Lowborn: Growing Up, Getting Away and Returning to Britain’s Poorest Towns
KERRY HUDSON
(Chatto & Windus, 256 PP, £14.99)
Tablet bookshop price £13.49 • Tel 020 7799 4064

The zeitgeist is a mythical will-o’-the-wisp disappearing for aeons only to reappear seemingly without reason or cause. All of a sudden it’s as though the literary world has rediscovered E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, after a longish period in which “there’s no such thing as class today” has been the received wisdom. Those of us who thought of ourselves as working-class were encouraged to be part of a déclassé meritocracy. But to identify as working-class isn’t the same as to be the poor “you will have with you always”.

When I started Kerry Hudson’s Lowborn, a vivid account of growing up in grinding poverty, the first thing that struck me was how similar and yet different our childhoods were – despite being separated by 50 years. I too had written an account of my childhood in my first novel, That’s How it Was, in an attempt to understand myself and how I had got where I was.

To begin with we were both bastards, born to women led astray by their love of dancing – in my mother’s case at the between-the-wars dance halls, and for Hudson’s mother the Eighties’ discos.