Ashok Patel. Image: Ashok Patel
The winner of this year’s Mayor’s Civic Award speaks to Islington Now about the brutal attack that left him fighting for his life, Paul Wright reports.
It took four hours to clean up the blood after Ashok Patel’s assailants made off with his store’s cash, booze and cigarettes.
The three young men who had stormed into his shop on a cold Sunday morning last December were masked and wielding knives. As Ashok tried to beat them away from his family business on Ferntower Road, the thugs pushed him to the ground, broke his skull and repeatedly stabbed him with a knife the length of his forearm.
“I remember two things while the attack was happening,” recalls Ashok. “The first, that I was going to die. I was 100 per cent sure of that. The second was remembering one of the masked attacker’s eyes – I knew I’d seen them before somewhere.”
He was not wrong. One of the young robbers was a regular customer – a local, barely-into-adulthood, who lived round the corner from the shop.
The boy’s family had known the Patels for seven years and just a few days before the attack, Ashok had given £300 credit to the boy’s mother so she could pay for the weekly shop.
This closeness to his customers and the positive impact he has had on life in the borough earned him the Mayor’s Civic Award earlier this week.
Other recipients included a traffic warden who was hospitalised after challenging a mugger, a young duo trying to lead young people away from gang crime, and a pub owner who put on his own fundraising event after a poppy donation box was stolen from his bar.
Crime was the buzzword of Monday’s award night, but for Ashok London was supposed to offer a sanctuary from these kinds of troubles. Born in Uganda of Indian descent, Ashok’s family knew his country of birth was no safe place to raise a family. The violence spread under dictator Idi Amin had already forced his brother to flee – and Ashok joined him in 1987.
“From the moment he arrived at the store he has been very much part of our community,” says Nicky Southin, one Ashok’s regular customers.
“He knows us by name, helps to deliver to the sick, supports and donates to local charities and even holds spare front door keys for desperate flat dwellers locked out of their homes. All of us know it in our hearts that he is the symbol of our community.”
Unsurprisingly, the savage attack left many in shock. The shop owner was rushed to hospital after 18 of his customers frantically called the emergency services (two ambulances were needed just to stop the bleeding).
But the brutality of the attack saw the community Ashok had served rally around him. Rival store owners closed their shops to help the family clean up the mess left behind. More than sixty well-wishers also sent get-well cards, for which he is still grateful.
“I remember it being difficult to get to know people at first,” Ashok says as he recalls what it was like when he first arrived in the borough. “We didn’t have many friends and it took a long time to get to know people. But now in my heart I know they are all like my family.”
Heroes like Ashok are all too rare in modern urban life. Live long enough in any city and you start to notice the cracks that leave people feeling lonely, afraid and anxious.
Knife crime has long been an open wound on London’s underbelly and Monday evening’s awards show it has little sign of dissipating anytime soon. The Ben Kinsella award, presented on the same evening in memory of a 16-year-old who was stabbed to death on York Way, is a stark reminder of this.
More than twenty of London’s 32 boroughs saw a rise in knife crime offences over the past two years, with Islington seeing a rise of 22 per cent.
This week David Cameron was forced to reaffirm his government’s commitment to tackling knife crime after the murder of a 16-year-old schoolgirl in Birmingham.
Her death follows the stabbing of another teenager who was found dead in a stairwell in a block of flats in south-west London last month.
But while attacks continue the award ceremony showed there are many individuals in the borough who are working hard to make their community better, no matter what the setbacks.
Ashok still suffers the after effects of his own attack. The stab to his head means he suffers daily bouts of dizziness and the damage to his hip means he finds it difficult to walk.
Hardest of all, he says, is the fear he feels whenever strangers come into his shop – a rarity given his encyclopaedic knowledge of who’s who in Newington Green.
Despite this trauma his love of his community is what keeps him going. He still serves the mother of the boy responsible for his scars.
“Some of the older customers came into my shop crying after the attack thinking I would be leaving. It was heartwarming and as long as I’ve got my health I’m not going anywhere.”
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