Dispatches From a Dilettante (11 page)

The social workers batted first and were mightily annoyed at three contentious LBW decisions had gone against them together with a highly dubious catch by our wicket keeper which dismissed their final batsman. They had some justification as I was the wicketkeeper who had failed to alert the umpire that the wonderful diving catch, taken by me to dismiss their familiar looking last man in, had in fact bounced just before I scooped it up. I was opening the batting after the tea break and strode out to the crease with a little muted encouragement from watching boys and a couple of sniggers.

Their opening fast bowler seemed to be pacing out a very long run up and duly delivered a bouncer of venom and pace which nearly decapitated me. There was no let up, despite protestations from out captain that this was a ‘friendly’. It was only after the third consecutive bouncer that I realised the bowler was the recent purchaser of my ailing Alfa Romeo. He had been in possession of it for a week which seemed, from his nakedly aggressive demeanour, to have given him enough time to realise its numerous faults. Amazingly I had a recurrence of an old leg injury, was recorded as ‘retired injured’ in the scorebook and, to avoid scepticism from colleagues, I had to limp around for the next two days.

The requirement to work every third weekend was not optional and it was hard to work out whether the boys, or the staff on duty, were most depressed. The gloom was lifted occasionally by trips out. Driving back from one such visit to York where the boys had, after strict admonition, been given the last half hour to themselves, I was overtaken by an agitated driver who swerved in front of me just before a set of traffic lights which were on red. This gave him the chance to get out of his car, rush up to my window and accuse the boys of stealing stock from his Arts and Crafts shop. We agreed to drive to a visible parking spot ahead to sort it out. In the thirty seconds it took to do that the boys howled their innocence in such an authentic manner that I too was convinced that a mistake had occurred. The shop owner was not to be placated until the boys and the vehicle were searched which in order to get back in time for tea, I agreed to.

To mine, and the boys’ relief, nothing was found despite a painstakingly thorough search. This allowed me to curry favour with them by making the man apologise. He grudgingly did so and I further berated him for further lowering the self esteem of vulnerable boys. We arrived back for tea and I mentioned to the colleague who was using the bus that evening that I thought there may be a slow puncture in the rear offside tyre. Rather than risk it he decided to change the tyre there and then. I was half way through what passed for dessert when he motioned me to come outside. Ingeniously crammed in the spare tyre bay slung beneath the bus was a tray of expensive looking ethnic jewellery.

We both understood the implications of having made this discovery. Many of the boys were used to police interrogation of a much more vigorous nature than any we might attempt and the time for that had passed. I had failed to note the address of the shop owned by the accuser or take his details and, shamefully as it was by now eight o’clock on a Sunday evening, I wanted to get home. However redress was made three weeks later. I had kept the jewellery with a plan in mind. After a little bit of research I was pretty sure that the contraband must have come from one of three shops and some further casual conversations over the next few days in school meant I had narrowed down the potential culprits to three boys. Ensuring that the three suspects were on board for my next trip to York, I stopped the van outside an Arts and Crafts Shop. I could tell by the surreptitious glances they gave to each other that I had lucked out straight away. Producing the jewellery from the glove compartment I instructed them to go in and give it back to the owner who I was confident would be pleasantly stunned and let the matter drop.

What I had failed to factor in my planning was the fact that the shop had changed hands in this period and woman behind the counter thought that she was being offered stolen goods by scruffy looking young thugs. She was correct in her assumption that the jewellery was stolen but would not buy into the truthful rationale for its attempted return. They eventually found a home in an Oxfam shop and several life lessons had been learned but not by the people who should have been learning them.

If there were advantages to be gained from having a restless nature and therefore constantly changing jobs/careers it was that I had the opportunity to meet and work with an incredibly diverse group of people, from those living in extreme poverty to power obsessed politicians. Many politicians in the past had often tested their theories about justice, policing and social equality in real jobs. Despite the padded out CVs of the current crop, this rarely is the case today.

Down in Sparkbrook, one of Birmingham’s most deprived inner city wards and my next port of call, political chicanery was something that I came up against on a regular basis. Mostly politicians emerged with very little credit but there were a couple of exceptions who displayed integrity when the chips were down during what was to prove an exhilarating two years.

8.
DOWN IN THE RIOT ZONE - BIRMINGHAM 1984-1986

Machiavelli said that “The innovator has for enemies those who profit from the existing system and lukewarm friends among those who may profit from the new” which was why the hundred and fifty acres in Sparkbrook that was about to become my workplace had been derelict for years. It was the former home of the once world famous BSA (Birmingham Small Arms) motor bike factory and the focal point for work in the area. Nowadays it would be called a ‘brownfield’ site with all the implicit potential that phrase is supposed to engender, but in the nineteen eighties it was just called a dump.

The Council, thanks to constant prompting from an old school honest toiler of a local politician called Jim Eames had formed a charity called The Ackers Trust, given them the land for a peppercorn rent, and appointed a Director to ‘develop leisure and recreational facilities for the community’. In doing this jobs were supposed to be created and income eventually generated. The first Director ran out of steam after couple of years and his single legacy was a small nature reserve which local schoolchildren infrequently visited to deposit their soft drinks cans and chip paper. Finding the stress of working in a tough area more than he could cope with, he could hardly bail out quickly enough.

It would be flattering to relate that I became the second Director after being head hunted for my track record, resilience, strategic vision and all round brilliance but the truth was much more mundane. There were plenty of applications when the post was advertised, but very few of quality and I probably got the job because I knew a well respected and connected principal of a local college. Having uprooted family – again, it was strange to arrive on the site for my first day to find no one there, no activity and actually nothing to do.

There was the dilapidated old BSA social club which was still ticking over in the evening as a drinking den, a one acre plot where a ‘Peace Fountain’ had been commissioned but not built, and acres and acres of rubble with the nature reserve in the distance.

I walked round aimlessly an for a while and then, for want of something better to do, went to the local hospital to where Councillor Jim Eames was having his prostate gland removed. Quite understandably after doing his best to look pleased at my arrival he didn’t seem overly concerned about the conspicuous lack of welcome for the incoming Director. He was a ‘hands off’ kind of a guy, and an astute local operator with a good heart. He possessed an incredible talent for becoming invisible whenever there was trouble, which in the first few months was often.

The vision for the hundred and fifty acres of The Ackers Trust specifically included a Social Centre with classroom facilities, football pitches, a climbing wall a ski slope and a Canoe Centre, as the Grand Union canal ran through a corner of the site. All this was eventually achieved - but not without money troubles, fist fights, riots, brinkmanship, and burglaries

I became quite an expert on Weils disease (look it up) and water quality. I looked knowingly at architects’ drawings and sometimes they were the right way up. I recruited people for their doggedness rather than degrees. For the first two weeks I was the sole alarm key holder of the social club and was called out in the middle of the night by police four times after burglaries. It was low rent crime because there wasn’t much to pinch inside the seedy bar with adjoining old snooker room, but it was spooky going in there at two o’clock in the morning.

Ceebert Gibbs was the barman who returned from holiday and took the keys back. When I say holiday, he had actually stayed at home during his vacation period and confided in me that he had not left Birmingham since arriving there twenty years ago from Dominica. He was a tall gentle, kind and patient man who didn’t drink, and a less likely barman would be hard to imagine. He kept a Bible by the till on the bar, and as custom there had slowed to a handful of people on the four evenings a week it was open, Ceebert has plenty of time for Bible study.

Almost all the dwindling band of customers were hard men and dedicated drinkers but they respected Ceebert and instinctively knew that it would be a cheap trick to abuse his trustworthy nature. One exception was a teenager who drank there illegally and persuaded him to leave the bar untended for a couple of minutes. It was only at the end of the evening that Ceebert noticed that the keys to the building had gone. Clearly the lad was planning a break in which would have been one of the dumbest ever. I was again called from home at midnight.

The police were not remotely interested in attending but I knew where David Clark, who was the would be thief, lived. His mother who was still up drinking when I called said that he was miles away at his girlfriend’s flat. After a long drive across town and several failed attempts, I located the girl’s flat in a manky looking sixties tower block. It was by now two thirty in the morning. Lights were on and, having somewhat nervously knocked on the door, I was surprised to have it instantly opened by the chief suspect.

He denied all knowledge of the whereabouts of the keys, changed his story mid sentence and then disappeared for a moment. Without apology or any degree of sheepishness he then returned jangling the keys he’d denied having and handed them over. Displaying monumental ‘front’ he declared that as he just finished with his girlfriend minutes previously he would now like a lift back with me to his mother’s house near the Ackers Trust. I was so stunned and exhausted that I meekly said ‘Go on then’.

I received not a word of thanks as we walked in silence down the stairwell to my car. There was though an unspoken quid pro quo after that evening and David never drank at the bar again. Eighteen months later he had become a father and soon after started as a volunteer member of staff on the newly opened climbing wall.

In the eighties, both indoor and outdoor climbing walls were only dotted around the country at a few locations. The outdoor structure proposed for the Ackers Trust was to be the largest in the UK but it almost never got built. Funding was obtained, plans drawn up and approved. I confidently waited for the final assent needed to start the work, knowing that everything required to get the go ahead was in place.

What followed exemplified the petty posturing of local politicians, one of whom attempted to invoke some long forgotten by- law in order to stop the project going ahead. At the eleventh hour he suggested that, as the climbing wall was potentially dangerous, there should be a wall built around the wall so to speak which would act as a barrier to access.

The mental picture of local youths illegally scaling the outer wall without insurance and unsupervised to get the ‘inner’ wall where there would be equipment and supervision, stayed with me for a long time. It delayed the project for weeks but, after some serious lobbying, planning permission was finally granted and a creative grand opening was planned.

Recovering alcoholic and former international footballer Jimmy Greaves had recently been hired by the local TV station to do different stunts every week. He would paraglide, canoe down rapids and attempt other adrenalin related escapades in what was becoming a successful personal reinvention on television. After a bit of discussion with Gary Newbon who fronted the programme, and a site visit, Jimmy Greaves was signed up to do a climb for the opening of the wall. Channel Four had just screened a tremendous documentary with top climber Ron Fawcett in the Verdun Gorge and we got him to come as the ‘expert’. Two climbing instructors Dave Stewart and Vinnie Middleton had been hired and both were strong personalities who shared a wicked sense of humour.

Sunny skies on the opening day and the presence of the TV cameras meant that there was quite a crowd as the opening ceremony started. Predictably the same councillors who had objected to the wall being built were forcing themselves in front of radio and TV microphones to talk about their commitment to the regeneration of the area and support for the great work going on at the ‘Ackers’. With the exception of Jim Eames not one of them had visited the place before.

As someone who has tried climbing, lacked talent and was paralysed by fear, I still love to study the experts in action. Watching a full climb with the strength, delicate balance and timing required for most moves is so like watching ballet in many respects. Brute strength is not enough as subtle use of muscle has to be combined with fast and slow movements which require incredibly developed hand eye co-ordination. At the top level, and while operating at altitude, fear has to be managed in order for athletic prowess to be fully utilised. Ron Fawcett specialised in free climbing i.e. climbing at great height and tacking technically difficult pitches without ropes or any other equipment. Climbing the sixty foot wall at the Ackers was, for him, a doddle.

The plan was that Jimmy Greaves, all roped up for safety, would be coaxed up the wall by our two staff, Vinnie and Dave. Ron Fawcett was going to be waiting at the top with a pair of scissors which he would hand to the all conquering Jimmy Greaves when he made it to the summit. A ribbon would be cut to cue applause from the throng gathered below.