Clapham's frightened cop lovers

A BLACK woman of middle age had come with a tribute of a flowers for the white policeman who had died. She stood at the top of Cato Road and handed over her rust-coloured dahlias to a policeman to carry to the spot where defenceless Constable Patrick Dunne was gunned down on Wednesday night.

Didn't she want to carry them there herself? For a moment she looked uncomfortable. She lowered her voice. 'I don't want to be seen on the TV cameras,' she said. 'Don't you be putting my name in your book.' The white woman next to her nodded. 'Nor me,' she said. 'If you're even seen talking to a policeman round here it's a bad thing. I gave a cup of tea to a PC this morning and my neighbour, he said, 'Cop lover]' '

These kinds of fears are common enough in west Belfast. To find them among church-going women who ride the Clapham omnibus is shocking in itself. The deaths on the street had horrified them, but had also reinforced their fear of speaking out. That, of course, was partly why it happened.

A brisk walk from Cato Road, down the notorious drug-dealing Landor Road, is the Stockwell Park Estate, where the shops are either empty or covered in steel mesh. Two years ago, while investigating a murder, police stumbled across the fact that armed men had burst into its community centre and robbed around 400 people. Not one victim had reported the incident.

In an area where even the objects of drug-related crime sometimes feel safer with silence it is hardly surprising that mere neighbours are loath to call the police about suspicious activities next-door: the constant running to the phone box, the doorbell ringing at all times, the expensive cars run by men and women claiming social security.

'You see. And you keep your nose out,' the white woman said. It was PC Dunne's job to walk the cold climate of these streets and win what trust he could. He was, it seems, surprisingly successful. Violet Dixon, who had come from a few streets away, said she had not eaten since she heard the news. 'He's been in my house for a cup of tea,' she said. 'He was a lovely man. Calm. He liked cats, like me. You'd see him on the corner of the street picking tramps up, off the ground. I don't think there was a bad streak in that man.'

In the window of a cafe in Brixton Market, 12 minutes' walk away, is a sign giving the Freephone number for those who want to report local muggers, like the Freephone number in Northern Ireland for those who will talk about terrorists. 'Oh, anonymously, you might speak. But no other way,' said a thirtysomething mother on Cato Road, inviting me in for a cup of tea. Hers was, like most of the Victorian houses in the road, divided into council-owned flats, roomy and high-ceilinged.

'A lot of people know what happened. They won't talk,' she said. 'I've a son. The trainers were stolen from his feet. I bought him a bike. It was stolen. I got him a second- hand bike. It was stolen. He recognised who had stolen it. But I wouldn't press charges. These people never forget a face.'

Up the road, even just around the corner, are the gentrified parts of Clapham. From those houses, with their gardens full of trellis and terracotta, ruffled chintz in the windows, children are sent in Volvo estate cars to private schools, shepherded by au pairs, shielded by money. Their parents fret over school fees and their own long working hours to fund them. In the council flats a few yards and a whole world away, the difficulties of raising children are different.

'My son says, look, so and so has pounds 85 trainers,' said the mother, as the kettle boiled. 'I can't buy pounds 10 worth of trainers. I say, how do you think he got those?' And a child who sees that the friends his mother most disapproves of also have the most money soon begins to wonder who is right.

Forty bouquets now lie on the pavement where Patrick Dunne's body had fallen. Several came from children: one, with a poem, from Glenbrook Junior School, which he used to visit. No one was more aware than he how hard it was to counteract the climate of the street, or to present to its children a living image of an approachable and humane law. He talked to them, one woman said, like a father.

A man drew up in a bright red car and gave another bunch of flowers to add to the collection. He was a local councillor, Yomi Buraimoh Igbo, whose parents came from Nigeria. 'Four guns have been found in this area so far this year,' he said. 'The task is to try to bring the children up differently.'

A few children wheeled their bikes before the tributes to PC Dunne, glancing first at the flowers, then up at the round bullet hole punctuating the first-floor window above. It was impossible to say whether they were more impressed by the one or the other. The fight between the glamour of evil and the modest attractions of good goes on in Cato Road and a hundred similar roads and estates nearby, on a daily basis. At the end of the street the chorus of lament continued.

'I feel sorry for the man who did this because his soul will surely burn,' said one. 'How does his mother feel? You bring a child into the world and he turns out to be a murderer. I'm a very typical black woman. I say, bend a tree when it is young, when it is old it cannot be bent. They are cowards, these boys, they live by the gun and the knife.'

'I'm a single parent with a teenage boy,' said her friend. 'His friend started bringing new video-recorders round. I said to my boy, you choose. You lose him, or you go through that door with him.'

A police car siren sounded. No one looked up. 'You talk to your children till you're blue in the face,' said the friend. 'Politicians say, don't smack your children. I smack mine, and he's 19. Every time he brings something home, I say, son, where's the receipt? And that's the way you have to bring children up these days, in Clapham.'

(Photograph omitted)