You're
twelve years old. Your mother's a junkie and your father might as well be dead.
You can't read or write, and you don't go to school. An average day means
sitting round a bonfire with your mates smoking drugs, or stealing cars.
Welcome to
Urban's world
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| Picture from the set of Urban and the Shed Crew |
Let’s start being direct
and honest: this book is one I would never have read if it wasn’t for Richard Armitage. This admission is not a first,
for me. I have already thanked his
acting projects for introducing me to readings and worlds I’d never have approached
otherwise. After this totally truthful introductive statement, I’m ready to tell you something about
this story without, I hope, spoiling your pleasure to discover more
reading the book yourself or watching the film adaptation, when it comes out.
Bernard Hare wrote “Urban Grishaw and the Shed Crew” several years ago now (it was published in 2005) mixing
compelling reportage with deeply personal memoir. His alter ego in the book is
Chop, aka Richard Armitage in the upcoming movie adaptation I mentioned before.
Leeds in the 1990s is the
setting for this story. Chop is an ex social worker who dropped his job and
retreated in a world of drinking and drugs, living at the margins of society.
It is in that unfortunate situation that he meets Urban Grimshaw and the Shed Crew, a
gang of feral kids who live stealing or as young prostitutes.
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| Richard Armitage as Chop |
One day Chop saves young
Urban’s life and since then they become almost inseparable, Chop becomes the only adult member of the
Shed Crew. Urban is twelve, his mother a drug-addict whom Chop has had an
affair with in the past - or more probably has shared some drug-taking occasions
with. His sympathy for Urban, 12 years old,
is immediate.
Chop’s house becomes a sort of emergency service for those lost
kids: he helps them as he can in his own wrecked situation, listening to them,
making them write or draw or play chess
in his house or simply giving them refuge when they need one. All that makes Chop
a role model to them and that forces him to be a real one, which involves drinking
less and giving up drugs eventually.
All the characters in the
book are real people. At the end of the story we are informed that some of the
Crew are doing well now that they are grown-up but some others are still in
trouble. After writing the book, Bernard Hare’s life changed and he decided to
adopt Urban Grimshaw. All's well that ends well.
This book was a real punch
in the stomach, eye-opening, informative, heartbreaking, thought - provoking but at the same time extremely
funny, something like watching a serious damnation-of-British-society documentary,
focusing on degraded urban areas in big cities, but with an ironical narrating voice and the
insertion of comical anecdotes here and
there. It’s not a book you can read without being disturbed or left puzzled, of
course, but you will find yourself smiling more often than you expect.
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| Bernard Hare on the set of the movie with Fraser Kelly |
It is a book through which
you learn that a non-judgemental attitude, an open mind and an open heart can
do miracles with young people, troubled or not troubled. This is what Bernard Hare understood and why
he was accepted by the crew and could help those young people. Not all of them,
but at least some. He didn’t know what he had let himself in when he decided to
join the gang and did something for those kids but, certainly, something Bernard Hare did for himself too: his generosity saved also his own life giving it a completely different turn.
About the author: Bernar
Hare
Bernard Hare was born in 1958 into a Leeds mining family. After gaining
a BA in Applied Social Studies at Hatfield Polytechnic, he became a social
worker, but after the miners' strike of 1984 he dropped out of the system and
has since worked variously as a mechanic, community worker and removal man. He now
writes, plays chess, and works in community arts: he has edited Reflections, a collection of
pieces by the creative writing class at East Leeds Family Learning Centre, and Flatlands, an anthology of
writing and a CD of music by local people put together by the Flatlands
Community Arts Group, which he co-founded.
If you like me are looking forward to watching Richard Armitage as Crop or wish to know more about the movie
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