The hood

"This is Finchmore man," I heard our neighbour say one day, "the F-Zone." He's a scary guy, all twenty stone of him, and I'm sure that for him the street we live on is riven with danger and criminal potential.

For me it is a place where the bins are a bit of a mess, the house across the street always has some crappy piece of furniture put out on the pavement on the wrong day for bin men, and the dwellings down the Cricklewood end let the side down badly. But it's not Hackney or Crackney; neighbour or not, it's lovely and tame.

Actually, I did see a fight on our street once. We lived in the attic of the building back then, and I was drawn to the window by the noise down below. First there were couple of boys, our neighbour and a lanky fella, and their dogs. It was a summer's day and the boys were scuffing around with not much to do. The dogs - salivating, leash-straining rottweiler-types were pent up like maniacs; whining, yelping, lunging at each other when they could get close enough.

Then the police arrived. A couple of cars and four policemen, and it seemed to me there was nothing casual about the way they were reacting to two youths and their dogs shooting the breeze on a summer's day. Very heavy-handed, I thought. "Why you pickin on me?" the one guy kept on saying, "Why d'you always go for the black man? It's him that's got the knife!"

Ah, a knife. I never saw that knife, but the threat of its existence was enough to bring three more cars and a police van roaring into the road in little under a minute. More police, and the scene now stoked up like a hornet's nest. For a second it looked like they were getting things under control - the lads separated and pinned against garden walls - when one of the dogs leapt from its tethering and gashed a policeman on the arm. That was frightening.

Next thing the policeman was being bundled off for urgent treatment, and the boys were getting handcuffed. One was led to a car while the other was dragged, kicking and mouthing off, to the waiting van. Even as it drove away I could hear him ranting within, punching the metal walls.

And that was the last time I saw my neighbour. For months and months the lads down this end of the street got on with more or less standard teenage behaviour, baiting each other, standing round smoking, doing nothing much. It was only when he reappeared, all twenty stone of him with his gangsta swagger and his air of downtown Baltimore, that bravado returned and our neighbourhood got its name: the F-Zone.