When I was young and a student, I did voluntary work with adolescent offenders, and they were just like the characters in this novel. I remember looking at them and seeing grown lads with the minds and emotional maturity of toddlers. They're lads who've never had a chance, actually; I remember the principal of Newton Aycliffe Approved School saying to us: `If you think where these lads are coming from, you're surprised they've done as well as they have.' This is certainly true of Lee; Jarman gradually, subtly, builds up the picture of his background on a sink estate with a mother who isn't able to cope with her money, with her life, with parenthood. We may not have street children in our society, but there are too many who are literally cast away, from the moment they're born, deprived of the loving hard work and care it takes to properly bring up a child.
All the same, Lee isn't cuddly. He's beaten his own mother up, a crime even the other young offenders despise - and his cell-mate, the horrible Sharpey, knows about this and uses the knowledge to control him. The novel's told in Lee's own voice, and Jarman has rendered it brilliantly, a mixture of brutality and vulnerability. It is, in many ways, the voice of a child.
But a child who's effectively on his own, who has to make major choices with the odds stacked against him. He's lucky, because there are one or two people who care enough to offer him a helping hand. All through the book, you're trembling for him, knowing that his future hangs in the balance - will he be able to turn himself round, or will he slither downwards?
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