‘All my life I’ve had dreams in a nightmare, because where I’m from there’s no scenery and no sun. I’ve just tried to work hard for Mum. I’m just a young entrepreneur who’s trying to change the world!’
23 October 2017
Welcome to Dreaming in a Nightmare. My name is Jeremiah Emmanuel. I’m twenty years old and I was born and raised in south London. All my life, I’ve felt like I’ve inhabited two different worlds. In one, I am listened to and respected. Doors are opened for me. I can do anything I want to. In another, I am ignored and I am targeted. In this world, prison is expected and violence is accepted. I have no opportunities and am punished for thinking I might succeed. This is a book about my life, but it’s about your life too. It’s about those two worlds – the dream and the nightmare – how you can move between them, and what happens when you do. You are probably wondering what I mean. Well, let me give you a few examples …
Scene one. I’m fifteen years old, waiting outside 10 Downing Street to receive an award for my community work. I’m a little nervous, but excited. I’m wearing a suit that’s a bit too big for me. The award was called Points of Light – an award that’s given out by the prime minister (and the president in the USA) to a volunteer who is making a positive difference in their community. I eventually got inside, met David Cameron, stood around chatting to various inspiring people, and had a few photographs taken. It was a good day.
Later that week, I was walking in my area on my own, and I was stopped by two police officers, one male and one female. They took me in the back of their van and made me take some of my clothes off in order to search me.
I couldn’t see why I had been singled out, but it was not a new experience. If I’m ever out with my friends and we see a police van pass, we play a game where we start counting to see how many seconds it will take before we’re stopped. I think the last time was ten seconds. I understand that police officers have a job to do. Maybe that’s why sometimes I just let it happen. It’s normal. It’s normal when you talk to your friends about it afterwards. It’s normal when you see it happening to someone else. It’s normal until you start talking about it with people who don’t experience it. It’s normal until you realise it’s not normal. Then it becomes something else. It becomes strange and shocking and upsetting. It’s degrading. It’s painful. It makes you feel worthless.
I remember thinking, as all of this was happening, how mad it was. A few days ago I had been with the prime minister in 10 Downing Street and now I’m being treated like I’m nothing, pulled off the street and humiliated in the back of a police van for no apparent reason. I have tried to make a positive change in my community and this is the way I am treated. This is the way I am always treated. This is the reality.
Scene two. Fast forward a year or two, and I was going through a bit of a difficult time. I was thinking a lot about my life, what I had done, and what I wanted to do next. How to properly escape the nightmare, really. Fate intervened, or so it seemed. For a long time I’d been applying for various grants and bursaries to continue my education and, a few weeks later, I found out that I was being awarded a full scholarship to go to university from an amazing organisation called the Amos Bursary (look them up!).1 They were offering to pay all my tuition fees — something like £27,000 in total. It was an extraordinary opportunity. A dream. But at the same time, I wasn’t sure if I was really ready.
I decided to go and see a friend who works for a charity in central London to ask for some advice, but the day before I was supposed to meet her, I got a call. One of my best friends, Kyle, had been stabbed and was in hospital. He had been waiting in the queue outside a show and a fight had broken out. He was there with a lot of his friends and it turned out that some other boys from a different area had spotted them. There was no animosity towards Kyle but because he was with this particular group, he was a target. As the fight broke out, people started screaming and running away. (This is what happens if you hear screaming in the ends, you don’t run towards it, you run away. This was a lesson I had to learn the hard way.) So everyone ran and it just so happens that Kyle ended up on his own. He was rushed. This group of boys got him down and stabbed him seven times, mostly in his arms and legs.
Kyle was lucky. He suffered damage to some of the tendons in his legs, which means that he is still recovering to this day, but it could have been so much worse. I rushed to the hospital and sat with him, talking for a while. I think he was in that early stage of shock where he couldn’t quite make sense of what had happened. He was talking normally, which was a little odd in itself. The ward was filled with patients who were seriously ill, or dying. You could hear other visitors whispering and crying. Kyle was adamant that he wouldn’t let the experience change him. He was determined to turn it into a positive, somehow. I was just happy he was still alive.
Kyle happened to be in a hospital just around the corner from where my friend worked at the charity. After I saw him I walked over to visit her. We sat in her office overlooking the Thames, talking about the scholarship offer and what I should do next. She said to me, ‘Look Jeremiah, if you decide not to take it, there’s always a job for you here.’ It clicked. I thought university was something I should do, rather than something I really wanted to do. If I worked at the charity, I believed I could make a difference. So I said yes.
Scene three. I am on the terrace of a restaurant in Corsica, overlooking the sea. It’s early evening and the sun is beginning to set. I am sitting at a table with a group of thirty people, including various CEOs, entrepreneurs, investors, policy-makers and philanthropists. We had spent the past two days cycling across the island together at an annual fundraising event, designed to bring leading figures from different arenas together in the name of charity.
My mum often likes to berate me by listing the accomplishments of my friends or the children of her friends. Anyone with West African parents, most likely anyone with a pushy mum, will know what I’m talking about. ‘Did you hear that Cynthia’s daughter has just graduated? When are you going to go to university?’ ‘Anthony has got a job in the city. He’s earning a lot. When will you get a proper job?’ ‘Mary’s son is taking her on holiday next week. It must be so nice to have a son who would do that for his mother …’. And so on and so on. But in addition, my mum has always paraded the accomplishments of Richard Branson as a kind of incentive. It is weird. Maybe she sees some of the same things in both of us, I don’t know, but I heard his name a lot growing up.
Anyway, also at this dinner in Corsica was none other than Richard Branson. After the meal we somehow got chatting on the balcony. It was too good an opportunity to miss. ‘Richard,’ I asked. ‘Would you mind saying hello to my mum, if I quickly FaceTimed her?’ Luckily he agreed. I called my mum and handed the phone over, much to her shock. It wasn’t a lot really, I was just standing next to the guy, but it was a moment I will never forget; leaning on the railing of that balcony in Corsica overlooking the sea, watching Richard Branson and my mum talk and laugh on the telephone. The dream. Do you know what I mean?
Now I need to backtrack a little. I have a cousin named Kayla (we’re not actually related, but we’re so close that we call each other cousins, if that makes any sense). We speak all the time but, for some reason, it’s never on the telephone. WhatsApp, Instagram, Twitter, in person — but never on the telephone. Kayla is still friendly with a lot of people from school and a lot of people from the ends, and has become a kind of unofficial source of news and updates. Not a gossip as such, but someone who likes to keep tabs on everyone. So, Kayla never calls me. She will only call me if something bad has happened.
Two days before the trip to Corsica, I got a call from Kayla. I was at home, I remember. She said, ‘Have you heard? Aaron is dead.’
Aaron was a friend of mine from school. He was funny, always making jokes, always the class clown. He was clever, but his behaviour got worse as we grew up and in year eleven, before our GCSEs, he got kicked out and sent to a pupil referral unit (or PRU). We’ll come back to this later on in the education chapter, but it’s enough to know for now that PRUs are not a good thing. Nearly everyone I knew who went to a PRU is in prison or dead.
So, I hadn’t seen Aaron much, but we’d kept in touch until very recently. He’d just come out of prison for some foolishness — he’d got in an argument with a shopkeeper and ended up slapping him. Six months for GBH. I wrote to him once or twice and he was in prison with another good friend of mine, so we stayed connected. Don’t get me wrong, I knew that he was getting caught up in various bad things, but he was a good person. I am not excusing his behaviour, but I can understand why he ended up where he did and I hope by the time you finish this book, you will too.
Anyway, not long after his release, Aaron had been out with the wrong friend in the wrong area. This is never a good idea and, at that time, was a particularly bad one. There had been a number of altercations in the neighbourhood and everyone was on the lookout for trouble. Aaron and his friend were spotted and rushed by a group of boys with knives. They ran, but Aaron was caught. In those kinds of situations, it’s really kill or be killed. Aaron was killed.
His friend came back to see what had happened and found Aaron lying on the side of the road on his own. Aaron had been stabbed a lot — in his back, his chest, his stomach. His friend somehow managed to get him into a taxi and that’s where he died. About two minutes away from a hospital. Stuck in traffic on a south London road.
The next morning, I got the call from Kayla. This is two days before I was supposed to fly out to Corsica. I thought about not going, but in the end, it felt like there was nothing I could achieve by staying in London. So I went. Aaron’s funeral was held the morning after the dinner on the terrace, where my mum had spoken to Richard Branson. I locked myself in my room with my phone and kept up with what was happening with my friends who were there. I think there was something like 200 people at the church. It was a strange and very sad situation. How do you come to terms with death when you’re eighteen? I just thought about all the things I had done with Aaron, and all the things we would never do together. I was never going to see him again. He would never make it to twenty. He would never move out, get married or have kids. He would never have the opportunity to turn his life around. After the funeral I left my hotel room and joined the rest of the group. I didn’t say a word about what had happened. How could I?
*
Close this book and look at the photograph on the cover.
It shows a group of boys sitting dangerously close to the edge of a small building. They are not safe. There is a pair of legs sticking out at an odd angle. One of the boys is bracing himself at the edge, looking down in fear. Another boy is clinging on, about to fall. No one is trying to help him. You worry about these boys. Maybe you think they are up to no good.
When I was young, we used to look up at our elders and think they were mad. Guys who were getting arrested, getting kicked out of school, carrying weapons, selling drugs. It was crazy. It was crazy, but it was expected. This cover represents the struggle that a lot of people in my generation have to face. We are alone on the edge of a precipice. There’s no safety net.
Now look again. clouds and blue sky. It’s the beginning of a dream. A group of boys are climbing up on to a rooftop to enjoy the sun. You can almost hear the laughter. It’s the summer. They are carefree. This is escape. The horizon stretches away without end. Anything is possible. You look at this photo and you recognise this feeling. Maybe you want to be with them. Back when I was that age, we had no worries. We were just kids enjoying our lives. Even though we didn’t come from the best of environments, we still had a good time. And that’s what I see in this photograph.
Which is correct?
The dream is a way out. It’s like an exit plan. It’s a vision of a better life. I feel from when we were young we recognised that we were stuck in a cycle. We got to a certain age and we thought, Is this it? Life got real. So we had to dream. It was the only way we could get out of this life. The dream is your way out.
I always used to dream. I dreamed about moving out of the area, finding somewhere better to live. I dreamed about doing something with my life. But those dreams didn’t necessarily correlate with my reality. These were dreams I shouldn’t have been having. We were told to be ordinary, when we wanted to be extraordinary. I had to dream because no one else was dreaming for me.
The nightmare is that closed-off space. It’s a lack of opportunity. It’s that feeling of ‘Is this it?’ It’s talking to people about the reality of life and seeing a look of shock or disgust on their faces. The nightmare is a world without opportunity or possibilities. It’s being stuck. The nightmare is not a physical place. It’s a state of mind. You are living in a nightmare if you are letting your background, your environment or people’s perceptions limit your potential.
This is all getting a bit woolly, I realise. Let me be specific. Although people of any age can be living in a nightmare, this is an issue that primarily affects a younger generation. A recent report by the Financial Times found that millenials are the first generation in over a century to be, on average, less wealthy than their parents at a similar age.2 You can call me a snowflake all you want, but it’s an undisputed fact that young people today have fewer opportunities and more pressure than ever before. According to the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s five-year report, the percentage of young people aged sixteen to twenty-four living in poverty has increased. The average hourly earnings of young people has declined, in real terms. In England, young people are more likely than any other age group to live in unsatisfactory housing.3 Young people are less likely to be employed and more likely to be the victims of violent crime. In another report from the Office of National Statistics, it showed that the proportion of young people reporting symptoms of anxiety or depression increased from 18 per cent in 2009/2010 to 21 per cent in 2013/2014.4 The number of young people who said that they had someone to rely a lot on decreased from 80 per cent in 2010/2011 to 76 per cent in 2013/2014. That’s almost one in four young people who do not feel they have someone they can rely on.
Of course, the struggles you face in life, and the chances you have, aren’t just affected by age. I am a young black boy from south London. As much as I want this book to be of help to all young people who are struggling, it is written from that perspective, because that is what I know. Being a young black person in Britain means that you have additional obstacles to face. As the saying goes, you have to work twice as hard to get half as far. That is something I have experienced first-hand.
But a lot of the issues I have faced are common to a lot of young people across the country. Don’t get me wrong, being a young black person in Britain is hard. But no matter your race, your gender or your sexual orientation, if you are under the age of twenty-four and come from a particular socio-economic background, you are likely to struggle.
For a large part of my life I was living in a nightmare. But I never stopped dreaming. And today, God willing, I am living in a dream. I want to use my life as a guide. Not because I know everything, because I really don’t. But I have always felt like I’ve seen and done some things that I hope can help others.
I proved to myself that I don’t have to be a product of my background or my environment. This is not a book about how bad life is. This is a book about hope. This is a guide to recognising the nightmare – and a blueprint for dreaming your way out of it.