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Mario and Nini |
Coming of age in a dangerous world
A new film offers a chilling insight into the lives of young boys growing up in north London, writes Paul Keilthy
LOVE will get you killed, that’s all I know,” says Mario, one of two boys whose childhood in the streets and schools of Camden and Westminster – and in the constant shadow of gang violence and death – is captured in a new and damning documentary.
Director Chloe Ruthven is a film-maker and teacher who met Mario and Nini (we do not need to know their surnames) when she was giving part-time extra tuition to nine-year-olds who had fallen behind at George Elliot primary school in St John’s Wood.
She took a camera to her sessions with the boys as a teaching aid: “The camera, I said, was like another person who can listen without judgment” – and the five-year project took shape, following the boys to their secondary school, Quintin Kynaston, and to the housing estates in Swiss Cottage and Kilburn where they live. She says the film charts their “perilous journey towards adulthood, coming of age in a dangerous world”.
As fresh-faced nine-year-olds the boys have difficulty reading but can recite gangsta rap without a hitch; by their early teens they are brooding and angry. Here is a 12-year-old describing “switching” from calm into rage: “Every human being has switching, you can’t take it away, it’s like war: even if you stop it, it will start again.”
War, combat, death – it is tempting to think that these boys are casting a twisted glamour on their lives, reflected from American gangsta culture. Camden cannot be like this, surely? But then the boys take the camera and conduct an interview between themselves:
Mario: “How do you feel about the murders in your area?”
Nini: “Well, after the first few murders, I felt quite scared to walk around on my own in my area. If people are going to get shot in the streets, anything could happen to me. When the fourth person, my friend, died, I stopped to think ‘what is my area turning into?’ People dying for no reason at all. He got stabbed six times in the back… over a fake £20 and a panel on a moped.” At this point the boys are 12; Nini is describing the murder in 2006 of 18-year-old Tommy Winston in Kentish Town by his childhood friend.
Later the boys are encouraged to make their own documentary. Asked what their subject will be they unhesitatingly opt for crime.
Their camera carries us to the underground car parks, the secluded staircases, the annexed playgrounds of their estates, where they solemnly garner the wisdom of pixilated “olders” – gang members of perhaps 19:
“Most of these niggers on the streets, they ain’t got no hope, they don’t know where they’re going. Crime is a career for them,” says one.
“Heads try and rob you, heads try and try it, heads think they’re big. So, like, you gotta protect yourself out there.”
This isn’t Philadelphia or Baltimore or even Harlesden or Brixton: this is Kilburn and St John’s Wood. If they listened hard they could probably hear the sound of leather on willow at Lord’s; instead they hear “olders” trotting out the facile rationale of gangsta life: “If you see us with money, walking around with nice girls, nice cars, you lot automatically want that as well.”
Mario and Nini are not stupid; they show no sign of falling for this stuff, but neither do they challenge the belief systems of violent, bigger boys.
Like the people they film, they are products of a schooling and housing system that has struggled to teach them how to read but has taught them how to survive on the street: they never snitch, they don’t get caught, they don’t stray from their own area.
In a bleak film, positives are tentative. Tufnell Park-based director Chloe Ruthven takes the boys to the country for an old-fashioned camping trip. Staggered by rural friendliness, Mario and Nini are shown stripping off the layers of street defiance and rediscovering childlike wonder: making fires, saying hello to strangers in the lanes, acting their true age. But as they drive back into Kilburn they reapply their battle-faces, angry at their environment but unable to change it: “Children at the age of 10 are getting robbed by 16-year-olds – how pathetic is that?” asks Mario.
Mario came for an interview at the New Journal’s office last week. He stopped on the brink of getting involved in serious crime and is now resolved to follow a career in the army.
He says he was “foot deep”, not “knee deep” in trouble before he turned the corner: “I‘ve done stuff that I’m not proud of like everyone’s done. I didn’t want to be stuck on that road, in that situation.”
The most powerful moment in the film is when a 13 year-old Mario, face creasing with anger and frustration, describes his inner turmoil: “It’s all crammed inside and I just explode and want to batter someone, batter them, fuck them up. It’s all the hate, cos I don’t try and show no hate, I always try and show love – but love will get you killed, that’s all I know.”
Now 15, Mario is proud of the film and has a rueful perspective on life in Rowley Way. Childhood, he says, ends at “about 10”; but with sympathetic teachers at Quintin Kynaston helping his ambitions in drama and the military, he is looking forward, full of hope and determination.
But the streets don’t release their hold that easily. He does not walk through Queen’s Crescent or Gospel Oak alone because gangs in those areas have a “beef” with gangs in his patch. He is stopped and searched by police “all the time”. And when two teenagers were shot and one pistol-whipped in an unsolved gang incident in Rowley Way in July, Mario heard the shots, saw the stretcher bearers take away the wounded, had police tape across his front step. “I know them,” he says. “London is a cold place. You know that you are more likely to get stabbed in London than you are to get shot in Afghanistan.”
We should all see this film for its insight into a Camden childhood.
As one of the boys says on their documentary’s voiceover: “In conclusion, the streets of London are fucked up.”
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