Murder in Matalan

Walking out of Sainsbury in Dalston a couple of days ago I noticed Matalan was closed. There was a small crowd, and police at the entrance. I guessed there’d been some disturbance, and people were waiting to go back in. Actually it was more than that. It turned out the store had already been closed a few days, and the people were holding vigil at a shrine that had been set up. Jamie Simpson, the manager of the store, had been stabbed in the neck and killed as he cashed up the day’s takings. The shrine was the usual mass of flowers, pictures, cards. Being inside there were also lots of candles. Also a scattering of cigarettes and a bottle of fresh orange juice, two of his favourite things apparently. Three people were caught on CCTV, and one person has since been arrested.

Of course, talking about murder I wonder if I’m adding to people’s fear. I can talk about the shrine having ‘the usual’ components because I’ve seen enough of them. In a crowded, deprived area it’s not too surprising if tensions sometimes bubble up, and someone gets hurt. Recently there’s been way too many gang-related murders of young people.

But… it wasn’t the first time I’d seen a shrine that week. The other was in polite Dulwich, along a busy road of big, expensive houses, marking the spot where someone else had died, victim to a car driver this time. Funny how these shrines are always to murder and road accident victims isn’t it? Our publicly mourned forms of death…

And of course the news has been filled this week with the trial of the teenagers who kicked to death a young woman simply because she was dressed in a way they didn’t like. All in Bacup, the sort of little town people scared of the East End want to retreat to.

I don’t have the statistics handy to see if there’s actually more killing per head of population in one area than another, but, whatever, it seems humans are quite capable of killing each other wherever they live. I have this feeling that at some deep level all the cases above are linked. You could summarise it as human nature. Maybe it’s all a matter of dividing into ‘us’ and ‘them’, whether it’s outright hatred of ‘them’ or just lack of concern. So, with lack of concern we kill the person who gets between us and the cash we want, or run over the person outside our speeding metal box. When it’s hatred then you get gang war, whether that is colour based, postcode based (as happens among the youngsters here in the East End) or based on how a person looks.

Those who live out in the ‘nice’ places might think themselves beyond all that, but they are wrong. Bacup shows that. I experienced it myself as a child growing up in a small town. I do think the more humans are crowded together, the more tension is likely to be caused. But it’s a balance of factors. Come to a crowded area like where I live and the flip side is you’ll find people more tolerant of each other than they tend to be in a small town. I live in a block that’s about as mixed race as it’s possible to be, and on the whole we get along pretty well in spite of the thin walls. Do I want to live in a place where someone on my income level can only hope for a tiny box with thin walls, or do I want to move out where I have more space, but people have strong and sometimes bigoted views on who they’d like as neighbours? It’s actually a difficult choice.

Of course, these days even the small towns are not so small. Back gardens and every other spare space in the cities are being built on. More and more people, whether born here or imported I don’t care, means we are living closer and closer together with less and less green breathing space. ‘Us’ and ‘them’ with less and less chance of moving apart. Of course, if our population continues to grow, most will learn tolerance, but I wonder if there’s some point when it when it gets too much? Experiments on rats showed that the more crowded you kept them, the more the normal rules of society broke down. I wonder if humans are really that much different?

Update: I made my regular shopping trip to Dalston today, pausing only to pay my respects at the shrine before heading into Sainsbury. While I was in there I walked round the corner of an aisle to see a disturbance going on. A woman was surrounded by store detectives. I heard her cry out ‘You can’t arrest my son for something like that. We’re decent people’. I moved on. Later I saw her, still very upset, accompanied by a man, apparently trying to get her head round doing the shopping while too distraught to think straight. Crying as she tried to decide whether to buy milk or not. Of course I wondered what her son had been accused of. Shoplifting? But not inside the store… I didn’t even know if he had actually been arrested. Was the man her son, or was he gone? As I left the store I heard the rumour going round that another of Jamie’s killers had just been arrested in front of his distraught mother. I didn’t see an arrest, or even any police. I guess they’d left by the time I got on the scene. But I have since heard on the news that two more people have been arrested for Jamie’s murder. Good news of course, but I really feel for the woman I saw. Another victim I guess.