Today was going to be a good day. Yesterday she’d stayed behind after school to help Miss Simister pack everything away and received a large bar of chocolate as a thank you. Hope Street was closing and in September she would be going to Lee Bank, a brand new school promising endless possibilities and uncertainties. But this was the beginning of the summer holidays and no time for thoughts of school. Instead she concentrated on her plans to conquer the world even though the world, for Dawn Adams, was no more than a small area of inner city Birmingham that was one step away from being knocked into oblivion.

The plans had already been made by Dawn and her friends in the preceding weeks. They had a list of adventures they were going to have this summer including the exploration of several buildings abandoned in the mass exodus of a community desperate for a better future; a community that saw no need to look back at the fragile history they were leaving behind in the hands of the city’s developers.  Every week more families left for a suburban promised land and for those that remained the daily struggle became even harder. Buildings were either being bulldozed or falling down of their own accord and the only increasing population in evidence were the rats who grew bigger and bolder as the human inhabitants became fewer. For the children of Highgate though this was a world of unlimited pleasure and fear. They never knew what they were going to find next and the thrill of it was immense.Continue reading “All That Glitters”