The results in the three categories are below:

Category A

First prize: Liz Gwinnell

Second prizes: Amelia Rodgers and Kay Sexton

Category B

First prize: Sobanan Narenthiran

Second prizes: David Breakspear and Caragh Connaire

Category C

First prize: James Firmstone

Second prizes: Lois Hartfield, Emily May and Jillo Serwaa Ntim

Read the entries in full for Categories A, B and C

Category A

First Prize: Liz Gwinnell

South of the River

“What’s poor?”

Me mother is busy. Distracted by big sister’s baby, by work, by sons, by life.
“What you talkin?” she says. “We ain’t poor.”
“White boy at school say we poor.”
Her eyes flash as I hook her attention.
“Since when you listen to white boys huh? You close your ears when dem say dese
tings. White boy say we poor! Huh! We may be poor but we got life. We got pride. We got
soul.”
She is breathing more heavily. She does that when she gets macky. That’s what she calls it
when things get under your skin. Macky.
I push it.
“Is poor bad?”
She sigh. Her shoulders rise and fall.
“Questions questions. Always questions wit’ you Denzil. Poor means you get to eat
more potatoes,” she say. “That’s all.”

At school, at dinner time, I help meself to extra mashed potato.
Hand on me arm like the po. I look up into the round pink face of Mrs Tunbrook.
“Tell me Denzil,” she say. “Why should you have more mash than n’one else?”
“Because I’m poor,” I say. “Poor people eat more potatoes.”

Running down the alleyways behind Loki’s Jamaica Supermarket with aerosol cans, marking
the brick walls and railway bridge with our tags; ducking into doorways when the po lights
flash blue in the darkness. We are foot soldiers with a postcode, affiliated to the gangstas
who cruise the streets in their black BMWs blasting boom boom bass, just like me father did before he went to jail.

Nappies stolen from Tesco Express. Nappies that stink in the kitchen bin, neighbours
arguing through the wall from the flat next door.
Romeo lie on the floor, his head in the cupboard, fiddling with the electric meter.
Ranny hold up his mobile to shine the light.

Money make the world go round the world go round the world go round, me mother
sing, bouncing the baby on her knee.
The lights come on and we re-join the world. Romeo get up off the floor and brush his
trousers.
“These cost two hundred pound,” he complain.
I give the baby a potato man with matchstick arms and legs.
“Don’t be giving her tings like that,” me mother say, wiping at Romeo’s trouser legs
with a dishcloth. “Potatoes cost money.”

I am hungry. I want chicken. Salt and grease on me fingers. Hot food in me belly.
I snatch a bucket from the fat man standing outside the chicken shop. He run down the
street after me and he nearly have a heart attack. That’s what the po say when they pick me
up.
“He nearly have a heart attack.”

In the Youth Court the magistrate stare at me. I see her before. She has shoes. Butter. Hot
fires.
“Why do you think you have the right to steal from honest working people?”
I look at the woman with her pearls and black framed glasses and she scare me.
I shrug.
“I was hungry.”
The woman stare at me.
“That’s no excuse for committing a criminal offence.”
Me mother stand up.

She is macky. She come from work in her pink cleaner’s overall and
her voice is shrill and shaky when she speak.
“The boy was hungry!” she say. “Is it a crime to be poor huh? Is it? Is it a crime to be
hungry?”
Afterwards, she walk huffy down the street and buy me a chocolate milkshake in
Macdonalds. She sit and watch me drink it.
“Can I have an Egg McMuffin?”
“No,” she say. “You lucky to get that.

I go to bed wearing me Nike trainers. They are me pride and joy. Sometimes when it’s really
cold, I wear all me clothes in bed. Romeo and Ranny stay up late making trap music. I will
be tired for school tomorrow. I am always tired for school tomorrow.

The trap is rough, raw and loud. Big blasty speakers. Ten thousand likes on You Tube.
“Step aside Snoop Dog,” Romeo say. “All me need now is a fur coat and shades.”
“And a stretch,” Ranny adds, his eyes distant as he inhales on a spliff. “And a stretch.”

From our balcony five floors up, I see twinkly lights across the river. It is still London but it is different London. London divided by a river.
“You don’t want to go there,” Romeo say. “People drinking oaf milk and flatty whites
and carrying dogs in their handbags.”

I stay in our world. I run errands for the gangs. I get cuffed round the ear. I find treasure. I
touch guns. I get excluded from school for fighting with the white boy and spend more time in the wilderness.
Stop search stop search stop search. Go.

On Wednesday afternoons I see the man from the Youth Support Team.
“What are you going to do with your life?” he say. “You’ve got potential Denzil. Don’t
waste it.”

“You could get a job,” he say. “You’ll be sixteen soon. Earn some money instead of
hanging around the streets. Macdonalds are recruiting.”

One day I’ll wear gold round me neck and sleep until three like Romeo and Ranny but
working in Macdonalds ain’t the way to do it. No one on the Estate work in Macdonalds. No
one work for ten pound an hour.

I leave his office. Steal a hot potato from the street van and eat it in the alleyway.
Butter drip off me chin. Me belly sing.

Romeo and Ranny slide by in their BMW and pull up to the kerb. Bass float out the window
and the air vibrate with dark promise.

“You coming with us tonight,” Romeo say, leaning out the window, dragging on a
spliff. “Man’s got work to do.”
“Ok,” I say, feeling excitement rise inside me. “Ok.”

Second Prize: Amelia Rodgers

Dear Baby

Welcome to the world. You came out of me with my blood on top of and inside you.
You’re crying without real reason, and for a moment, that is admirable. Your eyes
are closed, because darkness is all that you have ever known, but I can see from the
creases in the sockets that they likely resemble mine. You have your dad’s nose,
and I know that the little blonde curls that stand up on the back of your head are the
type that run throughout his family.

You poor sod.

As I raise you, I will try to be a good Mum. I will tell you I’m a good Mum, and
sometimes I will be. I will always keep your hopes and expectations moderate, but
never too high. I will love you, but I will love you in the way you need, rather than the
way you want to be loved: the way you see on television.

When you are young (perhaps a toddler, or a little child), young enough to string your
sentences together without thinking of the context, your dad will leave you. He will
realise that his little princess is a human being, another mouth to feed. You will wake
up to the sound of me crying in the kitchen, and you will then see me at the angriest I
will ever be. I will call him words that you have never heard before, and they will stick
to every layer of your skin forever. My friends will call him a coward, and my family
will call him heartless.

I will call him these things too, but I know that he must have thought this was
beneficial. He must have thought that this was the only way he could be of help.
When you are six, you will start school. Your pinafore will smell of a different child,
and your coat will be three times too big. You’ll grow into it, I’ll say, and you will think this is perfectly ordinary. When you go to school, you will see little girls in shiny
shoes and little boys with lovely big backpacks. Everybody’s coat will fit perfectly,
and everybody’s clothes will smell like their own. You will come home and tell me
about it, and you will ask why you don’t have any of those things. You just can’t, I’ll
say, it’s different for us.

I’ll sit you on the settee with egg and chips, and then I’ll go into your little bedroom
and cry until you call me down.

I will teach you that stealing is wrong, but when you get your period, I will teach you
how to do it. I will tell you that I’ve done it all your life, that neither of us would be
alive if I hadn’t. A girl about five years older than you will notice what you’re doing,
and she’ll give you a long, pitying look that will make you feel sick for a long time.
You won’t know if she works here because she has to, or if she is a student. I will
always tell you I don’t like them, because I won’t think you’ll ever become one.
You will walk out of the shop, and she will turn a blind eye. You will feel like everyone
is turning a blind eye, and for a reason that you can’t quite place, you’ll wish that you
had been stopped.

At fifteen, your teachers will tell you that if you fail your GCSES, you are nothing.
You will ask me how I performed, and I will tell you. You will look at me with
sympathy – or perhaps disgust – and you will hate that you were made upon the
blood and bones of nothing. I will tell you that school has never favoured people like
us, that it doesn’t even really favour the little girls with shiny shoes and the little boys
with lovely big backpacks either. You will ask how you can become favoured.
Don’t be born to me, I’ll reply. Don’t be born here.

You will work hard on revising for your exams because you will want to be
something. You will sit awake in your little bedroom for nights on end, your heart
broken and your eyes full, as darkness drags itself along the late afternoon sky. You
will try so hard, Dear Baby, but your grades will not be adequate for anything. We will
watch the television on your results day, and you will see the bright young girls and
boys of private and grammar schools holding up their A*s with a smile of pride and a
hope for the future. Your lips have never reached your cheeks in such a way. You
will turn to me for reassurance, but I won’t be upset. I expected this. In the eyes of
the world, my Dear Baby could never be favoured.

Eventually, – likely much too young – you will fall pregnant. You will look for a man
who isn’t like your father, and you will assume that will do. You will think that there is
something amiss with me, and something amiss with you as a result. You will want to
try again, to build a world of hope for somebody new – to do whatever I didn’t.
You will crawl over fences to take a cot from the local skip, and you will leave shops
with nappies under your arms. You will pile it all up in the corners of your living room,
and in the backs of your cupboards, and nothing will smell like you.

Months will pass, and when you see it laying on the hospital bed, Dear Baby, with
your blood on top and inside of it, you will realise that the mistakes have never been
ours. You will look into its eyes, and feel the soft skin of its fingers grazing your wrist.

You will hold it in your arms – this precious, beautiful, empty slate of hope and
possibility – and you will finally know me.

Neither you nor the world can account for the path that your Dear Baby will take, but
both will always account for the footprints they leave.

Second Prize: Kay Sexton

Exposure

The photographs were the price we paid, although we never knew what the payment was for, exactly. Or maybe only I didn’t know. There was me and Davey, and Anna, but then Anna went and it was just me and Davey. Later there was Arvin – but that’s later.

Me and Davey; the things they liked in the photos were grins, especially with missing teeth, projects made at school, and hugs. They really liked hugs. So we hugged a lot, me and Davey.

He was smaller, but smarter. He got the hang of things quickly. I knew my slowness was a problem; that’s what my Dad had told me, I was a problem. And then I was ‘a child in need’ and now I was ‘a foster child’ and I knew I wasn’t keeping up. It hadn’t been fast – months in therapy, a year in care, and now this new family, but I still hadn’t quite got up to speed. Davey arrived the same time as me, but he was fast. Anna didn’t help; she was mainly a bunch of piercings held together with attitude and anyway she moved on a few weeks after we arrived.

So I did what Davey told me; the grin, the hug, the holding up rockets made from toilet roll tubes or hand-prints turned into Christmas trees. I learned to say thank you for meals and to take my own stinking bedsheets to the washer on the mornings that I’d failed to wake up in time in the night. He taught me to tell my social worker that I was happy and wanted to stay, although I would have said that anyway, he just taught me to do it better – more eloquently.

I couldn’t teach him anything.

Davey went after about six months – I never found out where or why. He’d taught me not to ask questions. Arvin came soon after and I didn’t think he’d last a week. If Anna had been difficult, Arvin was impossible. He smoked and drank and possibly did drugs, he stole and lied and climbed out of the window in the middle of the night and in the middle of the day. But he was good at the photographs and sometimes he would put money on the kitchen table, tight-furled notes that our foster mother would pick up and hide from our foster father. In photographs he wore school uniform or football kit, or held the guitar which he claimed to play but never did. His smile was wide and bright and while I’d pulled Davey into the curve of my arm in our photos, Arvin often rested his hand on my shoulder, as if he was my big brother. As if there’d never been me and Davey.

Arvin aged out – that’s what they call it, and went to accommodation for care leavers. Then it was just me.

But it wasn’t. Arvin showed up at school and taught me how to climb out of the toilet window, how to shoplift, how to put the money on the kitchen table. Not like he cared about me, or wanted to help, but like it was a ‘fuck you’ to the system. I was a slow learner but I learned. I was rubbish at shoplifting but good at other forms of theft – slow but persistent. I could try every door on every car until I found one that was unlocked; there was always something in a car that could be sold.

I thought I’d age out too, but when I was fourteen and there was a new kid called Sharna who had a gap-tooth smile and a habit of pulling out her hair, something happened. I never found out what. They don’t tell children things like that, but I ended up back in care and although I called Arvin many times, he never picked up.

I looked for Davey, when I was out of care. After all, he was a year or so younger than me, he should still have been in the system. There was no Davey though, no David, no Dave. No record of him in foster care with me. Sharna was actually adopted – the only kid I ever heard of who was – and I found Arvin after a few years, in prison for GBH, which was a surprise because he’d never been the violent kind, but Davey just wasn’t in the system.

Me and Davey, the family that wasn’t, the boy that didn’t exist.

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Category B

First Prize: Sobanan Narenthiran

My Prison Gap Year

Prison’s weird, I sit with people I would’ve gone to school with. I went
to University and they went to the countryside to sell crack. It scares
me to think how lucky I was, to have a mum and dad who gave me
three meals a day and a roof to feel safe under. My friends in here,
their parents fought their own demons, broken by a system that didn’t
care about their fall.

I remember in school, I used to fight the kids that would steal phones.
I sat across my friend, he grew up in the city but he was one of those
kids, the ones who’d snatch your phone and threaten you with
violence. I asked him why, he told me that it was a choice between
cereal with water for dinner or some chicken and chips with the
returns from his ill gotten gains. It was in that moment it clicked. It’s a
crime to be poor. To grow up on a council estate, at the whims of the
system, it’s a crime to face adversity as a child, it’s a crime to have
parents who don’t know how to raise a child.

I see sadness when I look around, when I ask my peers about their
lives outside of prison- they tell me about fear, desperation and
poverty. Imagine, living a reality where uncertainty reigns supreme,
you don’t know where your next meal comes from, you only know
that you must try to survive. I couldn’t relate but I felt the pain, the
hurt children that become broken men. Only thinking about how to
meet immediate needs, with no thought for the consequences this
brings.

I went to prison thinking I would meet bad people, people who
deserved to be punished and be taught a lesson. Instead, I found
people hurt and in pain, people who had to grow up much earlier than
they needed too. Each story filled with lost hope and dreams,
completely avoidable by a more compassionate system where we
learn to love each other like family.

I’ve spoken to a few people who were quite rich- their sentences
were more lenient, their route to open prison more easy, it felt like
even in prison they were treated better. But still, they would complain
about the difficulty they faced and the culture of the men. It shocked
me that people so privileged could be so heartless to the suffering of
others.

The culture of violence and aggression we see in crime is a facade.
To live in a system with the disparity of wealth, where in the same postcode a child could go hungry and a billionaire resides in luxury – requires a level of numbness to survive. The child will grow up and wonder what did it do wrong, why was it born poor, why is it subject
to a system that doesn’t love it so. It learns to fight, take and grow,
without the violence – how will it ever make it through?

In each human is a desire to be loved, healthy and whole, but for
some the options are limited from the moment they are born. In
prison you can feel it, through the landings and the cells, there are
good people who just want to make it out of the revolving door, but
who should they do it for? I tell everyone to do it for yourself, but what
if crime is all you’ve ever known? It’s where we must show love and
compassion, to teach each other that it’s not a crime to be poor.

My time in prison taught me a lot, our system lacks humanity, it lacks
it to its core. Otherwise, we wouldn’t see our prisons filled up with the
poor, instead we’d see that criminality exists across a spectrum of classes, creeds and cultures. Only some will never have to see a prison wall. They’re the lucky ones, where their crimes are brushed away as they aren’t too poor. Next time, you see a story about someone being sent to prison, try to consider that they are still a
person, deserving of kindness and warmth.

Crime isn’t fair, it’s not black and white – it’s just a murky grey mess.
We criminalise in our culture, according to the whims of the day. I
beg you my friend, to consider the people in our prison walls, I
promise you they don’t all deserve to be there, their lives are an
orchestrated fall.

Imagine, not being able to read or write, facing abuse and negligence
at the hands of all those you hold dear. Not from a place of malice
but one of ignorance for their choices aren’t that clear. Poverty is
multi-generational, pain fills mother’s wombs, for a child born in
poverty has a fate written by the state. Think about that for a
moment, a life in institutions starting from the age of 5. You move into
school, care then maybe a PRU. Followed by some time in a Youth
Offenders all before 21. When your peers are graduating, you move
to the adult estate to learn about crime, how else does the
institutionalised spend their time? You’ll be released at times, without
support or guidance to help, instead they’ll blame you at each hurdle,
just to keep everyone safe. My own understanding of institutions is
from my experience alone, but I was lucky enough to leave and go
back home.

For I left prison, to go live with my parents, I worked part time and
went back to University. My friends were released homeless, without
a place to rest their head, they struggled each day but they would
hide their stress. They are determined to learn, going to University,
working full-time or attempting to become more than they were. I
don’t know if I ever could have a stable life, without my family there
for me- it scares me to think how many aren’t as lucky as me.
If there’s one takeaway from my experience in prison; it’s that there’s
always hope. Each person in prison must become a witness; sharing
their voice. It’s not a shame to have served a sentence, instead it’s a
badge of honour.

For as Mandela said “A Nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but it’s lowest ones. Only free men can negotiate, prisoners can’t enter into contracts. It is said
that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails.”
We know our nation better than most, for knowledge is power.

Change is coming, let us each do our part.

Second Prize: David Breakspear

Word!

Isolated
Secreted
Ignored
Taunted
Admonish
Criminalised
Refused
Ill-fated
Marginalised
Excluded
Trapped
Oppressed
Belittled
Ejected
Pigeon-holed
Ostracised
Overlooked
Rumbled!

Second Prize: Caragh Connaire

It’s a crime to be poor?

The proletariat and the bourgeoisie

Those lusting for more

Enslaved is society free?

Fixated to our phones

With never ending pits to fill

Credit card loans

For another cheap thrill

An act or offence

Punishable by law

No common sense

Like a wound that is raw

Omission of feeling

By purchasing the shop

Hoarding to ceiling

Cheap tat to swap

It’s a crime to be rich

When you can’t feel your soul

Down in the ditch

But chasing a goal

Community poverty

Opens a door

Hope and probability

Resilient at core

I would rather have this

Not more, more, more, more.

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Category C

First Prize: James Firmstone

These very words cycle through my head night after night, week after week, month after month, as I lie in my cramped, damp room near the bottom of the rig in which I pitifully reside.

There used to be hundreds of us. Not anymore, but I can’t be asked to count. Every week, it seems the guards from the floating cities come and take more of us rig-dwellers away, and every week the hopelessness mounts.

The year’s 2053, or last I checked, and I’m 17, or last I checked. I was supposed to have my life ahead of me, but now I’m stuck with nowhere left to go. I’m amazed we still exist at all. I live on R147, one of the remaining grounded habitat towers that rise up out of the sea like dead men’s fingers. Perpetually rising sea levels have pushed people up, and those who couldn’t have been claimed by the waves. Now, everyone left is either on one of the various floating cities, or for the common people, a rig like mine. R147 was adapted from an oil rig after the reserve dried up. And when I say ‘adapted’ I mean it was hastily and shoddily built upon by desperate men and women, until it resembled more of a corrugated tumour than a stable, industrial plantation. The original rig itself is now more than fifty metres below sea level, as rapid climate change has accelerated the rise of the water below and around us.
The people here survive on a subsistence lifestyle, with fishing skiffs going out and, hopefully, returning before dark carrying dwindling catches of mackerel or cod.

The people there live in glass domes filled with skyscrapers and trees, powered by nuclear reactors and with onboard plantation for fresh fruit and veg. The goal was to make enough of the fortresses for 40% of the population, but they only managed about 4% before the production facilities were all drowned.

Every now and then, a city will drift past and the captain and crew will decide to send a boat full of soldiers to take food, materials and often people from the rigs to keep the silicon domes afloat in this ever sinking world. We don’t know what they do to us, but it can’t be good because we never go willingly, and they never let us come back. I’d like to think they give us a job, a home, and food, but I can almost guarantee that’s a comforting fiction I made up to make myself feel better.

And now they’re coming for me. I can hear them tramping down the stairs and checking the doors on my hall.

To whomever finds this, know that there won’t be anything of value here, so you can just leave and forget we ever even appeared on the map. Because I doubt we even will

Second Prize: Lois Hartfield

The streets – as always – were cold. The sky was an odd shade the sort of grey commonly used to describe steel mixed with a strange dark rusted brown. The clouds were drawing in and hinting rain as I sat back in the doorway of an old shop. The street was not busy as such but people flowed past like a rain-coated river always moving , never stopping. There was a solitary bin across the road from me, the river of people moved around it hardly noticing it was there. The exact same reaction as they had to me, to them I was just another rubbish filled box sitting on the side of the road. Sometimes people did stop, though only for a second, to throw some cash into the plastic tub sitting in front of me, if the people were particularly brave and not so busy, they might even say a polite “afternoon” as they did so.

The car’s headlights were blinding, exactly at my eye level, I let my eyes close to block out the onslaught of light. A shadow fell across my closed eyelids, I looked up. Shielding my eyes I could see that this figure was a well dressed man, he was reaching into a wallet. When his hand emerged he was holding what looked like about £100 in cash I wanted to pinch myself to make sure this was real. The man seemed to waft the money in front of my face, so close I could virtually smell it. He ran his fingers over the cash as if he was counting it and then extended his arm as if he was offering it to me. Before I could reach up, he jerked his arm back making a tutting noise as he did so. He smiled a smile so chokingly cruel it made me want to recoil in shock, but I stayed stock still and he uttered the words “Not for dirty criminals like you” as he walked off.

I was no criminal, I had never committed a crime in my life, sure, other people in my position may resort to criminal activity, but I and many others did not. What that man just did was more of a crime than anything I had ever seen a person like me doing. Cruelty was more of a crime than anything I could think of, that man seemed to think it was a crime just to be poor.

Second Prize: Emily May

As I’m sitting here, legs and feet numb, my face burned by the frosty gale, watching the
world go by, I see another person hurl spare change in my direction. Its shrill clink rang in my ears as I grovelled at the floor and chased the runaway coins with my red raw hands, bitten from the cold, and I murmur my thank-yous to them as they leave. Time passes. I can’t tell if it’s been minutes, hours, or even days since I last moved from the same spot in which I sat and observed.

The rain is getting heavier, and the unpleasant scent of pond water that I am so familiar with surges through the air. The shelter I have is slowly dampening, the melting ice drips closer and closer towards the sheet of cardboard that I sleep on, and I know that soon enough, I won’t have a place to sleep tonight. I look up, and I’m greeted with disgusted faces which hastily turn away as soon as my eyes meet theirs. I feel little, like some sort of hideous creature which children point at and cry. I cannot hate them for how they feel, they don’t understand the horrors of the big, wide world just yet.

They can point, they can laugh, they can cry. But as they grow older they’ll learn that we aren’t the same as the monsters under their beds, or the ones hiding in their closets. We are just people. Very unfortunate people. Ones who made bad decisions, or people who were simply never born with a silver spoon in their mouths. But it’s alright – there will always be inequality.

So is the way of life, one person’s utopia is another’s dystopia, and I don’t have much of a choice in the matter. But as I’m sitting here in the bitter cold and gnawing, miserly rain as they scurry along towards their warm homes, with a family and a warm dinner to greet them every night, I wonder; “Is it a crime to be poor?”

Second Prize: Jillo Ntim

Tight green blazer, legs tight together, skirt at knee length and eyes faced forward. The teacher teaches. The teacher tells me what they think is right.

Their way, or the highway.

The flicker of PowerPoints, from beginning to end, the draining voice of status quo. Conform to this, do this, write this essay, due tomorrow. Talk to your partner, face forward.

You never go against it, you never disobey, you listen to the teacher, if not, they’ll be in dismay.

My mind, 1,000 miles away, black void, filled with obscure phrases, proletariat, variants, bourgeoisie why people flee the countries they once loved so much.

Each subject I do, it’s own vortex that will contribute nothing to me.

They teach me to be an employee, make me fall into an ideology.

Poverty, that crime. A crime to be poor. No choice but to conform.

Creative innovations trapped and sealed in the crevices of my mind, as they force me to keep up with specs to get expected grades.

Is it a crime to be poor ?

Today I’m here to flip this question on its head.

Why would it be a crime to be poor, but not to be rich ?

A crime to be struggling, squandering your last coins of change to pay tax and rent, but not a crime to be swimming in bags of cash, yet still having to pay no tax.

A crime to work two jobs and be taxed 40%, defeating the purpose of that second job, but not to be sitting and watching as the inflation price increase has no effect on the rich and their stacks of cash.

A crime to be poor, this question asks, but the answer is short and simple.

It is not a crime to be poor, It is a crime to watch the people of our nation struggle as others face no consequence.

The end of our prize winning entries