So sayeth Met Inspector Richard Beadle of the killing of 90 year old war veteran
Geoffrey Bacon in Camberwell.
Geoffrey certainly epitomised one class of Londoner - the murdered elderly native.
The moment I saw the headline, I was reminded of a piece I blogged about
six years back, which appeared in the now-defunct online magazine Right Now. It was about the killing of elderly white people by young black men in South London, and while I disagreed with the author's thesis that the Stephen Lawrence killing and the Brixton nail bomb were some kind of unconscious, inchoate 'resistance movement', he wrote it as he saw it - and it wasn't outside
my old primary school that people were being killed.
The link and site has long gone - but the magic of the Wayback Machine has brought J F Cronin's
'The Forgotten Victims' back to life - the victims being Constance Brown, 72, of Streatham, Elizabeth Pinhom, 96, of Herne Hill, Thomas Kidd, 61, of Tulse Hill, Ted Howell, 75, of Lewisham, Leslie Watkinson, 66, of Peckham, and Frank Dempsey, 56, of Clapham.
"I wouldn’t like to be an old person living in Bethnal Green" said musician
Jah Wobble when he moved to leafy Cheshire. For Bethnal Green, read 'most of London outside the leafy south west postcodes'.
(UPDATE - at the opposite end of the age spectrum, while she's not a native, the treatment
Michele Kirsch's kids received on a Stoke Newington estate is also relevant. The truism that racism isn't only restricted to white people is one that Guardianistas are happy to accept in theory. It's just giving chapter and verse they're uncomfortable with.)