Knives
“Everywhere I look people are enjoying knives”- Bart Simpson
Yes, everywhere I look people are enjoying knives. On the radio, on television, in the newspapers, on social media, people are talking about knives and many of them are using the (god forgive me for stooping to this awful language) debate around knives and knife crime to further their personal and political ambitions. Boris Johnson, his controllers and minions are beginning to position themselves for a general election and already enjoying the benefits of attaching themselves to the good old Tory ‘tough on crime’ banner. There is a large picture of a knife right at the centre of the notional flag they are waving.
I tell people I grew up in Stoneybatter, it’s an area in the North Inner city of Dublin that people, at least Dublin people, know, so it’s good short hand. Actually, I grew up just beside Stoneybatter in an area between Arbour Hill, the Quays and the North Circular Road. It was basically made up of O’Devaney Gardens (the flats) and Montpelier Gardens (the cottages). It was one of the first areas to be affected when heroin started coming into Dublin in the late-seventies (that’s the 1970’s) and by the mid-eighties when I was arriving at my teenage years it was essentially run by the drug. So there was crime…
….AND THERE WERE KNIVES.
The first time I had an encounter involving a knife I think I was about eleven or twelve years old. It was in The ‘Milo” a bit of a field at the back of the old Bricin’s Barracks at the end of my road. I was playing there with a friend who was a couple of years younger when another kid maybe a couple of years older than me approached us with a knife and demanded whatever money we might have. I don’t think we had any money or we might have had fifty pence between us or something but we weren’t going to hand anything over. We were scared to just walk past him and he was scared to use the knife so a sort of stand-off began. It was almost immediately not about the money, it was about losing face. He could not let us go and I was not going to give in under any circumstances. We stood like that for a long time. So long that my older sister came looking for me. She took command of the situation simply demanding that my friend and I come home with her right then. We walked by the other boy, past the knife in his hand and that moment was not pleasant.
We didn’t tell anyone about it. It didn’t seem that big a deal.
The second time I had dealings of this sort with a knife still feels like it almost doesn’t count because it was a joke. It was between classes in school. It was in first or second year. The boy behind me gripped my arms and the boy in front stabbed me in the chest with a small, cheap penknife. The blade was so weak that it hit my breastbone and bent so that it took a sort of slice of bacon off the area rather that penetrating. I went to the toilets and did my best to clean up the blood. It really didn’t bleed much at all. It made a small dark stain on the front of my grey school shirt. I cannot remember how I explained that away to my mother. And my mother would have noticed because…
I HAD A NICE CHILDHOOD. I had great parents and a great sister. (Still do) My father happened to be in the Garda (police) and work in the same area we lived (crazy) so there was always that feeling of being at one remove. When your father has locked up some of the neighbours it can make for some tension. We were (are) working class but we were doing reasonably well on a policeman’s salary. There were more and more of our neighbours with no work or who had never worked. We didn’t have a car or a telephone for many years but we went on holiday every year. I had lots of relatives living close by. It was a strange mix of the imagined innocence of the 50’s and the real high crime/ high joblessness situation of inner city communities at that time. (These sorts of problems have been moved out to the suburbs now I notice as the places people like I grew up in have been depopulated.) Add in the weird, sinister, repressive influence of Irish Roman Catholicism and I remember being a remarkably immature young man in many ways but one who was very familiar with violence. Again, not at home but pretty much everywhere else.
The third incident I want to talk about is the most serious. It happened when I was in my late teens. I was walking home from somewhere about ten or eleven at night. I was heading down Arbour Hill, three men were heading up the street towards me. They looked like junkies and I was ready for trouble. As we meet one asked me if I had the time. This is a common way to distract someone so that you can assault them so I immediately looked for the attack. And it came. One of the other two lunged at my throat with a knife. Not a little pen knife; a large, nasty, kill-you-fucking-dead knife. It grazed my throat, on the right side. I can still feel it now and I can tell you exactly where it touched. I lashed out with a fist and made contact with something and burst past them. I ran home as fast as I could (‘Ar nòs na gaoithe’- as we would write in essays in Irish for school)
Anyway, I got home. I didn’t tell anyone about it. I looked in a mirror and discovered that I only had a faint red mark on my neck. I went to bed. I slept very well. I woke in the morning, got out of bed and my legs went from under me. I sat on the bed. Took a few minutes and got on with my life. I didn’t tell anybody. I saw those guys a couple of times afterwards. They didn’t do anything; nor did I. I DIDN’T THINK IT WAS ALL THAT IMPORTANT.
If you think I’m being facetious I am, a little. It is important to understand that when you grow up around something it becomes normal, it doesn’t have that sense of horror and you talk and think and feel about it in all the ways you do about anything else with which you are familiar. I lived in a place and at a time that happened to be fairly rough. Being the son of policeman and basically having a financially safe and stable family meant I was insulated from a lot of bad things; I saw them happening all round me but mostly they didn’t touch me too closely. It also put a bit of a target on my back and probably sent a bit more violence my way over the years but the main point I guess I am trying to make is I know how easy it is for children to grow up thinking anything is normal. There was a level of violence and knife crime that I just didn’t find shocking as a youth. I talk to people I meet in my life now and sometimes forget myself and tell a story and get reminded quickly by the looks of horror on their faces that not everybody grows up the same way.
So we are talking about knife crime a lot lately in Britain and I have some feelings (more than thoughts) on the subject. You don’t change things from the ‘top’ down. You change the environment children are growing up in and behaviour will change. Children are not stupid and they are not evil they see the world immediately around them and they respond to it. If everything they see tells them violence is a normal everyday thing they will adapt to that.
The place I grew up has changed a lot now. Actually, it’s a lot more dead. O’Devaney Gardens is being demolished. The area has been half-gentrified. The problems I witnessed growing up have been moved somewhere else (if you life there you know where). When I was young I remember noticing that there were no bins on the streets where I lived. You had to walk a long way to get to the first one. I felt that sort of summed up how we were viewed- THEY thought if we had rubbish bins we won’t use them, or we’d set them on fire.
I noticed that when I was young and I felt that just maybe I would burn a fucking bin just to spite THEM. I still feel a little bit that way. It’s not helpful.
Maybe there is a place for longer sentences for knife crime and more prison places, maybe it will somehow help to extend stop and search to anyone who looks like they live in the place where they live…, maybe but you’ll never deal with the problem until you deal with the causes: jobs, health, education; opportunities for work and for beauty. That’s slow work and hard work and the Daily Mail won’t like it. It won’t get you votes. It’ll just make things better.
But we all know Boris Johnson and his like don’t care. The likes of me were never any threat to him. I know, I know I grew up in Ireland not the Uk but “Dublin, Dundee, Humberside…” and all that.
If that one knife that one night had cut my throat people like Johnson won’t give a damn. If I had decided to carry a knife to feel safe after that, people like him would build a prison cell for me. Knife crime is an issue he can use to get votes and, the thing is, he’ll get them.
Update of sorts- This episode of Darren Harriott’s Black Label on the BBC is both funny and relevant: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0006tm8