When I was 16, me and my friends used to hang around the estate youth club. We were good kids, not from bad backgrounds. We’d rap about the road lifestyle and the youth worker would say: “You’re trying to be something you’re not.” He was right. Most of our parents were together, we used to go to Qur’an school and we had good grades. But we’d go as a group into an abandoned block of flats where the police wouldn’t come and we’d smoke some weed. It would get into our heads to start a problem with this guy, rob this, carry knives, that sort of thing. It was a gateway to the hood lifestyle. You hang around your area, think you’re cool and gradually it leads on to worse things.
We started to deal cannabis. Low-class drug dealers at the bottom. We didn’t have real-life problems like our friends dying, becoming drug addicts, going to jail. But that was happening to people older than us. We were dealing to friends, people at school but also other people in our area where other people were dealing. That competition starts the beef.
Some of my friends started being assaulted wherever they went and I started to think, my goodness, we can’t let that happen, we have to do something. That was the paranoia: something’s going to happen to me and I’m going to have to do something before someone does it to me.
Just before my 17th birthday is when knives came in. People from other areas started to come to our area. They were the brothers of a girl which a friend had a relationship issue with. They jumped him, beat him up. My friend just stood up with his knife and stabbed one of them in the chest, 3cm from his heart. He survived. But the other gangs started to come to the area with knives, they had a gun at one point, and I thought this was getting serious. They started to say: “We’re gonna kill you guys, we’re looking for you.”
People’s houses were being targeted. That’s when I realised there’s no hope in sorting this beef out. The only way is to defend yourself. That’s what the police don’t seem to understand. It’s not that people carry knives to kill people, it’s to defend themselves. They are scared. That was the case with me. My life was under attack. I felt I was going to die at any moment if I was ever to see these guys.
I picked up my mum’s kitchen knife and started to walk around with it in my waistband. It didn’t have a case so it was just the blade and it hurt. I couldn’t run fast. It was very big – eight or nine inches. It could do a lot of damage if I had to use it.
There was also pressure from my own area to carry a knife; pressure to go get those guys and stab them when you see them. You start to see different sides to people and that hurts you.
I never used to take the knife into my sixth-form college. I left it in bushes in a park next to the school. One day the police were sweeping it for drugs and they found my knife. In fact, they found 17 or 18.
I went to grab another from the kitchen but my family started to realise and ask what the hell was going on. They said: “You go to sixth-form, you don’t have problems.” But they didn’t understand.
So a group of us went to a shop that sells Rambo knives and zombie knives with teeth. Me and the lads went to get a few knives and I grabbed the 17-inch Rambo – a whole lot bigger now because the beef had intensified. I thought: who’s going to try me now? I felt more than safe. My body was calm. I didn’t have butterflies any more.
I pulled it out a few times when people came to strike us, try to catch us out. Two guys on scooters came right next to my house one day. I was walking with my friend. I had a big knife. He had a machete. They were looking and they were looking hard. They stopped and said: “Are you guys from this area?” As soon as they said it we just pulled out the knives and we had a standoff.
It was an embarrassing moment for me because, as it was going on, my neighbours came out on to the street. They were shocked and confused as to why I was carrying a knife.
Most people have them for self-defence, but every area has a group that attack people. They make up names like “the assassins” or “the hitters”. We had one. I wasn’t part of it, but I remember walking 45 minutes one time with them to an area we had a problem with. We had baseball bats, knives. Nothing happened because they had been notified we were around.
When I was 19, a friend who was 17 was stabbed to death. He thought this guy was taking him for a muppet so he went over to set the record straight and the guy wasn’t having it. It was going back and forth and he pulled out a knife and swung it straight at my friend’s chest. It was a fatal blow. It was awful.
At his funeral, the imam was talking about this lifestyle and needing to avoid it. That evening I was in a chicken shop and these guys ran in, hit me on the head with a bottle and stabbed me once in the thigh. I took myself to hospital even though I was blacking out. I thought I was going to die. I thought my artery had been ripped apart and I was losing a lot of blood.
After the nurses stitched me up we had a heartfelt conversation about how I’m going to move on from this situation. People who get stabbed need help and a lot don’t get it, and the chances of them dying when they get stabbed a second or third time is high. I was glad that I got a lot of help from my community.
