From safety to Hackney estate

It would be a social experiment but, unlike Big Brother, there would be no cameras recording my activities, no video booth to serve as my confessional, and no get-out clause.

For one week I agreed to forgo my life as a self-employed, educated middle- class married mother of two, living comfortably in a leafy street in north London. Instead I became a single mother living in one of the most notorious housing estates in Hackney - one of the capital's most deprived and crime-ridden boroughs - with my 11-month-old son, an open mind and income support of £116 a week.

Eking out my finances; checking out opportunities at the JobCentre that would enable a single mother to earn a living and afford childcare; and confronting a pervasive culture of fear and crime - all this I found very dispiriting.

But, hardest of all for me, were the low expectations of the teenagers I met. I'll never forget 16-year-old Sinead, a pretty girl with years of fostering behind her and nothing ahead of her but dreams of a gangster boyfriend to keep her in drugs and liquor. I won't forget how she said "serves her right" after two boys attacked her mother, nor the screams of a young girl being attacked outside my bedroom window.

I spent the week in Mayfield Close, which backs on to Hackney's Holly Street estate. My cramped two-bedroom flat - with its prison-like metal security gate protecting the front door - was on the ground floor of a threestorey, 30-year-old barracks-style block of nine flats. By day, the Close was very quiet; you could hear the leaves of the four oak trees rustling in the breeze. You would be forgiven for thinking it was peaceful.

Lots of people do. "Holly Street, you've fallen on your feet!" laughed one friend, presumably because sand-coloured low-rises and neo-Victorian gabled houses have replaced the estate's 19-storey tower blocks.

Known as "The Snake", because of the criminal-friendly corridor that connected the four towers, they were pulled down in 1998.

The demolition of The Snake launched Tony Blair's grandiose pledge to rescue Britain's sink estates. But the crack cocaine and heroin epidemic, as well as rampant-truancy and dire unemployment, did not disappear with the rubble and the dust.

As recently as two years ago, three of the flats in my block were crack houses and another was a brothel - run by a husband-andwife pimp and prostitute double act. The stone stairwell was their Hogarthian pleasuredome.

They've all moved out now; the Close is quieter as a result. Burglaries are down, the drug dealers circle the estate rather than operating within it, prostitutes come and go. The legacy of fear lives on but is tolerated, for one reason only: it is better than it used to be.

But that does not make it an acceptable way to live.

Take the advice I am given the night I move in. "It's safe to go in and out, just not after dark," urges one woman. "If you put your rubbish out, do it during daylight hours," says another.

"Always watch your back," urges a mother of three. "The other day," she continues, "I dashed to the car to get my baby's dummy. I was terrified." Her car was parked not in some dark underground car park but all of 20 metres away.

That is why, should you visit the Close by night, you won't see anyone around, not tenants anyway.

They've locked themselves inside - protected by the metal security gates, double locks and grills on the outside windows - away from the outsiders, the dealers, the gangs of kids intent on "jacking" (stealing), getting some "jaw" (drugs) and getting drunk.

Then again, it could be sex that's on the teenagers' minds, raw sex where romance does not get a look-in.

"F***ing girls and then beating them up," is how one 16-year-old boy described his treatment of the opposite sex.

The 16-year-old girl with him countered his bravado with her own. "Let them know you're not a fool so they'll keep away from you," was her advice.

You're not likely to see anyone by day either. The young, the old and the carers of small children are forced inside.

There is nowhere to congregate outside, unless you count the overflowing dustbin dumps and janitor's building that form the centre-piece of the Close.

There is one concrete bench but it has been destroyed. Don't ask me how.

That is why I am holed up inside my flat at 7pm on a Tuesday, even though it's a glorious, balmy evening.

Cabin fever sets in. Sirens are whining and the sound of metal security gates swinging and banging against the concrete walls echo through the block. It sounds like prison lock-up around the clock.

I've got my receipts on the kitchen table and I am trying to work out, for the second time today, how much money I've got for the rest of the week. The man upstairs, a father with a newborn baby, is yelling again.

I look up at the white polystyrene tiles that are peeling off my kitchen ceiling like dead skin. I wonder if, should the council ever replace them, I would still be able to hear my neighbours upstairs.

Then my attention is caught by another siren. I start timing them, obsessively, like a pregnant woman recording her contractions. But they come so thick and fast, by 9.10pm I don't bother any more. I am getting used to my new life. Or so I think.

At 3.10am I am woken by the piercing screams of a young girl. "Help me! Help me!" she cries. "Get off me! I'll tell my mum. Get off me!" My heart is pounding. I go to pull back the curtain but stop myself.

What if someone sees me? I glance across to my son Sebastian, who is sound asleep in his cot at the end of my bed. The girl's screams don't let up. Then I hear a man's voice and the sound of a car.

The screaming stops. Sebastian awakes, filling the unnerving silence with his own, softer cries. I don't call the police, dare not "get involved". A girl in trouble probably wouldn't be enough to bring them out anyway, I tell myself. They've seen it all before.

Sebastian's cries wake me four hours later. During breakfast I hear the thud of a pram as an upstairs neighbour bounces it down the stairs, and dash out. I want to ask her about last night.

"Yeah, I heard her, it was nothing," says the single mother of two, who has lived on the estate for three years. I try to hide my astonishment. She continues: "I looked out my window and saw him carrying her behind one of the blocks. It means nothing to me. When the drug dealers were upstairs two years ago, there was so much of that. I don't notice that kind of thing any more. It's much quieter now."

The next day I take Sebastian to the One O'Clock Club in Hagerston Park, one in a national chain of state-funded parent and toddler groups.

Reached via the gauntlet that is the Queensbridge Road - the artery that divides middle-class "New Hackney" and desirable London Fields from the workingclass Holly Street estate - the club is a lifeline for local parents and carers.

Not surprisingly for Hackney, the club is threatened with closure within the year.

One of the women I meet here is Tricia, a single mother of oneyearold Tia. Tricia suffers from severe depression but is determined to give herself, and her daughter, a decent life.

She can't wait, she says, to get a job when Tia starts nursery in two years' time. Meanwhile, she'll stay on income support; we compare notes on the difficulty of making ends meet.

My budget for a single mother claiming full income support amounts to £110.75 a week. Averaging out weekly expenditures: £4.50 goes on my TV licence; £7 on gas; £7 on electricity; £25 on store card and catalogue bills; £6.50 on rent; £10 on my mobile phone (I don't have a landline).

That is a total of £60, leaving £50.75 a week for food and supplies and clothes for Sebastian. Entertainment, babysitting, clothes for myself, that's all out of the question.

I get most of my groceries from the local market, Ridley Road. Byzantium, that's how one foodie I know describes it.

Admittedly, you can buy everything - from cow's feet to ginseng roots - but, for me, it is merely a place to find cheap produce.

I do not choose ingredients. They choose me, especially if they are on special offer.

Still, I can't do anything with a crate of lemons, even if they are a snip at £1, and pick up a lettuce, mushrooms ( I ask for a quarter of a pound but the vendor says a half pound is the minimum) and tomatoes in the market for £2.

I get chatting to one woman, who says she has come looking for bargains. Michelle Dennis has got two daughters - Devonte, four, and Jade, three. She is a single parent and likes it that way.

"No males, no hassles," is her take on the nuclear family. She doesn't work and "the best thing" about that, she says, "is seeing your children grow up. The hardest thing is financial, having to juggle".

Unemployed lone parenthood as a positive choice? I don't get it.

I negotiate my way along Kingsland High Street (what one local describes as "another world", full of prostitutes and people doing drug exchanges), put £2 extra on my gas card at the newsagents, then go in search of a new raincover for the pram.

The original one is torn and, two days ago, I got caught in a rainstorm and Sebastian got soaked. The new one costs £12.99. Not much, perhaps, but a significant sum when set against my singlemother's weekly income.

As I am waiting to pay, a mother comes in with her two children. Something has wound her up. She is a lion ready to pounce.

"I asked you a question," she yells at her youngest boy, who can't be more than four. "Don't f*** with me!"

The boy, wide-eyed and fearful, recoils. He knows what's coming but he forgets to move his feet. The whack sears him clean across the side of his small head.

"I said don't f*** with me," his mother offers as if by explanation. Then she reaches across him and whacks his older brother for good measure. None of the other customers so much as flinch.

When I get home I check my receipts. I have spent £5.86 in Sainsbury's. My best purchase is a can of butter beans for 24p (a cheap source of protein), my worst two avocados. I've been charged 69p for each, even though the sign promised two for the price of one.

Later that afternoon I reach my arm through the bars of a neighbour's security gate and ring the doorbell. Not until I shout out my name does he open the door. Once inside, I ask the 75-year-old grandfather from Pakistan about life in Mayfield Close. And wish I hadn't.

"Sometimes I see strangers going upstairs," he says. "When they come down they stand near the stairs and they piss. Have sex. Smoke. It makes you scared to go in and out.

"One day I was walking home and two teenage girls were standing under the tree. I was carrying a large bag of mangoes, which I wanted to drop off before going on to pray. 'Have you got a fag?' they said. 'No,' I said, 'I don't smoke.' But they followed me into the block.

"They pushed me against my front door and one of them put their hand in my top pocket, then into my trouser pockets, tearing them. ' Help! Help! Help!' I screamed.

"I was crying. I couldn't fight two girls. Nobody came but I managed to get out of the building. There was a man standing next to a van. I called out to him but he must have thought I was mad."

As for the girls, they finally realised the old man had nothing to give them and moved on.

At 9 am on Thursday my own doorbell rings. It's the electricity man, here to install a new meter. I tell him how I'd put £5 on my card yesterday but it was not showing up. Too bad, he says, go back to the newsagents.

I feel my resilience foundering. Just before he leaves I plead with him to check my card, which turns out to be faulty. He charges the £5 onto it. I want to hug him.

Later, as Sebastian and I wander home through the market, I bump into Dawn. She's got three children. She talks me through the detritus in the yard behind her flat, the bit you can't see from the front of the Close, the bit the cleaners don't bother with.

"We get everything in here," she says, pointed to the singed grass. "Needles. Underpants. Condoms. Cans. Empty bottles. My kids don't go in there because of what they'd find."

So much for life on Mayfield Close being better than it used to. Besides, says Dawn, things could easily get worse again. "Now that summer's coming and the bridge [connecting Kingsland High Street with the Close] is open again, we are just waiting to see what will happen - to see if the dealers and prostitutes come back."

The next day it feels like summer has come early. I meet Sinead, 16, and her three mates. Talk is tough. They plan to do some "jacking" that night so they can buy some crack cocaine.

It's Friday night, after all, and, as I will reveal in part two of my exploration of life on Hackney's Holly Street estate, it's just the beginning of 24 hours of mindless crime.