Mr Chips goes to hell

Now even the wooden cross is gone. Urban's gone too, although only a couple of miles away to Armley jail, his first proper grown-up prison, where they feed you so little that you have to use your own money to buy Pot Noodles.

As for Angela Pearce, she was headline news for only a few weeks. First, the disappearance from East End Park, her mother growing more desperate by the day. Then, the full horror story. How she'd been abducted and locked for days in a tower block cupboard by a gang of five yobs about the same age as she was. How her face had been battered by an iron and a pool cue, her body used to stub cigarettes out on. How her hair had been set on fire. How she'd been made to drink disinfectant, and, finally, strangled. She was just 18.

What kind of country does this happen in? For once, the media wanted to know about the underclass among whom Angela Pearce had lived and died in inner-city Leeds. Fergal Keane headed north with a camera crew to make a documentary. Forgotten Britain, it was called. It was shown, and Britain forgot again.

But Bernard ("Chop") Hare didn't. A couple of years before Angela Pearce's death he'd been a washed-up former social worker who was taking too many drugs and drinking far too much. After he'd rescued 11-year-old Urban from drowning in the canal, he'd got to know his gang. They called themselves the Shed Crew, and although they were much younger than Angela's killers, they all had similar backgrounds and looked as though they could well have a similar future.

The Shed Crew did have families, but not that you'd notice. The father was usually long-gone, the mother out of her head on drugs or alcohol. They'd all been excluded from school years ago and no-one cared where they were. They couldn't work because they were under 16, couldn't read or write, get benefits or fix up their own accommodation. But they could steal cars (verb, to twock: from taking without the owner's consent), shoplift, spend their days sniffing glue and their nights sleeping together in a shed at the bottom of someone's garden.

Hare was approaching 40 when he joined them. It was a kind of family, random and outside all the rules, but still a family of sorts. Urban, who was 12, told the rest of the Shed Crew that Hare wasn't a nonce, and that seemed to be good enough for them.

He knew enough about the 1989 Children's Act to know that he could be in trouble for "harbouring" any runaway from a children's home, which is what many of the Shed Crew were. He knew he shouldn't shoplift, but without the money from that, he wouldn't have been able to look after Urban or any of the rest of the crew. He knew he was complicit, sometimes accidentally, sometimes not, in many of their other crimes, from twocking to drug-taking. He had turned a blind eye to some offences, such as the beating-up of the uncle of one of the Shed Crew girls, who had been sexually abusing her. He was hardly the kind of moral guardian a court of law would appoint to any troubled teenager. "I was," he writes in his gritty debut book, "like Mr Chips on smack."

Slowly though, he started coming off the drugs and the drink. The Crew, faced for the first time with an adult who seemed to like their company without being a sexual predator, started off by accepting his presence and gradually began to look up to him.

So, amid so many vicious moral circles, here's one spinning the other way round. Respect from the children sobers him up. In return, he becomes their teacher: perhaps not the best one in the world, but it's far better than sniffing glue round a bonfire. He gets them writing poems, tells them stories about the country they're effectively excluded from, gets them thinking about what they can do with their lives.

And here's another tiny virtuous circle. After Fergal Keane had shot his film, at the community arts group Hare founded in the wake of Angela's death, he and other people started writing about the things that caused it. He got in touch with Keane, told him about some of the things his film left out but really ought to have included.

To his enormous credit, Keane got straight back in touch. Many journalists wouldn't have done this: the story had moved on, and the underclass, after all, is always with us. But no: Keane told Hare he should write more, offered him practical advice, kept in touch, became a friend.

Maybe he, like me, started off with plenty of reservations about what Hare was doing, becoming involved with a pack of children. "They're right to be suspicious," he says, "but everyone knows me around here, and that I've worked in children's homes and all that. The children are even more suspicious than the adults - rightly so, because a lot of them have been nonced up."

As he takes me round East End Park, where he, Urban and Angela all grew up, doubts fade, one by one. For a start, it is, almost, another country. Every struggling patch of urban green is surrounded by motorway-style crash barriers to defend it against twocked cars. Terraced streets are turned into mazes, closed off half way along and implanted with speed bumps for the same reason. Shops are long gone, burned out or shuttered; graffiti is ubiquitous; on front doors and windows new and more elaborate forms of wrought iron grilles appear year by year. If this Britain is to rejoin the land most of us live in, it needs all the help it can get.

Then there's the way in which he talks about the Shed Crew - now all in their early twenties. If Trudi, now a crack cocaine prostitute, ever had any doubts about him, she wouldn't have asked if he could hold her hand as she gave birth. Urban, Frank, Skeeter and all the rest wouldn't have been so fulsome in their praise in the documentary the Culture Show made about him last week. At least one of the Crew would have had a bad word to say about him.

They didn't. Why not? Because they know that in his book, Bernard Hare gives us a portrait of their lives that is not only recognisable but true; that while newspapers have gone chasing celebrity and TV is charging after fabricated reality, perhaps it takes someone like him to show us other realities that really ought to shame us, but somehow don't.

From that hillside in Leeds where they buried Angela Pearce, you can see for miles. There's the massive Department of Work and Pensions - local nickname, the Kremlin - at the bottom of the hill, with its 50,000 hall carpet and indoor gyms. There's a bright and excellent new theatre, and down by the old canal, where Urban once swam and sniffed glue and where Bernard once rescued him, a cityscape transformed more than anywhere else in Yorkshire, with yuppie flats, zingy new office blocks and clean cobbled streets.

There's still something not quite right about that view, though. It all looks too gappy, like a railway modeller's idea of what a city should look like. And once you're down there, looking up at the hillside where Angela Pearce died, at the six high rises of Cromwell Tower where only ten people in each block work for a living, there's something wrong too. You're looking up at what Bernard Hare calls Ashtrayland - underclass Britain. And it's much, much too near.

Urban Grimshaw and the Shed Crew, by Bernard Hare, is published next week by Sceptre, price 14.99.