We lived in a straight street that joined Lavender Hill to Battersea Rise and Clapham Common North Side. Most of the streets on the Hill run parallel to each other and I knew them all and a lot of the kids who lived in them.
I did a paper round and that helped me travel. The kids in my street, and the other streets too, tended to band together and rarely went into anybody else's street. If we went on to Clapham Common it was as a bunch of kids from the same road, as separate from others as they were separate from us. Sometimes insults were swopped and hostilities would break out but normally we would ignore other gangs with a silent disdain. In the middle of this I felt different; I was a traveller, I knew other streets really existed.

WEEKLY BATH
Every afternoon I left school, sprang onto my bike and cycled from Clapham North along the whole length of the Common and went into our empty flat to make myself a sandwich: my mother didn't get home from work until much later, she was a waitress in Holborn. I took the sandwich with me and went out again to the bottom of the road, turned across the traffic and pedalled along the gently sloping hill, munching - past the traffic lights at Elspeth Rd where Gran and Aunt Eve lived, and where I went for a bath once a week because we didn't have one: past Sister's Avenue, past Sugden where my cousin lived and by the Ascension Church until I got to a tiny paper shop run by Hannah Smith, a widow with a kind and worried face that I liked a lot.
There were big gaps along the Hill, gaps caused by the Luftwaffe. Bon Marche, a department store at the bottom of Elspeth, had been bombed out of existence, nearly taking my Gran and one of my brothers with it. Only the Saturday before, I told my awe-struck friends, I had been in there with my Mum to buy a pair of shoes, only they didn't have any my size. The Pavilion Cinema too had disappeared one day after a doodle-bug had landed on the roof of a bus outside, and the headless body of the conductress had been found miles away, draped in a tree, so they said. A whole row of shops had been blown up as well, including Ford's sweet shop which didn't have much to sell those days, and the Westminster bank was just a series of big holes in the ground where the vaults had been and though us kids got down there pretty lively all the money had gone.
When I started the paper round for Hanna Smith she used to mark out all the papers very carefully with the name of the people, the road and the house numbers so that it was easy for me. Later I came to know the whole thing by heart and would just throw the newspapers into the bag and work it out as I went. I was fast too when I wanted to be and held the record for the evening round. Hannah reckoned I was the fastest she'd ever seen, but that was before I got to know the other streets so well and the kids that lived there and began to hang about talking.
First off though it was like going into unexplored territory. The streets were strange and I knew no one, and if the kids were out playing after school I could never be sure if they would throw things at me, or shout, or just take the mickey. But I could look after myself so I was all right. I don't mean fighting. I was always too skinny for that, but I was crafty and I got to know a lot of the girls up those streets and if you know the girls there's not a lot the blokes can do.
I used to deliver to a lot of the shops at the very bottom of Lavender Hlll, nearer to where my Mum had been brought up as a girl during the first world war. I liked that end. There were a few street stalls left and the shops were busier and friendlier somehow. There was a big draper's shop called Gobbold's where they used to send the change bashing about on overhead wires, and I used to buy some little thing in there just to see it happen. My Mum told me that when she was a girl there were stalls all the way up the hill: mostly gone now, so has Gobbold's.
When I had an adventure it was difficult to get other kids to come with me. My favourite was to get on a bus or an Underground train and spend all the money I had on my fare. Then I had to puzzle out how to get back. The easiest way was to get on a bus and ask for some place that I knew was in the opposite direction. It always worked. The conductor would look at me as if I were an idiot and say; 'You're going the wrong way, sonny,' and off I'd get and then do the same thing on the next bus that came along - that way, gradually, I could get home for nothing. The best way was to look all worried and cry and say you'd lost your money and get some old lady to cough up. Used to work like a charm that one.
I always had to do those trips on my own but the other kids in my street: Rex, Dreamy, Rose, Joyce and Valery used to come on my expeditions to Wimbledon. That was our favourite because Wimbledon Common was so rough and wild and exciting that you could explore it for hours and never get to the end of it, and if you did you were across and into Richmond Park which was more of the same.
Wimbledon was a long walk. Even if we put our money together, and the others never had any, we couldn't raise enough to pay the fares both ways, so we used to walk there and ride back, that is if we didn't spend our money on ice-creams. The route was always the same; Battersea Rise, Wandsworth Common, East Hill, Garratt Lane, across the River Wandle and up to Southfields...and we'd invent adventures every step of the way.
At last, already exhausted, we would tumble out onto the vast and mysterious green Common, generally too tired to go further than the Windmill for a drink of water. All we could do was rest our feet and postpone the return journey for as long as we dared.
On other days, if we'd brought a couple of bikes we would go further and explore, pushing on into the unknown: the Gravel Pit, Kingsmere and Queensmere, the golf course.
We got chased off the links once by a brown-suited Keeper. We'd invented a game which was simply riding round the green on our bikes as fast as we could, taking the flag out of the hole and then putting it back in. We collided a lot and fell off too but we were giggling so much no one got hurt. The Keeper came charging from the undergrowth like a mad bull which made us giggle the more. He was shouting and swearing: 'You bloody kids,' or some such. But it didn't matter - we all got away because that's what we were best at.
One day we decided that we really would explore the lot and walk round the whole bloody Common, and that was an adventure. We went up and down across hillsides we'd never seen before and eventually we saw a signpost that said 'Robin Hood Gate' on it, and we thought that was the best name you could have for a place, so we went there.
We should have turned back at Richmond Park but we didn't and went through the gates. The park was full of deer and we followed them, just watching; wonderful it was and even Valery, she was only eight and must have been dog-tired, even she cheered up.
Then it got dark and we were scared that they might lock the park with us in it but we got out safely at Sheen Gate, though we had no idea where we were. We made our way to East Sheen, and then to Putney High Street. It took us hours more to get home and some of the kids were crying; exhausted and hungry. I don't know what time it was when we came to the top of our road but every family, including mine, was leaning out of their windows, sitting on the copings, watching and worryng.
We all got clipped round the ear and the neighbours went for me because I was the ring leader: 'Taking my little Rexy here,' and 'taking my little Rosy there,' so my Mum stopped telling me off, and said if their kids didn't have enough sense to stand the right way up they should be kept under lock and key. In any event it was a bloody good row and saved me from getting a real walloping. At the end of it my Mum just took me indoors and gave me a good meal and laughed at me. She had a way of laughing that no one else had. After that I travelled on my own.
I suppose, though I wasn't to know it for years, that was how THE BORRIBLES started.

Michael de Larrabeiti's trilogy, THE BORRIBLES, THE BORRIBLES GO FOR BROKE, and ACROSS THE DARK METROPOLIS, is the most important work of children's fiction to have appeared over the last fifteen years. The power and authority of his prose, the tough authenticity of his dialogue, the vividness of his imagination, the sharpness of his wit, the excitement of his narrative, are all crucial elements in the success of the three books. More important though is the nature of the myth that he elaborates, the way in which his grim metropolis, full of adventure and menance, beauty and ugliness, relates to the imagination of his readers. The Borrible Trilogy creates an urban fantasy world, inhabited by monsters that have stepped straight from our own, but here they are not invincible and their triumph is not assured.
For those who don't yet know, the Borribles are anarchic tribes of inner city Peter Pans, pointed-ear children, boys and girls, black and white, who never grow up, live by petty theft, and squat in derelict buildings across London. They are continually on the run from authority in the form of the 'woollies', the police, who seek to clip their ears so that they will grow up into decent, hardworking, conforming, submissive, nose-to the-grindstone wage-earners, like everyone else: 'work, work, work; then die, die, die.' Their only protection is provided by their wits, their speed and agility, their comradeship, and their catapults. They completely reject the work ethic and instead prize freedom and adventure above all else. Some of them are very old; Flinthead and Spiff, for example, became Borribles in the old Queen's reign, Victoria that is, and have more cunning and experience than grown-ups.
Borribles do not accumulate possessions which can come to take possession of those who think they own them: instead they take only what they need to survive in a reasonable state of squalid comfort. In the words of the Borrible proverb: "Fruit of the barrow is enough for a Borrible." Much of the gear apparently falls off the back of lorries, something that seems to happen a lot in London on account of the bumpy roads! As for their names, Borribles remain nameless until they have earned one by some adventure. And the very worst thing that can happen to a Borrible is to get caught because that means growing up into adulthood with all its responsibilities and compromises, its strangled hopes and forgotten ideals.
The first volume of the trilogy appeared in 1976, and attempted to revolutionise children's literature by despatching an expedition of Borrible Adventurers on a raid across London to Rumbledom Common. They were charged by the Borrible tribes with the assassination of the leadership of the grasping, acquisitive rat-like Rumbles that lived there in well-defended underground bunkers. This gratuitous act of bloody vandalism against the thinly-disguised Wombles of Wimbledon gave notice that the values and conventions of much of traditional children's literature were about to come under attack. In de Larrabeiti's hands the harmless spiked sticks that the Wombles use to keep the Common litter-free become the fearsome Rumble sticks with their six inch spikes, the standard weapon of the Rumble warriors on which they like to impale their Borrible enemies. Of course, if the book had only performed at this level, while it might well have been an amusing conceit, it would never have achieved the resonance that was to give it a significance far greater than that of the literature it criticised.

THE GREAT RUMBLE HUNT
'It is sad to pass through life without one good Adventure.' Borrible Proverb

THE GREAT RUMBLE HUNT, as the first adventure becomes known, is cast in the form of a quest with the Adventurers undergoing a series of ordeals that put both them and their way of life to the test. However, instead of having to pass through some magical realm or enchanted forest inhabited by dragons and goblins, the perilous landscape they must cross is that of contemporary London. de Larrabeiti pays considerable attention to establishing a sense of place. The territory the Adventurers cross is mapped out for us, the places are named and familiar, and yet at the same time they are transformed into the terrain of high adventure where danger lurks in every shadow and around every corner and constant vigilance is the price of survival. The city itself becomes one of the trilogy's main protagonists. Just as the Adventurers seem to draw strength from the grim beauty of their urban wasteland, so do the books.
The Adventurers eventually number ten: Napoleon Boot, Knocker, Torreycanyon, Vulge, Stonks, Bingo, Orococco, two girls, Chalotte and Sydney, and a German Borrible, Adolf. After an early skirmish with the 'woollies' they fall into the hands of a Borrible Snatcher, Dewdrop Bunyan, and his idiot son, Erbie. They are held prisoner, half-starved and regularly beaten, only taken out on house-breaking expeditions, hidden in Dewdrop's rag-and-bone cart. Eventually the Adventurers murder their captors and escape, taking Dewdrop's horse, Sam, with them.
de Larrabeitik's recounting of the Adventurers' experiences in captivity and of their escape is harsh and brutal, with not an ounce of sentimentality. This, he tells us, is what the world is like for many people. There will be no kind old gentleman coming along to save these lost boys and girls. Instead they have to save themselves, drawing on their reserves of guile and courage to escape from Dewdrop's cruelty and exploitation.
At last they reach Rumbledom Common and launch a surprise attack on the Rumble High Command. The Rumble leaders are all killed, their bunker is completely destroyed and the Adventurers escape with the Rumble Treasure. On the return journey they seek safe passage through the territory of the warlike Wendles, the Borrible tribe that inhabits the sewers and underground waterways of Wandsworth. Here the ruthless, neo-fascist Wendle chieftain, Flinthead, rules by terror. He seizes the Treasure, but after an exciting flight through the sewers it is lost in the mud of the River Wandle. Four of the Adventurers hold the Wendles off while their friends escape to freedom.

THE BORRIBLES GO FOR BROKE
'That smell is the smell of freedom.' Ben the tramp.

The second book, THE BORRIBLES GO FOR BROKE, is principally concerned with the fratricidal struggle between the two rival Borrible leaders, Flinthead and his brother, Spiff, from Battersea. Spiff ruthlessly manipulates the survivors of the Great Rumble Hunt into helping him overthrow the Wendle chieftain and recover the Rumble Treasure. Only towards the end of the book do Chalotte, Stonks and the others discover that their lost comrades are still alive, slaves of the Wendles, something Spiff had known all along.
As well as this powerful story of treachery, betrayal and vengeance, de Larrabeiti also introduces his readers to the activities of an elite police unit, the Special Borrible Group (SBG) that has been established to suppress the Borrible menace and track down the murderers of Dewdrop Bunyan. At the outset of the story the Adventurers, now joined by Twilight, a Bangladeshi Borrible, are captured by the SBG and held for interrogation and ear-clipping at Fulham Road Police Station. They are only saved by the timely intervention of Ben the Tramp, a major comic creation, who is sleeping it off in another cell, and sets them free. When he releases Chalotte from her handcuffs she complains about his terrible smell. 'Don't mock that smell,' Ben tells her, 'that smell is the smell of freedom.'
de Larrabeiti's description of the old tramp is a masterpiece of children's grotesque:
'Ben certainly smelt and it was a very special smell; a concoction brewed of body odours, decayed rubbish, dried pee, wood smoke and stagnant Thames water. Ben never washed and the back of his neck was criss-crossed with deep crevices of dirt and pitted with scars of ancient blackhead volcanoes...he did not wear clothes like other people wore clothes, he inhabited them, layers of them. When his garments became so old and stained that other tramps would have thrown them away, Ben just found another layer and climbed in, discarding nothing. He was like an archeological dig...'
The Borribles escape to Ben's shack in the rubbish dump on Feather's Wharf. Here the tramp has collected huge quantities of other people's rubbish, a cornucopia of junk, much of it perfectly serviceable but now unwanted. He wonders at the mystery of life that has so many people working to provide him with an excess of riches. Ben is a most unlikely embodiment of the Life Force, probably unique in children's literature.
His antithesis is the cold dead hand of authority that is soon to feel his collar, the hand of Inspector Sussworth of the SBG. Sussworth is out to sanitize society, to stamp out all dissent and to enforce a soulless authoritarian conformity; in the words of the SBG song:
'To make a new society
We must reform the human race;
If all the world were just like me
The world would be a better place.'
The book reaches its climax when the two brothers, Spiff and Flinthead, finally confront each other at the bottom of the shaft that has been sunk into the bed of the River Wandle to recover the Treasure. They fight it out with shovels and Spiff strikes off his brother's head; 'the chieftain's head exploded from his shoulders and stood surprised in the air...for one instant, the opaque eyes of the Wendle shone at last, incandescent with the fire of death, and a red glow illuminated the whole cavern.'
The conflict between the two brothers, ending as it does in bloody murder, is a story of epic proportions. de Larrabeiti completely rejects the cosy and the conventional and instead writes of an almost elemental conflict that overwhelms the reader, a conflict that rises way above the conventions of bourgeois respectability and touches upon more fundamental feelings. The result is a quite shattering literary tour de force without precedent in recent children's fiction.

ACROSS THE DARK METROPOLIS
'Borribles are the rubbish of our society and as such have got to be swept under the carpet of coercion and stamped upon.' Inspector Sussworth.

The last volume, ACROSS THE DARK METROPOLIS, sees the Adventurers, after having recovered from their ordeal in the underground realm of the Wendles, determined to take Sam the Horse across London to a place of safety in Neasden. They find that they are embarked on their most perilous adventure as the riot-clad forces of the Special Borrible Group close in on them.
Under the command of the obsessive Susworth, the SBG have redoubled their efforts to hunt the Adventurers down and intend to let nothing stand in their way. In this, the most controversial volume of the trilogy, the Metropolitan Police are cast quite explicitly in the role of villains. They are portrayed as an inhuman, heartless force out to impose a dead authoritarian conformity upon society in the sacred name of law and order. Only the Borribles challenge this vision of a grey regimented policeman's Utopia and they have got to be brought to heel. As Sussworth tells his appalling assistant, Sergeant Hanks, who gives a whole new dimension to the word 'bogie', the Borribles 'have got to be made to behave like everyone else, earn money like everyone else, and grow up like everyone else. Society is our responsibility...The Borribles are undermining the pillars of society and when that happens those pillars topple. Freedom leads to anarchy. They must conform to law and order.'
Once again the Adventurers are captured and held in a secret underground bunker complex that stretches beneath Clapham Common. Here Sussworth tells his men, we have 'all the things that our civilisation needs to preserve in the event of a thermo-nuclear holocaust: government offices, command posts, food, water, lavatories...and a jail, a very large one.' Sussworth's is a mad apocalyptic vision: 'whatever happens law and order will continue beyond the day of doom. There is always a need for law and order.' As for the Borribles: 'You will be worked to death once we get them ears of yours clipped. You'll be nice normal wage-earners for the rest of your lives.'
The Adventurers escape but now have to rescue Sam the Horse from a Camden Town Slaughter House. After hiding out from the police in Brixton with a black Borrible tribe the Adventurers plan an attack on the slaughter house together with a tribe of Borrible punk girls - the Conkers.
de Larrabeiti describes the worsting of the SBG with positive relish. The cream of the Metropolitan Police, clad in their riot gear and beating their truncheons against their shields, are swept aside by a wild stampede of cows and horses, sheep and pigs, released by the Conkers. Inside the slaughter house itself a group of twenty SBG advance on the Adventurers, passing beneath a huge metal container. The Conkers empty it over them:
'And what fell from above was a ton and a half of viscous offal; bright vermilion lungs and purple livers; gaudy tripes and dark blue intestines, all jumbled together with hearts and kidneys, tails and tongues, trotters and skin, stomachs and bowels, eyes, teeth, bone and brains, and all of it slippery with a fast thickening blood...A soft crimson explosion had engulfed the polcemen and they were gone...'
Even after this victory, the Adventurers are still not safe. They are trapped in the Underground, hiding out with Sam the Horse on a disused link line at Swiss Cottage. Here the final confrontation with Sussworth and the SBG takes place.

THE BORRIBLES AND CHILDREN'S FANTASY LITERATURE

Some critics reject children's fantasy literature as being escapist, as offering a make-believe sanctuary from the real world of poverty and racism, sexism and exploitation. Instead of helping children understand the world so that they can later help change it, fantasy offers an alternative, unreal, magical world that shuts out and hides away these problems. Morevoer, the social model most often borrowed by fantasy literature seems to be some kind of benevolent feudalism. From this point of view children's fantasy literature can be seen as a kind of 'opium of the children' and is consequently to be deplored.
This view is based on a serious misunderstanding. Fantasy literature is not necessarily any more escapist than any other kind of fiction. What it does is offer an understanding of the real world in the form of allegory and metaphor. It provides its readers with a symbolic map of reality, a map that identifies good and evil, advocates kinds of behaviour, warns against danger and teaches particular values and attitudes. What is to be objected to about much fantasy literature for both adults and children is not the form itself, not the actual producing of symbolic maps, but rather what the maps show, the values and attitudes, kinds of behaviour, notions of good and evil that they espouse. This is, of course, not a 'literary' criticism, but a political one. de Larrabeiti's trilogy can, in this sense, be seen as a triumphant vindication of children's fantasy literature.
Inevitably any discussion of the trilogy has to consider de Larrabeiti's portrayal of the police in the third volume. This was almost certainly the reason for the hardback publisher, Collins, pulling out of a deal, with the result that the book has only appeared, in England, in the Piccolo paperback edition. The police are without doubt the villains of the piece, mindless bullies out to impose drab conformity, a threat to all that is vital and alive. When the Borribles are captured at Buffoni's circus, the police who arrest them are dressed as clowns with white painted faces, and with their mouths pointed downwards in expressions of sadness and misery - a marvellous touch! While the Borribles are determined to escort Sam the Horse to safety, Sussworth and his men are equally determined to turn him into catsmeat. The horse becomes the symbol over which the two rivqal philosophies of life clash.
Certainly the police are not shown in a way that is acceptable to those who control our society and one suspects that it is only a matter of time before the DES advises that the book should not be available in schools. Nevertheless it must be insisted that de Larrabeiti's portrayal of the police accurately reflects a role they have over the last decade come increasing to play. The Special Borrible Group, for example, is obviously derived from the Metropolitan Police Special Patrol Group (SPG) that achieved notoriety in Southall on 23 April 1979, when in confrontation with demonstrators protesting against the National Front, London schoolteacher Blair Peach was killed. Since then, of course, the police have become more and more openly involved in suppressing social unrest and imposing Law and Order on people by force. That this experience of policing should be reflected in literature, including children's literature, is absolutely vital. Any attempt to suppress this viewpoint is something that must be vigorously fought against. ACROSS THE DARK METROPOLIS is a masterpiece of children's literature and its portrayal of the police is both powerful and compelling. This is Britain in the 1980's for a great many people and their voice has every right to be heard.

The Borribles are upon us: they're invading our streets, our theatre - even our classrooms.
An invasion of Borribles is due. You may not have heard of Borribles but you've probably seen them. Borribles are to be found in every city back street, scuttling out of derelict houses, pulling their woolly hats down to hide their pointed ears, avoiding the law, nicking things. If it weren't for their ears they'd look like any other bunch of streetwise kids, scruffy, rough and tough, independent and, intheir case, having fun.
All Borribles have been in trouble and all Borribles avoid adults. They get to be Borribles through being latchkey kids, down-and-outs and troublemakers. Once they get out on the street for good they become Borriblised, their ears go pointy, they stop growing up and there's no looking back. Borribles have their own rituals. Borribles love nick-names, which they have to earn for themselves, and they are fond of proverbs like "That which falls off a lorry belongs to he who follows the lorry," and "wipe your own nose before you call me snotty."
Michael de Larrabeiti is quite proud of that last proverb because he just thought of it. In fact he invented the whole Borrible world, being about 90 per cent Borrible himself even though he looks deceptively like a grown-up. His book, The Borribles, chronicled their first great adventure and he's just about to publish a second, The Borribles go for Broke. The Borribles have even made the stage. Eighty South London schoolchildren recently became Borriblised for a week in a stage version at The Young Vic.
The first Borrible book tells what happens when an army of Borribles go on the march to crush the Rumbles of Rumbledom, twee, middle-class creatures who collect litter and can't pronounce their Rs properly. It is violent, noisy, funny, anti-adult and, despite all the fighting, thieving and swearing, really very moral. The Borribles discover that glory in battle is tainted with death and, for once, a story written for children has the courage to have an unhappy ending.
"A lot of people have worried about the downbeat ending," Michael de Larrabeiti explains, "but the kids love it. I've had nothing but compliments about it. They understand."
He's sure that they also understand the peculiar mixture of old-fashioned adventure and modern street life. He's all for realism, which is what he thinks the Borribles have, but realism alone is not enough.
"Kid's stories shouldn't necessarily be realistic. They should be brought up on murder and mayhem and adventure and treasure. I somehow wanted to get all that fantasy into a real background - the streets of Battersea."
Michael de Larrabeiti loved the William books because William and his gang do such dreadful things to adults. It's the same disruptive element in the Borribles which adults find disturbing but which kids love.
Every now and then Michael de Larrabeiti gets some concrete evidence of the Borribles' subversive appeal. In one school he found a whole classroom Borriblised. The children had all adopted Borrible nick-names and they even, he says in amazement, "had boys learning to knit so they could make Borrible hats."
The hats are essential to the Borrible disguise. You may have sat next to a Borrible and never noticed the tell-tale ears. They cunningly mix with ordinary children in order to escape detection, so be warned. You're probably surrounded by them. For that matter, have you looked at your own ears lately?

A top-selling author dressed up as a woman and gate-crashed a swish autumn charity ball for a bit of fundraising fun.
Armed with a long dress and make-up Oxfordshire writer Mike de Larrabeiti scaled a stone wall to get into the ball at Little Milton Manor.
He was challenged by his friend, GP Dr John Hughes who bet he couldn't get in undetected.
So he did what his top-selling creations the Borribles - top favourites with children - would have done.
He borrowed a long dress from neighbour Cynthia D'Anger and his two teenage daughters Amy and Phoebe set to work on the make-up.
He said: "Have you ever tried to climb a high stone wall in drag? It was very spectacular."
He got into the grounds expecting to find everyone eating and dancing - but got a shock.
The assembled 300 guests including newsreader John Craven were seated eating a full meal in a huge marquee.
"I had to walk the full length of the marquee to some very penetrating stares, but I saw John Hughes and claimed my reward. He paid up straight away.
"Then I was made very welcome by the guests and had a great evening."
He handed the bet over to the Aylesbury Vale Hospice Fund, the cause supported by the guests at the ball.
Dr Hughes said; "I was flabbergasted when I saw this creation coming up the marquee. I just flung my arms around him, it was marvellous to see him and I paid up. It was great fun."
One man who missed the joke was organiser Hugh Buchanan. "I did not know of any gatecrashers," he said.
"I had a lot of security like guard dogs to prevent that happening."
The £25-a-head ball is expected to have raised more than £5,000 for the charity.