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The cover is almost comically off-putting. A very soignee woman with meticulously coiffed hair and a shiny silk shirt looks out at the reader, arms crossed, with a self- confident, knowing air.
Behind her, in the dark middle distance, lurk half-a-dozen hoodies, all hunched up, their faces shielded from view, and, behind them, a gloomy mass of grey tower blocks.
It looks as if Penelope Keith has accidentally wandered on to the set of The Wire. And the book’s subtitle, My Years With A Teenage Gang, further adds to the impression that this is a book by Lady Bountiful about her afternoons spent popping across the river armed with a picnic hamper filled with nutritious scraps to throw to those simply darling little hoodies.
Guns 'n' poses: Harriet Sergeant with two of the gang on a trip to the Imperial War MuseumThis impression is not, it must be said, wholly inaccurate. Harriet Sergeant is not the usual type of media commentator who hangs out with street gangs. She is so posh, and lived such a rarefied life, that before embarking on this project she had never met anyone who was a single mother.
She works for the Centre for Policy Studies, the Right-wing (or, as they put it, ‘Right-of-centre’) think-tank which has, in years gone by, been dutiful in coming up with intellectual and philosophical reasons for why the very rich should be allowed to get even richer.
Sergeant first met her gang of South London hoodies in 2008 when she was writing a report on why so many white working-class and black Caribbean boys were, as she says, ‘failing to make the transition to a successful adult life’. Like many researchers, she came armed with all sorts of depressing statistics, but with no personal experience of those she was writing about.
She was initially introduced to the gang in question by a reformed robber called Jerome, who now worked in a local community centre. They were all around the age of 15. ‘Everyone who bumps into us says sorry,’ boasted their leader, Tuggy Tug.
Tuggy Tug proved vociferous, but his English patois was so extreme that Sergeant couldn’t understand half of what he had to say. So Jerome agreed to translate, and the book that has emerged from their encounters is peppered with bracketed translations.
‘Obviously I wanna touch leg man and what comes from that blud and how easy it is to make that,’ says Tuggy Tug at one point, handily followed by Sergeant’s own rendition: ‘He wants to make money legitimately and enjoy everything that comes from living within the law.’
Harriet Sergeant is not the usual type of media commentator who hangs out with street gangsTuggy Tug and his gang made their money from mugging. As she drove away from that first meeting, at which she seemed to be making a bit of headway, Jerome told her that Tuggy Tug ‘had “clocked” my watch and suggested in the newsagent’s they “bang” me and steal it. “Well,” shrugged Jerome, “he wants £1,000 to buy a Smart car. He sees stealing your watch as a career move.” ’
But after a few more meetings, all of them pretty edgy, she becomes increasingly confident that she will not be their next victim. They clearly like being the subject of her attention, as well as enjoying the odd meal or pair of trainers she gives them. Also, as Tuggy Tug points out, they never target the white middle class, because then the police start taking an interest. ‘We touch you, it’s a jail sentence,’ he explains.
Before long, her interest in these boys begins to shift from the academic to the maternal. ‘Will you adopt us?’ one of them asks, and she realises he is only half joking. ‘I felt like Mrs Darling overwhelmed by Lost Boys.’
They begin to see her almost as one of them, and even offer to have anything stolen for her, asking if she needs ‘any kind of drugs or perhaps someone mashed up? Or maybe a Disability Parking Permit?’
The more she sees them, the fonder she grows. She becomes, she says, ‘like a proud mother, forever talking about them and boring my friends’. Her son notices that she has their photos, not his, on her mobile phone, and asks why.
She teaches Tuggy Tug how to floss his teeth. She accompanies him to court. She sticks up for him when a magistrate says something dismissive. She barracks the manager of a shop who accuses him of stealing. She takes him and his gang on expeditions to Tate Modern and the British Museum.
At the Imperial War Museum, she tells them about the young men, only a little older than them, who fought the Battle of Britain. Tuggy Tug listens amazed. ‘Behaviour that now led to prison, then would have won him adulation and a place in history.’
Over the next three years, she witnesses the way the lives of her privately educated son and the barely literate Tuggy Tug diverge. ‘Where my son’s opened wide with opportunities, Tuggy Tug’s closed down.’
She feels her previous moral certainties falter. ‘I could not make sense of it. I hated crime. I was unprepared to find goodness in criminals. My moral preconceptions were being shot all over the place.’
Her own parents had been viciously mugged by a gang very similar to Tuggy Tug’s, yet she was now able to see the world through his eyes. ‘Here was a boy the same age as my son waking up in the morning hungry. Here was a boy robbing because he did not get enough to eat. How could this Dickensian world of crime and hunger exist in our welfare state?’
For all her empathy, Sergeant feels sure she is in no danger of becoming a liberal. In fact, she despises the liberals she meets along the way. These include the ‘concerned’ documentary-maker who ‘talked about institutional racism, but, apart from a Nigerian poet, did not know any black people’ and the bossy woman from Children’s Services who is more interested in checking Sergeant’s credentials (‘Have you had a CRB check and what are your qualifications for working with youth?’) than in answering her questions.
Yet I think she does, against her instincts, turn liberal in one regard: by the end, she feels that individuals are shaped by society, and that, consequently, society is largely to blame for poverty and crime. ‘We are turning a large number of potentially decent young men into misfits and criminals,’ she says.
She remains solidly conservative, however, in her conviction that the welfare state – inefficient, overblown, disempowering and cowardly – is to blame. Richard Taylor, the father of Damilola Taylor, who was killed at the age of ten by a teenage gang in 2000, has described the ‘catalogue of failures’ that led to his son’s death as ‘failures by the system to keep young people in school and off the streets, failure to prevent them from committing crime, failure by their mentors to give good direction and failure by the authorities to catch them sooner’.
Sergeant agrees with this catalogue, but emphasises the failure of the education system. Of the 6,000 young people who leave care every year, 4,500 have no educational qualifications whatsoever. Nearly half the prison population has a reading ability below an 11-year-old’s. For her, these people are the victims of the education system’s sheepish reluctance to enforce the civilised values that originally gave it birth. ‘If a society wants its youth to share its beliefs then it has to have the confidence to articulate those values with authority.’
You shouldn’t judge this book by its cover. Harriet Sergeant is no frothy Lady Bountiful. She shares George Orwell’s clarity and integrity and his readiness to mix with those he seeks to understand. Among The Hoods is a book written in anger, but born of patience and concern. It would be a terrible shame if it were dismissed as another reactionary rant. Those on the Left, Right and centre could all learn from it. In fact, if they refuse to learn from it, another generation of marginalised youngsters will surely be doomed.
