The shit blog of Paul Chris Jones

I was born in Erdington. Some people move there, but I was born in it, molded by it. I didn't see the light until I was already a man.

Growing up in Erdington, in hindsight, was a mistake. It wasn't my mistake though. No, I blame my mom and dad for it. For some reason, my parents decided Erdington would be the best place to raise four children. Or, more likely, the council put them there.

Erdington high street

Erdington is a shit-hole. I should know as I grew up there. It's basically a ghetto. Not a cool ghetto that Busta Rhymes would rap about, but, a depressing, everyday ghetto where mainly white, working-class people live.

The town is known mainly for its high street. Shit things to see here include: pound shops, charity shops, betting shops, pawnbrokers, a Jobcentre, mobile phone shops, litter, cars, beggers, and drunkards.

Erdington has a library. It's a Carnegie library, one of the thousands of libraries that were set up philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. It makes me wonder if Erdington would have had a library if Andrew Carnegie hadn't stepped in and given Erdington the funds to build one.

The Pound Shop

One day, a new shop opened on Erdington high street: the Pound Shop. Rumours were abound that everything in this shop, including the signage and the lighting fixtures, cost a mere coin of the Queen's realm.

It took a while for the people of Erdington to get used to the idea of a pound shop. Many times you'd go in, and there'd be a pensioner asking a cashier, "How much is this love?"

"It's a pound," the cashier would say, bored.

"And what about this?"

"It's a pound. Everything's a pound."

"And this?"

After the Pound Shop opened, it was shortly followed by the 99p shop. This was a shop that promised all the treasure and glories of the Pound Shop but - crucially - for a penny less. How poor must have the people of Erdington been for a single penny to have made a difference in their purchasing decisions? Maybe a penny was the difference between life and death for some people; the difference between a meal on the table and starvation. When you're that poor, a penny is a difference between life and death.

We wondered where the arms race would end. Though I can find no evidence of this, my brother maintains there was a 97p shop on Erdington high street for a while. The arrival of the 97p shop must have been like the arrival of the Beatles for the people of Erdington. Not only was this shop cheaper than the 99p shop, but cheaper than a whole two pence. It was a risky move to drop prices so low. The global supply chain can only take so much before it breaks. And, indeed, it did break. The 97p went out of business and today it's no more. It's a cutthroat business, selling cans of coke and six-packs of Hula Hoops to pensioners and single mothers.

The grove

The cul-de-sac my family lived on was a dead-end street with twenty houses or so facing each other.

My mom was anxious and she wouldn't let us play outside the grove, lest we get lost or murdered. Maybe she had good right to be scared, given Erdington's high crime rate. So we were confined to the limits of the grove.

The Island

In the middle of the cul-de-sac was a raised concrete circle that cars would drive around. It was like a little roundabout, except it went nowhere. The cul-de-sac had only one way out, which was the same way as you come in, so why they built a roundabout is beyond me. They could have just had a road, or even better still, just not build Erdington at all.

Our nickname for the concrete circle was "The Island". I'm not sure where the name came from. Maybe we invented the name or maybe it was passed down from generation to generation. Where the name came from, it's certain that "The Island" sounds nice, like a tropical island, where you can listen to the waves gently lapping against the shore and two coconuts banging together from a woman in a coconut bra. But the Island was actually just a circle of bricks and concrete in the middle of the road. It was a roundabout, basically. A weird sickly-green colour from where moss was growing between the bricks. The local yobbo used it to park his truck on.

A concrete circle. A concrete circle! You can't fool me because that's not an island.

We had a sign above our front door that read, "Island View". That was the name of our house: Island View. I guess the idea was that you could look out the window of our house and see the concrete circle outside and it was like you were looking at an island. What a fucking joke.

Bikes and cars

We used to ride our bikes around this concrete circle, round and round, going nowhere, like dogs chasing our tails. Every now and then a car would turn into the cul-de-sac, its engine growling. Usually it was someone who lived there returning home from work, though very occasionally it was someone from the outside world who had somehow gotten lost in the warren-like streets of our council estate. They would drive up the street of the grove, realise it was a dead-end, and then drive back out again. I imagine it was like a real-life version of Stephen King's story Crouch End, where people are "known to lose their way. Some of them lose it forever."

Whenever a car would come, one of us would shout, "A car! A car's coming!" and we would all scurry back on the pavement with our bikes to avoid being run over. My younger brother, five years younger than me, was usually the slowest. "Come on Adam!" we'd shout, urging him on. The little fucker always seemed to be moments away from being run over. But somehow he made it through childhood without any car-related accidents.

My brother didn't have a bike for a long time because our family couldn't afford another one. My dad justified it to Adam like this:

"You don't know how to ride a bike so you can't have one."

That is the kind of weird logic that only someone from Erdington could come up with. It the same backwards logic as, "You can't get a job if you don't have any work experience."

So instead of riding a bike, my brother would run around the island while the other kids rode their bikes. They would cycle and he would run.

My mom wrote "This area is rough. People mend the cars on the pavement opposite and there is always a truck with a crane on it parked about twenty metres from the front window. [...] The grove is scruffy. Kids ride around on their quad bikes."

Entries

In Erdington, there are these little alleyways that go around the houses, like rat tunnels. We call them 'entries'. We never did enter them though due to how dangerous they were. The idea is that you can access your back garden without having to traipse through your house and get your carpet dirty. This can be handy if you are trying to bring something big or dirty into your back garden, like a bag of coal or a dead body.

In practice though, no one actually uses these alleyways. They are abandoned. The fact that no one uses them means that nature has tried to reclaim them. They are full of thorny branches and ivy. Try to walk through one and it's like trying to get through Maleficent's forest of thorns from Sleeping Beauty. You'd need a machete like Rambo to hack your way through them.

That's not all. You also have manmade detritus, ranging from bricks and paving slabs to shards of broken glass and unexploded bombs from world war II. My dad used our entry as a dumping ground for the supplies for his failed DIY projects. In the end, he just gave up and let nature claim everything. To this day, you can see vines twisting around paving slabs like the arms of a jealous lover.

Scientists say there are millions of species in the rainforest that are yet to be discovered. But have they tried looking in my Dad's entry? There's bound to be all sorts of novel lifeforms there. I bet some of the plants would even cure cancer. Though saying that, some of the plants probably cause cancer. You'd also risk catching tetanus from the rusty nails. So it's a game of life and death every time you go down there.

Bin bags

The island was also where people would throw their bin bags of rubbish on Thursday nights for the binmen to collect on Friday morning. Used batteries, broken glass, rotting chicken carcasses – all into black bin bags and then slung out onto the street. That was how we discarded our waste. There were no recycling boxes or household bins. We would just put everything into a bin bag and sling it out onto the island.

Stray cats would come prowling during the night, looking for food. The cats would rip open the bin bags to get the rotting food inside. In the morning we'd find bin bags slashed open, the contents strewn across the island: potato peelings, sweet wrappers, used condoms - anything the cats didn't want and had left.

Sometimes, at night, we could hear the sounds of stray cats fighting each other: the growls and hisses. On those nights, we made sure the door was locked. The worst was when a cat would make the noise of a crying baby. It sounded EXACTLY like a crying baby. Except it was coming from a cat. I don't know how the cats of Erdington learned to do that trick. Possibly it was from a freak genetic mutation.

My mom never liked the stray cats. She wrote, "There are stray cats everywhere. [...1 Stray cats try to get into the house as soon as I open the door."

So that was our childhood: running around a circle of bin bags. We couldn’t even leave the Grove because our mom wouldn’t let us. There was no escape.

The wildlife

The trees

Every year, council workers came and cut the branches off all the trees. One day I'd be walking home from school and there would be a man with a loud chainsaw and a ladder, lopping all the branches off all the trees. He would then put the branches into a truck and drive away with them, presumably to take them to the tip, but I never found out.

For a while every year, the trees looked deformed and ugly. There would be nothing left of the trees but the trunks. It made Erdington bleaker, which was an achievement considering how bleak the town looked already. It was like going to an alternate reality, where everything was cold and haunted instead of bright and colourful.

It would take a whole year for the trees to grow all their branches back, at which point the council workers would just come back and cut them off again.

The argument was that they had to do this to avoid accidents where a big branch would fall down and land on the windshield of a hapless driver, killing him instantly. Even if a branch didn't fall on you, it could still fall into the road and block traffic.

I understand why the council cut all the branches off the trees, but I have never seen any other place where the council prunes trees so aggressively. In Erdington, they remove all the branches, all the leaves, and only the trunk remains. And they do it every year too. Maybe there's something in the soil that made trees grow extra fast in Erdington. It wouldn't surprise me. I've always suspected that much of Erdington, especially its inhabitants, could be explained by the presence of strange chemicals in the soil and water.

The bushes

When the council wasn't being overly zealous about chopping down Erdington's trees, they were doing the opposite and leaving the plants to grow wild instead.

In the summer, for example, the bushes that lined the streets would grow massive. They would grow out onto the path and force you to walk in the road to get around them.

I always had a healthy dose of fear of Erdington's bushes. When you grow up in Erdington, you quickly learn to what to be afraid of. Either that, or you end up as a crime statistic.

I imagine if you put your arm inside one of the bushes, something unnaturally strong would grab you and pull you through. The police wouldn't find your body until the next day, and even then they would have a hard time identifying it because of all the bite marks. I reckon Erdington was also where Stephen King got his idea for It.

Sometimes you could hear the ominous buzzing of wasps coming from inside the bushes as if there was a massive colony of wasps building a giant hive. Other times there would be the tattered remains of a porn magazine. On those occasions, I would be tempted to take a look, but my fear always held me back. Probably that's what saved me from being eaten by a rabid dog or stung to death by wasps.

The grass

There are also little patches of grass around Erdington. They were too small to play on but big enough to be a nuisance to walk around. The council would rarely mow the grass, instead leaving it to grow long and wild. People would throw their litter into the grass, and at any one time, you could expect to find beer cans, broken glass and dog shit hiding in it.

Sometimes I had an idea of taking a bin bag from my parents' house and going around and picking all the litter up. It wouldn't have been that hard and it would have made an instant and positive impact on everyone's lives. But I never did it. I was afraid people would think I was weird. In Erdington, it's seen as weird to do selfless good deeds, you see.

Our house

Here's my mom's description of the house we lived in.

We live in a small run-down three-bedroom council property. [...] This house is so small. You walk in the front door, and after ten strides you are out the back door. [...] We have numerous problems here. The roof is leaking but the council are in no rush to fix it. There is damp in the bedroom. Mould grows on the shoes in the porch.

My daughters share a tiny room. The fridge freezer is about to break but they don't sell small ones that will fit in the space under our stairs anymore. [...] The shoes grow mould due to the condensation in the porch. The roof is leaking and the ceilings are stained. [...] The house is only ten strides in through the front door then you are at the back door, passing the cooker on the left and two strides passed that, the loo.

Mornings are terrible. We queue in the tiny kitchen to use the bathroom to get ready for work and college,

My husband, our four children and I have lived in a small run-down three-bed council property in a rough area for twenty years now. The kitchen is eight-foot square, but it has the stairs door off it, the toilet/bathroom off it and also the back door. There is no room for a kitchen door as it would hit the cooker or you would not get in the fridge.

The garden

The front garden of my parents' house was like a jungle. You needed a machete to get through it.

Animals

The only dogs that people had in Erdington were aggressive fighting dogs. Pitbulls for example. My brother, Adam, didn’t know that any other dogs existed until he left Erdington.

People would stand around their dogs in circles and burn them with cigarettes.

Neighbours

We were lucky because our immediate neighbours (the houses on either side of our house) were friendly, law-abiding citizens.

The Morgans

On the left of our house lived the Morgans: Bob, Shirley, and their son Andrew.

Andrew

My next door neighbour was a boy called Andrew. Never have I met someone with so many health problems as Andrew. Andrew had every health problem. Glasses; a stutter; leg braces; ginger hair: Andrew had them all. He was the loser of life's lottery. He was like a Dickensian cripple, a cross between Tiny Tim and Oliver. He was like a victim of the seven plagues of Egypt. He had to wear braces on his legs for a while to straighten them, just like Forrest Gump. But at least Forrest Gump could run; the most Andrew could do was shuffle stiffly down the path. If you shouted "Run, Andrew, Run!" at him - which I did, on occasion - then he would just look at you, scared and perplexed, like a hedgehog about to be run over. He didn't win any trophies on sports day, that's for sure.

On top of this, Andrew also has some rare and weird condition that makes his face fat and his eyes bulge out. I don't know what it's called but I've seen at least one other person like it. My dad calls him "Spudman", perhaps because his face looks like a potato or he's a stupid as a potato.

Andrew used to have ox-tongue sandwiches for school. He'd open his lunchbox and there'd it be: an ox-tongue sandwich. I don't know what an ox-tongue sandwich is but I imagine it's literally a ox tongue between two slices of bread. A great big hairy ox tongue, cut fresh from an ox, sticking out from a sandwich.

Ox-tongue meat was the cheapest meat available, which explains why he always had ox-tongue sandwiches. But where they got the oxen from, I don't know. This was Birmingham, not Tibet.

Understandably, Andrew never ate his ox-tongue sandwiches. His mom would then put the same sandwitch in his lunchbox the next day, and the next, all through the week, and he'd never eat them. At the end of the week she'd turn the bread into bread and butter pudding. What she did with the ox tongue though is a mystery.

Andrew's an adult now. His ginger hair now reaches his waist and he has a long ginger beard that he keeps in a plait. The local kids shout "Viking" at him, even though he has neither the muscle or the testosterone of an actual viking. He still lives with his mom and dad, despite being in his thirties. And he's posted on Facebook recently that he's overweight and has diabetes. He has occasional bouts of crippling anxiety and depression, although, to me, these sound like the normal and appropriate response to his condition.

Bob

Bob was a man of a few words. Whenever I saw him, he would just nod at me and say, "Ooright?" as if I was a bloke down at the pub instead of a twelve-year-old. He smoked cigars.

Bob's prized possession was his car. Every Sunday, without fail, Bob would be out on his drive, cleaning and waxing his car, making the metal surface shinier and shinier. He'd be there for hours, cleaning and waxing away. I found it weird, but then again, when you live in Erdington, you have to take whatever small pleasures you can to keep yourself sane, I suppose.

But it angered my dad for some reason.

"There he is again," my dad would mutter as he watched Bob from behind the curtains. "Bob the Knob." It was if Bob cleaning his car was a personal affront to my dad.

The Morrisons

On the left of the Morgans lived the Morrisons (?). They had a little girl called Chandice, and the mom would scream across the grove things like, "CHAN-DEEEEEEECE! GET IN 'ERE NOW! IT'S YER DINNER TIME!"

In the first few weeks after moving in, they would sometimes knock on our door and ask for money. It would usually be some blatant lie like needing money for their meter. I don't think we ever gave them any but then again, my mom might have as she tended to trust people more than she should have.

Something the Morrisons would do was use taxis but not pay the drivers. They would tell the driver they had to go inside their house to get the money, but then not come out. The taxi companies soon grew wise to their schemes and would no longer go to their house. The Morrisons found a solution: they would use our address instead. That worked for a while until the taxi companies grew wise to that too and started refusing to come to our house. This made it a pain when we had to call a taxi to take us to the airport, but no taxi company would come to our house.

Gary

Gary is my dad's best friend. They've known each other since school.

Gary is known for:

• His moustache
• His friendliness
• The fact that he has witnessed years of dysfunction in our household but has never once commented on it
• Saying Brummie things like "Are you alright bab" (said like "Ah yuh right bab") and "Tarrah bab"

My dad and Gary would sometimes go around looking in builders' skips for scrap metal, which they would then sell at the local tip. They were always proud and happy when they came home with a big find: a pipe, church tiles, a manhole cover. It was always a wonder to me just how many church tiles and manhole covers were being tossed into skips in Erdington. One day my dad came home with a huge manhole cover, and I asked, "Did you really find that in the skip?" and he never gave me a reply. I'm still waiting to this day.

Maybe for some families, the difference between a good find and nothing was the difference between dinner on the table and going to bed hungry.

I never spoke to Gary. It always felt strange to have someone who wasn't a family member in the home. The first time we had a conversation, I was 22, a man. I was ready for us to discuss important topics, man to man. Things like the responsibilities of manhood. I was ready to learn the wisdom he had picked up over his years.

Instead, we spoke about cheese and jacket potatoes. Specifically, he said to have cheese with mustard because it brings out the flavour. He also said to eat strong cheese because then you won't need to eat as much of it.

My brother says Gary has koi carp in a fish pond and keeps a samurai sword on his wall, "in case of a sudden return to Bushido law".

Potholes

The Council barely maintained anything, to be honest. That included the roads, although the word 'road' is a misnomer because there was more pothole than road. You felt like Neil Armstrong walking to the shops because it was like walking across the lunar surface, the pavement was so cratered.

Crime

Unsurprisingly given the poverty and lack of job prospects, Erdington was a hotspot for crime, some of which we experienced firsthand. There was the time Adam almost got taken by child snatchers (or so he says - I need to ask him for more details about that one). There was also the time my dad was a witness against the gypsies and he had to fight them off with a broom.

There were gangs of youths that would roam Erdington like the Lost Boys. My mom wrote, "My daughter takes off her glasses as she gets nears the house as sometimes a gang of youths ridicule her."

The van

I might be confusing events here because I wasn't around anymore to see things happen anymore. I had escaped Birmingham and moved to Bournemouth. But I had left behind my dad, my brother Adam and my sister Lisa. They were still trapped in Birmingham. It was getting out of North Korea while knowing you have to leave your family behind at the mercy of Kim Jong-un.

From their testimonies, I can get some of the idea of events that happenend while I was in Bournemouth.

One day, a new family moved into the grove. It was a black man, a white woman and a mixed-race girl called Casey. Adam called the man Mr R because he had a car with an R on it. Mr R also owned a plain white van.

There was this youth who used to come up the grove at times. He was tall and thin. He had an odd look about him. My brother thinks he had fetal alcohol syndrome, though he can't say for sure.

This youth didn't like Mr R, probably for the simple reason that Mr R was black. Probably the fact that Mr R was married to a white woman also came into it.

The youth would leave razor blades and nails around the van to try to puncture the tires. Sometimes he would just simply slash the tires of the van. He may have also cut the brakes.

One night, the youth set the van on fire. Mr R's wife and daughter were inside. Thankfully, they got out at the last minute. True story.

Fighting four youths off with a rake

A gypsy family moved into the grove. (Adam says they were gypsies - so not my words.) For some reason one of them thought it would be a good idea to set fire to their neighbour's car.

The police and fire engines soon came. The firemen put the flaming car out, which was now just a wreckage.

My dad was more than willing to talk to the police about what he'd seen. He also agreed to be a witness in court.

The gypsies didn't like this and one night they attacked my dad when he got back from work. He had to fend them off with a rake while he got the front door open. Fending people off with a rake isn't typically what you'd call a fun neighborhood activity. Some neighborhoods have block parties. In Erdington you have to defend yourself with a rake while someone else tries to smash your head in with a block.

After that, the police gave my dad a panic button. This was a button you pressed in case of emergency, like a gang of youths breaking into your house to kill you. Once pressed, the button would summon the police to the scene. In reality, it probably did nothing.

Some rich people have panic rooms in their houses; we had a panic button. Some people have a bell that summons Jeeves; we had a button that called the police.

The childsnatchers

From your middle-class viewpoint, you probably think childsnatchers are just fiction, like the child catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. But come to Erdington and you'll see for yourself that childsnatchers are real.

One day, my brother Adam was riding his bike around and round the grove (somehow he had a bike at this point) when a white transit van pulled up and stopped next to Adam. The back door slid open to reveal a crouching woman. In her hand was a bag of sweets.

"You want some sweets?" she said to Adam.

Adam was retarded but even he knew that a stranger offering sweets out of an unmarked white van was probably a sign of trouble. He cycled to the safety of the house as fast as his stumpy legs could carry him. The van drove away.

The teddy seller

Shoplifting was a common pastime in Erdington. My brother says that people would come up to him and try to sell him their shoplifted wares. In the pub, men would ask if he wanted to buy packets of ham from stolen the Co-op ("it's breaded") or sandwiches ("the ham's wafer thin").

One day, Adam and my dad were walking to the Fort, the local shopping center, one day when they encountered a man wearing a coat. His coat was stuffed with something, making it look like he was pregnant. A pregnant man in Erdington - stranger things have happened there, so possibly he was pregnant.

"Want a teddy?" he asked as he opened his coat to reveal several large teddy bears, still with their tags on. "Got 'em from Clinton Cards," he said with a wink. How he'd got them he did not say, but I don't think it was through the usual method of paying for them.

"No thanks," said my dad.

"Only two quid each," the man said.

"No thanks," my dad repeated and walked past him.

What made the man think my dad and his teenage son wanted to buy a teddy bear, I don't know. Maybe if he was fencing Xbox games or PlayStation games, that would have been a different story, and Adam would have gladly given him some money.

Plantsbrook Park

One day, Adam, his friend Cain, and Cain's mom, Avril, went to Plantsbrook Park for a walk.

While they were walking, a man jumped out of the bushes and chased Adam, Cain and Avril. They managed to get to the car and he drove away, with the man still chasing them. They never went back to Plantsbrook back again.

My brother and the mugger

One of the main career paths for young people in Erdington is crime. One day, my brother Adam was walking to Erdington train station. A young man jumped out at him. In his hand was a knife.

"Give me your money," the man said.

"Wait," said Adam. "Didn't we go to school together?"

"Oh, it’s you Adam! How is it going? It’s okay, you can go. You don't need to give me your money."

My brother and the charity box thief

Adam once volunteered in a charity shop as work experience. One day a man came in and said, "What’s that book behind you?"

While Adam's head was turned, the man stole a charity box from the counter. The charity box was chained to the counter so the man must have cut through the chain while Adams back was turned. The charity was for blind people.

The man ran away with the charity box.

A couple of minutes later, the man was back. Adam could see that he was holding the charity box behind his back.

"How much is that box set of Godfather movies?" he asked.

"It’s £3," said Adam.

"That’s not fair," said the man. "The other videos are £1."

"It’s £3 because you get three movies," said Adam "It’s a box set."

"I only have £1," said the man, which was a lie because he was holding the charity box behind his back.

"It’s £3," repeated Adam.

In the end, the man left without buying anything, but he did have the charity box.

My brother and the bike thief

You can't own a bike in Erdington. I will illustrate why by telling you about what happened to my brother Adam and his bike.

He used to ride his bike to Erdington High Street, chain it up and then get the train to college. But on the second day of doing this, he went to get his bike and it was gone. Someone had cut through the lock.

My dad then took Adam to Halfords to get a new lock. They asked a man who worked there what the strongest lock was.

“You want one of these D shackle locks,” he said. They are the strongest by clocks we have.”

The packaging said something like:

• Solid heavy duty D bike lock
• Weather resistant
• Anti impact design
• Durable body
• Double bolted mechanism
• Hardened steel shackle and body
• THIEF-PROOF

So my dad and Adam bought it, thinking it was going to stop the thieves.

How wrong they were.

A few days later, Adam went to get his bike, and his wheels were gone. The bike lock was still there, intact. The thieves had been unable to cut through that. The frame was still there too, attached to a lamppost with the bike lock. Since the thieves had been unable to cut through the bike lock, they had stolen the saddle, front wheel and back wheel of the bike instead.

Who was stealing bike wheels? Why would they risk going to prison just for a bike wheel? Why did they want a bike wheel anyway? What with a building, a go-kart?

Adam and my dad went back to Halfords. This time they were serious. They bought two more locks, bringing the total to three.

Now, whenever Adam left his bike in Erdington, he used one lock for the frame, one lock for the front wheel and one lock for the back wheel.

One day he went to pick up his bike and found that the entire bike was gone this time. Somehow the thieves had managed to cut through all three bike locks.

Dad and Adam went back to Halfords. They found the assistant and my dad said, "You sold us these locks and you said they were the strongest locks you had. Well now a thief cut through three of these locks and stole my son's bike.“.

“Sorry," he said, "but the locks only protect against opportunistic thieves, not professional thieves.”

"What is a professional thief? Do you have to go to a special college to study how to become one?"

From that day on, Adam never rode a bike into Erdington again. He always walked instead.

And that is why you can't own a bike in Erdington.

The body

My dad once came home pale and shaken. He had been riding back home from college and he had ridden along the canal as he always did. This time, however, he had seen a body floating face-down in the water. It was the body of a man dressed in a scruffy coat. He had called the police and they had pulled the body out, confirming that it was a homeless drunk. Although my dad was shaken, he also seemed weirdly proud to tell his story. We all saw him as a bit of a hero for a couple of days after that.

The hostage situation

When my older sister was fifteen, she had a boyfriend called Lee. Lee's mom and dad were separated and lived apart. Lee never saw his dad. His dad didn’t like this. So one day, Lee's dad held his son hostage, along with one of Lee's friends. (This is what my brother says, anyway.) Police came and surrounded the house. Inside the house, everything was laid back. Lee’s dad said, “Right, what do you want to eat?” to Lee and his friend. They wanted pizza so the police brought pizza. I'm not sure how the situation ended, but knowing the police in Erdington, it probably ended with someone's face getting blown off.

The halfway house

There was one particular house that we were always wary of. There was always at least one menacing-looking man standing on the doorstep, smoking a cigarette. He would watch you silently as you walked past. Sometimes there would be a whole group of them on the front drive of the house, drinking beer. It was years later I found out it was a halfway house, a place where prisoners can stay after they leave prison.

Now, I don't have anything against halfway houses. They're a good idea. Reformed criminals should have somewhere to stay while they get their life back together. However, some of the people who lived in this particular halfway house were not so much reformed criminals as relapsed criminals.

The car boot full of pirated videos

There was this man who would drive up the grove and then park. He would then get out and open his boot, which was full of bootlegged videos. I'm not kidding. The whole car boot was packed with VHS tapes, all in neat rows. I had never seen anything like it. It was just like Blockbusters except it was run out of the boot of a bloke's car. A mobile Blockbuster's: films on wheels. Now, why didn’t actual Blockbusters think of that? If they had, maybe they wouldn’t have gone bust.

There were Disney films, Hollywood blockbusters, and probably a few special films that he kept hidden away for the moms and dads if you know what I mean.

We would run out and see what films he had, partly just because something different was happening and it relieved the boredom of living in Erdington. It excited me to see so many films in one place. I wanted to grow up to be him, so I could have as many films as he did. He was my hero.

That was the kind of role model we had in Erdington back then: not firemen or policemen, but people who casually engaged in crime.

Even now, I still admire his entrepreneurial spirit. He must have copied the films at home, and then drove around all over Erdington trying to flog them. The whole time he was at risk of getting caught by the police with a boot full of pirated videos.

My only complaint is that the quality of the copies was a bit shit. The picture would sometimes jump around and get fuzzy, which was a common problem with a pirated VHSs. My dad stopped buying films from him and we started renting films from Blockbusters instead. It's the circle of life. Only I've gone full circle because now I pirate all my films from The Pirate Bay.

My first-hand experiences of crime

The whole time I lived in Erdington, I was never actually victim to any crime. No-one beat me up or stole my money. To be honest, as far as I experienced anyway, there isn't all that much crime in Erdington. Walking around Erdington actually feels safe, as long as you know which way to run on the off-chance someone with a knife does chase you. The problem with Erdington is not the crime but the poverty and boredom. And whatever crime there was usually localised to just a few people or houses. So that's good, as long as you don't live in one of those houses, at least.

Children

The children who lived in Erdington were a special bunch, and by special I mean the kind of children who are still wearing nappies by the age of five.

For example, there was one kid called Michael. I never knew Michael and so all my knowledge of him is based on my brother's secondhand accounts. My brother says Michael was a strange kids with "problems" and possibly had some kind of disorder. Apparently Michael once kicked a kitten to death, which I don't know is true, but knowing Erdington, I would say it almost certainly is true. There was also a sleepover at which Michael shat himself while in a sleeping bag. Again, I would say this is probably true.

Even the kids who were only passing through Erdington were weird. One day, Adam and his friend Cain were playing in the grove when a new girl approached them.

"I'm from Nottingham," she said. "I'm here visiting my dad."

Everything was normal so far, but then she said, "I’ve got a black man’s cock at home. I cut it off and keep it in my freezer.”

Needless to say, my brother Adam and his friend Cain did not know what to say to that. Which is fair enough, because I would not know what to say to that either.

Then she said, "Who wants to watch me take a wee?"

Neither Adam nor Cain wanted to watch her take a wee but that didn't deter her. She went into one of the entries and a few moments later, a small stream of urine trickled down the entry. The girl herself was out of view, so that was all they saw - this trickle of urine.

She came back out and said, "I’m going home to fuck myself with the black man’s cock." And that was a typical day for Adam and Cain on the grove.

They never saw her again, which is probably for the best.

School

My brother and two sisters all went to the local comprehensive school, Kingsbury school. My brother maintains that it was once "listed as one of the top ten worst schools in Britain". Whether this is true or not, I do not know. Knowing Erdington, it probably is true. What I know for sure is that Kingsbury school had an "Inadequate" Ofsted rating for twenty years running.

Adam says that on Halloween, his fellow classmates would play a fun prank on each other, where they'd throw shit-stained toilet paper at each other. What fun.

Lifestyle

Usually, our lifestyle consisted of sitting on the settee while eating biscuits and watching TV. But every now and then, one of us would get into our head that we had to do some exercise. This would happen now and again. Sometimes my sister would realise she was growing a little belly (an Erdington belly, I call it) and want to get rid of it. Sometimes I would be the one who decided exercise was needed. Usually, this was because of some government advert warning about the dangers of a sedentary lifestyle: coronary heart disease and such. Television was the only way we received information from the outside world. If we hadn't had a TV, we probably wouldn't have even known there was an outside world.

Our options for exercise in Erdington were limited. There was a community swimming pool but it was small and cold and was apparently built in the Victorian era when things like the cold and hardship were celebrated.

In the end, we decided to try jogging. But one does not simply go jogging in Erdington.

Lisa and Adam went jogging around Erdington three times and all three times they almost died. (Adam's own words.)

On the first night, they encountered a woman with two large, ferocious dogs.

The woman must have been scared of Lisa and Adam. She'd never seen a jogger before; no one runs for exercise in Erdington. Her backwards mind could probably not even comprehend the idea of exercise. The only reason people run in Erdington is either a) to escape the police or b) to mug someone. Since there were no police around, this woman must have thought Adam and Lisa were about to mug her.

But she wasn't going down without a fight. She had survival instincts that were keenly honed from years of living in Erdington. Plus she had two vicious dogs with her.

“Go on, get them!” she said to her dogs.

Now, they say that a dog's bark is worse than its bite. But I don't think these dogs knew that; dogs in Erdington are generally a bit thicker than normal dogs. These dogs knew nothing except how to tear apart human flesh.

Lisa and Adam screamed, turned, and ran in the other direction. They escaped - barely. They had survived their first night, like surviving your first night at Freddy's. But things were only set to get worse.

On the second night, a black man chased them. He was shouting after them: "I want your blood so I can get your DNA."

On the third night, Lisa and Adam passed a gang of youths, a common sight in Erdington. The youths shouted things like, "Yeah, you'd better run!" Now maybe they were shouting "You'd better run... to reduce your risk of heart disease" but I think it was more of a threat, like "You'd better run or we'll stab you and leave you dying in the gutter".

Once, twice, thrice they had escaped death. Lisa and Adam took this to be a sign and they hung up their running shoes. They never went jogging again.

The End

In 2009. at the age of 22, I moved away from Erdington and Birmingham. I got a job working as a postman in Bournemouth, which was only a marginal improvement to living in Birmingham to be honest.

I'm one of the lucky ones who managed to escape Erdington, but there are still people who live there, children growing up there, who are not so lucky.