LITMIR.BIZ

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undeserving of their love for an adoptive son hell-bent on causing trouble. More often he was the damaged victim of racism so institutionalised in Yorkshire in the Seventies that his only option for survival was violence and crime. In either account, the youth criminal justice system subjected Tony to every punishment it could think of – borstal, secure children’s homes, youth detention, the short sharp shock.

      He always maintained that he burgled his first house at the age of four. It sounded impossible, but he was adamant. He stole everything he could get his hands on, and his father had to fit a lock on every bedroom door except his. His mother, he said with a smile, was a terrific snob, and forbade him to walk through the local council estate, unaware that he had already been barred from almost every house. Expelled from four primary schools, he became an accomplished truant, and had more or less aborted his education before reaching secondary school. He said he bunked off to make more time to burgle houses. Sometimes I wondered if he exaggerated the audacity of his delinquency, for it seemed too extravagant for even the most precocious of juvenile offenders, and could sound almost boastful. But the suggestion of pride was, I suspected, deliberately misleading.

      The crimes he described didn’t sound cunning or calculated so much as compulsive. He stole things he neither wanted nor could conceivably hope to get away with, and something else he often said made me guess that if he was exaggerating, it was not to make himself look good but to confirm his fear that he was bad, and corroborate his sense of shame. This one particular anecdote came up time and time again.

      Tony had been messing about on the street with a bunch of kids one night when a boy lobbed a rock at a neighbour’s porch lamp. The glass shattered, everyone scarpered, and within half an hour the neighbour was knocking on the Wilkinsons’ door. She was called Mrs Flood. That Tony could remember this detail when he was so terrible with names he called me D for the first year of our acquaintance tells you something about the significance of what happened next. ‘Your son just smashed our lamp,’ Mrs Flood told his mother. Tony was summoned to the door. ‘Did you smash Mrs Flood’s lamp?’ He looked his mother in the face and without hesitation replied, ‘Yes, I did.’

      ‘Why did I say that?’ he repeatedly puzzled. He wasn’t trying to protect the guilty party, or misappropriate any status the act of random vandalism might confer. All of the other boys knew who had done it, so what was there to gain from a false confession?

      The stories he told about adults in authority were almost unbearable to hear. As a boy he used to love cricket, until a coach made a false accusation against him, fully aware it was untrue. When challenged by Tony, the man took the ten-year-old off to a quiet corner and beat him up. On another occasion Tony was walking home from primary school with his sister through their leafy all-white suburb when a passing police car picked him up. Refusing to believe this could be where a black boy lived or had any business to be, the officers drove him to the inner-city Caribbean enclave of Chapeltown, where his parents had to come and collect him from the police station.

      Tony was in his teens before he met another black person. On his first day at every new school he would be confronted by a familiar reception committee of kids keen to prove themselves. ‘And what was I going to do? It was either them or me.’ The inevitable reputation for violence was secured again, before the class register had even been taken.

      Trans-racial adoption in the early Seventies was uncharted territory, and Tony never blamed his parents for struggling to understand the difficulties he found himself in. Racism was as bafflingly insensible to them as his behaviour. Nobody in their family had ever been in any sort of trouble before; they were out of their depth. But they were fiercely loyal, and that was what Tony remembered. Whenever Tony talked about his parents, he would revisit a memory of the night a middle-aged neighbour painted NIGGER on their gate. What lived with him was not the public humiliation, but the fury on his father’s face in the morning when he saw it.

      His father was not by nature combative. He might well have been the meekest man Tony ever knew – and it was a good job he was, Tony said, because he was not married to an easy woman. Tony’s mother could insist the earth was flat – and by his account, her assertions were frequently no less outrageous – and his father would defer and placate and concur. But the couple’s resolve to stand by their son was unassailable. When his father saw NIGGER daubed across the gate he turned pale, and stormed off to confront the neighbour.

      Tony thought he had been only seven or eight when he saw a television documentary about street hustlers in Soho, who defrauded gullible punters hoping to buy sex or drugs. That, he decided, looked like the life for him. In early adolescence his court appearances grew more frequent, the periods of detention lengthened, and his hostility to authority hardened. The youth justice system was chaotic and arbitrary; sometimes he would be locked up in secure homes alongside children whose only crime had been to lose both their parents, and he was always particularly indignant on their behalf. If the authorities had imagined he would consider his own punishment legitimate, they were disappointed.

      The only good to come of it was the loyalty his parents were called upon to prove, over and over again. If Tony was testing them, they did not fail. Had they given up on their son, I’m not sure that he would ever have been able to love, and might well have become dangerous enough to be capable of anything. As it was, he learned a concept of love that had little to do with intimacy, of which he had no experience, and everything to do with loyalty. But the boy his parents brought home from each incarceration had grown more unreachable, and at fifteen Tony ran away to London to realise his childhood ambition.

      He was always rather nostalgic about his years as a hustler. Soho’s seamy warren of alleyways became his teenage playground, and there was a certain daring glamour in his tales of touring the clip joints and late-night illegal drinking dens, promising fictional pornographic beauties to gullible tourists and passing off bags of tea leaves for cannabis, before disappearing into the shadows with pockets crammed full of cash. I said he must have been lonely and frightened, but if he was he had chosen to forget. Dodging the police was all part of the thrill, he said, and by his account an absorbing game of cat and mouse. His only unhappy memory was a surprising one. Having romanticised Caribbean culture for years back in Leeds, he had arrived in London with an Afro flat top and the carefully styled look of a Jamaican rude boy. The first actual black men he met were a shocking disappointment. ‘I couldn’t believe it,’ he said. ‘They just hung around the bookies all week, waiting for their giro. Then they’d get pissed and beat up their missus.’

      By seventeen Tony had established himself as a highly proficient hustler, and was going out with a prostitute who worked for a gang of Jamaican pimps. After he helped her to escape their control, they broke into his south London squat at dawn and beat him with iron bars, before carting his girlfriend off to resume her services. Tony got hold of a gun, tracked them down and shot several of them. Nobody died, and he went on the run, until a little over a year later the police found him. He was still in his teens when he stood trial at the Old Bailey and was sentenced to fourteen years.

      There was no glamour in his account of prison. Even though the sentence was reduced on appeal to seven years, he still served nearly five, much of it in segregation on account of violent non-compliance with the regime. Pragmatic self-interest was not a strategy with which Tony was psychologically familiar. He would have rather died – literally – than surrender to the authority of prison staff he considered more morally disreputable than most of the inmates, and his back never recovered from the beatings they inflicted. Resistance was a matter of principle. It even extended as far as temporarily turning vegan, simply in order to be a nuisance.

      Two weeks after his release he met a young blonde Californian woman on a grand tour of Europe, who invited him to join her. They went travelling, moved to Los Angeles, and married a few years later at a $50 wedding chapel in Las Vegas.

      According to Tony, the marriage was essentially expedient and transactional. He became a violent gangster who made a lot of money out of drugs, gunrunning, protection and so forth. She looked good, and liked spending it. It was a stormy relationship. Tony had a large stock of spectacular marital row anecdotes, which had the slightly worn air of many previous outings, and he often said that he should sue the Beach Boys for misleading him about the nature of California girls. Sometimes he claimed his wife

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