Lowborn: Growing up, Getting away and Returning to Britain’s Poorest Towns

By Kerry Hudson

Published by Chatto

When Kerry Hudson was a toddler in the early 1980s, her mother left her “for a few hours” with a cousin who had mental-health problems. Three days later, she had yet to return. Hudson was found “crying, filthy, starving”. A family member was to confide decades later: “You didn’t even get a few years’ good start.”

Lowborn is Hudson’s compelling memoir about coming from a long line of Aberdonian fishwives, a family beset with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and how she escaped the poverty of their lives. In the introduction, she casually lists the challenges she faced, any two of which would set most children back irreparably: one single mother, two stays in foster care, nine primary schools, two sexual assaults, one rape, two abortions, five high schools and one sexual-abuse child-protection inquiry. Her absent father doesn’t even make the list.

Hers was a largely loveless childhood of huddling around four-bar heaters, using Fairy Liquid to wash her body, hair and clothes, of violence fuelled by Special Brew and ice-cream vans dispensing drugs. She broke that poverty cycle by seeing a better life on the horizon and running like mad towards it.

“I ran, and I never looked over my shoulder,” she writes. Yet having found herself in the land of relative plenty as a successful novelist with a loving fiancé, she remained tormented by night terrors, blanks in her childhood memory and by questions of what became of those towns she was dragged to by her young mother, chasing men and a better life.

The answer lay in retracing the itinerant route of her youth and writing this book. Armed with 56 pages of child-protection documents, she set off in 2017, travelling to Aberdeen, down to Canterbury, up to North Lanarkshire, to Sunderland and Great Yarmouth. What does her odyssey reveal about Britain’s poorest towns today and 30 years ago? The most dispiriting discovery is how little any of them have changed. Canterbury, where as a six-year-old she had begged for “scraps” (batter bits) from the local chippy, remains a town in which owner-occupied housing is 43%, the lowest in the UK. In Airdrie, where in 1987 she’d been given unlabelled tins of meat and cheese from the back of vans, demand for food banks is up by one-third. In Great Yarmouth, she stands in the street where she was raped as a teenager and writes: “Not even that night had bent or bucked or broken me permanently. Nothing before it had either. I’d made f****** lemonade.”

How did she do it? Inherent perspicacity and her tough fishwife genes helped. She also chanced upon teachers who nurtured her intellect. There was Mr Green, the head of her primary school in Hetton-le-Hole, and the kindly librarians whose books inspired new horizons, the lovely Mr Collar from Caister High School, where kids stabbed pencils into her back because she was “weird”, her BTec instructor, Ian Gordon, who said she could do anything she wanted, and the English lecturer at Norwich City College who decreed she was a “natural writer”.

He was right. Hudson’s prose is easy-flowing and her anecdotes generous and unflinching, particularly when describing her prodigious sex life. With a teenage mixture of intellectual curiosity and zero self-esteem, she’d ask the older men fondling her bottom in nightclubs “whether they had read Truman Capote”.

Lowborn is an insider’s view of the complexities of modern-day poverty, written with humour and compassion, but without judgment. It should be required reading for anyone who unknowingly believes poverty is a personal choice and that if you work hard enough you’ll avoid its fate. Hudson miraculously escaped, but not without making sacrifices — her mother is now no longer in her life. “I could not live with the rages and denial of the past,” she writes.

In the final chapter, she looks forward to having a family of her own, and feeling “joy and hope for being a parent ... I think I’ll be a good mother.” A good mother, a fearless writer, an inspiring woman. Knowing how far she has come from that starving, weeping child, nobody reading this book could doubt Hudson can be all these things, and more.