How a grieving Brixton son discovered it was a policeman’s bullet which killed his mum – 25 years after it happened

Lee Lawrence’s win in the memoir category of the Costa Book Awards on January 4 brought back some of the anger after his mum, Cherry Groce, was shot by police in 1985 – an event which sparked the Brixton riots. In this excerpt, below, at the start of Lee’s book, he recalls his shock at discovering what killed her 25 years later. And Lee tells why he had to write The Louder I will Sing.

Lee Lawrence wasn’t aiming for prizes. He had been through the ordeal of his mum’s shooting in 1985, the investigation, his mum’s enduring pain and then her death in 2011.

“When you are in it, you suppress your feelings,” he said. “I had to go through all those things. But the story needed to be told.

“I tried with a diary. There were a lot of memories. I wanted to get it out of paper.

It wasn’t until a couple of years ago that I met an agent – and we were talking about TV, not a book at the start.

“I had a gripe that Brixton was depicted as scary. But they say it takes a village to raise a child – and Brixton was that village for me.

All mum’s friends were like uncles and aunties.

The front door was never locked – but we never had a break-in. I felt safe and happy, even though we didn’t have much. The shooting was the first time I had witnessed anything bad. I wanted people to see that.

“I followed mum’s lead – she was a survivor, a warrior. She dealt with it, with dignity. So who are we to complain?

That doesn’t mean to say we had no trauma of our own. We vilify young people if they behave badly, but if you dig deeper, there are usually issues that have not been addressed.”

‘At last I had proof police had killed my mother’

It was a few days after my mum passed away in 2011 that my life was turned on its head for a second time.

The first time had been in 1985, when I was 11, and a dawn raid on our house in Brixton left her shot by the police and fighting for her life.

That incident had triggered the second Brixton uprising. After the debris and destruction of that weekend had been cleared away, my family were left to pick up the pieces of our lives. For my mum, Cherry Groce, it was coming to terms with the fact that the shooting had left her paralysed, and facing the rest of her life in a wheelchair.

The second time began not with a bang, but with a whisper. I was back at King’s College Hospital, where Mum had passed away, to collect some paperwork. In a strange way, I was grateful for the bureaucracy that follows on from when somebody dies. It gave me something to do while I was still making sense of it all.

“There was a paper trail to follow – get something from the hospital, take that to someone else at the council, and then get the death certificate.

I was in the early days of grief. It was odd being in the hospital without her there; it felt that little bit different, that little bit emptier. I’d been so many times to visit Mum I knew the way to the ward by muscle memory. But this time, I headed in search of a small office in the basement. I explained to the woman behind the desk who I was and what I needed.

She gave me a small smile of sympathy and disappeared to look through the files. I waited. The fluorescent strip light hummed.

“OK,” she said, returning. “Here you go.” But she didn’t hand any-thing over. Instead, she continued to read. Then she whispered, more to herself than to me: “Oh, hang on.

“There’s a comment here. The doctor has written something. I’m sorry, but I can’t give you these at the moment. He thinks this might need to go to an inquest.”  An inquest? I didn’t know what that was.

“It looks like the doctor is asking for a post-mortem to be done,” the woman explained. “I’m sorry. These sorts of complications are probably the last thing you want.”

She tilted her head to one side and gave me another sympathetic smile.

There was plenty I had wanted to happen in my life; this really wasn’t up there with them.

It turned out my mum’s doctor wasn’t certain about the cause of death. Or rather, he was clear on the medical reasons why Mum died, but wasn’t completely certain about what had caused them.

The post-mortem by a forensic pathologist, Dr Robert Chapman, took place a couple of weeks later.

I read the findings at my kitchen table in fits and starts, hoping my brain would soak all the information up without me having to properly digest it. Mums aren’t bodies to be dissected.

The pathologist removed a section of her spine to take away and analyse. As far as I know, that’s still in a lab somewhere, gathering dust on a white shelf.

Reading the report was hard going. Chapman described how he found a succession of metallic fragments in my mum’s spine. These were fragments from the bullet fired by DS Lovelock in 1985.

That wasn’t a surprise: the medical advice was that any attempt to remove them could cause further damage.

The fragments that remained caused my mum pain throughout the rest of her life. A recurring, sharp, stabbing reminder of what had happened one September morning.

But what was a surprise was Chapman’s conclusion. It was those fragments, he said, that killed her. It was those fragments that had caused her paralysis and paraplegia, and it was the paralysis and paraplegia that caused a urinary tract infection and bronchial pneumonia, and these had caused more infection and acute renal failure – that was the last straw.

I had it in my hands: incontrovertible proof that, over two and a half decades after my mum had been shot by a policeman, his bullet had resulted in the end of her life.

The pent-up need for action sat in my throat like a stone that was on fire.

COMPETITION

Five copies of The Louder I Will Sing to be won. Simply answer this question: What was the prize author Lee Lawrence won on January 4

1. A MOBO

2. An MBE

3. The Costa Award for a Memoir

4. The Whitbread Prize

Send your answers to competitions@littlebrown.co.uk by 4pm on January 26. UK entries only.

South London Press rules apply: One entry per person, entries must be received by 4pm, January 26th 2021(email only). Please remember to include your contact details, address and phone number. GOOD LUCK!!!!