The Story of Childhood (31 page)

For his part, Majid is not purely an ideologue. Football matters too. He learnt it on the streets, he says mightily. If he had the chance, he'd play football twenty-four seven. He supports Manchester United, and he likes strong defenders who will really go in there and take a beating.

When he's older, he wants to move to Spain, so he can train to be a footballer. But he'll have to do university first, business or mechanical engineering. He's good at science. He's in the highest group.

This week, he's later coming home because he has a science revision class after school. We are in the sitting-room, while his mother prepares dinner in the kitchen. Next week he has tests in French, science, English and maths. He doesn't feel nervous because he knows he's worked hard.

Teachers are a variable tribe, according to Majid. ‘You have teachers that are very good at it, and you have teachers that just can't control anyone. It really depends. We had this one teacher, he left us a term ago, but he was loose, he would act higher than us, but not so high, and we would understand.'

Some teachers don't let you get out of your chair, they're proper, proper strict, and others are a bit more flexible. Majid says he will always talk, and be a bit loud, but work at the same time.

Some teachers find it really hard to control his class. ‘Like at science a week ago a boy in my class he verbally abused the teacher, he said, “I'll get my dad to rape you”.' He thinks she called his parents. ‘But people think if they're rude to teachers, they can't do nothing to you.'

It's less of a big deal to be rude to teachers at secondary school. ‘When I was in junior school, you had the most respect for teachers, but on my first day [at secondary school] I saw year sixes and they're calling a teacher a female dog. I'm like,
“Wow! This has never happened in my life!” and people just pick up on that.'

The girls in his class, everyone thinks they are the good ones, but they are devils. He wrinkles his nose at the maleficence of the opposite sex. ‘They will bitch about one another, they will talk about each other, they will make noises to annoy the teacher. In PE we are the best behaved because the boys are split up from the girls. It's the girls that start things.'

Status is carefully calibrated, and it is not always obvious how to acquire it. ‘There's this girl that thinks she's so popular, but she is not. She's been trying hard to get with the really popular girls, but then this new girl just made friends straight away with the popular girls and the first girl bitched about her and it became this big fight. She said, “Oh my God, how come you can get with them and look at my standards?” and everyone was like, “Look at your own standards!” In slang we have a word called “beg” and she begs a lot.'

Neither is status a constant. If you don't stand up for yourself, explains Majid, you will eventually lose power. ‘Like, me and my friends have play fights' – he rolls up his sweatshirt arm to display a ladder of bruises. ‘There was this one boy, he came at me when I was at my uncle's house, and I was like, “What? What?” and I had to blow him twice in his face and he hit me once.' He executes a pair of upper cuts whilst he's talking.

But with boys, in contrast to girls, everyone's equal. ‘There's this one boy, he's grown very big. But we don't pick on him, we all make fun of each other. We're like brothers, but the girls are always bitching about each other.'

The true depth of this brotherly intimacy is unclear. Angela Phillips, who has written widely on the young
male experience, points out the poor fit between boys' sense of loyalty to one another and a group culture that is contemptuous of close relationships.

In interviews with thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds about attitudes to schooling, she found that although the boys were aware that girls had more intimate relationships, they were suspicious of them. Many were preoccupied with girls' ‘whispering', implying that this made them sneakier and less honest than boys. Phillips suggests that this betrayed their own feelings of exclusion, when traditional masculinity demands that they forge an identity beyond the warmth and intimacy of the female family circle.

She discovered that, in the classroom, much of this ‘whispering' was in fact collaboration over school work, something which boys found embarrassing. ‘Somehow the idea of helping each other has been tied up in their minds with this feminine intimacy,' she writes. ‘Helping is something that mothers and girls do so to help others would open them up to accusations of being soft – like a girl.'

Majid says nothing much else has been happening lately. ‘Just getting beat up!' he says cheerfully. He says the bruises don't hurt. ‘I always take them down with me, start hitting their legs, then get up and run. That's what you do.' His strategy is all worked out.

When he misbehaves at home, he says it's mostly to do with his sister. ‘And I'm the one that's always to blame 'cos she's younger, so it's my responsibility to look out for her and not abuse her. We play-fight but then it gets real. Last year I was jabbing her with a comb and she moved her head down and it went into her ear, nearly deafened her! She went to hospital. I was just shaking!'

Sometimes Majid has trouble starting sentences because
there's so much to convey, and the syllables tumble over each other. He's noticed a big change in himself over the past few years as he's become a teenager. ‘Before I wasn't very hygienic, I used to sleep in my same clothes, I didn't care, I never used to do my sheets, never used to do anything for Mum. Now I do my bed every day, change my clothes. I never used to like outdoors much. Now I really, really like going out.'

Majid's specific trouble with really liking going out is that his mum worries. She doesn't let him go out in the evenings, even though all of his friends are allowed. ‘But my mum thinks that I'm too young. I say to my mum, “Please!” She thinks I might get kidnapped, but I'll be with a big group of people. She thinks I might do drugs, but I've been offered millions of cigarettes before and I said no.' He thumbs his chest. ‘I can handle peer pressure!'

Drugs and cigarettes are so stupid. His dad used to smoke the long shisha pipe. ‘I used to say,' he sneers into a baby voice, ‘ “When I grow up I want to be like Dad and smoke.” And I'd be putting everything in my life at risk, for what? None of my friends smoke. We beat up people that smoke. Round the back at school, we steal their cigarettes and beat them up. Smoking, look where it gets you – not just heart disease but bruise disease,' he scoffs.

He's seen a few people smoking weed. He makes a face. ‘Stinky, expensive, fake. Yeeeuh!' Alcohol is against his religion.

But he's not that sensible, he appends. ‘I have a big mouth. I speak a lot. I never used to do that before.' He's more confident now. ‘I have to look out for my sister. Like she was in an argument with some girl in her class the other day and I had to sort it out. 'Cos the brother of the girl and me, we're friends, so I spoke to him, sorted.' He crosses his arms, a man.

Majid thinks it's easier to grow up as a boy than as a girl. ‘ 'Cos girls do a lot of make-up and stuff, and, “Ooh, does this boy like me?” As a boy you don't
care
!' He spits the word out like a bad taste. ‘As a Muslim girl, my sister can't go swimming, but I can. She has to be careful who she talks to, what she does, how she reacts.' Does he think that's fair? ‘It's a way of respect. You don't want her becoming one of those girls that dresses in miniskirts.'

Majid doesn't worry about what girls think of him. ‘No! I just judge them, whether they're nice or not.' And does he ever wonder about marriage? ‘I'm not even thinking about that right now!' He seems stranded between girl-hating and girl-desiring, not quite sure which way to jump. Would his future wife have to be Muslim? Yes. Who practises? ‘Not necessarily,' he says. ‘I'd turn her into one.'

As Laura observed in the previous chapter, ‘loads of teenagers don't really know who to try and be'. If adolescence induces the struggle to fathom identity, how much harder has that become for boys, now that the male role is so in flux? The 1990s witnessed anxious debate about ‘the crisis of masculinity'. It seemed that boys were struggling more than girls to adapt to the major changes taking place in society, falling behind at school, falling into delinquency, unable to imagine their place in a new economic landscape that valued feminine skills more than traditional masculine ones. Negative portrayals of men in the media, unsuitable role models and single mothers were all variously accused of contributing to a lack of confidence among young males.

Meanwhile, lingering conventional expectations of what it is to be a man can narrow the range of boys' responses to these challenges. In their book
Young Masculinities
, the psychologists Stephen Frosh, Ann Phoenix and Rob
Pattman describe this process: ‘The ways in which masculinities are “policed” by peers and adults communicate to boys a message that alternative … ways of being are abnormal for males – that they are girlish and hence subject to opprobrium and exclusion.'

The book is based on an extended research project, interviewing 11–14-year-old boys in London schools over a number of years. The authors found that their subjects characterised masculinity as involving ‘toughness, footballing prowess and resistance to teachers and education'.

They saw how boys' behaviour and appearance were powerfully regulated by a set of gendered contrasts. ‘Boys were seen, by boys themselves and to some extent by girls, as “naturally” active and energetic, physically tough, easygoing, funny, brave and sporty, while girls were passive, fragile, obsessed with their appearance, easily offended, emotionally weak and academic,' they observe. These contrasts were assumed to be present in all activities, and so the performance of boys and girls ‘was constantly examined by their peers for signs of gender conformity or deviance.'

One form of ‘deviance' to which the boys in the study frequently referred was homosexuality. Calling somebody ‘gay' was a generic insult, rarely based on any concrete evidence about a person's sexuality. Often being gay and being girly were seen as interchangeable. ‘Homophobic and misogynistic repetition,' note the authors, ‘may be understood as a continual attempt to construct an ever-elusive masculine ideal.'

They described the ubiquity of homophobia among the boys they spoke to, and the way in which they used it to publicly assert their ‘normal' masculine identity. When I broach the subject of homosexuality with Majid, his reaction is immediate: laughing, cursing, embarrassed. ‘It's wrong,
really wrong!' he cries. ‘I'm racist against it!' At school, if someone says you're gay it can mean something else, not in a homosexual way, like you're annoying.

What would he do if one of his friends told him that he thought he was gay? He points to his father's walking stick, which is leaning against the fridge. ‘Take that,' he says deliberately, ‘bring it down on his head.' Even if he was your friend before that? ‘It's WRONG!!!' he shrieks. ‘God made man and woman for a reason, not man and man. It's going against the rule of nature.' If a gay person told him they couldn't help it, he'd tell them to get a doctor. Doesn't he have any sympathy for them? ‘Hell no! Eeeyeuh.' He squirms on the settee, tugging at his tracksuit leg in agitation, disgusted.

Like Majid, many of the boys in the
Young Masculinities
study used the football pitch as a site for exploring their male identity. When comparing themselves with girls, an important difference they highlighted was that they were more interested in sport. Like the boys that Angela Phillips spoke to, they expressed bafflement at what girls actually did during the lunch-hour when the boys were playing football.

The authors describe the ‘opposition between the active and productive use of time in playing football, characteristic of boys, and girls' aimless sitting, walking and talking … “Just” talking was understood as talk for its own sake, as having no other purpose and therefore as pointless and obsessive. When boys talked, it was for a reason.'

The following week, Majid's been up late watching a video. It was about a good president and an evil president, and there's this guy who has to take out the evil one.

His exams were quite easy, apart from English, which was hard. ‘They gave us this text and most of the questions
were based on opinion so we had to use PEA: point, evidence, analysis. It was about being watched all the time. Somebody wrote a book in 1948 called
1984
, “Big Brother's watching you” kind of thing. The second part was “how do you feel about CCTV?” ' Majid doesn't have CCTV in his block, but they're getting an entry gate because there are loads of druggies downstairs.

There have been more fights, he laughs, showing off a fresh crop of purplish bruises. ‘Yesterday I got taken down by
eight
people! It was a play-fight. My friend started it off, he kept cussing all these people, and I went to join in for my friend, then he just ran and I had to take on eight people that were strong! They kicked me down but I was kicking back and they said, “This one's a warrior, keep him alive.” '

The distinction between play-fights and real ones is subtle, but significant. He had a real fight on Thursday. One nine-year-old and one eleven-year-old, they wanted to have a go at Majid from when they moved into this block [of flats]. He said, ‘No, 'cos I'll get in trouble, but they kept on: “You're scared”, other language, bad language. Then on Thursday, they started fighting me, and they hit me in the face which hurts a lot 'cos I have braces and it cuts your cheek, then one of them punched me so I ran after him and I punched him in the face but he was wearing glasses so it cut his eye.'

His mum was very angry. ‘She said, “You're stupid, you're older than them, you could have put him in hospital.” ' But it wasn't Majid's fault. He had to defend himself. As punishment, he's not allowed to play football downstairs for a year. He doesn't care. He doesn't want to play down there anyway.