I started at St Paul’s Wood Hill school when I was little.  It was a year later than everyone else. Our mother considered that I could do with another year of seeing the world around me before being handed over to the system.

St. Paul’s was reputed to have the largest playing field in England. It was an excellent place, and I have lots of fond memories there, particularly of my first teacher Mrs Sutton. After a couple of years, news came that the school was to close. All the students had to move to another school. Most of my friends went to Crofton, a huge primary school over the ‘other side’ of Petts Wood, a little 1930s-style suburb of London.

My mother was determined that I attend the little Catholic primary school called ‘Manorfields’. My mother being an Anglican, got my father to make a rare in-person appearance at my school (a realm which I think he considered to be the responsibility of the mother), where he had to polish up his family’s Catholic heritage.  

Ultimately, I was let in.

At Manorfields, I was reunited with my first best friend, Andrew Plummer, whose Mum had emigrated from Shri Lanka, and in no time, I made some new friends too.

There were the Marks twins, Dan and John, as well as Dave H and Dave N.

My teacher was called Mrs Barthomomew, and sometimes as I might cycle from my house in Petts Wood to see Andrew or Dan & John, who lived near the school, I would shout hello or wave at her as she worked in her front garden.

Now, David H had a seething hatred of Dave N. Dave H’s’ Mum, a nurse, was Irish and his Dad worked at the Coca-Cola factory. They both worked hard for what they had.

Dave N, by contrast, was rich. His Dad, Clifford (Dave N told us) owned a skip company, and there was, incidentally, a Skip company just down the road that bore their surname, so that all made sense.

The hatred from Dave H toward David N was based a little on envy. In any event, I was friends with all of them and tried to play with all of them, as has always been my manner.

I have fond memories of cycling to Dave N’s big house in Chislehurst, where we would play with his two brothers Clifford and Ben. They had a big Rottweiler dog called Ben too. Despite the breed’s reputation, the dog was friendly and playful.

We would play ‘guns’, and David N had a large collection of toy guns.  He had a large collection of everything from transformers, including Optimus Prime, to bikes. The toy room was, the carpeted triple garage, which I had never seen used for cars.

I recall I once went to a bonfire night party at Dave N’s house, and at firework time, a rocket misfired, shooting up and coming down in the road. His dad said, “That was a waste of fifty quid.” This seemed astounding to me.  In contrast, our Dad might buy a box of fireworks for a tenner as well as a few packs of sparklers and here this family were spending so much on one firework which, as it happened, did not even work!

Dave N was a smart kid and had a keen sense of humour. He was just fun to be around.

In my opinion, the middle brother Clifford was always the nicest of the three siblings. He was fair at games, disliked cheating, and always tried to make peace.

The youngest, Ben, was just a playful kid, but I never really got to know him; he was just a bit too young.

Dave N was my mate, and we would, from time to time, spend time at each other’s houses and play in each other’s gardens.

Once when it was time to go home, my Aunty Shelley offered him a lift home since she was driving that way to Bromley. Dave N refused; it seemed to me very peculiar.  

We had had such a great afternoon mucking about, eating as a family, but he flatly said no to getting in the car with my Aunt, who, as far as I was concerned, he knew as well as he knew my Mum. I shrugged my shoulders at it at the time. In any event, my Mum telephoned his Mum and not long after, he was picked up from our house.

I have since reflected on his refusal, and most likely, it was because my lovely Aunty is mixed race.

Another time, Dave N came to our house, and we wandered down the road to Woolworths to get pick-and-mix candy, which was standard at the time.  

Whilst in Woolworths, I was considering the pros and cons of ‘cola bottles’ compared to ‘red chewy laces’, then Dave N disappeared for a bit, before coming around the corner and telling me that we were leaving. It was urgent. I said to him, what about my sweets?

He grabbed the little bag I had and stuffed them in his coat pocket, and holding my arm above the elbow, marched me out of the shop.  

As we walked some way down the road, he started laughing. He urged me into a closed shop recess and opened his coat. He has somehow hidden a Scalextric set inside! I was taken aback, but I had never played one before. Part of me could not wait to get home and play.

We got back home and upstairs into my little box bedroom. As we undid the box, we realised that we needed help finding a power pack or the batteries required to play. It was not there. Back then, it was commonplace for toys to be sold with “Batteries Not Included”.

Dave N was on a mission and determined we were going to race. He just got up and put his coat back on. “I’ll go back for the batteries.”, he said.  

We left the house again and, this time, used bikes to get back to Woolworths. Astonishingly, that is what he did. He stole two packs of the big D-size batteries, and he did it brazenly from a display by the record counter.

We got back home again, and we played. I cannot deny that it was excellent! We played for a few hours before it started getting late.

After we had played, I told him he would need to take the track and cars home when he went. I did not want my Mum to ask me questions, and I did not want to tell her the truth or lie.  

He didn’t want to keep it either and said to me that if I did not want it, he had best throw it away so no one got into trouble. It was heartbreaking. Not long before he went home, I reluctantly agreed, and I watched him take a walk out of our drive from my bedroom window so that he could pop a plastic bag of all the bits and pieces into a neighbour’s rubbish bin.

Sometime later, in any event, I told my Mum about it. I was never very good at keeping secrets. There was no trouble. In effect, my Mum just wanted to know that I was OK and that I planned never to copy my naughty but very funny friend.

The years passed, and we moved from primary school to secondary school. The Marks brothers, the two Dave’s and I went to Coopers School in Chiselhurst, around the corner from David N’s house.

I lost touch with my oldest pal Andrew since his Mum sent him to a different secondary school. he did well for himself, and we reconnected on Facebook.

I enjoyed my first year at school. I was in the same form as Dave N. We were in P. The Marks brothers were in B, and David H was in G, before he later moved to P.

That first year I kept up with homework and had a good report.

Then early in the 2nd Year at Coopers, we were sitting in form. Our teacher had left for a moment; she said she was going to collect something from the staff room (which, in my mind, often meant teachers were able to use the loo!). Anyhow, we were a teacherless class, left for 10 minutes to our own devices when Dave N, asked me to see if there was anything inside my desk. We still had the old-school lift lid desks and in mine was a bunch of crumpled papers, a few sweet wrappers, and lots of old chewing and bubble gum stuck in an assortment of colours inside – quite revolting!

He asked me for the paper, and I obliged. He told me to ask my neighbour if they had anything inside their desk, and so on. In no time, he had inside his desk a little pyramid of papers. Then Dave N went in for the ‘reveal’. I recall it was orange. He somehow had a Bic cigarette lighter in his pocket. Of course, he did! He was a cool kid and had access to all bits and pieces.  

For whatever reason, he decided to light the papers in his desk. I have, to this day, no idea what he was thinking. Maybe he was just not thinking at all.

He was not planning and had not thought through what would happen. Sure enough, a flame about 15cm tall began to dance, and nearly everyone nearby who saw, including me, laughed.  

It was entertaining, but it was also a laugh from nerves. Not too many other kids in the class had seen what was going on since the desk lid obscured their view as he, with his little flame, hid behind it.

At that very moment, the teacher came back into the room. Dave N closed the lid and leaned on his desk. It did not take long for a small stream of smoke to start emanating from both sides around him: only a little but enough for other kids to start laughing out loud.

The teacher saw and came over. He asked Dave N to open the desk, which had a terrible effect since the influx of air as the flame was fed only meant there was suddenly a ‘woof’ as the flame got unimaginably more significant.  

Somehow, Dave N tried to improve the situation by quickly picking up the fire from below the unburnt papers and throwing the whole lot out a big picture window behind him.  

This memory is unclear; he either picked up the fire or the whole desk, but either way, it was dramatic, and neither option served his defence. The teacher marched Dave N to the Head’s Office, and I never saw him again. The school expelled him. I was sad.

My Mum made it abundantly clear that was the end of our friendship; looking back, she was right.

I don’t recall how long it was after that, but the big house I went to play at was sold and the family moved to the Holmbough estate.

The new house was on an exclusive estate of smaller, but quite nice houses further down the road from the Chislehurst caves, which had been built on land once occupied by the Wheens in their fine old house ‘Holmbough’.

I heard later that Dave N’s Dad had been sent to prison for something, and that was why they had to sell the house.

It was not until a few years later I was watching TV, and Alistair Stewart on London Tonight was reporting on a murder which had happened up the road from us in Eltham. It was 22 April 1993.

A black boy only a little older than me had been stabbed and killed in an unprovoked attack. His name was Stephen Lawrence.  

I won’t go into details about the bungled and corrupt police investigation, the private prosecution, the inquest into the death, the Macpherson report, the Daily Mail headlines, or the subsequent cold case review. I will say that the case became a cause célèbre and has sporadically been in the news since the ghastly crime occurred.

My old friend Dave N was one of the five people associated with the news reports.

I had not seen Dave N for about four years when the murder had happened, and he and one other were ultimately convicted of the murder due to a change in the ‘double jeopardy laws’.

On 3 January 2012, Norris (since that was his name) was found guilty of Lawrence’s murder. The pair were juveniles at the time of the crime. They were sentenced to detention at ‘Her Majesty’s pleasure’, equivalent to a life sentence for an adult, with a minimum term of 14 years and three months, for what the judge described as a “terrible and evil crime.”

Now, snapping back to today. Why have I laboured to write all of this?

The whole question of good and evil is interesting to me; what makes one friend grow up to be friendly and contribute to the world whilst the other goes on to be so wrong?

By the time the murder happened, I had already been working with homeless folks for a year or two, and I had even started working with refugees. My life’s trajectory had already taken a path which would remain consistent through the years.