, after somebody was shot in front of them. They were shaking and scared and hungry…
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I’ll send the next part tomorrow.
Thanks for being here.
JPF