After Neville Lawrence's son Stephen was murdered in 1993, the family's lives fell to pieces. Now, with two of the killers finally in jail, Neville can smile again
There's something different about Neville Lawrence. Yes, his hair is whiter than it was 18 years ago, and he's a little bulkier, but it's more than that. After a couple of minutes it dawns on me – he's smiling. Laughing, even. We're at Kingston Racial Equality Council in Surrey, he's got an arm round the shoulders of his former police liaison officer, and there's something shocking about that cheeky, wheezy giggle.
You've got a lovely laugh, I say. "Funny you should say that. I went to see some people the other day and I was laughing, and they said, 'Neville, we haven't seen you laugh for a long time.' In the early days, if I heard somebody laugh I'd get angry, because as far as I was concerned there was nothing to laugh about."
The murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993 transformed race relations in Britain. It was not the first time a black person had been killed simply because of his colour, but it was the first time the failings of the police investigation were exposed in close-up: how the Met had failed to arrest suspects for two weeks, despite being given five names within hours; how officers were alleged to be in the pay of local gangster Clifford Norris, whose son David was one of the two eventually convicted; how the police spent more time investigating Stephen and his friend Duwayne Brooks then tracking down the killers. And on it went. There was the failed private prosecution after the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said there was not enough evidence to charge the gang, the public inquiry that concluded the police were institutionally racist, the discovery of new DNA evidence and finally, last week, the convictions.
How did Neville feel when the verdict was announced? "It was like when you dive underneath the water and you hold your breath, and you have to come out and huhhhh [he gulps in air loudly]. I thought my heart was going to fly out through my mouth and drop on the floor when I heard 'guilty'."
Neville is a big, handsome man – broad-shouldered, with two gold rings on his fingers (one saying "DAD" is a present from his daughter Georgina). Only the eyes give him away his equilibrium. He looks like a man who has seen too much.
He was brought up in Jamaica by his paternal grandmother. She was white and Jewish, and he believed she was his mother. "My grandmother would come to school and I'd think, why have all the other kids got a black mother and why have I got a white one?" But Jamaica was a tolerant place, he says – nobody asked questions. "Till the day she died I called her mum."
In 1960 he came to England, having read about a country of good jobs, big houses and croquet on the lawn. Instead he found racism and squalor. He was often turned down for jobs because he was black, but vowed to succeed within five years or go home. In 1972, aged 30, he married Doreen, who was 19 and a bank worker. Life was fine for many years – they had three children, and Neville made good money as an upholsterer and decorator. But then things started to go wrong. His grandmother died, then his mother (whom he had become close to), and he found himself unemployed. In April 1993, Stephen, an A-level student, was murdered.
He'd never been an angry man, but it didn't take him long to become one. He waited for newspapers to report the murder, but they didn't. "There was a story about a dog that was sent through the post on the front page of the papers and I'm thinking, yes, it's cruel, but isn't a human being also important? Why isn't the death of my son on the front pages, or even middle pages?" His anger fuelled his fight for justice.
The family met Nelson Mandela when he visited London, and he said he had always known black lives were cheap in South Africa, but he thought it was different in England. That's when people started listening, Neville says.
They decided to campaign through the courts, rather than marches – they knew that any overturned cars or smashed windows would become part of Stephen's legacy. Before long, the Daily Mail was championing them (Neville had worked for Mail boss Paul Dacre) as a "model" black British family. They became famous for their strength and dignity, but what we didn't know was that their lives were falling apart. "A lot of people don't realise the effect this has had on my family," Neville says quietly. "I'm now living 4,500 miles away from here, all because of what happened that night."
He and Doreen couldn't talk to each other about what happened. "Neither of us has ever sat down and said, 'How d'you feel about the loss of your child?'" The way he says it – bald, matter of fact, is desperately sad. "I've done counselling since then to try to understand how people deal with a situation like that." After Stephen died, he said recently, they never touched each other again – they'd sleep in the same bed, side by side like statues, locked into their own grief. The family went to Jamaica for six months, and Neville stayed on.
When Doreen asked for a divorce, he decided to return to Jamaica for good. "I was told by my liaison officers and my counsellor that I needed to get away or I might have a nervous breakdown. It was piling up here." He points to his head. "I lost my grandmother, then my mother, then my job, then my son, then my wife, and my little kids, so it was piling."
His confidence took a battering. "Maybe I started to feel worthless. Because I'm not doing what I'm supposed to do. I think any adult who's a breadwinner in the family, and is not capable of doing that any more, they start thinking bad things about themselves. So maybe I did."
Did he think he would have a breakdown? "Yes. The fact that I was going to have to leave my matrimonial house where my two children would be, to wake up in the morning and not see them, after losing my son …" He didn't want to leave? "No."
He says returning to Jamaica was the toughest decision a father could make, but he thinks it was the right one for him. "If I hadn't gone home, I wouldn't have developed into the state where I can talk to you now. The first thing that ran through my mind after the death of Stephen is that I wasn't going to live very long after that." Because he didn't want to? "I'm not saying I was going to kill myself, but people die from broken hearts …" He grasps at his hands, lost for words. "It was such a senseless thing."
Only now is he realising how damaged they all were by Stephen's death. The family blamed Brooks for being out with him when Neville had asked him to be home early, though Brooks said they were only taking that route home to beat the curfew Stephen's parents imposed. "I sat there and heard Duwayne give his evidence. He's still traumatised after all these years." He said he had no idea. "I wanted to talk to him that day, but he was in pieces. The fact that he had lost his father the night before and was determined still to come on that stand was admirable."
I ask Neville what has kept him going, and he tells me about a woman he once met at a BBC studio shortly after Stephen's death. "She was an old Jewish woman and she introduced herself to me and said she had heard about my son's death, and she said she's Esther Burstein and she was in Auschwitz. She said a day or two before the Americans liberated the camp, the Germans started to kill everybody, and she lost all her family in one day, from her mother to her aunt to her little cousins, and the only reason she wasn't dead was because she was underneath a pile of dead people. I said, 'How did you survive?', and she said, 'I kept quiet for 15 years, and for that 15 years it was hell', and it was only when she started talking to people that she started to earn release. She said, 'You've got to talk and let it out. If you don't, you're going to go mad, because it's going to eat you up inside.'" Talking has been his salvation, he says – he goes into schools, colleges and theatres and talks about Stephen and racism and gang culture.
Neville says he doesn't hate Stephen's killers, he pities them. Why? "I pity them because their parents let them down. No mother or father should not know what their children get up to." He talks about the moment in the trial when video evidence was played proving Norris and Dobson were violent racists. "When the mother said, 'That is not my son' … if it's not her son, well, who is it? And why were this boy's mother and father not aware of what this boy was getting up to when he met his friends?"
He tells me he had a premonition that something terrible was going to happen. "I had said to Stephen not to go anywhere that evening; that he was to come straight home … I had a very bad dream a couple of months before." He sounds distant. I ask him what happened in the dream. The words come out slowly. "I dreamed I was walking on this massive wide common and I saw a group of fellas coming towards me, and one of them reached up like that [he lifts his hand] and came out with a knife. He just raised the knife. I woke up before it came down." He laughs nervously. Did he tell Doreen? "No, I was too frightened to tell anybody. Sometimes when you dream about something bad, it doesn't happen to you, it happens to somebody else, and I was just waiting to hear something disastrous happen to somebody."
Does he blame himself for Stephen's death? "No, because I've done everything possible." He stops, and starts again. "In a sense, maybe I did blame myself, because what I then start to say is if I'd locked him in the house that day, he wouldn't have been killed. But then you say, well maybe you let him out tomorrow and the same thing would happen?"
Has he got the strength to go back to court if the others are charged? "I went through 18 years. I don't think it would be too much to go through another three or four." As for prosecuting the police who initially investigated the case, he doesn't know what would be gained at this stage.
We talk about the ways Stephen unwittingly changed Britain, and sometimes he speaks of him in the present tense. He says he'd love to be able to have a good chat with him, man to man. He's still so proud of him. But he's thankful for what he's got – he loves Stuart and Georgina every bit as much as he loved Stephen, and now there are three grandchildren to boot.
The smile is back on his face, and he's talking about the party friends are planning for his 70th birthday in March. Neville always loved dancing, but swore after Stephen's death he wouldn't dance again until there were convictions. Last week he had his first dance in 18 years.
There are other plans, too, he says. He'd like to find a girlfriend, a wife even, and now is a good time to focus on the task in hand. He mentions an old girlfriend from before married life who lives in America. "I'm working on that now. Heheheheh!" He really does become irresistible when he laughs. "I'd love to have somebody sitting here with me, and be able to say that's my partner, or Mrs Lawrence." He admits that, until last week, he wasn't much of a catch. "I wouldn't have been much fun, and it wouldn't have been fair to the person if I'd got married, because it wouldn't have been me, it would have been somebody else."
But this is you, isn't it, I say. "It's almost me," he says. "We're not quite there yet."