Just the other week, the government of Trinidad and Tobago sentenced ten men to the gallows. They were charged with the execution of a drug lord named Thackoor Boodram, whose brother Dole Chadee was himself hanged by the neck until dead for murdering an entire family because the head of the household did not pay a drug bill on time. Chadee was among nine men who were hanged over four days in 1999. This time, the number has risen to ten. Both the state and the people are involved in mass murder. None shall escape, all are consumed.

Those islands and the state of Guyana are trapped in this cycle of unending violence. Literally, there are children with guns. The whole Boodram family moved into the tiny village where I grew up, and from where I won a scholarship to one of the leading grammar schools on the island. They transformed it into a hell-hole. One of my younger brothers was released from a four-year sentence in a local prison only weeks ago. The word "hit" has gained a new meaning. Any serious problem, and members of the middle classes, who can afford the fees, pay for some gangster to administer justice.

I went to the funeral of a dear friend, Indian Joe, a few days ago. We grew up as young men in Port of Spain, the Trinidadian capital. It was the late 1950s and early 1960s, and we lived in a world of gangs implanted through the cinema, directly from America. We were "good fellas" in a sea of unemployment and mild debauchery. Indian Joe and I were renegades who looked overseas for salvation - to America or Britain.

On the evening following the funeral, a voice shouted from the street, "Colonel, Colonel", which is a nickname used among a small group of my friends. I went to the door directly from the bathroom with a towel wrapped round my waist. Neil stood on the pavement and announced that Carlton was dead, shot in the chest, after two blasts from a pistol. It was a robbery. He was on his way home at one in the morning, inches away from his door, in the company of a friend. Two masked young men came up to him and demanded money. The friend ran off. Carlton emptied his pocket of 12 Trinidadian dollars, equivalent to £1.40. The bandits blew him away. Carlton died with ten dollars in one hand and two dollars in the other.

He was born in that street with his brothers and sisters, all of whom toddled along the pavement, their hands in the steel grip of their grandmother, Ella, who was of Spanish origin and came from Venezuela.

Carlton and I struck up a friendship quite early. He had an unusually soft voice, not that torrid scream you often find in the ghetto. He was always immaculately clean, his clothes sharply pressed. I remember that every seam was in place the day he began his apprenticeship, when we walked the street together to the National Electricity Board. I was on holiday from school, and daily I'd meet him and walk with him to work. I was curious about this business called "apprenticeship" and what was involved. We became very good friends, part of a gang called Renegades, with its headquarters in Basilon Street, the same street where he eventually died. He loved my sister to bits and I would carry messages to and fro.

I came to London; he went to New York. But he did not wish to serve in the US army during the Vietnam war. He returned to Trinidad. He remained a loner, with that quiet voice of his and that winning smile.

I detail the social character because, when someone like Carlton dies, it tells you that a society has sunk into an almost irretrievable morass of violent behaviour. His murderers may have fallen from the womb of someone who knew him or who followed his footsteps from the day he was born. They could have been the grandchildren of his friends.

No one expects the police to do anything about it. I phoned a friend in the police force who simply explained: "He was in the wrong place at the wrong time." The Caribbean is reduced to an eye for a lingering eye and a molar for a tenacious molar.

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