Urban Grimshaw and the Shed Crew
Bernard Hare Sceptre, 311pp, £14.99
ISBN 0340837349
A flaw in much modern memoir is the discrepancy between form and content. The people who know how to write seem to inhabit a world that is not interesting to read about. Middle-class experience gets documented in all its humdrum guises, often very elegantly, but seldom with many surprises. Meanwhile, elsewhere, the drama of lives untouched by literary finesse - or even literacy - goes largely unreported.
Urban Grimshaw and the Shed Crew is an exception. It is a book about a group of delinquent children who live, literally, in a shed in Leeds. On the run from care homes and the courts, surviving on drugs and sex and crime, simultaneously abandoned and persecuted, they are what the tabloids would call "feral". It is impos-sible to think of any group more urgently deserving of a proper biography. And yet I was worried about the author. Bernard Hare used to be a social worker. What a shame it would be, I thought, if this book were to read like a social services report. I needn't have worried. Urban Grim-shaw and the Shed Crew is a gripping, vivid and deeply affecting piece of work.
Urban Grimshaw is a 12-year-old boy whose mother is an alcoholic, addicted to heroin and "ever so slightly schizophrenic". Her six children are all in care, but Urban keeps running away from the home, hiding out in a shed with ten other boys and girls in similar circumstances. Calling themselves the Shed Crew, they sniff glue and gas, smoke dope, have sex and steal cars. They cannot read or write, yet they speak a language so intricately customised as to necessitate a glossary at the beginning of the book. As with any language, the vocabulary is instructive. "Mispering": to become a missing person; "dirty digger": intravenous drug use; "bolties": bolt-croppers; "koompartoo": a fresh start; "Jimmy's": St James's University Hospital, Leeds.
The author met Urban during a brief relationship with his mother. The romance ended; a bond had been struck with the boy, however, and Hare, then 37, found himself drawn into Urban's chaotic world in a muddled role of surrogate father and over-aged Shed Crew member. Hare's own life was finely poised between legitimacy and exclusion. The working-class son of a miner, he had qualified as a social worker, but a combination of political disenchantment, drink and drugs had left him a marginalised figure - highly erudite and creative, but angry with "the system", and partial to the occasional heroin binge. When he met Urban, he was running a "dodgy man-and-van service" and helping out at a local chess club.
The book records the two years Hare spent with the Shed Crew, from 1996 to 1998. The narrative is explosive, if predic-table: violence, promiscuity, pregnancy, prison, the inevitable progression from glue to heroin. But Hare's relationship with the children forms the startling sub-narrative: a tender story of how the only grown-up in their lives, who was neither a nonce nor an authority, won their trust. He taught them to read and encouraged them to write poetry - yet went shop- lifting and took drugs with them as well. He is honest about his moral confusion: how does he "set an example" without alienating their trust? Yet if his weaknesses were essential to his complicity with the Shed Crew, they also spare the reader an uneasy sense of voyeurism.
"You're just like us," one of the girls tells him. "Fucked in the head." In a way she's right. However, the book is also an angry manifesto about how different they are. Hare grew up on the very same streets, but was cared for by a working-class community that wanted its children to be educated, and would never have dreamed of abandoning them to their fate. He can feel inspired by Urban's tenacity - "he had an air of Socrates about him" - but he is rarely sentimental. This is a deeply political book, one that expresses anger with a society that allows such things to happen.
Though the epilogue is sad - many of the children are now on heroin or in prison - the very fact that this remarkable book exists testifies to their redemptive powers. As Hare proudly tells us in the final sentence, he is now "a writer".
Decca Aitkenhead writes for the Guardian Magazine
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