‘I’m laying bare my most vulnerable moments’
The BBC’S fourth ‘Small Axe’ film tells how novelist Alex Wheatle went from prison to an MBE. He talks to Charlotte Lytton
Five years ago, in the writers’ room for Steve Mcqueen’s Small Axe series – five films focusing on the British black experience between the Sixties and Eighties – the director wanted to tell the story of a young man being put through institutions; a children’s home, maybe, or prison.
The spotlight fell on one of the writers, Alex Wheatle, a novelist also known as the Brixton Bard. He spent the rest of that morning detailing his upbringing: given up by his parents, sexually and physically abused in care, jailed (for assaulting a police officer, criminal damage and resisting arrest during the Brixton riots), before becoming an award-winning fiction writer and being made an MBE. “Everyone was astounded,” Wheatle reflects – not least when he brought in his social services file the following day. The decision was made: he was to be the subject of Mcqueen’s film, subsequently called Alex Wheatle.
Being the focus of a biopic must feel exposing – all the more so when you’ve been enlisted to tell someone else’s story.
“Initially, Steve asked me if I would write the script,” Wheatle recalls, “but I felt [that] would be too overwhelming.” It was not only the concern that he was too close to what had happened, but whether it should be told at all. “I’m laying bare to the world the most fragile, vulnerable moments of my life,” he says of the film. “It’s quite something to commit to.”
Wheatle has written 15 novels, including last month’s Cane Warriors, Brixton Rock and East of Acre Lane (around a third are aimed at young adults), which have been translated into several languages. Many reflect his own experiences of the loneliness of the overlooked, the rage of the mistreated.
And some of that comes through in Mcqueen’s film – in a scene set in the early Seventies when a young Alex wets the bed in his care home and a cruel matron stuffs the wet sheet into his mouth; and in images of protests following the New Cross fire in 1981, where 13 young black people were killed in a suspected far-right arson attack on a house party.
The Brixton riots followed three months later – Wheatle, now 57, remembers the April weekend where “all hell broke loose”; Molotov cocktails turning the sky orange, shattered glass carpeting the streets. His involvement lands him where the film begins: 20 years old and in prison.
In those days, Wheatle says that he used to have a fight and not care whether he was going to be killed. Being abused on a daily basis in care at Shirley Oaks children’s home in Surrey – this summer the centre of a sexual abuse inquiry – had convinced him “there was no way that I could make a contribution to society.
“When you’re that low a class, when you’re underneath the lowest rung of the ladder… it’s like you’re the scum of the earth, it’s very, very difficult to try and build up this reservoir of potential inside of you, to push on and be who you want to be.”
In Mcqueen’s film we see a gentle Wheatle (played by Sheyi Cole) harden a as he struggles to find his identity – he is too black among white c classmates, not black enough t to fit into his new community w when he finally leaves Shirley and moves to south London.
I It is, in fact, only when he i is sent to Wormwood Scrubs and meets his c cellmate Simeon – an a older Rastafarian with locks
(and severe gastrointestinal issues) – that he finally discovers a sense of place.
With the older man’s help, he begins hoovering up books: The Black Jacobins by CLR James, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, The Iliad (which was, he laughs over the phone, “a little bit” odd, as prison reading goes).
“I remember Simeon telling me, ‘Alex – you like blood and guts, right? Well, The Iliad is full of blood and guts.’ I gobbled every page.” That and reggae music connected Wheatle to his past. “It was like I was reclaiming my culture, reclaiming my identity,” he says; having been put into care as a baby, he “wasn’t even sure what my national heritage was” until into early adulthood. Greater than anything material Simeon passed on, though, was the fact that he saw potential in the young Wheatle. “He saw a talent in me. And he saw that I wasn’t someone to be left on the scrap heap… no one had ever recognised that in me before.”
Wheatle acknowledges that without Simeon (played by Robbie Gee in the film), his life might never have changed course; even with his guidance, the writer went through a breakdown in his twenties, fighting to repress trauma caused by years of abuse. “I felt ashamed,” he says. “I felt it lessened me as a man or lessened me as a person.” In writing – then mostly poetry and lyrics – it was if a pressure valve had been released, something he hopes can be true for those he has gone on to teach both in prison workshops and at Manchester Metropolitan University, where he lectures.
When the letter stating he had been awarded an MBE (for services to literature) arrived, Wheatle assumed it was from the police; other youth infractions catching up with him, perhaps. Instead, he spent the day at Buckingham Palace with his wife, Beverly (with whom he has three adult children), and his paternal aunt. It was the Queen performing duties, and Wheatle remembers her thanking him for his writing and the work he did. “Which was very nice,” he says, because many were receiving awards that day and “I don’t think she had any notes, so she obviously remembered what I did.”
This recognition – in fact just feeling visible – has been Wheatle’s life pursuit. For all the grimness that the writer has gone through, Mcqueen’s film feels almost lighter than it should; you can only root for a man who wants more. Wheatle believes that Cole and the other young actors in Small Axe are “like vessels for my generation”, and the fact that the stories of people like him are not just being targeted at a black audience now means everything.
“I remember Simeon telling me, ‘Alex, never think these stories are just for us.’” It gives him heart that people are finally listening. Wheatle has just finished a children’s novel and is mulling writing another play (“I’ve jotted down some ideas”) before beginning the next instalment of his Crongton Knights series (about a boy growing up on an estate setting off on a quest with friends to win a girl’s affections) in the coming months. He no longer feels like the “token black writer” he once did, the little boy wrongly pushed to the sidelines. Where once was anger, there is optimism, he says. “I have lots of hope for the future.”
My cellmate said, ‘You like blood and guts, right? Well, The Iliad is full of blood and guts’