Cover

About the Author

Jay Bernard is the author of the pamphlets Your Sign is Cuckoo, Girl (Tall Lighthouse, 2008), English Breakfast (Math Paper Press, 2013) and The Red and Yellow Nothing (Ink Sweat & Tears Press, 2016), which was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award 2017. A film programmer at BFI Flare and an archivist at Statewatch, they also participated in ‘The Complete Works II’ project in 2014 and in which they were mentored by Kei Miller. Jay was a Foyle Young Poet of the Year in 2005 and a winner of SLAMbassadors UK spoken word championship. Their poems have been collected in Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century (Bloodaxe, 2009), The Salt Book of Younger Poets (Salt, 2011), Ten: The New Wave (Bloodaxe, 2014) and Out of Bounds: British Black & Asian Poets (Bloodaxe, 2014).

By the Same Author

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Pamphlets

Your Sign is Cuckoo, Girl

English Breakfast

The Red and Yellow Nothing

Epigraph

“You’ve seen the physical. I was dealing with the opposite medium. I was in the belly of the beast … when you have to collect information and walk back into the belly of the beast to put it over, you’re on dangerous grounds.”

– alex pascall, new cross fire remembrance, albany, deptford, 2011

“For here we have not an enduring city, but we are looking for the city to come.” – hebrews 13:14

Author’s Note

In 2016, I was invited to be writer in residence at the George Padmore Institute, an archive, library and research centre dedicated to radical black history in Britain. At the back of my mind, I knew that I was interested in the New Cross Fire. It was only when I opened the boxes relating to it that I realised I had grown up as a black British Londoner with a piecemeal understanding of the event and the consequences that followed.

In the early hours of Sunday morning, on 18 January 1981, a fire broke out at 439 New Cross Road. It was Yvonne Ruddock’s sixteenth birthday, and she had arranged a party with her cousin to celebrate. The fire spread quickly, killing thirteen young people and injuring twenty-seven others.

In the immediate aftermath of the fire, dubbed the ‘New Cross Massacre’, many believed it had been a racist attack. Investigations yielded little: early reports by the police indicated that an incendiary device was found under the window. Forensics experts later said the fire had started in the middle of the room. Some of the teenagers who had been at the party gave statements that they later retracted in court, saying they had been intimidated or coerced. In response to the police investigation, a group of activists called the New Cross Massacre Action Committee conducted their own interviews – and these are largely the ones that inform this book.