# The Bee > The Bee is a literary magazine and podcast dedicated to nurturing and promoting the best new working-class writing and visual art. Public Ghost content for AI and LLM tooling. This file includes a bounded export of public pages first, then recent public posts. Append `.md` to any post or page URL to get the content in Markdown (for example, `/example-post.md`). ## Pages ### The Bee Universe URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/all-about-the-bee/ Last updated: 2025-08-19T13:45:14.000Z The Bee is a literary magazine, an online platform, a podcast, and the heart of a writing community. Our mission is to nurture, publish and promote the best new working-class writing by new and established working-class writers and visual artists. We strongly believe that there is a need to discuss contemporary social class more openly, and that writers can voice class experience in ways social science cannot. To understand what we mean by working class, and why a magazine of working-class writing is needed, read Dave O’Brien’s essay Publishing’s Class Problem. [Publishing’s Class Problem“This is not just about percentages or ratios. It is about the narrowness of a workforce that has little lived experience outside of that of the white, middle-class origin male.” Dave O’Brien on the missing numbers in British books.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/icon/favicon-13.ico)The BeeDave O’Brien![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/thumbnail/coin-banner-grey-1.jpg)](https://thebeemagazine.com/publishings-class-problem/) ### Team Publisher: Claire Malcolm, Chief Executive New Writing North Editor: Richard Benson Art Director: David Rainbird --- ### The Bee Magazine The Bee magazine will be published twice a year, the first issue being in autumn 2025\. It will contain short fiction, extracts, nonfiction and art. We seek work about contemporary working class life and culture. Our writers are new, emerging and established, and most are from working-class backgrounds. In each issue we look to share a mix of stories and poems that provide moments of delight, provocation and warm recognition of shared experiences in modern Britain. We are currently closed for submissionsand will open again in early 2026\. We will contact all writers who have submitted their work in our previous submissions period by November 7th 2025\. Our editor will then work with writers to prepare their pieces for publication. We pay all the writers we publish. For more information on submitting to the Bee, please see our [Submission Guidelines](https://thebeemagazine.com/submission-guidelines/). --- ### The Bee site On the Bee site, and in our social media channels, we share fiction, photography, interviews and nonfiction about contemporary working-class culture, politics. We also host our podcast, [The Working Class Library](https://thebeemagazine.com/tag/the-working-class-library/). We have open submissions on set themes several times through the year, and we let you know about these on the site, on our social media and in our monthly newsletter. --- ### The Beehive The Beehive is our online writing community that offers opportunities for development, access to advice from established writers, and chances for writers to discuss their own work, and books in general. --- ### The Working-Class Library ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/06/wcl-new-square.png) The Working Class Library is the Bee’s podcast. Each month Richard Benson, editor of The Bee, and Claire Malcolm, our publisher and CEO of New Writing North, invite a writer to discuss a book and decide whether it deserves a place on the shelves of the Working Class Library – our imaginary library of great books by and about ordinary people. We aim to celebrate both well-known and overlooked works of British literature, many of whose working-class origins are hidden in plain sight. [The Working Class Library](https://thebeemagazine.com/tag/the-working-class-library/) --- ### A Writing Chance The Bee grew out of [A Writing Chance](https://newwritingnorth.com/a-writing-chance/?ref=thebeemagazine.com), a programme co-founded in 2021 by the actor Michael Sheen, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, New Writing North and Northumbria University. A Writing Chance opens access to the writing industries for new writers from working-class and lower-income backgrounds. A Writing Chance 2024–25 is produced by New Writing North in partnership with Faber & Faber, the *Daily Mirror* and Substack, with funding from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, Mab Gwalia – Michael Sheen’s charitable fund – and Arts Council England, and with support from audio sponsor Audible. The programme is supported by research from Northumbria University and Bath Spa University, funded by Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). A Writing Chance is needed because the writing industries increasingly favour people from more privileged backgrounds. We believe that all talented writers should be able to access opportunities to develop their work, regardless of their background. We all benefit from reading a wider range of voices in our national media and culture. [A Writing Chance](https://newwritingnorth.com/a-writing-chance/?ref=thebeemagazine.com) --- ### The original Bee ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/03/the-bee-original.jpg) We took our name because the beehive is easily understood as a model of cooperation in which every member of the community contributes, is recognised and is able to progress. But we are also inspured by the previous literary magazine called The Bee, founded in October 1759 by Oliver Goldsmith, a writer who showed great sympathy with dispossessed and downtrodden. In the Bee, which lasted only until November 1759, Oliver sought to published “essays on the most interesting subjects”. We hope to continue his good work. --- ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/03/ACE-Black-1.png) --- ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/03/New-Writing-North--25252A-1.png) ### Contributors URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/contributors/ Last updated: 2025-02-26T15:33:06.000Z _No content available._ ### Sections URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/categories/ Last updated: 2025-03-06T18:31:37.000Z _No content available._ ### Archive URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/archive/ Last updated: 2025-02-26T15:45:35.000Z _No content available._ ### Support the Bee URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/support-the-bee/ Last updated: 2025-06-16T19:04:21.000Z ### Support Working-Class Voices We believe that the most moving, important and insightful writing comes from the lived experience and imaginations of ordinary people. Too often, though, those people’s voices are not heard. The Bee exists to nurture, publish and promote new and established working-class writers who are increasingly left out of the national conversation. Every story we publish is a step towards a more varied and inclusive literary landscape. But we can’t do it without you. If you value fresh perspectives and real stories, please consider supporting our work: #### Sign up for our newsletter to get powerful new writing straight to your inbox — and stay connected with a growing community of readers and writers [Sign Up](https://thebeemagazine.com/support-the-bee/#/portal/) #### Share our content on your social media #### Make a donation — big or small, every contribution helps us pay writers, keep the site running, and create more opportunities for working-class creatives [Tip the Bee](https://thebeemagazine.com/support-the-bee/#/portal/support) Together, we can make sure these voices are not only heard, but celebrated. ### Welcome to the Bee URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/welcome/ Last updated: 2025-06-16T19:04:31.000Z Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter and supporting the Bee magazine – and thank you for joining us. By signing up you’re already helping us to find, develop and promote new working-class writers and their work. Publishing in the UK has a class problem. It employs fewer people from working-class backgrounds than other entertainment industries, and that creates barriers for working-class writers. That in turn limits the kinds of books we all get to read. We set up the Bee to build a movement of people who want to change that. In the magazine, we’ll publish writing by working-class origin writers that reflects contemporary working-class life. Some of those writers are well established; others will be publishing for the first time. In all cases, the writing will be superlative: to be clear, this is not some kind of charity case. To discover and nurture new writers, we will later this year launch the Beehive, an online creative writing community where we’ll support new writers and seek out new talent. To discuss established and classic books, we’ll use our podcast, The Working Class Library. Follow us on [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/beelitmag/?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/beelitmag/), [X](https://twitter.com/BeeLitMag?ref=thebeemagazine.com) and [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/beelitmag.bsky.social?ref=thebeemagazine.com) to enjoy new work, to take part in discussions of class that are long overdue in our country, and to support us by sharing posts to help build our audience. This is the Bee Universe. Our newsletter is published monthly. Richard Benson, Editor & Claire Malcolm, Publisher The Bee is a New Writing North project that has grown out of the Writing Chance project, which is supported by Michael Sheen, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Esmee Fairbairn Foundation, Audible UK and Northumbria University. New Writing North acknowledges the support of Arts Council England. ### Coming soon URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/home/ Last updated: 2025-03-11T12:40:56.000Z _No content available._ ### Privacy Policy URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/privacy-policy/ Last updated: 2025-06-16T18:57:03.000Z ### About the Bee The Bee is a literary magazine, an online platform, a podcast, and the heart of a writing community. Our mission is to nurture, publish and promote the best new working-class writing by new and established working-class writers and visual artists. The Bee is published by New Writing North, edited by Richard Benson with art direction by David Rainbird. New Writing North (NWN) is a registered charity and an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation (a publicly funded organisation working within a funding agreement framework). NWN also fundraises, earns income, and receives resources from public, private, and charitable bodies and individuals. NWN is an independent charity registered in England and Wales (number 1062729) and a company limited by guarantee registered in England and Wales (number 03166037). ### How To Contact Us Please contact us if you have any questions about this Privacy Policy or your data, or if you wish to be removed from any communications or data processing activities. Address enquiries to: Claire Malcolm, Chief Executive Email: claire@newwritingnorth.com Write: The Bee, c/o New Writing North, 120 Squires Building, Northumbria University, Sandyford Road, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 8ST, UK ### Policy Statement This Privacy Policy sets out the ways in which we use your data and how you can hold us accountable for that. We aim to be clear when we collect your data, and not do anything you would not reasonably expect. Developing a better understanding of our subscribers, customers and supporters through their personal data allows us to make better editorial and design decisions to help support the achievement of the Bee’s mission. We are committed to protecting your privacy and data. We will use the information that we collect about you in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation 2018 and the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulation 2003. ### The Information We Collect You give us information when you subscribe to access content, submit content, receive our newsletter, update your contact information on and through our websites, or communicate with us. The information that we may hold about you may include: - Your name - Email address - Billing information - Donation history - Your preferences about how we communicate with you about our activities - Information that is available publicly. If you consent to have your photo or video taken, this may be published on our website, social media accounts or appear in the broadcast media. We maintain a record of your transaction history, but we never store your payment card number. We keep a record of the emails we send you and we may monitor whether you receive and open them so that we can make sure we are sending you the most relevant information. ### How We Use Your Data We will use your data in a variety of clearly defined ways as follows: **General usage, which applies across our work** 1. To keep a record of your relationship with us. 2. To ensure that we know how you prefer to be contacted. 3. To undertake anonymised research into our users and customers so that we can improve and refine our activities. 4. To undertake research as part of a commissioned programme and on behalf of partners to support consultation and strategy development. 5. To target advertising to you via your social media accounts via Meta Pixel (please see below for further information). **If you are a member of our mailing list:** 1. To send you information about events, news and activities that may be of interest to you by email and post. 2. To encourage you to participate in fundraising campaigns to support our work. 3. To tell you about changes to our work and services. **If you donate to our work or organisation:** 1. To update you on the projects or areas of work that you support. 2. To administer your donation (including the processing of Gift Aid and associated declarations). **If you enter your work to the Bee’s submission window and/or your work is accepted for publication:** 1. To administer your work for the purpose of that programme or opportunity only. 2. To create anonymised statistical overviews of entries for the activity, which we use to report to funders and stakeholders and to demonstrate the demand, reach and interest in our activities. 3. To use anonymised data to monitor and evaluate and to support research into the impact of our work. **If you are a supplier:** - If you are the employee of a supplier or potential supplier or a partner organisation and have given your name, email or any other personal data to identify you for the purpose of correspondence, that data will be stored on NWN’s accounts system and will be associated with any correspondence between us and your organisation, for example, quotes for services, invoices and statements. **If you engage with us on social media:** - If you engage or follow us on social media, for example on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Bluesky or X/Twitter, we will have access to any information that you have agreed to share on that channel. This may include your name/username, demographic information, and access to content that you have posted. We may use this information for statistical purposes to help us understand the size or demographic make-up of our users/audience, and we may use contact details to send you a response to something that you have raised. If you do not want to receive information by email you have the option to change any of your contact preferences at any time by clicking unsubscribe on email newsletters or by updating your preferences via your account with us. **Digital Advertising** A Meta Pixel is embedded on the Bee’s website which collects visitor data and links this data to your Facebook or Instagram profile\[s\]. This allows Meta to build user profiles for advertising purposes. Permission to collect this data will enable the Bee to target advertising of opportunities you may be interested in directly to you. If you do not consent to the Meta Pixel collecting your data you can opt out via the Cookie Consent Banner which pops-up as you launch the Bee website. You can also control your information via your [Meta](https://developers.facebook.com/docs/meta-pixel/implementation/gdpr/?ref=thebeemagazine.com) account. ### Cookies This website is operated by [Ghost](https://ghost.org/?ref=thebeemagazine.com), which collects anonymous information such as the number of visitors to the site, and the most popular pages. Keeping this cookie enabled helps us to improve the website. ### Third Parties We will not sell, rent, or trade your personal data. We will never share your personal data with any other third parties without your agreement unless required to in order to fulfill our contract with you or allowed by law. In general, third-party providers used by us to fulfill our contract with you will only collect, use, and disclose your information to the extent necessary to allow them to perform the services that they provide for us. These providers include the systems used for submitting applications, streaming video (e.g. YouTube and Vimeo) and audio (e.g. Spotify). We have agreements in place with each to ensure that your data is secure at all times and cannot be accessed or used for any other purpose. We may share statistical and anonymised data drawn from your information with third parties such as Arts Council England, who use this to analyse the reach of our activities and to understand patterns of engagement with arts activity in the UK. Undertaking statistical analysis of our activities assists us when reporting to funders, supporters, and stakeholders, and helps us to make better decisions about how we develop and programme our activities and where they are delivered. We will never sell your personal data to an agency or other companies. The Bee website, newsletters and social media contain links to other websites. Although the majority of them are our partners, we are not responsible for the privacy practices of these websites, and you should read their own privacy information before providing them with your personal information. ### How You Can Control Your Data If you sign up to the Bee we will tell you about activities, opportunities, events and literary news, and opportunities to support our work. Occasionally we may include information in these communications from our partner organisations and supporters. You can opt out of these communications at any time. Every email we send you tells you how you can unsubscribe. ### How We Keep Your Data Safe Your personal data will be held and processed on the Ghost platform and accessed by NWN, Richard Benson and David Rainbird. Where possible we aim to keep a single record for each user or customer. Your data is always held securely and access to information is strictly controlled. We do not process data outside of the UK. We may need to disclose your details, if required, to the police, regulatory bodies, or legal advisors. ### Your Rights You have the following rights related to your personal data and interactions with us: - The right to request a copy of personal information held about you. - The right to request that inaccuracies be corrected or removed. - The right to request us to stop processing your personal data for specific purposes. - The right to have all of the data that we hold on you deleted (where legally possible). - The right to withdraw your consent if you have previously given it. - The right to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioner’s Office or Fundraising Regulator. To exercise your rights in relation to the data that we hold on to, please contact the Data Controller at NWN. Please note that if you choose not to share your data this may affect NWN’s ability to provide the services you request. ### Changes to This Policy We may change this Privacy Policy from time to time. If we make any significant changes to the way we treat your personal information, we will make this clear on our website or by contacting you directly. Policy reviewed May 2025. ### Submission Guidelines URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/submission-guidelines/ Last updated: 2025-08-19T13:43:31.000Z Thank you for your interest in submitting work for consideration for the Bee. We are currently closed to submissions and will open again in early 2026. We pride ourselves on the quality of our editorial support and, should your work be accepted, you will work with our editor to prepare it for publication. Throughout the year, we run three to four open calls for submission of new work, and we will announce further calls here and in our regular newsletter, which you can subscribe to for free [here](https://thebeemagazine.com/#/portal/). ### General Guidelines We welcome work from writers who are working class or from working-class origins. All submissions must be the original work of the writer. We are interested in work of all lengths and in fiction, nonfiction, commentary, essays, and journalism. We are also interested in visual arts and photography submissions. Work will be published on *the Bee* website and considered for a forthcoming print edition. Any work submitted for consideration must not have been published online or in print previously. ### Agreement If we accept a piece for publication, you will be issued with an agreement for usage of the work. The agreement covers the following: that New Writing North (on behalf of *the Bee*) will retain the first publication rights on the work produced, and the non-exclusive right to use the work online and in print in perpetuity. We reserve the right to be involved in any future exploitation of the work. ### Payments We pay all of our writers and contributors, and we have varying scales of pay for commissions depending on the length and complexity of the piece, as well as the work involved in producing it. For journalism and non-fiction pieces, we work to a rate of 30p per word. This method of payment is industry standard. At the point that we agree the commission with you, we will be clear about the word count we are asking for. For example: - A piece of 300 words: £90 - A piece of 600 words: £180 - A piece of 1,000 words: £300 For longer commissioned essays and photography, we will agree a fee that reflects the complexity and length of the work, and which, if necessary, will also cover research and travel costs. For short fiction, we pay a standard publication fee of £400 per story, regardless of length. ### How you will be contracted and paid We will issue you with a letter of agreement stating the terms of the commission, rate of pay, and payment process. You will be paid when you finish your piece to a standard we can accept for publication. We make payments when we receive your invoice, and settle all payments within one month of receipt. ### Contact Us URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/contact-us/ Last updated: 2025-05-04T13:34:38.000Z **Address** The Bee New Writing North, 120 Squires Building Northumbria University Sandyford Road Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 8ST --- [Email us](mailto: hello@thebeemagazine.com) ### Advice for writers URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/advice-for-writers/ Last updated: 2025-11-03T14:02:47.000Z We were delighted to receive more than 400 submissions for our first open call for the Bee magazine. We were hugely impressed by the diverse and thought-provoking ideas that were submitted, and it was a pleasure to read through them all. We wanted to share some broader feedback on why pieces might not have been selected, and guidance on how you might adapt your submissions to increase your chances of your work being selected next time. We will be opening for submissions again in early 2026, and we would love you to submit again. ### Explain why your piece is right for the Bee The Bee is currently interested in publishing fiction, narrative non-fiction, non-fiction and journalism about being working class in Britain in 2025\. The strongest submissions were those that clearly explored contemporary topics through a working-class lens. We’re keen to see work that feels as if it could not have been written at any other time. We loved seeing submissions that clearly detailed how the piece met the goals of the Bee, and reflected on how their piece might fit in with work we had already published, or on how it might fill a gap. ### Be specific with your ideas and present a new perspective We’re particularly interested in new perspectives on class, and in voices that aren’t traditionally heard in the publishing mainstream. The submissions that spoke to us the most were those that surprised us, giving a working-class perspective on a familiar topic or theme. Try to avoid stereotypes or clichés, and think about what new angles you can take. ### Check eligibility Make sure you read the eligibility and FAQs carefully. Some submitted pieces were unsuccessful due to ineligibility, for example: writers not being based in or having a clear connection with the UK; submitting work that was ineligible for this call, such as poetry or a full manuscript; submitting more than one pitch; not including a pitch or a writing sample; and not clearly presenting a working-class perspective. ### Write a clear pitch that is specific about how the piece will work The pitches that worked best were specific about what the piece would explore and how it would develop. You might consider: what examples will you give, or what scenes will you include? How will you start the piece? How will the story of the piece unfold? How will it end? We ask for pitches rather than full pieces for several reasons. Firstly, we are interested in new writing and new perspectives on class in Britain in 2025\. That’s not to say that if you have a piece you’ve already been working on, it wouldn’t be accepted, but we want you to reflect on the already published pieces in the Bee, and think about new perspectives on class. To this end, we also don’t want to ask you to fully research and write a piece when there is a chance it won’t be selected for publication. Finally, selected writers work with our editor-in-chief on their piece, and this might affect how your work develops. ### Explain why you are the person to write the piece Submissions were stronger when authors explained how their own distinctly working-class experience would determine the piece’s perspective, insights and tone. The journalism/non-fiction submissions to which we were most drawn were those embedding a personal element in the pitch. There were some submissions that seemed to be writing about working-class life from a non-working-class or an unclear class perspective. To be clear: the Bee is concerned with writing *from* the working-class perspective, rather than *about* the working-class perspective. We look for work that feels written from inside working classness. ### Let your voice stand out We strongly suspected that some people submitting work used generative AI to help draft their pitches. We understand that generative AI can be a helpful tool for writers, but it tends to create writing that feels generic and clichéd. We’d much rather see a pitch that is rough around the edges, but has a genuine voice, than one which is technically perfect but feels generic. We want to publish real, contemporary working-class voices that are not being already being published; by its nature, generative AI draws on what is already out there. Try to send us writing that could be written only by you. ### Think about how your writing sample is supporting your submission We appreciate that you might not have written in the exact form/genre you are pitching. However, we would recommend that you think about how your writing sample is supporting your submission. Some writing samples took the form of a biography: this is less helpful to us in understanding how your writing might look. Similarly, submitting poetry gives us little sense of how your prose might look. ## Posts ### Lee meets The Bee URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/lee-meets-the-bee/ Last updated: 2026-07-27T16:46:53.000Z If you're ever confronted by someone arguing that people from working-class backgrounds don't become successful writers, it may be useful to cite the example of Lee Child, aka James Grant from Birmingham. Lee/James is one of the bestselling contemporary writers on the planet. His series of Jack Reacher novels has sold around 200 million copies (a figure often quoted is that one is sold somewhere in the world every nine to 13 seconds) and his books have been made into two movies starring Tom Cruise, and an Amazon Prime Video series. The author grew up in a working-class family in Birmingham, and remains intensely loyal to his background. Learning to read aged three, Child felt like a class traitor due to his academic talents, which saw him get to university to study law, eventually switching to a career in television. Working for Granada TV for 18 years, he was famously a union shop steward. It was after being made redundant by Granada in 1995 that he began writing the Reacher novels, choosing the crime genre because he loved crime books. One wonders if the Reacher novels commonly recurring revenge themes may be not entirely coincidental. Of course there is a common argument that says at the point of becoming a bestselling writer, Lee relinquished whatever working-class status was left after his parents had striven to enter the lower-middle ranks, and he had worked in telly. This is a matter of opinion and sociological metrics, but if you are open to the subtleties and nuances of class influence (which The Bee, like Lee, very much is) then you can see this is at the very least a complex issue. "Having gone through the whole thing of having to have the net curtains the whitest on the street and the step donkey-stoned to perfection and all of that, we moved up into a semi-detached house in an undistinguished suburb, rather than a terrace in the inner city," he says below. "I was born in Coventry but grew up in Birmingham, entirely surrounded by a physical infrastructure and a cultural infrastructure that was created by the skilled working class. And yet, I was being forced to be middle class. That tension is really the key aspect of my life." Jack Reacher is a former US Army officer and vigilante drifter who travels across America armed only with a toothbrush, righting wrongs and breaking up criminal gangs as he goes. On the surface he might appear to have little in common with everyday life in the UK, and yet, as his creator explains here, his life philosophy and modus operandi are rooted in British working-class ideas about crime and retribution. Child sat down with Bee editor Richard Benson after recording an episode of our Working Class Library podcast, to talk about his life and career, and why he believes Britain needs to encourage more working-class writers. **You’ve spoken about being influenced by a solidarity you saw in the working-class community where you grew up in Birmingham. Was that a feeling you always had as a kid, or is it something that you thought more about later on in adulthood?** With childhood experiences, you don't truly understand what’s going on at the time, and you then analyse them later and see why things turned out the way they did. For me, it was a solidarity with individual people. What I took from that environment, at a DNA level of conception, was that you could make things. Ordinary people could make things. All around me, raw materials were going in one door, and the finished products were coming out of the other door. So, the idea that you could make things and people worked all day doing that, that was important. **Do you think about your writing practice in those terms at all?** I do, yeah, I think I'm making a product, and I do it in a kind of Midlands way, a very Birmingham way. You do it as best as you can, but you don't make a big fuss or a drama about it, and you don't pat yourself on the back. There are a million people doing it, and you're only one of them. **Can we look at your writing journey? *Killing Floor* was published in 1997, introducing Jack Reacher to the world. Had you tried writing before? How did you begin, and how did you then get to publication?** No, I hadn’t tried to write before. I wrote letters and stuff, and I was aware that I was efficient. I was effective at putting down my thoughts on paper. So, I knew that, but I'd never attempted any fiction or anything like that. I'd been an obsessive reader all my life, an obsessive reader, but with a peculiar blind spot – possibly because of the class thing – in that I had never imagined where the books came from. To me, they were just there on the library shelf. I had no concept at all that somebody must have written this, somebody must have published it, somebody must have distributed it. **Were there any particular books that inspired you?** The Travis McGee series by an American writer called John D MacDonald. It’s a fabulous series, 21 books long, high quality, terrific entertainment, and while I was reading them, it was suddenly like a blinding light. I could see what he was doing, and why and how and when. It was like suddenly seeing a blueprint. Maybe it was him, maybe it was just the time of my life, but I was ready for it. **And you had been working at Granada Television…** The rumblings at Granada about us all being fired went on for five years, and I thought, you know what, when shit hits the fan, maybe I'll try writing a book, because I could suddenly see how it was done. And so that's what I did. I wrote the first book with my eyes closed, metaphorically speaking, because I'd been in the entertainment business a long time, and I'd learned that you can't plan a success, and you can't make somebody like a character. You can't sit there and think, "OK, I need to do this, this and this, and then it will be a success and a bestseller." So, you write from the heart. I self-consciously ignored everything that I thought I knew, and wrote from the heart. **What kind of things did you read as a child?** Reading for me was about absolute escape. I started with Enid Blyton, *The Famous Five*, especially. That was my first love. That was the first series I really got into. And of course, looking back, I could totally understand why. *The Famous Five* was a kind of orphan fantasy. There were no parents involved. I had these dull, strict parents and the idea of being able to roam free and do what I want, like those four kids and their dog, was just magical to me. **Many crime writers enjoy doing intensive research into the situations they write about. Do you?** Not really. I do it in reverse order, and I think that's very important for writing. I'm fascinated by process, I'm fascinated by how things work, insider information, nuggets of things. I consume it all the time. I read stuff and talk to people completely irrespective of whether I think I'm ever going to write about it. It's an ongoing thing that I used to do when I wasn't a writer, and I will always do when I'm no longer a writer. It's just part of my life. Talking to people about how things work. You build up this giant database in the back of your head, and that’s there when you come to write a book. I never take a notebook and a camera and research a location, I never go and talk to an expert about something for a specific book, because by that point it's too late. We work through a book-a-year pattern, and that means that it's really too late to do any specific research, and if you do, it will come out undigested. You've got to let it settle for years, until you see what's the really important part of it. So, "research" is all stuff I've done before, out of natural interest, and I will undoubtedly be able to use it. I mean, sometimes I find the most ridiculous stuff. About 20 years ago, the Super Bowl in the US had this big, fancy half-time show and that particular year it was sponsored by Pepsi-Cola, and it featured Britney Spears. Somebody pointed out to me that the only anagram in the English language of Pepsi-Cola is Episcopal, and the only anagram in the English language of Britney Spears is Presbyterians. I'm never going to use that in a book, but I would rather have that information than a million dollars; I just love stuff like that. **I recall a scene in which Reacher cuts somebody’s throat, and he knows that the throat is actually a really hard thing to cut. So you wouldn't have researched that for the purposes of the book, it's something you'd have happened to come across somewhere?** I will have come across that, yeah. Probably some surgical thing. In the movies, they show throats being cut with elegant flicks, but it's absolutely not like that. In reality, you saw like mad, and you need a lot of physical strength. I've never cut anybody's throat, but I picked up that information somewhere and just used it. **Where do you see yourself sitting in the British class system?** I'm a product of the skilled working class. My ancestors, my mother's family, was the dominant family culturally for us. My father was from Northern Ireland. His family was very small and distant, and had very little impact on us. But we were the products of three or four generations of the skilled working class. They had been apprentices, mostly. They had a trade. Mostly, they were fitters rather than labourers, up in the north-east, in the shipyards on the Tyne or in the big heavy industry up there. **I think your mum and dad were quite aspirational…** Yes, they both were, and my mother, in particular, was desperate to become middle class. By and large, she achieved it. By the time I was a sentient kid, you would have called us lower-middle class. Having gone through the whole thing of having to have the net curtains the whitest on the street and the step donkey-stoned to perfection and all of that, we moved up into a semi-detached house in an undistinguished suburb, rather than a terrace in the inner city. So that experience that I had was... I was born in Coventry but grew up in Birmingham, entirely surrounded by a physical infrastructure and a cultural infrastructure that was created by the skilled working class. And yet, I was being forced to be middle class. That tension is really the key aspect of my life. **Were your parents keen for you to have middle-class jobs?** Oh, absolutely, yeah. Literally, they would have given their right arms for us to be solicitors or doctors, you know, so that we could have a detached house and a two-year-old car instead of a five-year-old car. **Do you feel there were more working-class voices in the arts when you were growing up than now?** Yes, in my lifetime, there was John Osborne, *Look Back in Anger*, and a lot of northern stuff going on. There was a pretty solid stream of kitchen-sink drama and all of that. The working class were finding a voice. And so, I don't think the class thing was necessarily a negative. But I think it was coming in from the outside. Big stars like Michael Caine started out in Billingsgate Fish Market and so on. So, at that time, it wasn't that we were trying to break into something that was previously inhabited only by hoity-toity people. There was already representation there. **Do you think coming from the working class gave you any advantages as a writer?** There are a lot of different working classes, based on who you are, where you are and when you were growing up. I don't know that it really gives you any advantages. I think that you can have a combination of events that give you an advantage, though. In my family situation, my parents were extremely scathing about anything that I wanted to do or was interested in. I had zero encouragement about anything. Zero. That toughens you up and makes you much more independent. You're sort of pre-accustomed to discouragement. Nothing I wanted to do fit in that mould of upward mobility. I did not want to be a solicitor living in a detached house. I started writing because I'd lost my job in the reorganisation at Granada. A couple of months later, my parents dropped in, and I said: "By the way, I've lost my job." And they said: "Oh, what are you going to do now?" And I said: "I'm writing a book." And my father said: "I'll bet you 10,000 to 1 it's a failure." **If someone said to you, "What class are you now?", how would you answer that question?** That’s a great question, because I think once you enter the creative world, class falls away to an extent that it doesn't in other professions. If I'd become a solicitor, like my mother wanted me to be, there are gradations of solicitors. At the bottom, there are the guys that do nothing but divorce and conveyancing, and then at the top, there are the people that do corporate stuff. I think that as soon as you quit that sort of career path and go into the creative world, then it's a random hodgepodge of people. You meet people who are from every part of society, but you're all working in the same way towards the same goal. It seems not to matter so much. **What's your advice for aspiring writers?** Ignore my advice. That is my advice. Ignore me. Ignore everybody else. Do what you want to do. If you want to do something on page three, do it. Don't sit there thinking: "Oh, well, Stephen King does that much later. John Grisham doesn't do it at all. Lee Child does it differently." If you do that, you're lost. If you want to do that thing on page three, do it. And then you end up with a book that you are 100% happy with. You personally need to be 100% happy with this book. And, of course, you are a unique individual, but you're not that unique. People are not that different. Therefore, if you love it, lots of other people will too. The only luck involved is how many. Is your particular twisted mind appealing to hundreds of other people, thousands of other people or millions of other people? That's the luck. But you don't even get to the starting line unless you personally are 100% happy with it. You cannot fake it. **A lot of the younger writers we work with seem like they might be getting somewhere, but then they'll try to adopt that "other" voice. What do you say to younger writers?** It's a horrible thing to have to talk to younger people about writing because there really is only one message. This happens so many times. You're invited to a school or a university, and all these people want to be writers. And the honest answer is: don't do it. Do not do it. Not now. Read for another 20 years. Then do it. That’s the best advice. I've seen undergraduates, you know, 20 or 21\. And they're writing very slick pastiches of something else. And there is never a second novel or a third. It's a horrible message to have to give. You know, you've got a 20-year-old sitting there all keen, and you have to say: "Look, don't do it. Wait 20 years." They don't want to hear that. **I've heard people who worked in regional TV in the 1970s talk about how it was more open to working-class kids. Working-class people could get jobs in TV more easily than now, where it’s become a more middle-class profession. Do you look back at Granada and think that?** Yeah, pretty much. Granada's big thing was Manchester speaking to London, you know, telling truth to power and so on. It was the regionality of ITV that really counted for a lot, that you could have a distinctive regional voice rather than a distinctive class voice. Granada was absolutely stuffed full of working-class people, because, you know, it's fundamentally a technical job. The writing and the acting are one thing, but then the huge background stuff, the crews, the technical stuff, there. The technology was invented at the BBC historically, and the people operating it tended to be Manchester workers, I would say. The sort of people that might have been mending the equipment in the cotton mills, that level of foreman-type worker. **I feel like in my lifetime we’ve seen a decrease in working-class access to the arts. Coming from a more ordinary background, it feels like now you're going to have to fight a lot harder to get a job in, let's say, publishing, mass media or TV. It feels harder now than it was 25, 30 years ago. Did you see that as well?** Yeah, and I think that was a direct result of the decline of industrial employment. You know, I've worked in factories for holiday jobs and stuff like that, and my observation was that there are no unskilled jobs. Every job is skilled in its own way. You had your parents and your neighbours and your friend's dad, and everybody, inevitably, was working at some level of skill with some level of diligence and discipline, with regular hours. All of this gave a shape to your picture of the world. And when that started to erode, with the decline of industrial jobs, I think it left the upcoming working-class generation completely unmoored. They didn't have a pattern to follow. You know, Granada had the electricians' union — not my union, but the electricians were absolute working-class people whose kids followed them into the trade. So, when mass employment of a certain type disappeared for the older generation, it really screwed the younger generation. **Why do we need working-class writers?** It is about permanently placing, into the record, people's lives, people's views. You know, if you publish a book, it'll never be destroyed. There's always a copy of it somewhere. And the more variety and diversity that we can get there, the better. And also, the audience, readers, are like an oil tanker. It takes forever to move it. But it is possible that it will move towards a different type of experience and develop an appetite for a different type of story, because it is all about escaping. Nobody really wants to read about their own life because you're already living your life and you're sick of it. You want to experience somebody else's life. And there's no reason why that shouldn't be a working-class life. A middle-class person should... Well, they read George Orwell and stuff like that, but they need to do it in the present day. And men also need to read women, which is something that’s almost like the last frontier. **Because there is no sense of any option that you could just go to the police to sort it out. It's got to be sorted out in the community, for better or worse, right?** Yeah, which is, generally speaking, a part of the working-class experience, in my recollection, that you don't expect help. You don't expect justice. And in a funny way, it informed the Reacher books, you know, because there was no recourse to anything other than fighting. There was no legal help you could get. It was very emotionally inarticulate. Any problem at all was a fight. And so Reacher is a legendary brawler. And really, that's me, aged nine. It was the only way to do anything. ### The Power of a Happy Meal URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/brands-and-snobbery/ Last updated: 2026-07-22T19:55:14.000Z In the mid-1990s, as a young single mum with two kids under five, I lived on £51 a week. Budgets were tight: a fiver for the gas, a fiver for the electric, £4 each for the phone, council tax and nappies. After food, there was barely anything left. This was a time when single parents were the scourge of the welfare state, the benefit system pushing us to the furthest edges of society. There were few luxuries. The accidents of family life could lead to financial disaster. No wet wipes in the bag after a little one spilled their drink or wet themselves in the park could blow the budget for a week. Being caught out at the time of the month could break the bank. This was long before period poverty was a thing. That’s what made a McDonald's Happy Meal such a treat. Sat on moulded plastic seats, sipping coffee, I watched my babies munch fries, their faces shiny with anticipation for the toy that was not always crap. This was not about nutrition. It was not about filling them up; it was absolutely not about the peace of sharing a meal. It was about belonging. Just for a moment, sat in all that noise and chatter, it was about belonging to a society that had no place for us. I know McDonald’s is not without its problems. And more than once, I’ve received snobbish, judgmentalcomments about taking my kids there. There’s a superiority, a looking down the nose, that sometimes feels less like political awareness and more like a sly dig at class. But here’s the thing: there’s a big difference in terms of power and social capital between choosing to boycott a brand or space, and being excluded because of poverty. And that’s what poverty does. It excludes you. I could never afford a holiday. I was never going to be able to take my kids to a theme park or the zoo. There were trips to the library and the free museum, endless days in the town park, but rarely money for ice creams or buns. Bus fare was budgeted for one way, when little legs were too tired to make it home. But for 99p, just in that moment, dipping dippers in tomato ketchup, my kids were not shut out of the world for being poor. ### The Working Class Library Episode 8: Running Hot by Dreda Say Mitchell URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/the-working-class-library-episode-8-running-hot-by-dreda-say-mitchell/ Last updated: 2026-07-22T19:55:54.000Z For the eighth episode of the Working Class Library, the globally bestselling author Lee Child joins hosts Richard Benson and Claire Malcolm to talk about Dreda Say Mitchell’s groundbreaking 2004 novel [Running Hot](https://www.waterstones.com/book/running-hot/dreda-say-mitchell/9781904559092?ref=thebeemagazine.com). *Running Hot* was not conceived as a crime novel, but it established Mitchell as a significant voice in contemporary urban crime fiction. Set in pre-gentrification Hackney in east London, the novel’s story centres on Elijah “Schoolboy” Ray Campbell, a petty criminal and former jailbird desperate to leave his past behind and start a fresh life as a chef in Devon. His dreams of escape are derailed when he finds a mobile phone near a dead body in the street, and his subsequent adventures take us into the dark heart of contemporary London. In 2005, the novel was awarded the Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger for best first-time crime novel, making Mitchell the first Black British author to win the prestigious honour. “Having grown up on an estate and seen some of the most intelligent men I knew end up treading the path of crime,” she said, she wanted to “figure out how I ended up at university and becoming a teacher while many of the young men I grew up with had ended up in prison”. However, she also “wanted the novel to have a certain type of ending because I was tired of reading stories or watching TV where the Black character ends up dead by the end”. Ultimately, her goal was simply to tell something of what life was like growing up in working-class east London because “very often I feel that working-class lives are not explored; we don’t really want to talk about them”. It was this use of crime as a way of talking about issues in modern urban society that drew Lee Child, himself a working-class man from Birmingham, to the book. When we asked him to choose a novel for this crime special, he didn’t hesitate in naming this one. Together with Richard and Claire, he considers why it is so important in 21st-century British crime writing – and how Mitchell so cleverly puts the capital on the page. Finally, we ask if it deserves a place on the shelves of our imaginary library of great books by and about working-class people. ### Books and authors mentioned: Margaret Atwood – [The Handmaid’s Tale](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781784873189?ref=thebeemagazine.com) Enid Blyton – [The Famous Five series](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781444910582?ref=thebeemagazine.com) Lee Child – [Killing Floor](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780553826166?ref=thebeemagazine.com) Philip Larkin – [High Windows](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780571260140?ref=thebeemagazine.com) John D. MacDonald – [The Deep Blue Good-by](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781448170227?ref=thebeemagazine.com) Denise Mina – [The Good Liar](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781529931785?ref=thebeemagazine.com) Dorothy L. Sayers – [Murder Must Advertise](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781473621381?ref=thebeemagazine.com) Robert Tressell – [The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781840226829?ref=thebeemagazine.com) [A Guide to Running Hot by Dreda Say MitchellDreda Say Mitchell was told that “someone like her” would never be accepted as a writer. But in 2004 her east London-set novel Running Hot became a hit – and changed British crime fiction.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/icon/favicon-9e366dd1-29a6-46d9-ae84-7add17a9bed9.png)The BeeSiobhan McShane![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/thumbnail/dreda-say-mitchell-85dd5408-108b-4e6c-adc3-5b0cfe70b8f3.jpg)](https://thebeemagazine.com/a-guide-to-running-hot-by-dreda-say-mitchell/) --- [Tip the Bee](https://thebeemagazine.com/#/portal/support) All donations go towards supporting the Bee’s mission to nurture, publish promote and pay for the best new working-class writing. ### A Guide to Running Hot by Dreda Say Mitchell URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/a-guide-to-running-hot-by-dreda-say-mitchell/ Last updated: 2026-07-15T17:17:37.000Z Published in 2004, *Running Hot* was the debut novel by British author Dreda Say Mitchell. Even though it was not conceived as a crime novel, it established Mitchell as a significant voice in contemporary urban crime fiction. [The Working Class Library Episode 8: Running Hot by Dreda Say MitchellLee Child joins Claire Malcolm, Chief Executive of New Writing North, and Richard Benson, editor of The Bee, to discuss Dreda Say Mitchell’s groundbreaking 2004 novel Running Hot.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/icon/favicon-8b7830b4-d05c-4e35-bb3b-ad3f4346cf95.png)The BeeLee Child![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/thumbnail/wcl-site_running-hot-794c725c-5f75-4c16-a667-84ae1640f32b.jpg)](https://thebeemagazine.com/the-working-class-library-episode-8-running-hot-by-dreda-say-mitchell/) The novel is set in pre-gentrification Hackney, east London. Its story centres on Elijah “Schoolboy” Ray Campbell, a petty criminal and former jailbird desperate to leave his past behind and start a fresh life as a chef in Devon. However, his dreams of escape are derailed when he finds a mobile phone near a dead body in the street. Unbeknownst to Schoolboy, the phone is a highly coveted asset holding explosive secrets. He becomes the target of a high-speed, lethal chase through east London’s underworld, pursued by two ruthless, competing factions: a calculated Nigerian numbers crew and a fierce Grenadian hit squad. The latter is led by a terrifying matriarch known simply as “Queen”, a woman who fiercely upholds family values while coolly dispatching her enemies. *Running Hot* received critical acclaim for its pacing and linguistic style, which draws heavily on east London slang. Critics praised Mitchell for updating and adapting the standard gangland thriller format. *The Guardian* lauded her “slangily poetic zip” and distinct fictional authenticity, while *the Mirror* remarked that Mitchell “outguns Martina Cole for pure, shocking East End gangster grit.” *The Times Educational Supplement* praised its “gripping plot, but also its portrayal of east London characters and the gangster underworld.” There was some criticism, with one early reviewer from the *Literary Review* commenting that the “ethnic slang” made the “high-speed narrative \[…\] hard to follow”, although he still considered it “well worth seeking out.” Mitchell received many comments from readers, as well as listeners after she spoke about the novel on radio. Some readers and listeners were surprised that someone from Mitchell’s background was writing novels. *Running Hot* was inspired by Mitchell’s experiences as a young woman. “Having grown up on an estate and seen some of the most intelligent men I knew end up treading the path of crime”, she wanted to “figure out how I ended up at university and a teacher while many of the young men I grew up with had ended up in prison.” However, she also “wanted the novel to have a certain type of ending because I was tired of reading stories or watching TV where the Black character ends up dead by the end.” But ultimately her goal was simply to tell something of what life was like growing up in working-class east London because “very often I feel that working-class lives are not explored; we don’t really want to talk about them.” In 2005 the novel was awarded the Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger for best first-time crime novel, making Mitchell the first Black British author to win the prestigious honour. ### Dreda Say Mitchell’s biography Mitchell was born in 1965 and grew up on a council estate in the East End of London in Tower Hamlets. She still lives in the East End with her partner, Tony Mason (also known as Ryan Carter). Mason co-writes with her. He is also from a working-class family and the books they write together are a “fusion” of their experiences. Mitchell’s family hail from Grenada in the Caribbean and moved to the UK in the 1960s. Mitchell attributes some of her writing style to this heritage, saying: “My family are from Grenada and we are notorious for being nosy! I use the same questions to create complex characters.” She has also discovered that education is very important in Grenada and feels that this led to her parents’ high aspirations for her. Her father left school at 13 to become a fisherman in Grenada before becoming a factory worker in London, while her mother, who also left school before 16, was a cleaner at Mile End hospital. Apart from the Bible there were no books in Mitchell’s house when she was growing up, but she remembers being regularly sent to the local Whitechapel library to get books with her siblings and neighbours’ kids. However, Whitechapel library no longer exists. Mitchell worries that the publishing industry does not understand this route into reading for certain communities. She stresses that “access to reading can open up a new world for youngsters from economically poor backgrounds.” Mitchell was the first in her family to attend university (as was Tony Mason) and studied African history at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London (she also has an MA in education studies). She was inspired to study African history after seeing a book in her school library with a Black man (Toussaint Louverture) on the cover. Mitchell worked as a teacher, deputy head, and education consultant across primary and secondary education. Prior to this she worked a range of short-term jobs including waitress, chambermaid, and catering assistant. ### Social class in the work of Dreda Say Mitchell Mitchell found her way into writing when she applied to a prestigious creative writing course at London’s Groucho Club. She was told that “someone like you won’t get it” and “knew they meant because I am Black, working class, and my parents both left school before the age of 15.” This was a friend who was also “working-class like me”, but who didn’t share the “high expectations” of herself which Dreda puts down to her parents’ history of migration. She did get onto the course but found it terrifying due to her background, worrying about being “from a migrant family” as well as growing up on a council estate and her parents’ lack of educational background. Later her first publisher, who also led that course, informed her that “one of the reasons she chose me was because my writing was unique”. Now Mitchell claims both these comments as part of the same pride in her writing and her background, commenting that “‘someone like you’ became my unique selling point. Far from being a weakness, it is one of my greatest strengths.” She is also positive about the external perception of being working class, arguing that “I think we live in a time when being working class is no longer seen as a negative thing. I grew up on a housing estate in the east end of London and I see this as an incredibly positive aspect of my life”. Similarly she celebrates that “class prejudice is now deemed to be as unacceptable as any other kind.” She claims the East End as “the bedrock” of her writing and has even said that “I think if I hadn’t grown up in east London, I probably wouldn’t have been a writer”. She argues that “The mantra that the only way working-class people are going to be a success is to leave it all behind is not true. Truly successful people are those that are confident and grounded in the people who they are, not what someone else wants them to be.” She also criticises “people’s depictions of housing estates, all this sense of deprivation, these poor, poor people,” since her experience is that she did have access to things like the local library and art gallery that made her childhood “rich in culture” and “quality of life goes beyond money.” Mitchell has not always been so sanguine about acceptance of working-class people, however. When *Running Hot* was published, comments from readers led her to conclude that “We live at a time now where being working class, particularly being white working class, is getting a bit of a hammering to tell you the truth”. She missed the “powerful working-class figures in the art world” that she felt were around in her youth. Nevertheless, she stresses that “those you actually live among” are more likely to be influential mentors than, for example, celebrities who may be helicoptered in by schools for inspirational talks. Her writing is inspired by her father’s oral storytelling, and she emphasises that “Some of the greatest storytellers I’ve known in life are people who left formal education at an early age”. She does not write “solely” for working-class readers, and points out that the growth of short-term employment, and the contract or “gig” economy is redrawing class lines. “The experience of having \[your\] backs to the wall financially and being forced to take poorly paid jobs that may not be good for \[you\]”, she says, is no longer the sole experience of “the poor – increasingly, it’s starting to be the case for people of other backgrounds too.” Her first fan mail, she notes, was from a middle-class white man from Hampstead. Mitchell uses her platform as a writer to speak out on numerous social and political issues. She has appeared on television shows and has been a columnist for *the Guardian*, *the Independent*, and *the Observer*. Her class background has impacted responses to her television appearances. In 2017 she complained “there has been one constant theme: why do I refuse to speak English properly?” and translates this into “the real question being posed here – why are they bringing working-class types into studios to comment on respectable people’s business?” “There are still many people in this country who don’t understand that language is a means of communication, not a symbol of social status,” she says, “and that the working class includes some of the most intelligent, articulate and witty people in our society.” Mitchell felt that it was her responsibility to appear on television panel shows due to a lack of working-class representation. “If not me, who like me? For often, when I’m approached to appear on the media or at public events and have to decline, I am then asked: ‘Do you know any other minority pundits who share your views?’ Or any who are working class, council-housed or comprehensively educated?” ### Activism Mitchell is a campaigner and speaker on social issues and the arts. For example, she is clear that “Writers need to get paid, or we’re in danger of reducing the arts sector to a hobby and lifestyle choice only open to those with the finances to do it.” She has been a Reading Ambassador for the Reading Agency, and she does work in prisons, helping inmates with reading and writing skills and using “my life as a springboard to talk about the barriers I faced and how I overcame them”. In 2020, she received an MBE for her services to literature education work. When she was first asked to do this, after speaking at a conference for prison librarians, she felt it “really chimed” with what she had written about in *Running Hot*. She was commissioned by the Youth Justice Board to pilot a creative writing and mentoring project with young offenders from African and Caribbean working-class backgrounds. Work in prisons inspired some of her later novels, including *One False Move*, which was written specifically as a Quick Reads novel for the Reading Agency. She speaks of a visit to a women’s prison which “reignited my interest in writing about the working-class people I grew up with, especially the women.” ### Running Hot, Dreda Say Mitchell and the Black British crime novel Alongside her working-class background, Mitchell is concerned with other aspects of her identity. She worries that there are still too few BAME crime writers: “Access has always been a problem for writers of colour and other marginalised groups in society,” she has said. “When we do manage to get our foot in the door there’s still a huge level of pressure on BAME authors to stay in their lane and only write about ‘Black’ issues. \[…\] It’s as if the publishing industry thinks that writers of colour live their whole lives through the colour of their skin.” Mitchell resists pigeonholing by ethnicity, declining to call herself a “Black writer” because she believes it involves “defining very clearly what you write about.” Mitchell has also suggested that her working-class background exacerbates the racism she faces in the publishing industry since “If you speak the language \[i.e. have the right accent\], the publishing industry is quite happy to pull you in because you sound like them already. You might be a different colour, but essentially you kind of dress like them.” The problem, she says, is that in the publishing industry “when they hear Black or ethnic minority, they’re thinking race, oppression, colonial history, migrant. They’re not thinking about a woman who writes about murder and mayhem on the streets of London.” She argued against Marlon James when he said that Black authors were being pushed into genres that were only relevant to white people, arguing instead that they are excluded from these genres. “It’s when you look at other \[not specifically identity-focused\] fiction genres that Black authors tend to thin out. I’ve been to events in the crime-writing world where I’ve been the only Black woman among hundreds of attendees.” Mitchell is also concerned because she feels that being known as a Black writer will mean that people looking for crime writing won’t find her because her books will be stuck in the wrong section of bookshops. ### Literary influences Mitchell has said several times that Alice Walker’s *The Color Purple* is her greatest literary influence and she argues that it “shows how fiction can be life-changing”. It was particularly important for her because it is about “the triumph of a Black woman from a poor background who overcame the odds stacked against her”, which was a “powerful message and motivator” for a young Black woman growing up on a council estate. Mitchell has said that Lady Macbeth is her favourite fictional character, despite struggling with Shakespeare at school. She criticises her school curriculum, which contained “no books by any Black authors”, driving her to read only Black female writers during her twenties. As a young person she loved the Poldark novels by Winston Graham, citing class as a key theme that drew her to them. Lee Child is a strong influence, particularly *Killing Floor* in his Jack Reacher series. Mitchell praises the crime-writing community as being extremely welcoming and supportive to her throughout her career, and she singles out Child as a successful author who took notice of her after the publication of *Running Hot*. They met at her first crime fiction convention, when he helped her find her way to a venue and then chatted with her at lunch. He has continued to be what she calls her “biggest supporter”. ### Crime writing and class Mitchell considers that the crime-writing community is so welcoming because “for a long time, they were kind of dissed and put down by the literary community as not proper fiction”, which meant that they bonded as writers and are keen to welcome new blood “because it’s such a popular genre, there’s room enough for everyone.” *Running Hot* fits into the genre urban crime fiction, although Mitchell did not write it intentionally in this genre (“I thought I was writing a redemption piece,”) until her publishers “gave it to a crime novelist, who said it was a crime novel.” Mitchell has said she realised that if she described the novel through its plot and as a crime novel it generated much more interest than describing it as being about redemption. This points to another reason why Mitchell resists being pigeonholed as a Black novelist who will be expected to write about “heavy” subjects like identity and racism. The critic Gill Plain describes urban crime fiction as centred around “the city as a site of conflict between competing cultures of power” as well as “a space for the negotiation of gender anxieties”. The genre often focuses on the city to the extent that location becomes a “character” in its own right, and Mitchell acknowledges that “inner London is as central to her novels as some of the characters”. Crime fiction has had a long-standing, if sometimes problematic, relationship with the working class, and Plain describes the role of police officers who maintain order “through the more-or-less heroic agency of white, working-class masculinity.” It has also been seen as a key site in literature for Marxist interpretations: according to Andrew Pepper, author of the 2020 book *Crime Fiction and Global Capital*, “what distinguishes crime fiction’s treatment and interrogation of capital is its insistence upon drawing out the violence which is often hidden by and in other types of fiction and modes of representation.” However, Pepper also demonstrates that there is ambiguity in how crime fiction approaches social issues since although fiction about crime tends to “draw attention to the failures, flaws, and coercive capacities of the state’s crime and control mechanisms,” what could be interpreted as “overt political radicalism is contained by the accommodations crime stories must make towards the articulation of law and the restitution of order” as it often seeks a solution that restores social cohesion. Although these reasons seem to make working-class representation a logical move in crime fiction, it has not always been associated with portrayals of working-class individuals. Although British Golden Age crime fiction was often set in rural communities, Snell demonstrates that lower-class characters are “rarely developed”, not even as murderers, although Dorothy Sayers’ novels are an exception. Mitchell has explored some of the drawbacks to crime fiction, in that it can be extremely triggering to people who have suffered criminal acts, or fear them, including rape and violent abuse. However, she suggests that the fact that crime touches people personally also makes them want to read about it and see it represented in fiction. Crime fiction is not entirely welcoming to Black writers. Peter Messent, author of *The Crime Fiction Handbook*, highlights that “Blackness – almost inevitably – comes accordingly to stand in contrast: for criminality, ‘otherness,’ and an unfamiliar, unknown, and threatening social world”, creating a problem for Black crime writers who try to fit in with the conventions of crime fiction, which are “geared toward the interests of the dominant white world”. However, crime fiction is particularly growing amongst francophone African authors and research in this area suggests some reasons why it might be attractive to Black authors. The critic Pim Higginson highlights “its exploration of what one might call a poetics of the vernacular. Racial, ethnic, class, gender, and regional origin are all increasingly reflected in the speech of the characters that populate the works of the hard-boiled school.” Christian Patterson argues that *Running Hot* “offers a cacophony of voices across the classes”, tapping into this tradition. Another review by Higginson praises dialect spellings in *Running Hot* for making the novel “more urban and gritty”. This is an additional attraction to the genre’s interest in exploring “the policing of social boundaries” as discussed by Higginson above. In addition, Robinson points out that the hard-boiled tradition in the US was “fundamentally entwined with the possibility of interracial sociability”, with plots relating to issues such as the social impact of emancipation and resultant changes in labour divisions, which, even if racist in their initial appearances, opened up spaces for later writers to appropriate the genre to challenge racism in society. Finally, Martin suggests that noir or crime thrillers, which focus on the criminal rather than the detective, grew out of racialised discourse around crime in the mid-20th century in the US, meaning that they arose through Black authors like Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison challenging the white establishment. *Running Hot* is not focused on a detective, but Schoolboy is closer to someone solving a puzzle than committing a crime, meaning this novel fits somewhere between the two categories of this genre. ### Literary influences Martina Cole was “the first writer I knew who had the brass to write stories about the struggles and experiences of women who lived on council estates. She made me realise that someone with an accent like mine has a right to be heard just like anyone else in our society.” She suggests that Martina Cole’s novels are very popular with working-class women “because they resonate so much with their own experience.” Cole was also supportive when Mitchell was a new writer, offering to spend a day with her when Mitchell called to ask for a quote for her gangland novels. Chester Himes, the African American crime writer, is another significant influence. Mitchell remembers coming across his novels in the library as a child and being “transported back to an age when Harlem was hip, cool and, of course, dangerous”. Himes has been particularly influential on the francophone African boom in crime fiction in the 21st century, largely because his crime novels were initially published in French while he was living in Paris. Agatha Christie is another key influence, as she is for any British crime writer, and Mitchell “admires Christie’s determination to give older single women a voice”. ### The publication of *Running Hot* *Running Hot* was published by a small independent publisher, Maia Press, which Mitchell describes as “two ground-breaking women who set up their own publishing venture from a house in Hackney.” One of these women, Maggie Hamand, ran the course she attended at the Groucho Club, where she developed the character of Schoolboy. Hamand asked Mitchell if she could publish a chapter of Schoolboy’s story in an anthology, but then asked if she could actually publish the whole book. This came as quite a shock to Mitchell, who did not have the whole book ready. She rushed home to her partner, Tony Mason, who now formally co-writes with her under the pen name Ryan Carter, and they hashed out the rest of the plot together in cafes. Mitchell recalls “writing the book on the Tube” to get it done. A crime writer known to Mitchell’s publisher encouraged them to put *Running Hot* forward for the John Creasey Dagger; when Mitchell won, she says it was the proudest moment of her career. Since her fifth novel, Mitchell has formally co-written with her partner, Tony Mason, although he is only credited (as Ryan Carter) on some of the book covers. She values writing in partnership as an “easier process” which allows the two writers to bounce ideas off each other and use their own strengths. Mitchell claims that Mason’s strength is in plotting while she is good at adding emotion and also takes on most of the editing to ensure a consistent style (his writing is “Dreded up” through her edits). The team are prolific and Mitchell claims they write each book in about six weeks. They are published by Thomas & Mercer Amazon, but only have a contract for one book a year, which is not enough for their output, so they also self-publish. Mitchell and Mason turned to self-publishing after realising that their advances from their mainstream publisher started dropping after the first few books. “What job,” Mitchell asks, “would you be in where you would, after a couple of years, expect to get a pay cut, and then a pay cut, and then a pay cut?” She left the mainstream publisher, took some advice from very willing members of the crime-fiction community, and is now positive about self-publishing: indeed she sees her adoption of it as being “when our big success started”. (So far Mitchell’s books have been translated into 14 languages, and there are rumours that some of her recent books may be adapted for TV or film.) She also suggests that the move to self-publishing means that “artists creatives writers are starting to see that they’re the ones with the power.” Mitchell puts some of her dissatisfaction with the remuneration system in traditional publishing down to being working class, emphasising that writing is “work” and so writers should be fairly paid like other workers, and associating this belief with a “work ethic from my parents and from being working class”. She also credits this work ethic with her ability to meet deadlines and make it as a writer. Some of Mitchell’s later novels centre around gang violence and the characters “represent the many strong women who lived on my block as a child.” In later life, she realised that many of these stories were influenced by her mother’s early death when she was 28 and involve young women looking for mother figures. This led to a realisation, which she had been denying for years, that she does write about her own life in her novels. Mitchell continues to often write about London and claims that it is important to have a “range of characters” in her novels because “you can’t write about our great capital city if you don’t truly reflect the different type of people who live there.” --- [Tip the Bee](https://thebeemagazine.com/#/portal/support) All donations go towards supporting the Bee’s mission to nurture, publish promote and pay for the best new working-class writing. ### Don’t You Dare Tell Me That! URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/dont-you-dare-tell-me-that/ Last updated: 2026-07-01T18:59:56.000Z Whenever I tell someone from Middlesbrough that I grew up in Acklam, I can guarantee that they’ll call me ‘posh’. With its curves of privately owned homes and a beck that winds its gentle way through meadows, Acklam’s one of the last Middlesbrough suburbs to come to mind with regards to child poverty. Yet halfway down one of its few 1970s-built terraces, I grew up in a family who received Income Support, a form of benefit once given to the poorest people. In those late-1990s days, welfare payments had to be redeemed at the Post Office, so every school-holiday Tuesday would see me queuing alongside my mam and dad. With my hands nestled snug in theirs, I’d stare at the shelves full of teddy bears they told stories about, to take my mind off the dirty looks our neighbours gave us. Yet my parents couldn’t protect me from the slaps or stamps or strangles that came my way in the playground. Nor, apparently, could the teacher who eyed the swelling round my temple and said, ‘Don’t you dare tell me that! Catherine isn’t a bully: her daddy works!’ So alongside maths and science, I had to learn an extra lesson: as the child of a benefits family, I would not be heard or believed. Ever the diligent student, I stopped telling the teacher about the cause of new wounds, until the bullying grew so bad that my parents insisted I was to have my dinner at home. Those hour-long respites from the torment of the playground gave me the strength I needed to get through the rest of the school day, but they came at the cost of further mutterings. ‘My mammy says only riff-raff have that much time on their hands,’ and ‘that fella should be at work.’ Words that cut my heart and crushed my stomach, till red sauce sandwiches were all that it could manage. Till I came down with infection after infection, and never played outside – and I might have shrunk to nothing if it hadn’t been for Craig Noe. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2026/06/Fly-and-Louise-1.jpg) A strapping brindle greyhound, he was: all bronze muscles, jasper stripes and oaken eyes. Irish-bred from an eminent sire and dam, Craig Noe had come across the sea to race for my much older middle brother. Not at Newcastle’s dog track, which operated under the strict rules of the National Greyhound Racing Club, but on County Durham’s independent circuit. Commonly referred to as ‘flapping tracks’, the likes of Wheatley Hill and Easington let anyone from anywhere race a greyhound round their sandy ovals. I’d been part of the flapping community since I was a newborn, when my eldest brother’s fawn bitch Fly raced as Clwyd Lodge. The whole family would pack into an auld banger to cheer her on at the track, but later years saw us lavish her with treats, while she lived out her retirement as our beloved pet. So when Craig Noe came along, it was a few years since we’d been to Easington Greyhound Stadium, and its unfamiliar vastness meant I hurried to my mam. Wrapped my arms round her neck as she clicked us through the turnstile; hid my face in her jacket when the café door squeaked open. Pretended that the fag smoke and fried onions made my throat tighten, while the hubbub become a quiet that amplified every palpitation. ‘Lang time nee see, Benny!’ came a fella’s shout, while a group of women asked, ‘How ya deein’, Annie pet?’ And the knot in my belly loosened as those voices steered us to green plastic chairs; cooed what a dot of a bairn I was. Promised their kids would keep an eye on me if I ever wanted to play, and I looked up from my mam’s chest to find freckly faces nodding. Swearing on Tamagotchis that I’d be alright, till my cracked, chapped lips remembered how to smile. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2026/06/Louise-and-Fly-2.jpg) After a few meetings, I was playing hide and seek, and sharing vinegary chips and bags of 10p mix-ups. Strutting beside my dad and Craig Noe in the pre-race parade, I waved first at my mam, then at my new friends: brown-haired Laura in the pink duffle she’d put round me when I shivered, and Danny with his blond spikes. He called himself my bodyguard, but said the lads at Easington were far nicer than the ones who went to his school. ‘It’s the same with the lasses,’ Laura sighed as she zipped me into her coat; and I found myself telling them about my bullying. Then freezing, as they gave me this deep, hard look – but then they said as one, ‘That’s terrible.’ And when the warmth coursed through me, I knew it came from more than Laura’s duffle; that the sun shone hot inside my veins because I’d found a place where I belonged. It was a precious feeling for a six-year-old lass, one that strengthened with every trip that my family took to Easington. Once Craig Noe had retired to my middle brother’s home, my auntie gave me a coal-coloured bitch called Molly. Between the responsibility of getting Molly ready to race, my trackside games with Danny and Laura, and the continued support of my parents, I found ways to cope with the bullying. While I was still too young to understand that it was rooted in class, I sensed that there were bigger factors driving the behaviour I encountered. That instinct sustained me throughout my teenage years, when a now-retired Molly curled up in the porch and I began to write. There was a short story inspired by the turnstile man at Thirsk Races, who used to bend the rules so that he could let my whole family in for just two quid a meeting. I penned an article which railed against the ‘benefits scrounger’ stereotype, then made a piece of performance poetry that exposed the callousness at the heart of David Cameron’s austerity measures. It was a cruelty that I understood first-hand, as I also had to use my writing to challenge benefits decisions that made my dad suicidal. ‘The letter Miss Powell wrote is so powerful that I have no need to hold this tribunal,’ the Judge said. ‘I overturn the decision and will not hear a single word of complaint.’ ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2026/06/Louise-Parents-and-Fly.jpg) At the same time my words won battles against the DWP, emails arrived to tell me I’d been shortlisted for national writing initiatives. Yet as none of them explained that writing could be more than a hobby, I was in my late 20s before I started taking my craft seriously. I attended an introduction to screenwriting course run by New Writing North, which taught me it was possible to pitch for opportunities. I was working three part-time jobs alongside a funded PhD and being an unpaid carer for my parents, but I burnt the candle at all ends to write. A pitch for a play about a man shattered by the benefits system, then tales of a world fast slipping away. Easington Greyhound Stadium had closed to become a new-build estate, and only four flapping tracks remained in the whole of Great Britain. While I couldn’t do a thing to stop the closure of the tracks, I knew that their colourful characters and high-stakes gambles had the sort of storytelling potential that would allow flapping to live on in another form. A fitting way, I thought, of giving back to the world that had given me so much. What began as an essay published in Kit de Waal’s *Common People* anthology mushroomed into a body of work. I was commissioned by Durham Book Festival and Hartlepool Little Waterfronts Festival to write short art films and a spoken-word piece which explored the heritage of flapping, then had an audio drama broadcast on BBC Radio 4 Extra. Yet as the praise and credits grew, I began to receive the messages. ‘Benefits scum writing about benefits scum’ and ‘you must have made up your doctorate cos educated people don’t write about trash’*.* When my pilot social history podcast attracted so many listeners and so much media attention that National Lottery Project Grant funding followed for an eight episode series, my inbox pinged with a fresh load of bile. ‘I’ve put in a complaint to the Arts Council!’ one person told me. They swore that they’d get my funding stopped, so I couldn’t waste taxpayers’ money on something that only ‘riff-raff’ did. Not content with threatening my livelihood, the trolls went on to write lurid descriptions of exactly how they’d put ‘you greyhound scum’ to death. My chest tightened and prickled and burned; my stomach lurched and my shoulders sank. I sagged shivering behind my laptop screen, fighting nausea and the urge to curl up in a ball. For all I knew, they might have my address; they definitely had the dates and venues of events that were open to the public. I’d been the victim of assault and sustained harassment just a few years before, so the messages brought that trauma back, compounding the hypervigilance that every female has to practise. Without the reassuring presence of my family at all public-facing events and the Arts Council’s willingness to ignore the complaints, I might never have made the podcast series that won praise for enabling my community to tell their stories in their own voices. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2026/06/Louise-and-Craig-Noe-1.jpg) It was a long time before the shock of the online abuse subsided, and I felt able to consider the people behind the threats. Young lasses with bios that advocated for inclusivity; older men who mocked the way that women dressed for Aintree’s Ladies’ Day. People who said ‘I like the finer things in life’ and ‘we should all #BeKind’, and scores of anonymised accounts that screamed for an end to greyhound racing. I’d never stayed on any profile for longer than it took to click ‘block’, but it was time enough to clock the hypocrisy and classism of the trolls. And once time gave me a little more distance, I realised that little had changed from my primary school days. There was the same conflation of worklessness and immorality; the same refusal to see the value of unemployed lives. The same desire to silence my speaking of my truth, even if that meant I came to physical and mental harm. It was only when I started speaking to other creatives within the greyhound community that I realised how pervasive this attitude is. Paul Wilson grew up on a South Yorkshire council estate, where he developed a lifelong passion for whippets and greyhounds. After racing on flapping tracks, Paul now has runners on the licensed circuit, and writes poetry that he circulates to a handful of folk. ‘I know that if I share it \[more broadly, middle-class\] people would look down on it as something from the lower classes,’ he remarks. Having been targeted by online trolls for his involvement in greyhound racing, Paul believes that ‘we mean nothing to these people.’ Paul’s granddaughter Grace Cawthorn has inherited both his talent with words and his love of the dogs. At the age of just 15, Grace won the BBC Young Reporters (North) 2023 competition with an essay about the life-changing influence of the greyhound community. ‘I’ve always been really nervous,’ she explained, ‘but being at the track and talking to new and like-minded people really helped.’ Yet as Grace worked with the BBC to make a short film about her experience, she had to think about more than her script. ‘There was a bit of concern about the anti-racing people,’ she remembers, ‘and when the film was shown on TV, I did get a few threats from them – and a ‘rescue’ charity!’ When Paul’s and Grace’s experiences are set alongside mine, they point to a multi-faceted middle-class drive to silence working-class writers. From the slurs we hear in our childhoods to fantasies of fatal injury to our adult bodies, we are constantly under not just criticism, but threat. Every word that we write is an act of defiance, one which consumes huge reserves of energy. Even when we have a final draft, our battle isn’t through: we must mentally prepare to mute and block and report. To look out at an audience and convince ourselves we’re safe; to slump exhausted afterwards from the strain of it all. It’s a process at the forefront of my mind, as my debut novel *Underdogs* nears its publication date. With the novel set in the flapping world, and launching at Newcastle Greyhound Stadium, I’ve had to have frank conversations about possible backlash. I know that these aren’t the sort of discussions that a debut author should be having, and I’ve grappled with the guilt of potentially exposing John Murray Press and New Writing North to vitriol. Yet I also know that both organisations share my attitude: as awful as it is to be on the end of threats, it would be far worse to let the bullies win. So as time speeds towards July, I remind myself that I’ve written a novel which needs to be heard – for the sake of my family, my community, and every other working-class writer ever ordered to shut up. ### Write for the Mass Observation Archive URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/write-for-the-mass-observation-archive/ Last updated: 2026-05-09T16:40:52.000Z The Mass Observation Archive is one of our favourite British institutions. Based in Falmer in East Sussex and active since 1937, it is a national archive of records of “everyday life, thought and feeling in Britain”. That’s writing, photographs, drawings, some oral history materials and ephemera (tickets, menus, postcards and the like), all capturing ordinary life as lived by ordinary Brits for the past 90 years. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2026/04/12th-may-illustrated-diary-2025.jpg) Each year on 12 May, the staff run the Diary Project, an annual national initiative that invites people across the UK to document their everyday lives – thoughts, feelings and activities – on (you guessed) 12 May. The project was launched in 1937 to record everyday life on the day of King George VI’s coronation, and revived in 2010 to study how British lives change over time. You can see various past examples on this page. The submissions are held in the archive forever, so it’s quite an incredible thing. The diaries have become a unique and valuable national resource for researchers, sociologists and historians studying British life. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2026/05/brownies-12th-may-diaries-1--1-.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2026/05/Diary-by-female-prisoner-2014.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2026/05/Diary-May-2014-HMP-Drake-Hall-Female-53--1--1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2026/05/IMG_6924.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2026/05/IMG_6925.jpg) This year The Bee is honoured to be working with the Mass Observation Archive team, encouraging our readers and writers to submit their 12 May diaries. We’re proud and pleased to be promoting working-class people’s representation in the project. You can find a full guide to submitting work here: [https://massobs.org.uk/12th-may/](https://massobs.org.uk/12th-may/?ref=thebeemagazine.com) but a quick summary is that: - Anyone can take part - Participants (often called “Mass Observers”) record a full day’s activities from waking to sleeping. - Diaries can be written, typed, or submitted as photos, drawings or collages. - Submissions require a brief self-portrait (age, location, job, relationship status) and a signed consent statement for the archive. If in doubt, you can surely find inspiration from some of the previous diaries on this page, whether you’re looking after kittens, being an emo, obsessing over your Xbox or working your arse off as per. Information about consent, copyright and data protection can be found on the linked page. ### The Working Class Library Episode 7: This Sporting Life by David Storey URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/the-working-class-library-episode-7-this-sporting-life-by-david-storey/ Last updated: 2026-06-15T18:58:44.000Z In this episode of the Working Class Library, David Peace joins Claire Malcolm, Chief Executive of New Writing North, and Richard Benson, editor of The Bee, to discuss David Storey’s classic, controversial 1960 kitchen-sink novel, [This Sporting Life](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781784873974?ref=thebeemagazine.com). This Sporting Life, said The Guardian, “provided one of the great energising shocks of the 1960s, a blast of energy smashing at the dullness, complacency and hypocrisy of class-ridden Britain.” Written by Storey when he was still a professional rugby league player, it is a story of frustrated sexual relationships, money, power and celebrity, set in the dark, smoky world of rugby league in the industrial North. In 1963, Lindsay Anderson turned it into a film starring Richard Harris and Rachel Roberts, who were nominated for Oscars. Storey wrote the screenplay. Book and film are now recognised as classics. David Peace grew up a few miles from where Storey had lived in Wakefield and, of course, has written extensively about sport and class in the industrial North, most recently with his novel Munichs. He joins Claire and Richard in the studio to consider This Sporting Life’s enduring appeal and what it means to him as a novelist. David also talks about how encouraging it was to know that writers such as Storey, John Braine, Stan Barstow and Keith Waterhouse had come from working-class communities local to his parental home. If you have any thoughts or comments on the episode, please share them with us on our social media channels. ### **Books and Authors Mentioned** Stan Barstow – [A Kind of Loving](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781914595462?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [Ask Me Tomorrow](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780573015137?ref=thebeemagazine.com) John Braine – [Room at the Top](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780099445364?ref=thebeemagazine.com) Arthur Conan Doyle – [The Complete Sherlock Holmes](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780785848790?ref=thebeemagazine.com) D. H. Lawrence – [The Rainbow](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9798880919628?ref=thebeemagazine.com) John Osborne – [The Entertainer](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780571335145?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [Look Back in Anger](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780573112553?ref=thebeemagazine.com) David Peace – [The Red Riding Quartet](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781781259894?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [GB84](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780571314874?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [Tokyo Year Zero](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780571231997?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [The Damned United](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781350005136?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [Red or Dead](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781839044571?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [Munichs](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780571381173?ref=thebeemagazine.com) Alan Sillitoe – [Saturday Night and Sunday Morning](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780007205028?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780007255603?ref=thebeemagazine.com) David Storey – [A Stinging Delight](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780571360321?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [This Sporting Life](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781784873974?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [The Changing Room](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780413703705?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [Saville](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781784873967?ref=thebeemagazine.com) John Wain – [Hurry On Down](https://www.waterstones.com/book/hurry-on-down-valancourt-20th-century-classics/john-wain/john-andrew-fredrick/9781948405713?ref=thebeemagazine.com) Keith Waterhouse – [Billy Liar](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780241973646?ref=thebeemagazine.com) [A Guide to This Sporting Life by David StoreyGeorgia Poplett’s introduction to David Storey’s novel and film about a young rugby league star in 1960s Yorkshire, and its place in the Northern Realist and Angry Young Men movements.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/icon/favicon-c600615d-b216-45d8-bd3b-523a17109bb2.png)The BeeGeorgia Poplett![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/thumbnail/tslscene-efa10db2-9d76-4bd7-acae-7ee3c50ed563.jpg)](https://thebeemagazine.com/a-guide-to-this-sporting-life-by-david-storey/) --- [Tip the Bee](https://thebeemagazine.com/#/portal/support) All donations go towards supporting the Bee’s mission to nurture, publish promote and pay for the best new working-class writing. ### A Guide to This Sporting Life by David Storey URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/a-guide-to-this-sporting-life-by-david-storey/ Last updated: 2026-06-15T18:58:27.000Z ### David Storey’s early life, Rugby League and British literature David Storey was born on 13 July 1933 in Wakefield, the son of coalminer Frank and Lily (née Cartwright). His older brother Neville died while Lily was pregnant with David, creating an environment of grief and loss which characterised his early years. Of his childhood, Storey remembered the housing estate in which the family lived as nestled between two collieries, a mill, brickworks, and the Pennines. Storey won a scholarship to the Queen Elizabeth Grammar School and, at 18, signed a fifteen-year contract with Leeds Rugby League Football Club (now Leeds Rhinos). [The Working Class Library Episode 7: This Sporting Life by David StoreyDavid Peace joins Claire Malcolm, Chief Executive of New Writing North, and Richard Benson, editor of The Bee, to discuss David Storey’s classic, controversial 1960 kitchen-sink novel, This Sporting Life.![](https://static.ghost.org/v5.0.0/images/link-icon.svg)The BeeRichard Benson![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/thumbnail/wcl-this-sporting-life.jpg)](https://thebeemagazine.com/the-working-class-library-episode-7-this-sporting-life-by-david-storey/) In Rugby League, which in the UK is mostly played in former industrial towns and cities in northern England, and associated with the working class, players were paid, unlike their Rugby Union counterparts. In Storey’s own words: ‘I went for a trial and played two trial games and they signed me on for what seemed a lot of money: £1,200, for which I got £400\. I would get the second £400 when I was 21\. The contract was until I was 32.’ In today’s money, these lump sums are equivalent to nearly £4,000 each. Storey later reflected that, ‘rugby league in those days was seen as a species of prostitution.’ Allegedly, when he signed professionally, his former deputy headteacher wrote to say that he had let the entire school down. Storey played as the Leeds A side’s half-back for five years during weekends on a weekly wage of £6, and spent his signing-on bonus on fees for the Slade School of Fine Art, which he attended during the week. He found time to write on the commuting train. Upon graduating with his three-year diploma in 1956, Storey bought out the remainder of his contract with Leeds, feeling dislocated from both halves of his life. (After a disastrous formal event organised by Storey as president of the Slade – to which Lucian Freud brought his dog as a plus-one – he had been asked not to come back to complete his fourth year.) He worked as a tent contractor in Wakefield. He then found work as a schoolteacher while living above a sweetshop in King’s Cross. He married his childhood sweetheart Barbara Rudd Hamilton in 1956, with whom he had four children. After multiple rejections, Storey’s first novel *This Sporting Life* was published in 1960 by Longmans (since acquired by Pearson). It received critical acclaim, winning the Macmillan Fiction Award and making an immediate mark on 1960s British literature. Within three years it had been adapted into an Oscar-nominated film starring Richard Harris and Rachel Roberts. On its release in 1963 the film, the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw has written, ‘provided one of the great energising shocks of the 1960s, a blast of energy, smashing at the dullness, the complacency and hypocrisy of class-ridden Britain.’ Storey followed *This Sporting Life* with *Flight into Camden* (1961), winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize; *Radcliffe* (1963), winner of the Somerset Maugham Award; *Pasmore* (1972), winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize; *A Temporary Life* and *Edward* (1973); *Saville* (1976), winner of the Booker Prize; *A Prodigal Child* (1981); *Present Times* (1984); *The Phoenix* (1993); *A Serious Man* (1998); *A Star in the West* (1999); *As It Happened* (2002); and *Thin-Ice Skater* (2004). Storey was also known – perhaps better known, in fact – for his plays, often co-produced with Lindsay Anderson. His first – *To Die With the Philistines* – was roundly rejected, until a young director rediscovered it six years later and reworked it as *The Restoration of Arnold Middleton* (1967), for which Storey shared the Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Playwright with Tom Stoppard. Later plays at the Royal Court Theatre included *The Contractor* (1969), *Home* (1970), and *The Changing Room* (1972), which all won the New York Critics Best Play of the Year Award; *In Celebration* (1969), adapted for the screen in 1974; *The Farm* (1973); *Life Class* (1975); *Mother’s Day* (1976); and *Sisters* (1978). Storey’s plays moved to the Royal National Theatre with *Early Days* (1980), *The March on Russia* (1989) and *Stages* (1992). His career in the theatre was not uncontroversial: during the 1970s, Anderson denied free tickets to a reviewer – Hilary Spurling – who was only reluctantly re-added to the press list after the Arts Council intervened. Similarly, following a series of poor reviews of *Mother’s Day* in 1976, Storey punched critic Michael Billington with three impressive blows while shouting, ‘Idiot!’ on impact. However, despite his career as a rugby player, and a quality that could be called bluffness, Storey struggled with anxiety and depression throughout his life. This is discussed openly in the successful memoir *A Stinging Delight*, published posthumously in 2021 after his death from Parkinson’s disease and dementia on 27 March 2017. ### This Sporting Life, class and social realism *This Sporting Life* was published in 1960\. It tells the story of Arthur Machin, a working-class Yorkshire rugby league player whose rise to professional success is dogged by emotional and social struggle. After signing with a local team, Machin lodges with his widowed landlady, Mrs Hammond, and develops an intense, often destructive attachment to her. Burdened by grief and wary of his aggression, Mrs Hammond ultimately rejects his advances; meanwhile Machin attempts to assert control over his career, relationships and identity within a rigidly stratified working-class environment. Storey contrasts the physical brutality and commercialisation of sport with Machin’s inner vulnerability, depicting a man unable to articulate his emotions except through force and persistence. In its first edition, the jacket featured a stern line illustration of a rugby player charging towards the viewer, with factories clearly visible in the background. It ran with a subtitle – A Novel – perhaps used to distinguish it from memoir, given Storey’s former rugby career, and to lend it a kind of literary legitimacy in the eyes of the publishing establishment. This interpretation is reinforced by the front flap copy, which reassured the reader that ‘This book is recommended by the Book Society.’ The retail price of 16 shillings (roughly £23 today) is also clearly marked. It is striking to compare the 1960 edition with the most recent reissue as part of the Vintage Classics series, published in 2018\. This remodelled design emphasises the ‘split psychology’ motif of the novel, and gone are all signs of northern industrial life. Instead, traces of the love story are made explicit through the highly gendered visuals. Storey’s connection to his working-class roots remained a point of contention throughout his life, which found its way out in various guises through his work. In three separate interviews with theartsdesk’s Jasper Rees, Storey spoke openly about his dislocated life of ‘double exile’. As an educated man whose academic and creative pursuits kept him out of the coal mine where his father had spent his life, Storey voiced a sense of guilt connected to his decision to sign with Leeds. ‘I felt I was an outsider, I was there under false premises \[…\] I wanted to be an artist, a writer and a painter, and I really went to art school in order to have time to write,’ he explained. ‘My father wouldn’t support me there so I played rugby league in order to go to art school in order to learn to write. There’s a kind of duplicity involved there. \[My father\] approved of \[the rugby\] because I was connected with the real world at last.’ The idea of real and unreal worlds resurfaced often in his writing and conversation. ‘There are two Wakefields,’ he told Rees. ‘There’s an imaginary Wakefield and there’s a real Wakefield which, horrifically, I see when I get there. And the two are increasingly separated. When I go back, although I prepare myself, I know it’s going to be a shock, but what’s there now has this rather frightening resemblance to what used to be there but isn’t what it was \[…\] I don’t feel I belong anywhere particularly.’ His 1969 play *In Celebration* – about Nottinghamshire brothers returning home for their parents’ fortieth wedding anniversary – epitomised the alienation of the postwar generation’s access to educative and economic opportunities which were denied to their parents, creating the uneasy social mobility which informs *This Sporting Life*. A contemporary Guardian review from critic and rugby league pundit Geoffrey Moorhouse pointed out that ‘An interest in rugby league is by no means necessary to appreciate this story, any more than a fascination with whaling has ever been vital to an enjoyment of *Moby Dick*.’ Other critics saw that there was more to this novel than the sport or recognisable kitchen-sink tropes, and the 1963 film accelerated the classification of Storey’s novel as a classic text, spawning significant coverage and homages even into the present day. In recent years, features on *This Sporting Life* have been published by the *Guardian*, the *Paris Review*, and the *New York Times* (which also favourably reviewed Lindsay Anderson’s film adaptation in 1963). *New York Times* critic Clive Barnes described Storey’s work as ‘gripping and unusual’ in 1973, in a review of his stage play *The Changing Room*, which encounters similar thematic ground to *This Sporting Life*. In his review, Barnes summarises rugby league for his transatlantic audience: ‘A semi-professional game that is played only in the coal-mining areas of the north of England, and is not to be confused with the better-known Rugby Union amateur game, although there is not too much difference in the rules. There is, however, the men who play the game. This is one of the roughest games in the world, partly because the players go out onto the field quite unpadded. The competitive nature of the game also makes it tough and bloody. The players are working-class, a lot of them miners during the week. They will use weekend rugby to add to their meagre earnings.’ ### **Working-class fiction, Kitchen Sink Realism and Angry Young Men** The 1950s and 1960s saw a boom in fiction, drama and film from the industrial north, which was in some ways an offshoot of the Angry Young Men school. This wave of so-called ‘kitchen sink realism’ was authored by a group of northern working-class creatives (including the visionary Shelagh Delaney), though the term was derived from the “Kitchen Sink School”, which originated in 1954 in the visual arts courtesy of critic David Sylvester, who coined the name to describe the work of the Beaux Arts Quartet. The genre has its roots in the postwar political landscape, often foregrounding working-class antiheroes who strive for the ideals of socialism and react against the ephemeral qualities of romanticism. John Osborne’s 1956 *Look Back in Anger* is considered the theatrical trailblazer (although the 1947 film adaptation of the Arthur La Bern novel, *It Always Rains on Sunday*, may be thought of as an early precursor). It was the Royal Court’s press officer George Fearon, for Osborne’s play, who created the term ‘Angry Young Men’ as part of his promotional work, and it stuck. As the fifties turned into the sixties, it became associated with kitchen sink realism, even though the two concepts were originally quite separate. Kitchen sink drama was especially popular on screens, including such films as *Saturday Night and Sunday Morning* (1960), *A Taste of Honey* (1961), *A Kind of Loving* (1962), *Alfie* (1966), and *Spring and Port Wine* (1969). However, despite the success of US-based films such as *A Tree Grows in Brooklyn* (1945), kitchen sink realism seems to have been a distinctly British scene. The movement was in its heyday in Britain at the time of *This Sporting Life*’s publication. Other bestselling novels of the time spoke to similar interests in true-to-life grit and scenarios reflective of the new decade’s changing tastes and attitudes, including Muriel Spark’s *The Ballad of Peckham Rye*, *Border Country* by Raymond Williams, Harper Lee’s *To Kill a Mockingbird*, *Advise and Consent* by Alan Drury, and *Hawaii* by James Michener. Storey sat both inside and outside the movement. He did not consider his writing to be much influenced by this strand of art and thought; rather, he cited a ‘Damascene moment’ during a school French lesson, while his teacher read from a Verlaine poem: ‘I had this vision that we were all on a railway line, that we were all going to be schoolteachers: you could see marriage, a house, a car, a salary, a pension … and right at the end of the line was the one word, death. It came across in a matter of moments and it seemed extraordinarily clear. I just decided that I would do something with my life that was different to all that had been expected \[…\] The volition to write was much more personal than anything that came from being in a movement.’ His *Telegraph* obituary described Storey as a product of ‘the northern working-class drama explosion of the early 1960s’, adding that he ‘never had the visibility of contemporaries such as Alan Sillitoe and John Braine’, and is chiefly remembered as a dramatist. *This Sporting Life* was rejected for publication multiple times, this rejection providing the push that sent him into playwriting. ‘I really belonged to the previous generation,’ Storey once said. ‘\[John\] Osborne, \[Arnold\] Wesker, \[John\] Arden. Their plays were not thought to be worth doing \[at the Royal Court\] any more, or they were not writing plays with the same engagement with society. After I arrived it coincided with what was called the second wave, which I think was comprised of me, Edward Bond and Christopher Hampton primarily.’ Storey perceived himself as joining the kitchen sink genre, rather than helping to start it. The second wave had largely run its course by the mid-seventies. ‘I think I’ve been very fortunate. I couldn’t get my work accepted. *This Sporting Life* was rejected for four years, otherwise it would have come out at the time of *Look Back in Anger* and *Room at the Top*. It was rejected by 15 publishers over those four years. It was only accepted by a publisher who covered his face in his hands and said, “Oh God, I hope I’m doing the right thing.”‘ \* To understand quite why this generation’s work resonated to the extent that it did, it is essential to grasp an understanding of the postwar British creative industries landscape. During the war, British publishing was subject to major restrictions, including a shortage of physical paper as well as information censorship. A key instruction from the government was that books published during this period should be both morale-boosting and didactic – for example, disseminating advice on animal rearing for food and allotment maintenance. By the 1960s, there was an appetite for cultural forms which more accurately depicted the lived reality of a majority of people in Britain at the time, fostering an environment in which kitchen sink fiction flourished. For instance, the success of Lynne Reid Banks’s 1962 *The L-Shaped Room*, which arguably speaks to the genre’s core themes, was widely attributed to riding the wave of changes in social attitudes. (Banks is also alleged to have served as real-life character inspiration for her literary nemesis Osborne’s *Look Back in Anger*.) *This Sporting Life*’s exploration of sexuality, contraception, and psychological struggle similarly dovetailed with many of these attitudes, suggesting that these works may have originated in response to – as opposed to kindling – such cultural moments. The working-class existentialism which influenced kitchen sink coincided with the creation of Arts Council England in 1946, during a much-lauded ‘era of increased opportunity for all’. Advocated by John Maynard Keynes, the council was set up by royal charter as the Committee for Encouragement of Music and the Arts in 1940 and was authorised for government spending by 1948\. Despite this sense of ‘increased opportunity’, the forties and fifties were immensely challenging times economically, especially as the lifeline that was the coal industry in the north and in Wales increasingly declined. Keynes himself, although raised in an upper-middle-class household, was the son of social reformer Florence Ada Keynes, an influence perhaps visible in his famous 1945 essay setting out his vision for the Arts Council: ‘The task of an official body is not to teach or to censor, but to give courage, confidence and opportunity. Artists depend on the world they live in and the spirit of the age. There is no reason to suppose that less native genius is born into the world in the ages empty of achievement than in those brief periods when nearly all we most value has been brought to birth. New work will spring up more abundantly in unexpected quarters and in unforeseen shapes when there is a universal opportunity for contact with traditional and contemporary arts in their noblest forms.’ This increasingly monetised cultural landscape was marked by the advent of popular icons from the north, including the Beatles, Coronation Street and artists like David Hockney. The constellation of kitchen sink names rapidly became mainstream, before being overtaken by the craze for science fiction. Indeed, these divergent genres may be thought of in explicitly political terms: after the false buoyancy of second world war-era fiction, the kitchen sink aesthetic to which Storey and *This Sporting Life* belonged symbolised a desire for true-to-life representation, which evolved into a utopian desire for change and recalibration. We might even say that the 1950s and 60s scrubbed away the glossy façade of wartime propaganda to reveal the grime and grit beneath, while the 1970s gave it a new, optimistic lick of paint. However, it is also important to think through questions of presentism here: were the fifties perceived to be so bleak at the time? This was also a period characterised by the end of rationing, the return of economic growth, the beginning of TV advertising, the advent of the teenager, the popularisation of hire-purchase and a common belief that growing affluence was eroding class identity. Director Ken Loach is quoted as saying indignantly: ‘The Fifties weren’t bleak and depressing. It was great. We had just won the war!’ ### Sport and Rugby League literature The 1960s, then, proved to be a watershed moment in many ways, from arts and culture to social attitudes to sports. In particular, the move from modernist values into postmodernist quests for personal autonomy and social liberation became a turning point for the transformation of class relations in rugby and cricket particularly. During the 1950s, these were two sports characterised by the presence of amateur players – often wealthy “enthusiasts” who were skilled but unpaid members of the team, expected to finance themselves. Increasingly, however, these amateurs were displaced by a growing fleet of professional players. By the end of the fifties, only six sports counted many of their players as formal professionals: cycling (7000); football (4000); boxing (1700); golf (1500); cricket (300) and horse racing (270). In cricket specifically, amateur players were addressed as “Mr” or “Sir”, while professionals were addressed only by their surnames, indicating the maintenance of class divides within these spaces. Cricket was also known for veiled professionalism, whereby amateur players could claim expenses equal to the payments made to professionals without paying tax on them. The amateur player was eventually phased out after 1962, when alternative leisure activities such as holidays abroad and car ownership became accessible to working-class people, diminishing cricket’s appeal as a weekend pastime. Around the same time, as Britain began to lose its grip on its imperial monopoly and its international prestige came under scrutiny, there was an increased desire for excellence in sports, of which the practice of amateurism fell woefully short. As a result, Harold Wilson appointed the first minister for sport in 1964 and directed government funding into sports through the Sports Council. This opened the doorway for underrepresented competitors who could not have previously afforded to participate. The history of rugby union is intricately entwined with that of both professionalisation in sport and that of football (and the forms of writing which have emerged from both). Rugby as a sport developed out of precursors to modern football, and in particular one ball game which was described as taking place in a medieval London street. This particular game was played around Shrovetide and created a community across the feudal hierarchy, until it was banned by King Edward II in 1314\. Edward and his nobility feared that commoners would favour it over practising their archery, then a compulsory activity for all able-bodied men and boys outside the nobility, which was vital for maintaining England’s military sovereignty. Nonetheless, across time, football in the UK has broadly been characterised as a working-class tradition in a way distinct from rugby or cricket. The presence of rugby and cricket on many fee-paying schools’ sports syllabuses may have contributed to this notion, as did the prevalence of amateur players prior to the 1960s, which necessarily excluded working-class players. The Rugby League was formed in 1895 when 21 clubs in the north of England rejected the English Rugby Union to enable them to pay their players, putting an end to the amateurism which was still practised elsewhere in the country. In 1948, the very first rugby league match was televised when Wigan beat Bradford in the Wembley Challenge Cup final; by 1965, rugby league had staged a World Cup tournament, attracted almost 70 million paying customers to its pitches, and then BBC controller David Attenborough scheduled Tuesday televised games via the BBC2 Floodlit Trophy. The midweek evening slot was chosen because of its potential to reach a wider audience of working-class individuals, who were most likely to be home or within reach of a TV elsewhere (at pubs, for example) at this time. During this period, British television was beginning to diverge in terms of audience. Broadly, there was sport for men, soaps for women, and cartoons for children, with complementary advertising models applied to each. It is worth noting that these soaps were influenced by the kitchen sink school, often foregrounding the lives of working-class people. Televised sport has been linked to certain behavioural transformations within communities for whom watching or engaging in sport is an important social ritual. In particular, throughout the second half of the 20th century, professionalised sports became globally respected as well as denigrated for “showy” displays of wealth, as in the case of the controversial footballer George Best. Globally, game broadcasts also changed the face of sports journalism and writing, as commentators and pundits moved away from simply summarising the state of play and towards detailed, colourful narratives which searched for the story behind the story. Just as the hyperbolic emotional scene of sixties soaps modelled values linked to contemporaneous beliefs around femininity within the domestic sphere, televised sport may have provided men – and especially working-class men – with an arena in which to vocalise the emotional climates of their lives. In his essay *Emotional Grounds: Stories of Football, Memories, and Emotions*, Professor Alan Bairner observes that ‘Men were uncomfortable with expressing their emotions, football and its spaces providing some of the few available loci for emotional outbursts’, with powerful implications for the development of a masculine, working-class nostalgia. There is a romanticism here which is at the heart of *This Sporting Life* and other seminal sports fictions, including *The Damned Utd* (2006), *Rabbit, Run* (1960), and *The Natural* (1952). ### **This Sporting Life: film vs novel** After *This Sporting Life* won the Macmillan Award for Fiction, the film industry sat up and took notice: Storey was wined and dined by moguls Stanley Baker, Tony Richardson and Joseph Losey in turn. The rights were eventually sold for £10,000 (equivalent to roughly £250,000 today) to British production company Rank. *This Sporting Life* provided the directorial feature debut of Lindsay Anderson; Storey himself wrote the screenplay, after being introduced to Anderson by producer Karel Reisz. The two quickly became firm friends. The film was beset by difficulties on the road to distribution. Albert Finney turned down the part of Arthur (renamed ‘Frank’) Machin. Rachel Roberts – ultimately cast as Margaret – also turned down the role twice. Anderson feared he was not up to the task of directing. Storey and Anderson quarrelled over the script, and were reconciled only by its star, Richard Harris, who advocated for the film’s subjective point-of-view form over a series of flashbacks. Indeed, during filming at the ground of Wakefield Trinity Rugby League Club, local players stood in for extras and were, it is said, looking forward to roughing up the actor during action scenes. However, according to Storey’s Times obituary, ‘when Harris appeared, they were standing in a group, hands on hips, sullen. Harris ran at them full pelt. They only realised he was not going to stop before it was too late. Harris was instantly simpatico’. Anderson later wrote that it was Harris himself who requested Arthur Machin’s name be changed to Frank for the purposes of the film. As Anderson wrote, ‘Frank Machin was immediately striking, with an ambiguity of nature, half overbearing, half acutely sensitive, that fascinated me without being fully aware that I understood him. The same was true of his tortured, impossible affair with the woman in the story.’ Anderson was widely believed to have been in love with Harris, although this fact was not made public until after his death in 1994\. Their relationship during filming was remembered by Cliff Goodwin in his biography of Harris: ‘On set, Harris would suddenly turn on Anderson. “Stop smiling,” he would say through clenched teeth. “I’ll smile if I wish to.” “You’ll smile when I tell you to,” Harris ordered, delivering a hefty punch to Anderson’s upper arm. The director admitted there was a “strange sadomasochistic element to our relationship.”‘ This Sporting Life is a film which remains dramatically ambivalent about its representation of masculinity, class, and professionalisation. Beyond its homoerotic overtones, Storey’s recollection of his old schoolmaster’s characterisation of rugby league as ‘prostitution’ is also vividly brought into focus in the film, such as the scene during which Weaver, the team owner, drives Frank home and places a hand on his leg, suggesting the expectation of sexual favours in exchange for a place on the team. In his revisit of the classic film, critic Joe Jackson highlights the feminising pancake makeup which Harris wears throughout: ‘There are so many lingering, languorous body shots and close-ups of Richard in This Sporting Life that the movie could have been called From Lindsay With Love’. In terms of financials, Storey spoke candidly in several interviews about the economic realities of writing. This Sporting Life was not a commercial success; Storey earned more from the film adaptation and from his plays. Not until This Sporting Life won the Macmillan Award for Fiction in the US did Storey see much return on his most famous novel; with the prize money, he allegedly bought himself a white Jaguar, which was the only place in which his baby daughter would fall asleep. On multiple occasions, however, he turned down Hollywood filmmakers to prioritise art over money despite having four children to support, as well as his parents. ‘It was very difficult to make a living, certainly just as a novelist.’ By contrast, supplementing his income with stage and screenplays allowed Storey to comfortably support two households. In part it was Storey’s association with Anderson which would prove the most lucrative of his life. More specifically, This Sporting Life has been praised for its furthering of the British New Wave of film in its use of landscape, class critique, and auteurism, which inspired a host of subsequent British sports films such as Playing Away (1987), The Damned United (2009), Believe (2013), and Jawbone (2017). In these films, and in the hearts of several new generations who have discovered the film and novel since their releases, the influence of This Sporting Life endures. --- [Tip the Bee](https://thebeemagazine.com/#/portal/support) All donations go towards supporting the Bee’s mission to nurture, publish promote and pay for the best new working-class writing. ### The Likes of Us URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/the-likes-of-us/ Last updated: 2026-03-31T14:41:55.000Z I started writing because I was angry. When I was reading to my young children I couldn’t find any books where people lived in a block of flats like we did. So I wrote about it. I wrote about why it was important to show housing diversity and socio-economic diversity more broadly. Then I compiled a list of children’s books which feature families living in flats, and where said flat is not central to the plot as a marker for urban deprivation or poverty. The article was published and I felt better. Parents and educators messaged me. “I’ve never thought about this before”, they said. I know you haven’t, I thought but I didn’t say that, because I was happy that they were thinking about it now, and thankful that they took the time to tell me so. I got angry again when I read Roald Dahl’s Matilda to my kids and noticed it was chock-a-block with classist tropes that I hadn’t picked up on when I was a child. Matilda’s parents love TV, hate books, and despise their intelligent daughter. Dad is a petty criminal and Mum doesn’t work or cook. Dad wears a tacky suit and gaudy tie. Mum is a “large platinum blonde woman” with “mousy-brown roots”, and heavy make-up. Look at their poor taste! What terrible parents! See how stupid they are! I wrote it down again, digitally scribbling some words on my phone one evening when the children were in bed. During Covid I got angry again. This “we’re all in the same boat” nonsense was everywhere. Not just from mainstream media, but from my community and friends too. Class inequality was staring me in the face more acutely than in my living memory, which is saying something considering I was born when Thatcher was in power. But no one around me was talking about it. I didn’t know how to say it out loud without screaming or ranting. So I wrote it down. I wrote about our allocated daily exercise in a gentrifying corner of south London. Looking out from the top of the park onto the city skyline, I imagined the tall shiny, silver offices devoid of bankers — replaced by a smattering of cleaners, security guards and baristas. London’s lowest earners, keeping the capital going. That piece won me a place on the ‘A Writing Chance’ a development programme for working-class writers, supported by New Writing North and Michael Sheen. The people behind it saw that the barriers to a career in the arts were getting taller, wider, firmer. The infrastructure that, a generation ago, had enabled access and opportunities to some working-class artists simply didn’t exist anymore. I felt happy again that my story had resonated with people. Michael Sheen — yes that Michael Sheen — told a national newspaper that it made him think about what it was like to navigate the pandemic with young children, no money, and no outdoor space. In doing so he was considering the experiences of millions of other people in a similar position. This opportunity, brought about by my silent rage, changed my life. It was the first time I’d ever thought of myself as a “writer”. The truth is, I’m not an angry person. I can find joy in everyday places. Examples fresh from today include: a phone call with my twin sister, singing Motown songs with my kids in the car, and watching a parakeet eat pink tree blossom from my bedroom window. And yes, writing too can bring me joy. But I don’t feel compelled to write about any of that. Of course, working-class writers don’t just write about being working class — that’s reductive, one-dimensional, and frankly a bit boring. But, the truth is, I write best when I’m fired up about something — something that’s made me so angry or sad I can’t quite say it out loud. My words fall over in my mouth, I um and ah and sound hesitant when I’m anything but, and often tears come out when words don’t. So I write it down instead. This brings to mind my working-class upbringing — with an emphasis on the “my” as they’re not all the same. Particularly as a girl-then-woman: a product of a society where appearance is everything. Endure but for God’s sake just get on with it. I’m thinking here of what is not said. Don’t grass, don’t complain, don’t answer back, don’t ask why. Don’t show off (if you’re clever), don’t show me up (if you’re not). Bear other people’s anger but never unleash your own. It’s a silencing that’s implicitly enforced. Our voices aren’t to be heard. Literally — I softened my accent a long time ago without even realising. I now sound a bit like my mum’s ’90s telephone voice, the one she used when she answered the landline by reciting our home phone number. But what I can do is write down the words I can’t say, the complaints I can’t make, the screams I can’t scream. My dad wasn’t good at expressing his anger out loud either. Not with words, anyway. A few years ago I found the start of a novel he’d written while in prison in the 1970s. It’s spread throughout seven prison-issued exercise books, variations of faded beige and drab orange, with ‘GENERAL EDUCATIONAL NOTE BOOK’ printed on the front. Inside the front cover of ‘Volume I’ is a pull-out flap listing “Instructions for Prisoner’s Note Books” \[sic\]. “You may if you wish take this book out with you when you are discharged provided you have not written in it about any of the following matters: Your own life Conditions in the prison The lives of other inmates or ex-inmates” Imagine being forbidden to write about your own life. That’s taking deprivation of liberty a bit far. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2026/03/exercise-books2.jpg) The novel opens on an auspicious day. The protagonist is being released from prison and sets off to start a new life on the straight and narrow. My dad gets around these rules by changing the protagonist’s name and some identifying details, although it’s clear to me that the book is based on himself. These days they’d call it autofiction. Just as I do, he’s marked the sentences he needs to return to in a later edit. I scan the text for matching asterisks to find his prompts and additions. Most are scribbled in the margins, a place he was all too familiar with. “\*more description of the room here” “\*include examples of book titles?” “\*add details of place in first para.” At points, I can see he’s changed a single word three or four times, only to settle on the original one. These are the indelible markings of decisions being made at a time when he had very little scope to make any decisions at all. In writing, he got to make choices. He had the freedom to rescind those choices and make different ones. Maybe creatively engaging with his past, present and future moved him towards some kind of transformation. Gloria Anzaldúa was right, writing about your life can provide a handle with which to grasp it better. Or maybe it just made the days easier to get through. As a child, I knew he liked to write but not for a moment did I consider him a writer. The likes of us didn’t become writers. I’d carried certain assumptions about who could call themselves that. Unspoken assumptions, as so many societal norms are. For me, a writer was more than someone who writes. They don’t write any old thing for a start, they write newspaper articles or books that get published. They’re at ease mingling with the literati. They know what “literati” means. A proper writer is sure to have a study in their house with a writing desk. No additional day job probably, since writing is the day job. Even those that aren’t well-off financially are well-educated and well-connected. Those who didn’t finish school, or who have never considered publication to be a possibility? Those who have never met a jobbing writer in real life so instead hold folkloric ideas about what that look like? How many of these writers find their readers? And why does it even matter anyway? Of course, it all starts with a book by somebody else. I can picture the intricate shelving my dad had built in the hallway of our council house. On opening the front door, you’d be faced with a mini-library of ‘classic’ fiction and poetry, illuminated from below by tiny spotlights. People are surprised when I tell them that. We have the same kind of received ideas about who reads as we do about who writes. Those ideas don’t tend to include, for example, builders arrested for breaking and entering. Literature has always been a site of power, even if the writers themselves are underrepresented or oppressed. We just need the gatekeepers to step aside so that the necessary pathways and platforms exist. In this way, those writing in and from the margins can wield influence. In a time when “class consciousness” is found predominantly in textbooks, some people don’t realise they need voices that reflect their own experiences until they find them. And that really does matter. It matters because otherwise there’ll be a dearth of books set in the UK that accurately depict how a significant chunk of the population lives. There’ll be children’s books written by established authors or celebrities that misrepresent or mock working-class people, or just ignore their existence altogether. People will keep assuming that all incarcerated people have no interest, or potential, in anything that could be described as ‘literary’. It matters because, despite more recent initiatives for underrepresented writers, things are getting worse for artists from lower socio-economic backgrounds, not better. Fewer people are reading and writing for pleasure than ever before, when it can literally improve your life. It matters because there are headlines in national newspapers like “Working-class creatives don’t stand a chance in the UK today”. Because the logic that the most talented people with the most brilliant minds also happen to come from the most affluent backgrounds just doesn’t add up. I’m sure I’ll write about joy one day. Perhaps during a writing ‘retreat’ that I don’t feel out of place in, after I’ve spoken to an agent who wouldn’t dream of saying “but I’ve already got a working-class writer on my books”. Or – the holy grail – after I get that publishing deal that means I can write for a living without the need for a financial safety net that so many of us don’t have. My dad’s story ends mid-sentence (that’s where he was too). The last volume must have got wet at some point. The blue biro ink has bled into the final pages, just like the tattoos on his arms. I’ll never know the fate of the remaining notebooks, or whether I’m the only person to have read them other than him — save for a skim read by a prison official or two. Maybe the act of writing was enough. A statement of intent. A defiance of the rules, written and unwritten, which dictate who can write about their own life, and who can’t. It’s not enough for me though. This essay was written to be read — and not only for my children to discover when they’re older. They already know that working-class people can read books and that they can write them too. Whether those books end up being published, that’s another story altogether. *This essay is taken from Bread Alone: What Happens When We Run Out of Working-Class Writers, a collection of essays by Kate Pasola and published by Indie Novella. Click* [*here*](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781738442188?ref=thebeemagazine.com) *to buy this book from our bookshop – and we heartily recommend it.* --- [Tip the Bee](https://thebeemagazine.com/#/portal/support) All donations go towards supporting the Bee’s mission to nurture, publish promote and pay for the best new working-class writing. ### The Politics of Gardening URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/the-politics-of-gardening/ Last updated: 2026-03-18T21:00:14.000Z I am starved of colour. After an interminable winter, drowned in dreary shades of grey, the first of the snow drops felt like a gift. Now the hyacinth are blooming, planted in a rush a few years ago they’re in the wrong place but their hot pink flash of colour brings all the promise of what’s to come. The garden is a state, mind. A quagmire, run into ruts by the dog, plant pots, strewn from storms, scatter across the first tentative show of weeds. I should get out there. There is much to do but one of the best parts of being a gardener is sitting with a cuppa, making plans. See, I have clematis envy. Lovingly tethered to the fence, my neighbours' clematis nod their downy purple heads in the summer breeze, and my heart grieves for the terrible state of my own clematis. They’re thin and weedy, giving up the ghost after a few pathetic years. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. Wheeling through the council estates, where I live, the dog and I pause to nose over gates and fences. There are some beautiful gardens around here, although not many would believe it. When I say I live in a council house, people think woodchip wallpaper and yards with a decorative mattress or sagging sofa growing amongst the weeds. They don’t think of sprawling roses or ornamental trees. They don’t think raised beds full of walking stick kale or free-roaming raspberries, canes bent double with the weight of glistening fruits. What is the image that comes to mind when you think council estate? Is it grubby alleyways from some procedural drama, or maybe real-life crime viewed on the telly from behind a police line? Google ‘council estate’ and it’s all litter, graffiti, and rising tower blocks with institutional planting of nameless shrubs, which are strimmed to the ground every year, exposing even more litter and dog shit. There’s a bit of that where I live, but mostly there are pots sprawling with colour; orderly little borders with summer bedding spilling across paths; decades-old lavender lovingly trimmed each year so it doesn’t grow woody. Grace, she of the enviable clematis, has lived here for over 30 years. Her garden has grown and then shrunk as she’s raised a family, nursed a husband and then, with the frailties of osteoporosis, cared for herself. Her garden is neat as a pin, roses cut to the ground each autumn, blue hydrangeas putting everyone to shame, troughs and planters – a concession to age – full of bulbs and bedding. Hers is one of the few homes in her close to still have a front garden. Years ago, the council, responding to calls for more parking, tarmacked over grass, but even the drives here are smart. Strings of solar lights glint on early autumn nights, B&M fake hanging baskets bobbing in the wind. Our estate, built in the 70s to bring in workers from the Midlands and Liverpool to work in factories over the Welsh border, has none of the sprawling gardens of the neighbouring estate. There, they have ‘homes fit for heroes’ – council houses built in the interwar years with long plots, which are now filled with trampolines. Built to assuage returning soldiers' demands for a better life, and the state’s perceived threat of Bolshevik uprisings of the early 20th century, these council homes offered outdoor space and spare bedrooms to working families used to the cramped collective living of tenements and slums. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/09/g1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/09/g2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/09/g3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/09/g4.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/09/g5.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/09/g6.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/09/g7.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/09/g8.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/09/g9.jpg) Then Prime Minister, David Lloyd George argued, “Britain would hold out against the dangers of Bolshevism, but only if the people were given confidence, only if they were made to believe things were being done for them.” [\[1\]](#fn1) Now-sneered-at privet hedges and the later out-of-control leylandii offered the luxury of privacy to tenants, a few veggies at the back of the lawn, and rows of beans attracting the bees, which staggered drunk from flowerbeds full of busy Lizzie, lobelia, begonia, and pillows of white alyssum spilling over crazy paving. With estate gardening clubs, a yearly subscription meant you could borrow the collective lawnmower and roller when you needed. This was gardening as an opiate to the working classes: homes for families who rejected a return to the old social order; revolution and social change stayed with saxifraga and sedum. ![flowers-26-500px.png](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/09/flowers-26-500px-1.png) The bones of those gardens are still visible today, but most were sold off in the great right-to-buy destruction of council-let homes. The gardens on our estate, built decades later, are smaller, meaner, lacking in all that space to breathe. Some are no bigger than a yard, but still lovingly tended. A postage stamp of lawn surrounded by well-ordered little borders. Space left around each plant, and windmills and windchimes bringing more cheer. This is a style of gardening sneered at by ‘proper’ gardeners, and by ‘proper’ we mean those whose ‘land’ spreads across acres. With their ramshackle, more naturalistic style, these ‘proper’ gardens are all Latin names and Gertrude Jekyll. There was a shift in the 90s and early 2000s, when gardening columns, and then TV makeover shows, disparaged our bright, ordered borders of bedding and bulbs as “boring” and “lacking in taste”, and our gardening was somehow reduced. [\[2\]](#fn2) Garden writers like Christopher Lloyd advocated ‘country house living’ as the gardening we were meant to aspire to. Articles in the ever-growing gardening magazines advisedHow to Turn Your Small Plot into a Stately Paradise as we were encouraged to plant shrubs and mixed herbaceous borders in complementary shades. Not the gaudiness of lurid colours and, more recently, the addition of fake flowers, solar-powered fairies and bobbing plastic butterflies. There’s taste, so we’re told, we just don’t have it around here. There was a time when the only thing my husband and I really argued about was gardening. A trained gardener, he loved the styles of Christopher Lloyd and Beth Chatto, knew all the Latin names and the right way to do things. He liked to visit a plant nursery while I, self-taught, wandered up and down the aisles of summer bedding in the garden centre, gorging on colour, and the rules be damned. Ignoring the rules, the gardens around here are created with joy, signifying a sense of community and respectability. Everyone I spoke to as I wandered the estates said the same thing when I asked. They spoke of how they’d created something that was theirs; they stressed the work put in, and the plans of things to come. Digging up over there, replanting over here, apologising for the mess when there was none to see. There was a pride in keeping their space spick and span, often offered up in contrast to the state of neighbours’ gardens, spilling with weeds and scattered plastic recycling. “I learned gardens from my father,” one woman who has lived in her council house for 47 years tells me, her garden awash with colour and brightly coloured ornaments from Temu. “He always said what was on the outside reflected what was on the inside.” She indicated her front windows. “You know people will have a tidy house if their garden is nice.” I know this in my bones. I feel it when my own front garden gets a little unruly – the litter, blown in from bin day, still uncollected; my health limiting my tidying up. My husband laughs, joking about me cleaning my front step, but I worry about what people will think if they see the state it’s in. When a police raid smashed in doors down the road, my first reaction was surprise, because that house had ever such a lovely garden. Always tidy, with nice pots; not the type to have the police knocking at the door. Front gardens are often for other people. Not many of us sit out in our front step, though many here still bring a chair out into the close for a cuppa and a chat. Another sign of our lack of our sophistication and taste. Front gardens are an advertisement of respectability, a way to show you are capable of taking care of you and yours, a kickback at the story that others tell about ‘people like us’, living around here. It reinforces connection with your neighbours and your community, themes replicated in Lisa Taylor’s 2008 study of gardening class and gender. [\[3\]](#fn3) “I love my garden,” says one woman, proudly showing me around. “Me and next-door share plants. If I’ve got too much of something I pass it to her, and she does the same with me.” ![flowers-51-500px.png](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/09/flowers-51-500px-1.png) Gardening brings with it a sense of social cohesion, a sharing of community, of ideas, and the coming together of cultures, even if all you want is a spot to sit and enjoy the sun. There is judgement and disapproval, don’t get me wrong, but on the estates here, the mostly women gardeners are always keen to share a cutting or a solution or five minutes of their day. Gardens ground us in our histories. I, like many others, can tell you the story of my plants: “I planted that one when my father died.” “My mother-in-law gave me a clump from her garden.” “I got that one from my neighbour, Liz, before she moved away.” In lockdown, I waved at neighbours with offers of tomato plants, having accidentally grown over 25 varieties in a Covid-induced stupor. Gardeners are nothing if not generous. It’s not just plants, either. When my neighbour was moving into a care facility, I gratefully accepted her stone elephants and comical cow statues into my own plot, a daily reminder of her place in the world and her stories. Gardens are a step into our collective histories if you care to take a look. ![flowers-11-500px.png](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/09/flowers-11-500px-1.png) But what now, for the future of gardens? One in eight households have no access to a garden (one in five, in London). People of colour are four times more likely to have no access to outdoor space at their home. You are three times more likely to have no access to a garden if you are unemployed, or in casual, semi-skilled or unskilled work. [\[4\]](#fn4) Many of the less tended gardens here are privately rented. That’s not a judgement, just an observation. With six-month tenancies still common, tenants can’t put up a poster, let alone make a garden, without their landlords’ permission. Such insecurity is the opposite of the gift of a council house with a secure tenancy, which affords not just the space to build a home, but also space to build a future. It’s hard to plan your life or dream big plans or sow new seeds if you are worried about whether you can afford the rent next month or next year. Insecurity of housing does not make a garden grow. It does not make people flourish and thrive and take up space. Growing gardens is about decades, not days. “Why should I bother?” a woman in the row behind me says, while admiring my garden. “I’d love this,” she gestures to ten-year-old roses, “but why would I invest my time and money in someone else’s house?” It is hard to have a sense of belonging when you don’t have the chance to make connections, to put down roots, to make a space your own. It is hard to have pride in where you come from when you’re told it’s a shithole, that only scallies and troublemakers live there; when lack of investment and underfunding over decades have stripped services to the bone. But still we do. In the face of so much social exclusion, taking pride and ownership of where you live, in raising a garden, is an act of political resistance. Maybe rather than the opiate of the masses, gardening could lead the revolution, bringing us all together one seed packet at a time. Oh, and answer to my wilting clematis? Grace says chopped up banana peels steeped in a watering can should do the trick! --- --- 1. p19, Behind the Privet Hedge (2024) by Michael Gilson [↩︎](#fnref1) 2. See A Taste For Gardening (2008) by Lisa Taylor, for more on this. [↩︎](#fnref2) 3. ibid [↩︎](#fnref3) 4. Access to Gardens and Public Green Space in London, Office of National Statistics, 2020 [↩︎](#fnref4) --- [Tip the Bee](https://thebeemagazine.com/#/portal/support) All donations go towards supporting the Bee’s mission to nurture, publish promote and pay for the best new working-class writing. ### David Olusoga on Home and Belonging URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/david-olusoga-on-home-and-belonging/ Last updated: 2026-03-18T17:00:45.000Z There is a sound I remember from my childhood. A sound that at some point I stopped hearing and then stopped noticing that I had stopped hearing it. I was only reminded that it had ever been part of my life’s soundtrack when I heard it again, many years later and thousands of miles away. The sound is one that I had heard every weekday morning through the late 1970s and early 1980s, the years I lived on a council estate on the south banks of the Tyne. In those years the heavy hum of an industrial city waking up reverberated along the Tyne valley. A deep rumble, the scraping of metal on metal, furnaces being fired, night shifts handing the baton to day shifts and activity that had been kept quiet while the city slept ramped up to full volume. I heard that sound again in the mid-1990s when travelling in India, the nation to which whole production lines, stripped from insolvent British factories, had been sold off, the land to which even the great, towering cranes of Swan Hunters were transplanted. The morning chorus of late-industrial Newcastle was the sound in the background as I readied myself for the journey to school; a sink school which today would be defined as a failing school, an institution that would now be put under special measures or closed down. There, in my failing school, we were prepared for jobs that did not exist, jobs in failing companies that were part of failing industries. We were taught metalwork and technical drawing, we endeavoured to master the art of the draftsman, and to acquire the skills needed for a lifetime’s work in an engineering workshop. The only workshops I was to enter, once I left school and found work, were those that involved flipcharts, role play and motivational speeches. To be educated in a comprehensive school by the Tyne in the 1980s was to be prepared for a world that was dying before our eyes. It was the equivalent of being expertly instructed in the art of making flint tools in the early years of the bronze age or winning royal patronage in the Paris of 1788\. Technical drawing, even in the early 1980s, was being rendered defunct by computer-aided design. Although I did see computers at my school, as a child with severe but undiagnosed dyslexia, a child judged by my failing school to be a failing pupil, I was never allowed anywhere near the two BBC computers that sat in the corner of a heavily policed classroom. As the rumble of heavy industry faded so did our chances of employment in anything like the world our parents and grandparents had known. At times school felt like it was merely a holding pen, readying us not for work but for life on the dole. On leaving school the place where the majority of my classmates who did find jobs went to work was the Department of Health and Social Security – the DHSS – whose vast campus of offices at Longbenton had already become one of the biggest employers in the Tyne conurbation, second only to Newcastle city council. The DHSS was the government department that administered the payment of unemployment benefit. On Tyneside unemployment itself had become the region’s growth industry. Anyone who remembers what it felt like to live on Tyneside in the 1980s will recall that cold, pit-of-the-stomach feeling of creeping disaster. Local evening news was a list of closures and lay-offs, like a roll call after a battle. For people of my generation, brought up in the region, those years are today a subject of endless nostalgic conversation, a subject we keep returning to. Having lived through that time is one of the experiences that binds me emotionally to a region that physically I felt I had no choice but to leave; and by the 1980s leaving the north-east had, in effect, become a local tradition, a rite of passage. Even before I had worked out how I would do it the need to leave had become obvious. The point was made musically when I listened to the song by the Animals, "We’ve Got to Get Out of This Place", a song they did not write but did adapt, changing the lyrics to make them apply to Newcastle, even though their Newcastle, that of the 1960s, was doing relatively well economically speaking. While the title perhaps tells you all you need to know, the lyrics hammered home the message: "We’ve got to get out of this place, if it’s the last thing we ever do." Then, I think in 1986, when for the first time in my life I had some money of my own, I bought, for £2.50, from a charity shop near Newcastle Civic Centre, the book A Tale of Five Cities. It had been written in the late 1970s by the British journalist John Ardagh and published in late 1979, the year Margaret Thatcher became prime minister. On one page Ardagh predicted that Thatcher’s "tough, anti-cossetting approach is the antithesis of the Geordie ethos" and asked rhetorically: "Will she shake up Geordieland?" It is always valuable but never comfortable to read an assessment of your home town and its culture made by an outsider, even one as insightful as John Ardagh. Long before Ardagh arrived in Newcastle in the late 1970s there was latent, pre-existing opposition to his sort of journalism. Even then, almost half a century after the event, memories had not completely faded of the sketch of Newcastle and Gateshead that had been penned in the 1930s by J B Priestley, who had written about the region in his best-selling English Journey of 1934\. For a short time during the first world war Priestley had been stationed at Tynemouth so knew the region and its problems, and had had time to sharpen his literary knife. Newcastle came off comparatively lightly as it was Gateshead, where I was brought up, that received the full force of his cutting prose. "The whole town," he wrote, "appeared to have been carefully planned by an enemy of the human race." "If there is any town of like size in Europe," he went on, "that can show a similar lack of civic dignity and all the evidences of an urban civilisation, I should like to know its name." Priestley described Gateshead as "a frontier camp of bricks and mortar", but lamented that "no golden west has been opened up by its activities". "If anybody ever made money in Gateshead," he observed, "they must have taken great care not to spend any of it in the town." "No true civilisation," he railed, "could have produced such a town," and finally, in an exaggeration of sheer literary brilliance, he concluded: "Insects can do better than this." The Newcastle Journal was so affronted by English Journey that it ran an article under the headline "Tyneside Denounced by J B Priestley", stating: "Mr Priestley is a big man and has trod very heavily on the Tynesider’s toes." John Ardagh’s A Tale of Five Cities was, for the 1980s, what Priestley’s English Journey had been for the 1930s. What hurt was that despite the exaggeration and generalisation, much of it was true. Both writers had said things that many people on Tyneside felt and said in private, but resented when the same observations were made by outsiders. Both had identified the traits of the region that have at times held us back: the shallowness of our confidence, our combination of breezy optimism and deep insecurity. Ardagh noted the sense of inverted snobbery that I feel is still there, a dislike for airs and graces, a quickness to spot slights and take offence, and a powerful dislike and resentment of external criticism. A belief that we are "real people" and that people in the south are somehow unreal and affected. But what John Ardagh did for me was point out, on page 198, something that I had not realised – that previous generations had come to the same conclusion I was then reaching. "The area produces brilliant young people," he wrote, "but the best tend to emigrate." More controversially and more hurtfully he continued: "Those who stay have many qualities: intellectual clarity is rarely one of them." Many of the people I know from my generation who stayed do not lack intellectual clarity, but when I think of those who left I see how the region has impoverished itself. Most years, at Christmas, I meet up with friends I used to drink and party with in the alternative scene of late-1980s Newcastle. We hold our little gatherings in London, where most of us now live, the rest coming in from the commuter towns that orbit the capital. Barristers, graphic designers, IT specialists, academics – they, we, are individual drops in the lifeblood of the north-east that for successive generations has haemorrhaged away, to be transfused into the economies and cultures of the south and the capital. For me there were additional reasons for wanting to leave. This summer I took a journey that I have not taken since the early 1980s, a pleasure cruise down the Tyne, from Sandgate on Newcastle’s quayside to the mouth of the river. Among the plants that have colonised the former industrial sites on the banks of the river, working their shoots and roots through the layers of concrete and between the Victorian cobblestones, are migrant species. In the age of sailing ships, when ships were setting sail for Newcastle, tons of earth and rocks were scooped from the shores and riversides of their home ports and loaded into the deepest parts of their holds as ballast. On arriving on the Tyne this dead weight was shovelled out, loaded onto the backs of men and then dumped on the banks of the river. Between the rocks and within this soil from far-off lands, carried across oceans as ballast, were seeds, some of which germinated and poked their shoots through the soil to explore their new home – the Ballast Bank of the Tyne. Botanists might call them invasive species, but they were in truth accidental passengers rather than invaders, carried in the ebb and flow of Britain’s wealth and her imperial connections. Rather like myself. When I left the north-east I did so with the physical scars of racism cut into my body and the mental scars lingering in my mind. African keloid scar tissue had grown over wounds from fights and beatings, some of which I concealed from my own family so as not to add to their concern. I was glad to leave the north-east and I had reason to be glad. I had at times, at school and in the street, been made to feel like an invasive organism, unwanted, a problem. I have met many black Britons who have had similar experiences to my own and who in response have completely rejected the towns and cities in which they were brought up. They keep visits to those former homes to a minimum. When I left the north-east I felt a similar urge. But in a way I never did completely leave, as I found it far harder to cut the ties than I had imagined. Through shared experience of living through the region’s darkest decade since the 1930s, and ironically through the act of leaving itself, I began to make peace with the north-east. A sense of belonging that I had not felt while growing up emerged only once I had left. This perhaps should not be a surprise. I have met Geordies all over the world, bumped into them in bars, beaches and hotels in Asia, America and Africa. The one thing they have all had in common was a powerful affection and nostalgia for the region. The north-east, a place that had on so many occasions rejected me, was, I discovered, not so easy itself to reject. Even today, in my phone, under "home" is my mother’s house in Gateshead, not my house in the south. At our Christmas gatherings in London those of us who left the north-east as teenagers still ask who is going "home" for the holidays; this 30 years after our departure. And perhaps most telling of all, despite my deep teenage desire to be anywhere but by the Tyne, the sound of the north-east being criticised in a southern accent – even though I myself now have one – irks and grates. The defensiveness and tribalism that John Ardagh identified and criticised in the late 1970s is a trait I appear to have acquired. We, in the early 21st century, live in the age of identity. I am mixed-race, half white, half black; I am dual national – British and Nigerian – and I am a working-class northerner who lives in a middle-class suburb of a southern city. To cut through all this complexity and duality I have, in recent years, begun to describe myself using a term that I would never have used three decades ago – Nigerian Geordie. I have, over the years, rejected my rejection. Like the plants that stowed away as seeds in the ballast of the ships that once sailed up the Tyne, the north-east is my home. ### Sticker Upper URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/sticker-upper/ Last updated: 2026-03-06T16:00:51.000Z A pub. Splott, Cardiff. Smoke. Men. Stonewash jeans. It’s 1997 and looks like it, smells like it. It’s an L-shaped room, the wooden alley the long stretch, a hatch at the back the balance. Drinks and change swapped through the shutter doors, the barmaid 21 but looking 42, a tight perm keeping each strand of bottle blonde under orders. The kid rifles balls back down a gulley to the next man, more than a few missing chunks, the cider to blame. The thud of wood hitting wood punctuating the pop music. The man’s curtains are gelled down, his Umbro touchline coat still on indoors. He takes a ball, works it in the palm of his hand, seeing what’s what. Whispers in its ear like a missus with a mood on. Takes three paces back and, with a flourish, launches it down the wood to the pins. It lumbers down. The men shout. \*\*\* The kid walks down the street, a hint of a strut. Brown cords, three white stripes down dark blue arms. Past pebbledash houses. Satellite dishes. *Peter’s, Gent’s Hairdressers*. A group of kids hang around outside, all Kappa bottoms and Benson & Hedges. The kid swallows. Fuck’s sake. He raises an eyebrow: a hello, a what’s happening, and tries to tiptoe through them. His legs are swept. Smack. Mister Head meet Mister Pavement. \*\*\* Gelled curtains knocks another pin down. The men shout. The kid’s poised behind a gate, slammed shut to stop the pins flying in his face. His chin’s sat on top of it anyway, supreme confidence in his reading of the game. Nothing can hurt him here. The next ball makes it halfway down the alley and slides off the side. The men sneer. \*\*\* The kid’s dazed on the pavement. Chewing gum and white dog shit traced around his sore head. He pulls himself up. The other boys are cackling, hyenas on helium. A Boxer strains on the lead looking to make a scene. He gets up while they’re cracking up, lost in spoils rather than beady eye on the butt of the joke. He’s on his toes, stretching out a head start, an elastic band sure to snap. Not this shit again written all over his face. Now they move. Sick notes in cross-country at first, all sorry sir, what’s the point. But they grow into it. Winner takes all. The Boxer’s loving it most, proper sherbet mouth and Hallowe’en fangs. \*\*\* The smoke moves down the slim room by stealth, edging closer to the kid from the men 20 feet down the alley. His mam used to hate the smell of him when he came home. *You’re not getting in that clean bed reeking like that. The shower, now, and yes the immersion’s off and yes I don’t care.* \*\*\* There’s a corner shop ahead. *Shah’s of Splott*. The kid’s still running. They’re still chasing. He pushes through the door. A bell chimes. You can hear it over Candle in the Wind. The shopkeeper stands behind the counter. Brown face, big moustache, dad age. The kid runs past him. Makes eyes at him. The door slams open. \*\*\* The ball smacks the front pin. This fella’s a professional. An amateur, but a professional. Maths and physics in the real world, Pythagoras applied in the everyday, the ball hitting the pin just there, into the next pin just there, into the next pin just there, and – \*\*\* They’re in. Three of them. And the Boxer. Eyes at the shopkeeper. He looks back. Gives nothing away. A proprietor of a convenience shop ready to serve his public. The kid’s nowhere to be seen. They pace through the aisles, the one in the baseball cap knocking tins off the shelves. The others follow. The Boxer all gums, clocking the cans and thinking it’s treat time. The tins hit the floor. Bang. Bang. Bang. \*\*\* The skittles don’t stand a chance now. It’s predetermined. The white curves fall against the alley, steelworkers in the divan after a double shift, glad of the rest. Eight. Nine. Strike. Shouts from the men over the music. *We’ve fucking won it.* \*\*\* The shopkeeper picks up a baseball bat from the little shelf he’d built special behind the counter. No need for a swing. They get it, a fuck off and out the door. The Boxer follows. One, two, three and the kid emerges from behind an aisle of Pedigree Chum. \*\*\* The kid vaults the gate, a feline landing among the scattered skittles. He’s a contortionist, balletic. Fluid in form. Collecting, creating order. The black tape around the necks of the front three an arrow to the future. \*\*\* *I’m not saying I was born to do it. It don’t work like that. Nothing’s just yours all because you woke up one day. If you don’t like it, do something about it, and if you don’t do something about it, don’t say you don’t like it. I’m not sure it’s as tidy as that, but that's what she taught me and she’s dead now so best not to argue, really.* *The doctor reckons it’s all about making things right, restoring equilibrium, gaining some semblance of control over the chaos. Her words, not mine. Alright mate. Whatever you say.* *Because it’s not like that, right. No way, José. I’m just the sticker upper.* --- [Tip the Bee](https://thebeemagazine.com/#/portal/support) All donations go towards supporting the Bee’s mission to nurture, publish promote and pay for the best new working-class writing. ### Lucy Apps’ Outstanding Debut URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/lucy-apps-outstanding-debut/ Last updated: 2026-02-25T20:10:11.000Z Lucy Apps’s debut novel [*Gloria Don’t Speak*](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781068794179?ref=thebeemagazine.com), published this week, is attracting significant attention from critics, and last month saw Apps named as one of the best debut writers of 2026 by The Observer. Good things seem to lie ahead for this young practising GP from east London. Set in Apps’s home borough of Newham, *Gloria Don’t Speak* is about a young, bright, working-class woman with learning difficulties and a form of mutism. The book reads as a tender experiment in writerly empathy, with Apps – a voluntary support worker with people with learning difficulties – taking Gloria’s point of view, and using observation and innovative literary techniques in imagining her responses. Gloria faces sometimes horrific ordeals, and for a first novel it shows a terrific sense of control over what could have been highly challenging material. The book also contains powerfully evocative descriptions of Newham, an area of the capital that receives little positive attention from journalists and artists; it is a refreshing change from familiar, stereotypical images of other more gentrified areas of east London. The Bee caught up with Apps to discuss this superb piece of contemporary working-class fiction, as well as class and health, the changing politics of east London, and the genius of Martina Cole. **Richard Benson:** Lucy, *Gloria Don’t Speak* is being hailed as a feat of imaginative empathy. You’re a GP, and separately you work with people with learning difficulties. Is the novel based on your own experience in those situations? **Lucy Apps:** To a point. Working with people with learning disabilities is always about building relationships with people, and trying to think, well, what’s going on for you? Why are you saying this? Why are you doing this? Where might that be coming from? You try to respond in a way that matches your guess, and then if you get it wrong, rethink or try to just say that, well, why did I get that wrong? Similarly, writing the novel, I was thinking about meeting people, and entering into their world and their perspective. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2026/02/91sBnUQ-3FL._SL1500_.jpg) **RB:** Because of the fashion for polemic, I was half-expecting it to be more political. But that didn’t seem to be what you were trying to do here. **LA:** No, I certainly wasn’t trying to write this book to be like, “This is what’s going on. This is how we need to reform things.” This is my guess at what might be going on in the head of a fictional character. **RB:** How did you begin working with people with learning disabilities? **LA:** When I was in medical school, I worked with special needs kids in my time off. It was through my mum, who worked at a support organisation for kids with disabilities. I really loved it. I qualified as a doctor in 2022, and when I started working I really missed that support work, so I started volunteering with adult women with learning difficulties. I’ve carried on ever since. **RB:** What was so rewarding about it? **LA:** You can build really strong relationships with non-verbal children and adults – I think that wasn’t something that I was necessarily expecting. I also wasn’t really expecting it to be as fun as it was. **RB:** With lines like “She’s not confused. She knows what she did. She pushes a man, she runs away.” You take the reader inside Gloria’s thought processes, and we have a sense that as a support worker, you must have a lot of experience of guessing or intuiting how people think? **LA:** Yes… When I first started working with kids who were non-verbal and autistic, I would just watch a child playing. Say they were just tapping something, I would stand next to them and tap it as well. They would start noticing me tapping it, and then maybe they would tap a different rhythm and I would tap a different rhythm, and we’d do things like that. Like okay, you’re tapping it – why are you tapping it? What do you like about tapping it? I’d just try to get involved in their world. Eventually they would start to notice me and then we would start to do stuff together rather than just doing it side by side. It’s just guessing, but it’s the same with anyone, isn’t it? You try to work out what’s motivating people, and why they’re saying things, and why they’re behaving the way they’re behaving. **RB:** I guess you have to be careful not to project? **LA:** Yes of course. It’s really easy for all of us to do that with everyone – to just assume that someone’s acting for one reason when actually it’s from something completely different that you’re never going to understand. For example if somebody’s stressed about going into a bathroom, say, you might think, oh, is it because of the hand dryer making a noise? But sometimes people just are stressed or upset or whatever for their own reasons. **RB:** How did you start writing about the experience of someone with learning difficulties? And what was your path to publication? **LA:** It came out of guessing and being curious. I’ve always written, and I started writing novels and enjoyed the process. Then I began *Gloria Don’t Speak* in 2017, and kept going with it because I enjoyed it. I wrote the vast majority in 2018, and for a while I was sending it out to agents and publishers, and not getting any interest. Eventually I came across Weatherglass, the publisher, and after reading some of the books on their list I thought, well, maybe this is something they’d like. I sent my book to them, and then they initially asked if I could make some changes. It was a bit of a mess structurally. They said that if they liked what I did, then they would think about offering publication. **RB:** The story explores repercussions of an event in 1999, moving to 2001, 2017 and 2019\. Were the structural changes you made connected to that? **LA:** Initially it moved backwards and forwards in time, and the publisher said just give us a chronological account. There were other changes, but that was the structural change. It was very good advice. It freed me to be less gimmicky, and just tell a story. **RB:** You show us how Gloria is hearing speech by phonetically repeating parts of dialogue – for example, when Jack says “He got it drawn out in chalk like or what.?” And she hears “Korwhat. Likorwhat.” It struck me as a clever way of taking us into her head. **LA:** That probably came from talking to people and noticing that sometimes they will just repeat phrases or say phrases in a certain way, and you can tell that although they’ve understood the meaning of the phrase, they haven’t understood word by word what’s being said. It made me think about why people repeat those phrases. **RB:** You capture a distinct east London environment in the novel, and it’s a world that isn’t found in much fiction. I enjoyed the simple, clear language and love of the area in lines like: “She can see Canary Wharf in the distance with other big glass towers next to it. She can see the supermarket and the flyover and all the new flats, brightly coloured and gleaming all the way up to the sky. When Jack lived there there was a factory over the other side of the station.” **LA:** Well, I was born in Newham, I grew up in Newham, and yes, I love east London. The longest I’ve been away other than that is probably about three months. I work in Barking – I couldn’t work as a GP in Newham because I know too many people there. Most of my family and friends are here, and maybe if I’d grown up somewhere else I would love that place the same. One of the things that I really like about the area, though, is that you can mix with so many different people, and just do so many different things. It’s just there on your doorstep. There’s also lots of public transport, so everything’s very accessible. **RB:** For Gloria it’s a challenging environment at times – do you think her experiences would have been different if she’d been somewhere else? Or from a more affluent background? **LA:** I think it would probably depend more on the environment than on her background. The events of the novel are products of being in Newham and wandering around and being vulnerable. Even if she came from a more affluent background, if she was still going out in Newham she would still probably be in the same situations. If she was living in a nice little village somewhere where everyone’s got money and everyone knows each other, maybe her experiences would be different. **RB:** Talking about the influence of geography makes me think of people in the 19th century studying the relationship between location and health, and that leading to the study of class. **LA:** It’s interesting that they came to geography first because the impacts of location on health are obvious. We still talk about postcodes impacting on health – they’re part of the risk calculation when we’re calculating the risk of cardiovascular disease, for example. That may be partly to do with class but it can also be connected to pollutants. For example in Newham we’ve got really high levels of air pollution, with City Airport and the A13\. It doesn’t really matter if you’re rich, if you’re living in this area, you’re still breathing the stuff in. Although obviously if you’re rich, you’ve still got better opportunities to take care of your health. **RB:** Have you worked in any non-urban areas? **LA:** I did GP in a rural area for a bit and the social problems there were shocking to me. When I went to the park there on my lunch break, people were openly shooting up, and I’d never seen anything like it. I mean, people do shoot up in Newham, but not so blatantly. I’d go on home visits and it was a bit like Happy Valley. It surprised me because I just assumed, you know, rural England – it’s going to be really lovely. What you find there is that there are very few resources to help. There are lots of charities and projects to support people in London. But if you’re living in poverty in rural England, it’s really tough. And it’s hard to just get a low-paid job, because if you’re in a village, how are you going to commute? You’ve got no money, and there’s no real public transport. **RB:** Gloria’s nemesis character, Jack, does some terrible things and is often very unpleasant. I’m sure he’ll remind readers of people they know, with dialogue like “I pay my taxes. I just want equal treatment same as everyone else. Same as what I’d get if I was a fucking refugee or a fucking single mother. Fuck all of them.” But you show a lot of understanding for him as well. As you had him railing against refugees and immigrants, did you have the current wave of anti-immigrant protesters in mind? **LA:** Yes, he’s saying all of that, but I think he’s just somebody that is angry and frustrated for a lot of different reasons and that’s a hook to hang it on. He’s got a lot of other stuff going on as well that he’s maybe not so aware of. You can see that maybe if he changed his behaviour things would go better for him, but there are also a lot of circumstances where he’s just screwed either way. Newham is very multiracial and the vast majority of people in this area don’t talk like that. Even if they think it they’re not going to say it. But this is in the section set in 1999, and a lot of the white people who feel that way moved out between 1999 and now. I haven’t really heard people here saying or talking like that. **RB:** Gloria’s mum says “He must of \[sic\] thought all his Christmases come at once when he met you.” The assumption being that Jack is a sexual predator. But you make it more nuanced than that. **LA:** Jack was just meant to be a slightly loose cannon, someone with a quite difficult sort of energy that he’s carrying around by himself. He hasn’t really got a lot of friends. And he’s found in Gloria somebody who isn’t judging him. And who’s given him the time of day. He gets a lot of self-esteem from the fact that in the way that he would see it, he’s not taking advantage of her. He reacts quite badly whenever that’s challenged. **RB:** Let’s talk about you and your books. Did you enjoy reading when you were a child? **LA:** I loved reading. I could spend all day in bed reading when I was a kid. My mum had to make me get up sometimes. I read a lot of Roald Dahl, and I loved *Charlie and the Chocolate Factory*. I also read *The Secret Garden* and stuff like that, you know, *A Little Princess*, *Narnia*, those classic books. That was when I was about seven or eight. Then I started reading more YA books, and in my late teens I got more into politics. I liked American radical writers from the 1970s and 1980s. Andrea Dworkin, the Black Panthers, a lot of Frantz Fanon. There was a point when I didn’t really want to read fiction and I was reading mostly Sivanandan and people like that, but then I got back into reading fiction, and read really widely. I used to love detective novels as well. I loved Agatha Christie. I loved Sherlock Holmes, and Dick Francis. I mostly got those murder mystery books from my dad. He would get them from the library, and then I would read them. From my mum, I was getting books like Enid Blyton, *A Little Princess* and *The Secret Garden*. **RB:** At the Bee we often talk about children’s reading and whether they like or need books that reflect their own environments. It sounds like you started out reading more fantasy-based or escapist books, but then grew into things that linked more directly to your world? **LA:** Yes, I think when you’re a child, you want people travelling through great glass elevators and stuff, don’t you? But I did definitely find that as I got older, I wanted something that’s about a world that I knew. I started reading Courttia Newland, Alex Wheatle, Zadie Smith… And I absolutely love Martina Cole. I started reading her books and I just thought they were brilliant. She was writing about an area that I knew and it also slightly made sense of things that I hadn’t fully understood. Like, when she explains how organised crime works, I was like, oh, okay, that’s why that happens, you know. I also really like her style of writing. **RB:** Did you study English at school? **LA:** Yes, my A-levels were English language, philosophy, chemistry and biology. **RB:** Did you know then that you wanted to study medicine? **LA:** Yeah. I was very young and very idealistic. **RB:** And how was your experience of higher education? **LA:** I hadn’t realised how many people went to private school! I thought it was a really uncommon thing to go to private school. I thought that every year about a thousand kids went to private school and everyone else went to state school. And then I realised that actually, loads and loads of people went to private schools. It took me by surprise. If anything, I’d thought that we were posh. **RB:** Were there any books that helped you in writing *Gloria Don’t Speak*? **LA:** I don’t think there was anything that I would necessarily say helped me create it but I read *The Sound and the Fury* around the time I started writing it. **RB:** I wondered about *The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time*? **LA:** I liked that book but it’s not about the same thing. That’s a bit different because that boy doesn’t have a learning disability. I don’t think his diagnosis is ever mentioned, but I would imagine he’s autistic. **RB:** Were your mum and dad readers? **LA:** Yes. They had different backgrounds. My dad’s from Chatham. He left school at 14, but he’s a very gifted artist, so he went to art college and started working as an illustrator. My family are religious, so he mostly illustrates religious books. My mum did English lit at Oxford University. They met at a Christian publishing house. He was an illustrator and she was an editor. I’m not massively interested in labelling myself in class terms, because whatever I say, it’s like… you know, if I say I’m middle class, people are like, oh, come on, you’re not middle class. But if I say I’m working class, people are like, you’re not working class. I don’t really fit in anywhere. --- [Tip the Bee](https://thebeemagazine.com/#/portal/support) All donations go towards supporting the Bee’s mission to nurture, publish promote and pay for the best new working-class writing. ### Adelle Stripe’s Olfactory Records URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/adelle-stripes-olfactory-records/ Last updated: 2026-02-16T16:55:26.000Z The critically acclaimed Adelle Stripe excels in taking people, places and experiences that don’t quite fit into the run-of-the-mill way of things, and creating ways of writing about them that feel true. With *Black Teeth and a Brilliant Smile*, she helped us to reappreciate the work of the Bradford playwright Andrea Dunbar; with *Ten Thousand Apologies: Fat White Family and the Miracle of Failure*, she took one of the UK’s most controversial bands and span entire cultural histories. *Base Notes: The Scents of a Life*, her 2025 memoir, is a grittily lyrical and bleakly comic story of growing up in and getting away from a northern brewery town in the late 20th century. It is also possibly the only memoir of its kind with chapters themed around remembered commercial fragrances. On the eve of *Base Notes’* publication in paperback, The Bee met up with her in Scarborough’s famous Harbour Bar cafe to talk about childhood, books and the experience of becoming a working-class writer. To begin with, though, she requested a very specific kind of question. Always happy to indulge a writer, we were glad to oblige… **Richard Benson:** So, Adelle, *Base Notes* has been acclaimed since it was published last year. Looking back, you must feel pleased? **Adelle Stripe:** Yes but I was wondering if you could ask me a different kind of question? **RB:** How do you mean? What kind? **AS:** Like *Smash Hits* questions. Like, does your mother play golf, or what’s your favourite crisp? **RB:** I’m supposed to ask about Base Notes. **AS:** Well, we can do that in a bit. Go on, ask me about crisps. **RB:** Right. What’s your favourite crisp? **AS:** Seabrooks. I used to be a fan of the smoky bacon ones, but you don’t really see them any more, so I default to Worcester Sauce. I’m not a massive crisp fan, actually. **RB:** I assume you are a fan of ice cream, as you suggested we meet here in the Harbour Bar in Scarborough. What would your preferred flavour be? **AS:** Coffee, but you can’t find coffee ice cream in many places any more. It’s a 70s or 80s retro flavour, and rare, sadly. Sometimes you’ll find a cappuccino flavour. I’m a big fan of Brymor raspberry ripple, which is off the chart, but again you can’t find raspberry ripple either. **RB:** Least favourite? **AS:** Well, I don’t like salted caramel as a flavour, which is unfortunate as it’s ubiquitous. It’s almost the raspberry ripple of the 21st century. **RB:** Have you ever punched someone? **AS:** Over ice cream? **RB:** No, in general. It’s a Smash Hits-type interview question. **AS:** Oh. No, I’ve never punched anyone, but I did bite a girl’s face. I was getting picked on by this girl, and my mum said, “whatever they do to you do back to them twice as hard.” So one day at school, she bit my arm, and we ended up fighting and I bit her face. She had my teeth marks perfectly printed in her cheek. I was suspended from school. **RB:** What item do you most commonly lose? **AS:** My glasses. But now I’ve just invested in more spectacles, so I have glasses all over now. I managed to get a deal at Vision Express. **RB:** You must wear them when you’re writing? **AS:** \[Pause\] Are you going to make me talk about the book now? ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2026/02/811w7b34vBL._UF1000-1000_QL80_.jpg) **RB:** Yes. I’d like to ask how it came about. It’s a coming-of-age memoir that deals with your relationship with your mum, and your youthful experiences in her hairdressing salon. How did you get started? **AS:** I’ve been writing it for 20 years. Some of the stories are really old, but I didn’t want to put them out as my first book, because I wanted to write other stories first. I was conscious of being defined by writing a memoir as my first book. I mean, there’s an argument that all writers’ first books are memoirs, even if they’re novels; they’re all thinly disguised romans à clef. I kind of knew that, so I thought, that’s why I’m going to write *Black Teeth and a Brilliant Smile* \[Stripe’s first book, a fictionalised biography of the life of Andrea Dunbar that was published in 2017 by Wrecking Ball Press and then republished last year by Virago.\] **RB:** So, what was the catalyst that made you do it? **AS:** I had this idea that I wanted to write about the hairdressing salon, and I had these little fragments. I had a few sentences here and there, and I just really took myself back to being a girl in the salon, sitting in the waiting area, looking through the glossy magazines and smelling the scented strips inside the magazines. Looking at those perfume adverts took me to places. I would smell the Giorgio Beverly Hills or the Poison or the Opium; I would rub them on my wrist, and I would look at the images. And that was quite exciting to me, because Tadcaster, where I lived, was so fucking boring and dull. I mean, it was just not a very inspiring place to live when you were a kid, style-wise. In *Base Notes* I’ve written this sort of mock advertising copy at the beginning of every chapter because I wanted to reimagine what that effort looked like and where it took me, and I wanted to think about perfume copywriting, which is a funny thing, style-wise. **RB:** *Base Notes’* chapters are titled with the names and descriptions of perfumes, which is interesting for a memoir because smell and memory are strongly connected. Did thinking about the smells trigger particular recollections? **AS:** Yes. Just when I thought about the perfumes, not only did I remember the smell of them, but I could also remember all these details attached to that smell, like where I was at the time, and what people were wearing. The actual fragrances triggered deeper memories. I started doing some writing around smell and memory. It was very formal and journalistic, and I wrote a feature on each fragrance that I remembered. I researched the history, all of the different elements in the fragrance, why they were like they were – doing deep journalism into each one of these fragrances. At that point I thought it might just be a non-fiction book about perfume that I was writing. And then I started pulling in these memoir sections, and what I realised was that the memoir was more interesting than the journalism, which anybody could have written. So I just cut all the journalism out and dumped it, because it wasn’t doing anything unique. Then it became a different book altogether. **RB:** Did writing the book change how you felt about your mum? **AS:** I think so. My mum died in 2015, and we’d always had a really tricky relationship. But I felt that by writing the book, I came closer to her, more accepting of her. I sort of realised what a special person she was, and I felt like I understood her for the first time. I felt like I had closure and acceptance. **RB:** We know from reading the book that you weren’t alike. Could you talk a bit about what she was like? **AS:** Well, my mum grew up in a prefab in Withernsea in East Yorkshire. It was a harsh environment, so you see why she’d be drawn to the glamour of hairdressing. And that’s why she loved money. She loved Margaret Thatcher, because she represented aspirational working-class culture. My mum didn’t want to spend the rest of her life in a council house. She was going to have her own car, she was going to have a business, she was going to make money. And in the 1980s she got her shop, and became a capitalist. A raging capitalist. Unfortunately, just as she loved Maggie, my dad loved Arthur Scargill. So you can imagine the rows that happened in our family at home. **RB:** In *Base Notes*, she comes over as challenging, but also very warm. **AS:** She was the funniest woman. Just hilarious. And I think that’s what I really miss, that she could make me laugh, and she just had quite a twisted sense of humour. She was also a very impulsive woman, and so I think that could be quite difficult for me. She had a short fuse, and she would blow up and get very emotional. I think my personality was kind of a reaction against that, in a way, bottling my emotions up quite a lot. I don’t get angry unless I absolutely have to. **RB:** Do you think there are distinct and typical problems with mother-daughter relationships? **AS:** It’s so tricky, because you’re half them, aren’t you? And then if your daughter turns out not to be what you want her to be, and she rebels against you, then I think mothers feel that becoming mothers themselves is possibly the only way in which they will ever understand the pain and suffering you had to go through to bring them up. But for me, I didn’t have children. I drew the line. It was like, I’m not doing this. **RB:** Did she think about you being a writer? **AS:** She was actually quite supportive. I think because I was 30 when I went to uni, she was like, “Well, go do it. Yeah, you only live once.” And she was really supportive, so was my dad, like, “you only live once, and it’s clear it’s really important to you.” I’d also saved loads of money up to go to uni to get me there. **RB:** Where did you grow up? Was it in Tadcaster itself? **AS:** I grew up just outside Tadcaster, near a little village called Bickerton. I was there until I was four. My dad worked on a farm, and then he used to work for Sam Smith’s brewery, delivering beer on the drays, so we had a tied house. My mum didn’t work for the first few years after I was born. Well, she did a bit of mobile hairdressing, but it was mostly just me and my mum. She taught me to read and write before I went to school. **RB:** Did you like to read? **AS:** Yes. I was a highly advanced reader and I was voracious. My mum would take me to the library, and I read every book three times over. I remember really loving all the Roald Dahl books, *The Call of the Wild* by Jack London, Ursula K Le Guin’s *The Wizard of Earthsea*, *The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe*, and even things like *The Secret Garden*. I liked quite a lot of Victorian children’s literature. I would read abridged versions of *Little Women*, books like that. My nana had Pam Ayres poetry books, and I used to read those. I like Pam Ayres. **RB:** I’m assuming those are books about distant worlds, rather than reflections of you actual life at the time? **AS:** Yes, I liked fantasy. It was an escape from the boredom of my life at that time. Although sometimes I liked the idea that a book was like my world, but had crazy, magic, weird stuff going on in it. Like *The Secret Garden*. **RB:** You’ve mentioned *Billy Liar* as a book that captures your feelings of growing up in Tad, as they call it. **AS:** Yes, *Billy Liar* is like The One for me. It’s a really special book, and it really does capture this idea of escape through the imagination. It fizzes with working-class energy, and Billy just … lives. He’s delusional, obviously. There’s probably a neurodivergent reading of that book to be done. **RB:** You moved to east London and worked in the music industry after leaving school, then went to Greenwich University to study creative writing when you were 30. **AS:** Yes, it was wonderful. It was such a privilege to go to uni when I was 30 and not 18\. I had some really good tutors there, and most of the students were working class. There were a lot of mature students, so the quality of the work was quite high. We all had life experience that we could write about. **RB:** Was there a point where you became aware of being a working-class writer? **AS:** I didn’t even know what being working class was until I went to university. It hadn’t really crossed my mind. But I remember reading *The Uses of Literacy* by Richard Hoggart and thinking, “Oh, that’s my family.” Before that I just thought my family was weird. So it was probably in my early 30s, reading Richard Hoggart. When you’re put into a university environment, it’s very middle class and academic, and you become aware of your difference. Whereas, when you’re working behind bars or working in a factory or whatever, you’re all in the same boat. After Goldsmiths I went to Manchester University to do a master’s, and I remember in a workshop there I wrote about a guy who drank 25 pints a night. Someone in the class pulled me up on that and said, “You’re making that up. No one would drink 25 pints in a night.” I said, “No, I’m not making it up. I grew up in Tadcaster, and that’s what people do there. They’re professional drinkers.” He didn’t believe me. Someone else in the class who was from the Welsh valleys was like, “Yeah, they would drink that amount in the valleys as well.” These disagreements aren’t necessarily about cultural disapproval. Sometimes it’s just disbelief that such differences could exist. **RB:** You’ve worked in publishing and education now, as well as writing. Do you think there are factors in those worlds that can make them difficult for working-class writers to navigate? **AS:** It depends on who you’re working with. I’m quite lucky. My editor at my publisher, Hachette, is from Pickering; the head of marketing is from Leeds; a lot of the sales people are from Leeds and Lancashire; the CEO is from Middlesbrough. So that’s pretty good for me, but it’s not the same with every publisher. Publishing is painfully posh. The people who work in it are all really nice and polite, and there are lots of incredibly intelligent people who really do want things to change, but I don’t know how you bring change about while the industry is concentrated in London. Because it’s not just a class thing, it’s also a cultural thing, and the industry is so London-minded. **RB:** Were there any books that gave you the confidence to write about your own life? **AS:** I would say that for a lot of writers, particularly from working-class backgrounds, Gordon Burn has become a blueprint in terms of how to write non-fiction. His influence is not to be underestimated. It runs through fiction, sports writing, crime writing and journalism. If I get stuck when I’m writing, there are two writers who I turn to to help me. Gordon Burn is one, and Hilary Mantel is the other. **RB:** Can you distil what it is about each one that you admire? **AS:** With her, it’s her clarity, which is unsurpassed. With Gordon, maybe it’s his ability to dig deep beneath the subject and find resonances there that other people can’t. Another writer I’d mention is Patrick Kavanagh, and particularly *The Great Hunger*. When I read it, I just felt like the world of my family was there on the page, and I just felt this incredible sense of connection to the writing. That was probably one of the poems that really made me think I can do this, I can write about the world that I’ve come from. For me, it’s up there with *The Waste Land*. **RB:** You write a lot about the north of England and its distinct culture, but you must see a marked difference between the 1980s and now? **AS:** Yes, of course. Things feel bleak just at the moment. I don’t know whether it’s because I think we’re in a period of permanent decline now, and it seems that things were sliding for a long time, and now it’s just … gone. You know, we’ve seen the best of it. I know that’s really pessimistic. I try not to think about it too much. **RB:** Do you think you’ll write more about your family after this? **AS:** There’s one story I’d like to write, which is set in the second world war, and about one of my great-uncles. He grew up in Selby in Yorkshire, but became one of Churchill’s chief translators. He was also openly gay, and got away with it, which makes me wonder if that was because of him being in MI6\. There’s quite a bit of research that needs to happen before I write about him. **RB:** You seem drawn to hidden stories that are, in a way, concealed in plain sight… **AS:** I think we sometimes forget that our people couldn’t write their stories down because they couldn’t read and write. We didn’t have education until the 1880s. When I go back through the census I find a lot of people who couldn’t even spell their names properly. It changes with different people – is it Strype or Stripe, for example? Family history sites on the internet are just the most wonderful resource for a writer who is interested in writing about the past or their family history, especially when that family history is an oral tradition that’s been passed down, which it usually is when you’re working class. Elizabeth McCracken said that family is the first novel. I think about that quite a lot. [*Base Notes: The Scents of a Life*](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781399608602?ref=thebeemagazine.com) *is published by White Rabbit and is available now in paperback.* --- [Tip the Bee](https://thebeemagazine.com/#/portal/support) All donations go towards supporting the Bee’s mission to nurture, publish promote and pay for the best new working-class writing. ### “Wuthering Heights” Review: Problems Aren’t Only About Race and Class URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/wuthering-heights-review-problems-arent-only-about-race-and-class/ Last updated: 2026-02-11T12:33:10.000Z To be fair to Emerald Fennell, adaptations of Wuthering Heights have always been controversial, and the first person to sell out Emily Brontë was her sister Charlotte in 1850\. In the edition of that year, already PR-ing the family as more genteel and literary than it was, Charlotte watered down Joseph’s Yorkshire dialect to make the book more accessible to “Southerners”, while humblebragging the novel’s romantic wildness in the preface: “Wuthering Heights must appear a rude and strange production \[to\] strangers who knew nothing of the author \[…\] The wild moors of the north of England can for them have no interest: the language, the manners, the very dwellings and household customs of the scattered inhabitants of those districts must be to such readers in a great measure unintelligible, and – where intelligible – repulsive. Men and women who, perhaps, naturally very calm, and with feelings moderate in degree, and little marked in kind, have been trained from their cradle to observe the utmost evenness of manner and guardedness of language, will hardly know what to make of the rough, strong utterance, the harshly manifested passions, the unbridled aversions, and headlong partialities of unlettered moorland hinds and rugged moorland squires, who have grown up untaught and unchecked \[…\]” With her characteristic marketing nous, Charlotte was giving a reverse-exotic spin to criticisms made by reviewers on the book’s publication. Several honed in on the Earnshaws’ baseness and savagery, in terms reminiscent of those used in contemporary accounts of urban slums. Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper decried it for its “details of cruelty, inhumanity, and the most diabolical hate and vengeance”, which “disgusted, almost sickened” the reader. Another reviewer from the Examiner labelled it “wild, confused, disjointed, and improbable; and the people who make up the drama, which is tragic enough in its consequences, are savages ruder than those who lived before the days of Homer”. Emily Brontë kept cuttings of five reviews in her writing desk, which were found after her death. Each review, in some form or another, gestures towards the schisms of cultural capital at play in the novel, contrasting the “gentle” occupants of Thrushcross Grange against the “rude” inhabitants of Wuthering Heights – an assessment veined through with class politics. She was writing about race and class, and she knew it. The political conflict between Thrushcross Grange and Wuthering Heights is best seen as one between the yeoman class and the gentry, but throughout the book, boundaries that should contain working-class characters are also strained and subverted. Heathcliff disrupts conventions of economic inheritance and land ownership. Nelly Dean, the working-class narrator played by Hong Chau in the Fennell film, is a servant brought up with Catherine and Hindley, later acquiring an education of sorts in the Linton library. Joseph (Ewan Mitchell), the roughly puritanical farm servant, advises Mr Earnshaw on care and discipline for the children, and becomes a bitter, hypocritical guardian of the house. All three move above their stations and find themselves in unstable positions. The critic T K Meier points out that Heathcliff, the boy “taken nameless from a Liverpool slum”, transforms into “a gentleman’s son \[who\] in his new situation \[…\] is at first rejected by family and servants alike, but achieves in time a violent communion with Cathy and a quieter toleration from Nelly Dean, two members of the household themselves undergoing a reduction from their former positions – Cathy from her rightful one of daughter and later sister of the squire, and Nelly from her unnatural former status of having been reared as a member of the family by Earnshaw” [1](#footnotes). Meier points to the novel’s “profound genealogical decay” as a symbol of the “apparent disintegration of the class system; the five children of the second generation have dwindled to two in the third, despite four marriages prior to the union of Catherine and Hareton”. The principles of Christian morality, Meier notes, gradually disappear: “The local church closes its doors, the local lawyer becomes corrupt, and Joseph postulates a kind of theology of damnation as irrelevant as it is heretical; this, amid the general background of characters who are either weak, ignorant, foolish, or malevolent, heralds a culture in ruin”. Heathcliff may himself be Earnshaw’s illegitimate son, as gestured towards by Mr Earnshaw’s unsatisfactory explanation for how he came upon Heathcliff as a foundling in Liverpool. Even before Heathcliff has so much as said a word within the narrative, this interpretation positions him as a threat to the “propriety” of the Earnshaw family, estate and wider class system. Conveniently, Heathcliff is younger than Hindley, somewhat mitigating the threat to primogeniture; however, he later interferes with another family’s inheritance pathway when he convinces the lawyer Mr Green to forge Edgar Linton’s will, enabling Heathcliff to take ownership of Thrushcross Grange. (During the Brontës’ time, inheritance was a hot-button topic; there was no standard legal process to bequeath possessions until the 1837 Wills Act.) It is worth remembering that Wuthering Heights may be set in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, but Emily Brontë began work on it in 1845\. That was only three years after the Chartists raised the “Leviathan petition” of three million signatures, and violent conflicts broke out between workers and employers in industrial towns, one of which was Haworth. It is fair to say that little sense of this has crept into the new film version of the story. \* Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights has attracted much criticism for its casting of Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff and for its restyling of the work as a Fifty Shades of Brontë bodice-ripper. Fennell has said, by way of an apology for the film’s inaccuracies, that the film is her own half-remembered, half-imagined version of the story, which is why its correct title uses quotation marks, “Wuthering Heights”, not Wuthering Heights. This is the kind of thing artists do when they have been heavily praised and spent rather too long at work, but Heathcliff and Cathy do seem to bring out the self-indulgence and experiment in film and TV creatives. Wuthering Heights was first adapted for screen in 1920 as a silent film of the same name, directed by A V Bramble, which has not survived. Laurence Olivier starred in the famous 1939 film adaptation, made during the Hollywood wartime gothic boom, a film in which Heathcliff is at least referred to as “gipsy”, as he is in the novel. In 1992, Peter Kosminsky directed a remake of Wuthering Heights (“the biggest mistake of my life”) that featured Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche as both the older Cathy and her daughter Catherine. The 2009 ITV drama serialised the novel for TV, starring Tom Hardy as Heathcliff opposite his now wife, Charlotte Riley. Other TV adaptations include the BBC’s 1953 version, cinematically groundbreaking for its use of new camera technology, and its 2002 Sparkhouse, in which Heathcliff was played by a woman, Sarah Smart. The 2011 BBC TV series, however, is the only adaptation that has cast a Black actor in the role of Heathcliff: James Howson. In the overwhelming majority of these adaptations, Heathcliff is played by white actors from wealthy backgrounds. It may be useful to briefly recap why this is racist. Emily Brontë variously describes Heathcliff as a “gipsy brat” and “blackguard”, although it has been argued that these terms were used as metaphors and cultural shorthand for class differences – “blackguard”, for example, was an umbrella term for a man of bad character during the 19th century. Other references to Heathcliff’s appearance, however, are explicit, not least the specific description of him as “dark-skinned”. We know from the juvenilia of Glass Town, Angria and Gondal that Emily was exposed, through publications such as Blackwood’s, to the machinations of empire and its racial atrocities (although these would have been framed through the language of the imperial project, by turns dehumanising or patronising, depending on the nature of the publication). Liverpool, from where Heathcliff is adopted by Mr Earnshaw, was also a major port for the transatlantic slave trade during Wuthering Heights’s historical period in the late 18th century, and lies only 68 miles from Haworth. The novel’s context that Heathcliff was allegedly “kidnapped by wicked sailors and brought to England” is often used to reinforce the notion that Heathcliff was a disenfranchised Black person of African origin, as is the fact that he is bestowed only a single name, in keeping with enslavement practices of the time. Such evidence is overwhelming. The novel has been adapted to a bewildering variety of forms across a global spread of countries, from the 2013 Fifty Shades of Grey-style retelling by I J Miller (which credits Brontë prominently as a co-author on its front cover) to not one but two telenovelas in Mexico in 1964 and 1979 [2](#footnotes). Given this tradition of interpretation and adaptation, one might argue that criticism of, say, casting a white Australian actor as Heathcliff, or yassifying the curmudgeonly servant Joseph, is inappropriate. However, at a time of considerable sensitivity around cultural appropriation, Fennell’s version does look conspicuously rootless and touched with a distinct kind of globalised glamour. This is, after all, a novel whose author was consciously writing about distinct geography and social, political and class context with great attention to detail. Irene Wiltshire points to Emily’s use of dialect, for example, as an important indicator of class within the novel. Characters’ idiosyncratic “ways of speaking” correlate to “their station in life and \[…\] their aspirations” [3](#footnotes). For example, Emily “has Lockwood comment on Mrs Dean’s refinement of manners: ‘Excepting a few provincialisms of slight consequence, you have no marks of the manners that I am habituated to consider as peculiar to your class’ \[…\] Mrs Dean’s reply is that she has undergone strict discipline and taken advantage of the library at the Grange where, by that time, she had resided for 18 years. Thus her speech reflects the influence exerted on her early life by the Earnshaw family and, crucially, her own book-learning at the Grange.” Joseph’s dialect marks him out as belonging to the labouring class, which makes Charlotte’s imposed elocution all the more misleading. Wiltshire also remarks on the subtleties of class consciousness and upward social mobility in Heathcliff’s speech, which begins as “gibberish” but does not develop into the dialect of Joseph; rather, he takes on the speech of the Earnshaw family, thus “aligning himself with the yeoman class and not the serving class that others see as his rightful place”. Of course, such nuances are omitted in the new version, class reduced to the old tropes of repression and bits of rough. \* It is a stretch to call Wuthering Heights a working-class novel, although it is hardly a bourgeois work either. It is a book about messy, selfish, unregulated, vengeful people in inhospitable provincial places trying to climb out of the mud, sometimes literally. Whatever the characters are or are not, they are not beautiful, which is another problem with the Fennell version: casting Margot Robbie as Cathy is like making a cinematic version of Happy Valley with Julia Roberts as Catherine Cawood. The truly repugnant factor, though, is not the presence of beautiful people playing ugly characters. To find the real reason this film makes some of us so depressed, you have to go back to Emerald Fennell’s quotation marks, and her plea that this is the Wuthering Heights in her own head. Another way of putting that is that she took someone else’s story and made her own version of it, so that its places and people look like she would like them to be. So far, so fanfic; fine. Lots of us re-imagine other people’s work. The difference is that Fennell can raise the funding to get her vision made into an international hit film. If you loved Emily Brontë’s version in the way many of us do love it, the experience is akin to seeing you and your friends’ favourite caff bought and turned into a caff-themed café by Benugo. It comes down to money. Last year, Claire Malcolm reported for the Bee on the increasing tendency of film and TV financiers to seek out “beigevision” material: material with conventionally pretty visuals and global-middle-class-friendly plots, light on limiting features such as regional accents and working-class homes. The resulting beigevision films and TV series – all those young lawyers with marital problems, all those wealthy international travellers – are bad enough in themselves, but when they are made by filleting out the pretty bits from quality, meaningful-but-sometimes-difficult books, they are infuriating. And that’s the real problem with Fennell’s Wuthering Heights. It feels like a story by and about people from below, and as such it has inspired devotion in millions of people around the world for 150 years. Fennell appears to have taken the sexy bits and made them into a film for people from above. *With thanks to Georgia Poplett.* --- 1\. T.K. Meier, *‘Wuthering Heights* and Violation of Class’, *Brontë Studies* 38.4 (2013), p. 309\. 2\. The range is spectacular. To give a cursory overview: Wuthering Heights was also adapted into a 2011 graphic novel by John M Burns, and a self-described 2024 “modern gothic punk remix” novel, Catherine the Ghost, by Kathe Koja. More firmly within the remit of literary fiction are Caryl Phillips’s The Lost Child, which he characterises as “an oblique, intricate re-writing” of Wuthering Heights (2015), and Windward Heights, a re-interpretation of Brontë’s classic by French-Caribbean author Maryse Condé in the vein of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. Bernard Herrmann adapted Wuthering Heights for opera between 1943 and 1951\. Carlisle Floyd and Frédéric Chaslin also completed versions in 1958 and 2009 respectively. And of course there was Kate Bush’s international 1978 smash hit “Wuthering Heights”. Outside the Anglosphere, Wuthering Heights has been adapted for film as the Mexican Abismos de Pasión (Depths of Passion, 1954); the Hindi-language Arzoo (Desire, 1950) and Hulchul (Commotion, 1951); the Bollywood-produced Dil Diya Dard Liya (I Gave My Heart and Took Your Pain, 1966 – in which the transplanted Heathcliff character, Shankar, is literally thrown off a cliff); the French Hurlevent (Stormwind, 1985); the Japanese Arashi ga oka (Wuthering Heights, 1988 – also the name of a song by Japanese guitarist Hotei about the romanticism of war); and the Filipino Hihintayin Kita sa Langit (I Will Wait for You in Heaven, 1991). A telenovela, Cumbres Borrascosas (literally, Stormy Summits), was broadcast for Mexican TV in 1964, for Venezuelan TV in 1976, and again for Mexican TV in 1979\. Finally, of course, there is Kate Bush’s 1978 global hit single, “Wuthering Heights”. 3\. Irene Wiltshire, ‘Speech in *Wuthering Heights*: Joseph’s Dialect and Charlotte’s Emendations’, *Brontë Studies* 30 (2005) --- [Tip the Bee](https://thebeemagazine.com/#/portal/support) All donations go towards supporting the Bee’s mission to nurture, publish promote and pay for the best new working-class writing. ### Building My Dream Home in The Sims URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/building-my-dream-home-in-the-sims/ Last updated: 2026-02-04T18:00:20.000Z *‘In that memory, I am good at something, and it is a bridge. I can hold it in my hands, move myself through space. It is real and not real. It carries me away, for a little while.’* Carmen Maria Machado, Critical Hits, Introduction Growing up working class, home was a contradiction. Something I struggled to explain easily to people who grew up in one fixed place. It felt like longing; sometimes safety. But it always felt temporary. My upbringing was unstable. After my parents divorced when I was five, I was caught in a custody battle. Though my father’s contumacious and reckless nature made him unfit for parenthood, he somehow managed to manipulate the care system to keep sole custody of us. This left me and my brother at the mercy of constant moves and changes. Then, during the weekend, I was at my mother’s house on the outskirts of Leeds. According to statistics, in 2024 more than 150,000 children were living in temporary accommodation. This was an increase of more than 14% since the previous year.[1](#footnotes) Even writing out ‘according to statistics’, I felt these figures lose their meaning. One of the problems with statistics is that they don’t capture the nuance of the experience. It’s sort of like reading labels for the food you’re eating without the memory of the taste. We need real stories to understand the impact. It’s not that we don’t have enough houses in the UK: it’s because they are too expensive. Working-class people are moving around this small island and filling houses up to overcrowding. Social housing access is dropping, though, at an alarming rate, while private renting is increasing in price. It’s about the profit margins, not the people. I know: both my parents struggled to keep up with it because of their circumstances. So my home was constantly changing. My mum waited months to get a council house and, once she moved into it, she tried her hardest to make this a home for us and to get us back into her permanent custody. This meant adding more ornaments and furniture to the house, repainting the walls, and having access to things she might need. One of those things was a computer. She had bought it to study a new course in the hope she would get a job she enjoyed, so that she would eventually rely less on benefits. One day, in a charity shop, I found a scratched copy of the Sims inside a small square of plastic. She begrudgingly bought me it, but as she kept the computer in her bedroom, sandwiched between the clothes in her wardrobe, I was given specific restrictions on the times I could play. The back of the computer monitor extended the length of the wardrobe. It was cream, stained and glowed in the shadows. The sound of the PC’s dithering modem was meditative. As I put the disk in and the tray closed, I watched the Sims introduction video, mesmerised. I remember the Sims’ loading screen. Glowing blue letters against a background of dark blue. A small roof, windows and chimney above the letter M. As I loaded up the tutorial, Bob Newbie grumbled at his wife. The tutorial instructed me to address both of their needs. I realised quickly that something as simple as deciding what a simulated person decides to eat for breakfast could be thrilling. I went to Create a Sim, decided the outfit my own Sim would wear. I picked their personality through a series of pre-determined traits like ‘Active’, ‘Playful’ and ‘Neat’. Then, the game gave me a select amount of money to start with, to build their house. The Sims was released in 2000, and was marketed as *the* life simulation game. You get to create a simulated person, decide what they wear and what job they do. You control their daily life and get to build and decorate their house. Pixels interlope as you plop down the walls first, a small patio in cream. Decorate each wall with a pattern. Cycle through furniture. Get the necessities. Then, you realise: you can’t afford the TV you wanted from the menu. Should you delete a window? Opt for the tattiest couch, with stains on it? You zoom out, look into the other neighbourhood houses. Your Sim’s house has nothing on the Goth Mansion with its three floors and perfect garden. You flick through the house with a growing longing and a question. Where did they get the simoleons[2](#footnotes) for something so perfect? Mortimer Goth stands in his garden, staring at the old gravestones and his generational wealth. You flick back to your own Sim. They wave and mumble at you as they try to cook using their cheap microwave. A fire breaks out. You start to panic. Cheap furniture is more flammable. And you can’t afford a burglar alarm, so your Sim is robbed that evening, and their bookshelf is gone so they can’t improve their skills. They miss their bill payment and a repo man comes around and takes their coffee table. Poverty can be so punishing. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2026/02/sims2.jpg) I didn’t understand why I had to leave my mother’s house during the week back then. It gnawed at me, the desire to send my Sim off to work so I could keep improving their house. While the rest of my childhood was chaos, I just wanted to keep building a room of my own, virtually. It was when I was about this age that my home with my father became a moving door. First, we moved in with one of his girlfriends. She used to spend a lot of her own time drinking cans of beer and staring at the neighbours. When they broke up, we had to live with him in a bed and breakfast above a fish and chip shop for a few months. Then there was a high-rise block of flats. Finally, he decided to move back to the small town in Yorkshire where he had grown up, and where I eventually went to high school. At first we lived with my grandparents, then he found a council house close to our new school. I remember him being excited about having his own home. He could never hold down a job because he believed he was too punk for it. But I think he still liked the idea having a place to finally settle near my grandparents. So I knew at an early age what it was like to constantly move around based on circumstance. Doors led to corridors, reflecting lights inside a fun house. The word ‘home’ started to catch in my throat. Each week was a strange new surprise but, by contrast, my weekends with my mother felt safe. There was a warm glow in the living room. As the years passed, she kept it the same. The old computer, still rattling and gathering dust in her bedroom, was passed on to me. I managed to get my hands on a copy of The Sims 2. The Sims 2 had better graphics and more stories inside it. My mum’s old PC struggled through the loading screen. Vibrating blue tiles with a bar at the bottom, inching forward. Then cut to the introduction. I first looked at the Broke family in Pleasantview, intrigued by their story but then quickly deciding it was too close to home. So I chose a different neighbourhood. My new view was a fly over of Strangetown, which is one of the neighbourhoods you can move into in the base game. There was a crashed spaceship inside a crater, steam rising from the glitching pieces. Then stones arranged in a circle, spiking from the desert floor, one of them in the shape of Will Wright \[creator of The Sims\] wearing glasses. Then rows of houses, gregarious mansions and small bungalows clustered together, surrounded by barren sand dunes. Green diamonds glittering over some of the roofs. I sat in my childhood bedroom and clicked around the houses frantically, the fans in my PC whirring with a clicking fatigue. I moved my first Sim into a nice one-bedroom townhouse on the dual carriageway, which was called ‘The Road to Nowhere’. My Sim started to ask questions as they met the neighbours. I wondered where Bella Goth had gone. Why there were barracks in one of their houses. Why one of the men was pregnant with an alien. Why those suspicious singletons had a telescope on their roof. Strangetown had its name for a reason. I was glued to the screen and cycled through each of their memories and tried to find an answer. It was a parable. A story I wanted to piece together. I thought to myself, ‘I wonder what it’s like to live somewhere with so many strange things happening.’Then I thought about the town I had moved to with my father. Down the staircase, out of his new council house and into the streets, terraced back-to-back houses lined up all the way to my high school. Only the local shops to interrupt them, where teenagers tormented the shy kids with slurs and circled around them on their BMX bikes. The looks on the faces of the people walking around. My father’s friends and their camouflage parkas, broken in their livelihoods and chanting Oasis lyrics with roll ups. The back streets with furniture strewn across them, pylons in the fields and burnt tires in the train stations. Market stalls that sold antiques and bike parts. The pasty shop and the butchers. A street of terraced houses built for the miners and paved with gravel. Fields with murky puddles, stolen shopping trolleys tipped into the rivers. Empty forests with tarps swaying in the branches and needles discarded in the grass. A tip for scavenging parts and then a motorway beyond it, rumbling with the urgency of an escape and that feeling that ebbed through me – that I didn’t belong there. I wondered if my Sims in Strangetown felt the same. Like watching horror to assimilate with anxiety, I felt safer exploring the strange town in my teenage bedroom than the one I was living in.[3](#footnotes) Later, I tried to make my dad’s family in Create a Sim, and build a house for us all to live in. I made my grandparents, my dad, my brother and me. When I moved them in to a house that I had meticulously replicated, they all stood within the grey walls and argued at each other in Simlish about the ugly furniture and lack of decoration. That’s when I went back to creating my own storylines and houses based on my fantasies. The mirroring was fractured. By the age of 14, I was already thinking of escaping my own Strangetown. I was gay and it didn’t feel safe. I wanted better things, more choices. A degree. I had fantasies of living in the city and doing something exciting. I struggled with where I was living and decided I would just focus on my studies as a vehicle to get out. My dad had started finding bits of computers in scrap piles. This was his new obsessive venture that he thought could make him lots of cash in hand on the side, only later realising people weren’t willing to pay high prices for PCs with rattling old parts. Sometimes if we passed skips he would find old PC parts and bring them back to the house, like a magpie. A fan. A wire. I asked, begged, my father to build me a computer that was powerful enough to run The Sims 3\. Told him how I would be so happy, wouldn’t need anything from him, if he could just help me build something that could get it to work. So we went out skip diving together until he had all the pieces to make me a computer. He painted the case using green spray paint in the back garden, while drinking a bottle of cider. Globs of new paint had dripped across the disc tray of my new PC as I put the copy of Sims 3 in to play. Cue the opening credits and glowing memories. Small, virtual people and their beautiful lives so far beyond the world I was living in. In the bask of the loading screen I waited. Prayed all of the other parts would hold out. The warmth of the air rolling through my bedroom and the small whirring noise. I smiled. In the hours inside my bedroom, when things didn’t feel safe outside it, I decided I would make homes that did. Eventually, I moved to live with my mother, but I kept building different versions of my dream home. I even spent some time making storytelling videos in Sims that were some of the first pieces of content I put on the internet. I had a slightly viral video about a sad death where Alexandra Burke’s version of ‘Hallelujah’ played in the background. I played out dream lives of travelling the world through The Sims 3: World Adventures. Imagined a life in a city apartment with The Sims 3: Late Night. Made a version of myself in The Sims 3: University who rode a bike around campus and studied Communications. Symbiotically, I went interrailing across Europe, then moved into university halls to study. I moved into a maisonette with some other students. Half of a house below a rehabilitation centre. A groundfloor flat in Manchester. Three more flats in Manchester. My restlessness persisted. My environments had changed and the feeling of needing to escape had mutated with it. Things felt safer, better, but I was still searching for something. Better cafes, better choices, better options. Like my other friends in their twenties, I was moving to discover. Moving because you are forced to is different to moving out of choice, but it can bring some of the same feelings up. It can catapult you back to a familiarity. It feels a bit like when I moved different bits of Sims furniture. If something doesn’t fit quite right, why should I settle? I’m not encouraging or needing excess here. I’m talking about having choices and, at the root of it for me, safety. Until then, or until I can rub this stain out of me, I’ll probably keep moving. In all iterations of The Sims, there are NPCs (non-playable characters) called ‘townies’. They are fully fleshed out characters who move between different lots and interact with your playable Sim. Except they are always moving. No fixed address, but sucked into a vortex when they aren’t of use to the story. Sometimes I think back to all of the moving I’ve done and it feels not dissimilar to this. I am not an NPC. Sometimes though, I have people ask me where I’m living now when I haven’t seen them in a while, as if they are already expecting it to be different. Sure, my Sim might spend years of their life sucked into the vortex after their carpool picks them up, but eventually they might be able to make a home that’s perfect for them. Are they a green thumb? They might save their wages and spend it on a rack of plants. Are they a chef? They’ll save up simoleons until they can buy the most useful oven. In real life, I can’t sell a window or the pool ladders when my bills are too high, even though there’s been points I probably wished (or needed) that to be the case. I could get money for my Sim using the motherlode cheat for my sims, but it feels less satisfying. Life is a lot like this. It’s capitalism, yes, but for people who grew up working class, a dream home won’t come from a cheat code. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2026/02/sims2a.jpg) In recent years I have played the Sims 4 in different stints. When I first downloaded it, I made an updated version of my dream home. There was no empty space. Wood. Not the kind that splinters and stains. Sustainably sourced, of course. Beams in the ceilings with hanging plants. My mother’s ornaments stacked upon them. There were shelves of herbs and baking ingredients. There was a room for my Sim to sit and type his novels with abandon. Behind him, there’s a huge bookshelf. The books my mother gifted me. Wall-sized windows that let the light in. Rooms decorated with memories. Faces in photographs fill the rooms with love. Beyond the double-glazed doors that swoop open, there is a patio where you can sit and read in the summertime. Beyond that, a stretch of grass. There is a wardrobe of shirts. An award for my Sim for his writing. A cataclysm inside me, that all of this might be possible one day. From homeless to home owner. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2026/02/image3.png) Recently, EA decided to sell the rights for the Sims franchise. However you feel about this decision, it is a stark reminder of capitalism in a game that allows you to imagine a life beyond your limits. Sometimes I come home from a writing event and check the time. Should go to bed, but there’s an hour free. I think about opening the game sometimes, but I feel less of a pull to build a fantasy like this based in a speculative future. In my neighbourhood now, I pass houses with their low orange lights on, wonder what it feels like. Stare longingly into shadows in the doorways and listen out for the laughter, wondering exactly how it would feel to have something to call my own. That stained-glass window. That perfect desk I can see refracting the light. Pick pieces apart from them and compare it to the place I’m living. Perhaps, even though I am not playing it out in The Sims, I am still in this state of longing. Maybe it’s a feeling of finding a place to settle. Maybe it’s piecing together a life that’s intentional. I know this kind of play was integral to me becoming a writer. In The Sims, I realise, too, I was not just building my dream house; I was building my own identity. Lately, when I’ve been asked where I grew up, I generally say Yorkshire, since it’s the most fitting description of my sense of place. But home, to me, has become more than this. It is the people you know. The work you do. The stories. The people you love. The friends you keep. The healing you work through. Because a home, even for a Sim, is more than a house. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2026/02/sims4.jpg) --- 1\. [Housing And Young People, A Complicated Relationship: Children In Temporary Accommodation](https://www.resolveuk.org.uk/about/latest-news/housing-and-young-people-a-complicated-relationship-children-in-temporary-accommodation?ref=thebeemagazine.com#:~:text=Our%20young%20people%20are%20being,to%20feel%20isolated%20and%20forgotten.) 2\. Sims currency 3\. For further consideration of the relationship between therapy and online environments, see [ Drama Therapy in Virtual Reality: A Study on SessionDesign and Empathy Improvement by Yoriko Matsuda, Yutaro Hirao1, Monica Perusquía-Hernández, Hideaki Uchiyama and Kiyoshi Kiyokawa, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, 8916-5, Takayama, Ikoma, Nara 630-0192, Japan ](https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3907/paper1.pdf?ref=thebeemagazine.com) --- [Tip the Bee](https://thebeemagazine.com/#/portal/support) All donations go towards supporting the Bee’s mission to nurture, publish promote and pay for the best new working-class writing. ### Davina Quinlivan’s Loving Gaze URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/davina-quinlivans-loving-gaze/ Last updated: 2026-01-30T18:52:01.000Z Davina Quinlivan is a research fellow in the department of English and creative writing at the University of Exeter, and the author of Shalimar, an "imaginative memoir of migration and finding a home" published in 2022\. Like Shalimar, her new book [Possessions: A Memoir of Transformation in an Era of Precarity](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780715656044?ref=thebeemagazine.com) combines different forms and styles of writing, and draws on her Anglo-Burmese heritage and her experience growing up as a working-class child in Hayes, west London. The Bee caught up with her to talk about class consciousness in middle-class work environments, walking, taking control of your work as a writer, and how her cultural heritage enabled her to forge a stronger sense of herself. **Richard Benson**: Davina, in Possessions you movingly describe growing up in Hayes in west London, where a lot of people work at Heathrow. The way the community was clustered around one place of work reminded me old working class industrial communities where everyone worked in the same place. Do you see similarities there? **Davina Quinlivan**: I’d not thought about that. But everyone did work at Heathrow! It was one bus stop or a 15-minute drive for most people. I worked at the WH Smith in Terminal One between the ages of 16 and 18\. I’d finish studying, and then I would go and do that. My dad worked in a food distribution company warehouse. I just grew up walking around the aisles of pallets. My mates used to get things from the duty free, because their dads worked there in security. Everyone always had plenty of CK One. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2026/01/possessions-1.jpg) **RB**: How did it feel doing that sort of work in a place where people were jetting off all over the world? **DQ**: In a weird way it was exhilarating, because there were people travelling to these amazing places, and you’re seeing all this buzz and this business. It was quite interesting to be in this gateway to places that I was never going to go to. **RB**: You explain in your memoir how you went on to become an academic, and then describe how the precarity of short-term contracts, and the remote working undermines your sense of yourself. It’s that debilitation that eventually leads to you drawing on your Anglo-Burmese heritage to reclaim your mind and body. It seems that you revere your work but find modern working conditions destructive. **DQ**: Yes. It’s like a sacred thing to be able to teach and to work in that field that’s about knowledge and, to use a bigger term, enlightenment. But academia is much more open about being a business now, and that’s changing the whole system. The values within that system are being rewritten. **RB**: Working in higher education is seen as a middle-class occupation, but do you feel the use of short-term contracts has weakened some of those old certainties and confidence? **DQ**: Yeah, but the confidence has been eroded in every area of our lives, hasn’t it? I do write about people who do job interviews, and because some people may have had a more privileged upbringing or may have just a different way of operating, they already know that they’re going to turn down the job so that they can negotiate their pay in their current job. I think that’s all bound up with class and confidence. But there are very few people who have that kind of confidence now. I certainly don’t. I feel like we’re falling through all the levels that used to be in place. We don’t know what’s left and what’s right or what’s up or what’s down. Eliza Filby talks about this in Inheritocracy. **RB**: Yes, security, or the lack of it, seems like a key element of class status now. **DQ**: In a way, the idea of having a working-class background and being more kind of family- and community-oriented gives you a sense of security, but the precarity and the short-term contracts mean there are all these holes … I talk a lot about holes in the book because I see the gaping holes and threads coming undone in everything. **RB**: You talk about your dad being a grafter … **DQ**: Yes, he tells me I’m not a grafter, and I feel guilty because I’m not doing what he did. Because he died when I was 27, I’m trying to work out if he would think I’m happy. What would he want for me? He was a prisoner of war as a child, so he wasn’t really about material achievement. **RB**: There is a strong sense in Possessions of you managing your different, intersecting identities. Did that influence how you write the book? You have called it an “imaginative memoir”, and it combines conventional memoir with elements of mythology and poetry, and a non-linear narrative. Plus, James Roberts’ illustrations. **DQ**: Those identities are all coexisting all the time, but I sometimes become more aware of them when I’m teaching online, or in job interviews. Because it’s very, very much about being a woman. It’s very, very much about being a mum. It’s very, very much about being a woman of colour. And then they’re asking me about EDI … And this is all happening while I’m in rural Devon. Sometimes one thing is more powerful than the other. It feels like I have to keep wondering, and the more I ignore those things, the more painful it is. I talk directly about class, about being a woman and also about my ancestors, but it also shows in the book in that there are set pieces where a sort of magic happens. I think the passage in which I meet the witch in the cave speaks to all those areas. It manifests in the weirdness (laughing). **RB**: That makes sense to me as a reader, because it seems that you had to invent new forms to express yourself, because you were talking about things that are not often expressed. There’s not a set of rules you can use. **DQ**: Well, not wanting to sound too arty, or like we’re doing a creative writing lecture, I feel I have deliberately chosen that form because it’s the only way to write it. I think that’s the strangeness that I’m trying to get out. **RB**: It seemed a very inward-looking book, yet also very interested in social relationships. Were you deliberately trying to get that balance? **DQ**: I keep thinking, is it a bit sad because it’s just me going around in my own mind, but it’s not, because there are so many presences in there. I worked in a cast, or a collective community, so even though it feels like it’s memoir, it is still about communities. **RB**: I find a lot of working-class writers are looking for a different way of writing about their experience that doesn’t really fit into conventional narratives, and one recurring example of that is people who want to write in a collective way, about and for others. They want to write about the community. You can see it in books from The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists to Lark Rise to Candleford to The House on Mango Street to Trainspotting. **DQ**: That feels like something I was trying to do. Writing memoir, especially as a working-class writer, is something that means you come under scrutiny. Is this a working-class narrative? What kind of story are you putting forward? There are expectations. And it’s intersectional, isn’t it? Because it’s also about capitalism, colonialism, and ethnicity and race and sex and caste and all those things. **RB**: Were there any working-class writers that you feel particularly influenced by? **DQ**: I think the better way of answering that is, I just want to read more around writers who’ve had either similar experiences, or very different experiences, which haven’t been just broken down by the class system or who have found other ways to be. I read poetry, and I really like Ella Frears. Her poetry is great, and she writes about class a lot. As I teach film, could I add a working-class film recommendation? That would be Clio Barnard’s The Arbor. **RB**: I was struck by your point about borrowing and becoming, which gave a class context to your thinking about identity. There is a moment around halfway through the book where you say “Becoming was rarely within the reach of my own vocabulary. Becoming was not something I understood. I was born grateful, or ignored, never entitled. I was always ready to beg, borrow or steal by any means necessary. I borrowed but I did not become.” I felt a lot of people would recognise that experience. **DQ**: Yes. Magpie, raven or ancestral goblin? I think we have to borrow a lot, all the time. **RB**: What was your process for writing Possessions? **DQ**: I started writing the opening section, which started off with about 5,000 words, in December 2023\. I had the first section, which grew to about 10,000 words, by January 2024\. It’s almost like books all have their own kind of rhythm or, you know, they’re all a different kind of song, and I immediately felt the energy of what I was writing. I recognised its tone. And I felt the song within this was strong. It all came quite quickly, and I had a whole draft by around the end of March 2024\. That is not normal and I recognise that it’s quite speedy, but I did have that feeling that I knew where it would go. I sent it to my agent, and she had an instinctive feeling about it and saw it for what it was straight away. But again, I want to say that that’s not a standard practice. Books happen in their own way. They develop in their own way. And I’d already set that in motion with my previous book, Shalimar. **RB**: Do you have a particular place where you like to write? **DQ**: Probably 90% of it was written in the bedroom, facing a window. I write about the window in the book. It’s important because I could just look out \[at the countryside\]. Sometimes in the spring, I’d open the window and I could hear the sheep. **RB**: And then, in September, your publisher bought the book… **DQ**: Yes, and I’ve been very, very fortunate in that they made me part of that whole process – they’re not an imprint of Duckworth, but I think working with an indie publisher has given me a lot of agency, and I really value that kind of agency that an indie publisher gives me. I feel working with indie publishers does tend to give me that opportunity to world-build around the book. I think writers need to envisage where they want their book to live. **RB**: You mean everything from how it might be packaged, how it might be sold, where it’s going to be in the bookshop and things like that? **DQ**: Yes. I think it’s important for us to get tooled up to have knowledge of how the industry works. I know it’s time-consuming. But I think it’s important to understand what’s going to happen to this material object that you’ve created. **RB**: That sounds like a demystifying approach. **DQ**: I like that demystification. I can’t talk enough about how important it is to understand the politics, the dynamics and the power systems at play in the process of publishing. If you can understand the dynamics, and you can understand what each person’s role is and what they need to do, and to have trust. **RB**: In the book you talk a lot about online communications, and particularly the online video meeting. You look at the etiquette, the subtle power displays and how the experience plays out differently for different classes, ethnicities and genders. There’s a telling moment when a man in a senior position is brought a cup of tea by his wife … **DQ**: The book is partly about what all that is doing to us. Take the job interviews I write about. What the hell is going on there? You know people say, “Oh, it’s really windy outside,” or comment on the rain – but we’re not in the same room. What am I supposed to say? And you can’t even have that bit where someone gives you a glass of water. And interviewers can really scrutinise your micro-behaviours in a way they wouldn’t in person. **RB**: Do you feel the use of video meetings entrenches or gives away any class divisions or differences? **DQ**: It probably benefits a lot of people because they can detach themselves a little bit further and not be physically present, but have control and at the same time be an all-seeing, kind of godlike figure, because they can check their emails and messages at the same time. They can check their calendar, they can check what’s happening on TikTok and probably no one’s going to know. You can have several conversations at the same time. There’s an interesting power structure there because it tools up people in powerful positions even further. I think it suits a lot of middle-class men to work in that environment. The online system is quite enabling. And it means you can also relinquish any kind of real physical human responsibilities that you might have. **RB**: You dedicate the book “to all those who were present”. Is that a reference to people being fully present – or not – in meetings? **DQ**: Yes, I mention it at the beginning because there are a lot of people who were not present. I write just being present again. And the book does reference Marina Abramovich and her The Artist Is Present show. **RB**: When we look at what’s happening in the US now, the act of simply being present and appreciating another person as a human being seems important. **DQ**: I think it has quite a Marxist indication. There is a brilliant book called Marx for Cats by Leigh Claire La Berge. I’d recommend it. It makes a case for the cat as a kind of icon for Marxist logic. In the book I say the cat is never on the side of power and talk about a cat on a Zoom call just walking where it wants. And I think that connects to what you’re saying: it’s about the idea of the artist and paying attention and being present and just sitting in that space with someone. **RB**: Yes, with no one acting out someone else’s script or expectations. One of my favourite parts of the book was your analysis of how white male academics construct an idea of objectivity, or neutrality, that hides their class biases, and the micro-behaviours used to assert their power. Reading the book, I could sense your frustration. **DQ**: Yes, to be in that world is to notice micro-behaviours. Things like bringing your pet cats into a meeting. I feel I don’t need to do fiction, because there’s so much absurd behaviour in reality. I felt such anger about this – I think that’s what drove the book. I was increasingly faced with these absurd and decentring, obliterating micro-behaviours, which never stopped. I thought, is it only me that’s noticing this? And then decided, well, you can either be completely ground down by that, or you can bear witness. In the end I felt I could be grateful for understanding the ethics that are at play here. **RB**: Just thinking about the future – what would you hope for from this book? **DQ**: Part of it is that I just want to sit in a room and listen to other people. I hope people say, “Oh my god, I’m so glad you said that,” or “Yeah, that’s what I thought.” Because I want that kind of dialogue with people. It’s not about just sitting there and reading, but getting people to have that kinship and understanding all the complexities. It’s intergenerational as well – I feel speaking across generations is important, because the logic of capitalism is that we’re not supposed to be intergenerational. I want to meet more people, more women in particular, who’ve had the things I write about happen to them. More generally, I’d like that sense of connection to the way that we think about the living world, and climate, the connection to the British empire, and Britishness. I really want to lean into the Britishness of it, celebrating the kind of Deep England that my parents might have imagined as kids when they were living in India and Burma. Often Britishness is portrayed as just one thing, or just one note, and I think it can’t just be one note. I think that it’s important to understand the reality of what we all face, because we’re all living under that cloud of capitalism, with everything being driven by the rules of commodity, everything being about what we’re purchasing online, and our dreams being curated by Instagram. **RB**: It feels like you’re coming back to being present and making genuine connections with people. **DQ**: I’m really interested in the process of deep listening. We’re not really doing that anymore as a society, partly because online communication is very performative. It relates to Walter Benjamin, and the way that he talks about in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. I think it’s important for people to really have a conversation and to talk to each other, with stops and starts and breaths and coughs. It’s just sitting with someone and just experiencing their energy. About loving attention, and a kind of loving gaze. An extract from Possessions: A Memoir of Transformation in an Era of Precarity can be read [here](https://thebeemagazine.com/extract-possessions-by-davina-quinlivan/). Quinlivan’s essay “Why I Write Imaginative Memoir”, published by the Women’s Prize, is [here](https://womensprize.com/why-i-write-imaginative-memoir-by-davina-quinlivan/?ref=thebeemagazine.com). [Extract: Possessions by Davina Quinlivan“We were all predicted fails or very low grades at GCSE and beyond. Some of my peers were already retaking the first year of their BTEC qualifications or A levels. I was going to do OK, but we all knew we were destined to work nearby at Heathrow Airport or the local warehouses like our parents.”![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/icon/favicon-16.png)The BeeDavina Quinlivan![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/thumbnail/possessions.jpg)](https://thebeemagazine.com/extract-possessions-by-davina-quinlivan/) --- [Tip the Bee](https://thebeemagazine.com/#/portal/support) All donations go towards supporting the Bee’s mission to nurture, publish promote and pay for the best new working-class writing. ### Extract: Possessions by Davina Quinlivan URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/extract-possessions-by-davina-quinlivan/ Last updated: 2026-01-30T19:00:50.000Z My school friend Malika once kissed her teeth at our English teacher in secondary school while the teacher was trying to explain the nuances of Coleridge. She hadn’t meant to curse the teacher, but it was what her body wanted to do, so she did it. We were beyond it at that point. Our headmaster had famously walked off with all the funds and was wanted by the police. For the record, in my fifteenth year, the 1996 Ofsted report for the Hayes Manor School (Hillingdon, West London) is tonally woeful and apathetic: > Whilst the standards of attainment are well below the national averages, they are commensurate with those in similar schools. It’s hard not to connect that damning line with another few lines which appear earlier: > Forty-three per cent of the pupils are eligible for free school meals, well above both local and national averages… About a fifth of the pupils are refugees, including asylum seekers; the predominant country of origin is Somalia. About a third of the pupils are white. More than half the pupils have English as an additional language (EAL) which is very high, and a significant proportion of them requires additional support to learn English. There are 35 different mother tongues represented in the school population, the main ones being Punjabi, Somali, Gujarati and Farsi… The ability range of the intake as indicated by the end of Key Stage 2 tests and cognitive ability tests shows a strong skew towards the lower ability end with few pupils of the highest ability represented.[ 1](#footnote1) We were all predicted fails or very low grades at GCSE and beyond. Some of my peers were already retaking the first year of their BTEC specialist work-related qualifications (Business and Technology Education Council) or A levels, if they were lucky enough to be accepted on to the course. I was going to do OK, but we all knew we were destined to work nearby at Heathrow Airport or the local warehouses like our parents. Many of us were already working part-time at the airport, careers mapped out before we had even finished school. Towards the end of our last year at school, my most eccentric friend, ‘Vicomte de Valmont’, as he liked to be called back then owing to his obsession with the film *Dangerous Liaisons*, encouraged me to go to an open day with him at the highly prestigious Slade School, University College London. We didn’t know it at the time, but decadence awaited us: Bloomsbury squares and all of their hallowed architecture; blossom on the trees and blue plaques everywhere with names we’d never heard of. The feeling was beautiful, even though we understood it was on the other side of a piece of glass we would never be able to break or fracture with our fists. Beyond that glass was Graham Sutherland, Lucien Freud and Roger Fry, Dora Carrington, Ithell Colquhoun, Paula Rego, Stanley Spencer, Mona Hatoum and Rachel Whiteread. Others had brought their portfolios – we brought nothing but our attention and ill-informed curiosity. Our art teacher had taught us precisely nothing, simply prioritising more important things like smoking a fag or eating crisps round the corner in the room where the pottery kiln was housed. I’m surprised he didn’t spontaneously combust or explode, just like all the other things that went near that kiln. We listened to a talk about one of the Slade’s most famous graduates, the post-impressionist British artist Gwen John. Despite being currently enrolled on an A level in Art and Design, we’d never heard of John so we just gazed up at the pictures from the projector. We lolled back in our seats and whispered to each other, complaining, albeit half-heartedly, of hunger or boredom. We had no point of reference for John’s *Landscape at Tenby* (1896–1897) or *A Corner of the Artist’s Room in Paris* (1907–1909). Deprived of the cultural means through which to understand any of the subject matter, I felt myself fall into the folds of the paintings and they settled and glimmered inside my body, making odd shapes and whispering in gentle harmonies, while the colonial voices inside me nodded and simultaneously criticised John’s use of texture, her affected placement of a chair, her choice of medium (oils). I tried to touch the face of John’s portrait of a little girl who stared lovingly at her mother as they walked along the shore at Tenby, fascinated by her gaze. Then, ‘Vicomte’ grabbed my hand and squeezed it, announcing he had had enough. We bid farewell to the other students (because we were raised to have manners) and then legged it to KFC for lunch. My friend takes a photo of me with his imaginary camera: ‘Girl in Bloomsbury, 1997’. Which was better, the KFC or Gwen John? One thing sated an immediate hunger, while the other gave me the taste of something new that would last a lifetime. A few years later, we both graduated, him in a black velvet suit and me with my hair down and two little ‘horns’ pinned up, in a bold homage to the hairdo made popular at the time by ‘Scary Spice’. The Fates spoke to me, as much as they spoke through Malika’s lips. As a joke, I once predicted that a girl called Rajinder was going to marry at nineteen and have many children. I repeated this information to her face. It wasn’t much of a prediction, but she was highly offended. We all knew it to be true, but to speak it aloud as an insult deeply disturbed her. While I had hoped to cheat my own fate, Rajinder would not be able to, and neither would most of my school friends. The laughter, the kissing of the teeth, was a rebuttal of the highest order, emboldened by what I don’t know, fate, perhaps. Failing to produce her homework on Coleridge’s ‘The Nightingale’, Malika simply shrugged and made an abject sound which, once and for all, told the Fates to fuck off. I never forgot the laughter that followed before Malika was sent outside the classroom. She was still laughing in the corridor, blowing a crappy bubble with the Juicy Fruit gum she turned in her mouth. Perhaps she had simply meant to blow a bubble instead of making that slow tutting sound. A couple of years later she was thrown in jail overnight for defending her little brother in the playground, attacking a teacher in the blind fury of it all. Promising to be good, she enrolled herself at Ealing Tertiary College, admittedly a step up from Hayes Manor, and then trained as a nursery school teacher. I like to think of her laughing with a smirk on her face, because she always knew her own mind and I admired that. ‘Knowing your own mind’ isn’t as easy as it sounds. Remember, you also have to know your own body. Malika knew who to fight for and she would never stop, body and mind. I had broken the rules of space and time and someone had to pay. I should never have escaped my fate (or indeed, for that matter, the UK’s ‘unhappiest town’). My friend had kissed her teeth at the Fates, but it was me who had defied them most of all. They were seething. I was sitting in the imaginary halls of Brideshead as an academic, being paid good money to talk about art and revolution, beauty and desire. Even before I had sat in halls at Kings College, Cambridge, about to give a paper in the French department as a research student, I had somehow ended up at one of those notoriously posh summer balls at St John’s College, Cambridge, thanks to a friend I had met while temping in Uxbridge (we’re still friends). I had betrayed my ancestors and was wearing the sheep’s clothing of a person I had invented and then become through sheer willpower. Then, a plague arrived in my fortieth year and the laughter got louder and louder in my head. I found myself living in rural England, the furthest out of London I had ever been, where the slumping, weather-worn cows made their archaic, baseline bellowing in the cornfields outside my house while all of the world shut all of its doors. My *Padaung* ancestors returned the brass coils to their necks and tried to elevate themselves, higher up my body, near my vocal cords, but still they could not get out. A midwife once told me babies tend to turn towards their mother’s heartbeat in utero if they sense she is distressed and now my ancestors were doing the same thing, their little heads turning, turning, trying to hear my bloodlines crackle and hiss, which were also their bloodlines crackling and hissing. They touched their necks and prayed. I couldn’t hear them because their voices still sounded like they were at the bottom of a well. Another prayed for me too. From the very lips of Saint Sidwella came a call to arms, a loving gesture. She tried to keep me in the living world where the fritillary butterflies landed on pink valerian, sow thistles, nettles; where the ragged foxes slid under yesterday’s blooms deep, deeper still, beneath the newly shorn, blunted hedgerows, the widening shade of the cedars and the elms. Spring arrived and her stalking shadow came by, approaching me from the fields outside my house, her eyes wide discs of light that dazzled and shone, as silvery as the dew on the grass, flecked with their rolling, blinking moisture. She was holding her head in her hands – her voice emanating from the thin spaces between her fingers, which were illuminated with a pure and intense light. This, too, I could not accept because I was no longer there. I was under the spell of my computer screen’s bewitching, myopic gaze. I heard laughter again from behind the screen I was working on and then all of a sudden the world around me altered from black to blue, to blue to black, and back again. Or, more accurately, all was aglow beneath shifting shades of *blue light*. Soon, I would learn that the blue light was the colour of an explosion on a battlefield, as my ancestors and the Fates fought to the bitter end, thrashing and gripping each other by the neck, surrounded by an impenetrable ring of blue flames. Whatever it was, it was inside and it was outside. It pulled me in all directions. My body, a battleground. There was no time to talk, yet talking was all I did. The words pulsed and thrummed with their own persistent beat, burning bright blue and vermillion behind my eyes and ears. White noise, blue terror. Saint Sidwella was still calling me out to the fields, but I didn’t listen so she called upon the rain. The water flowed, the water rose. The floods came, as they always did in these parts of the country where I lived, but I was already under the waterline, inside the streams of data, which were churning out of the technological hell hole I was in – and all that world was aflame. The water, which ran off the floodplains and the moors further north and south of my house, couldn’t put the flames out, nor diminish the scripts of smoke that were rising from my own fingers. The smoke was my past, present and future on fire. Like Saint Sidwella, I found myself with my head in my hands and I was floating in the light of a thousand Zoom meetings. I watched all of my edges and ends being cut away. That bitterly persistent feeling of falling, or being folded, so that I would fit perfectly inside the stammering lines upon lines of those ever expanding, scrolling rivers in the sky. [Davina Quinlivan’s Loving GazeThe Shalimar author’s new memoir explores her working-class childhood and Anglo-Burmese heritage. She talks to Richard Benson about the art of imaginative memoir”, growing up near Heathrow airport, how to be present and what makes modern work rubbish![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/icon/favicon-17.png)The BeeRichard Benson![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/thumbnail/davina-quinlivan-interview.jpg)](https://thebeemagazine.com/davina-quinlivans-loving-gaze/) --- 1\. Freely available [here](https://files.ofsted.gov.uk/v1/file/763669?ref=thebeemagazine.com) --- [Tip the Bee](https://thebeemagazine.com/#/portal/support) All donations go towards supporting the Bee’s mission to nurture, publish promote and pay for the best new working-class writing. ### When We’re Smiling URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/when-were-smiling/ Last updated: 2025-12-28T01:00:09.000Z When we started the Bee, we wanted to use photographs showing working-class people with a range of emotions, and not the black-and-white sullenness many documentary photographers seem to look for in working-class areas. We love how [@carminarip](https://www.instagram.com/carminarip/?ref=thebeemagazine.com)’s pictures capture glimpses of smiles, grins and laughter in day-to-day settings, so we asked her to help us celebrate the festive season with some of her favourite moments of everyday joy. “What makes people smile? It must often be other people,” she tells us. “But taking people’s photographs has taught me something else. “When I take the pictures, I talk to them about their lives, and when they start telling me about themselves, that’s often when they relax and smile. I think it’s partly being allowed to talk about themselves and what they do that makes them smile, because people don't get that chance much do they? That applies across all ages as well. “When we’re talking I find that time slows right down, somehow. I really try to make a photo that encapsulates that little moment “It’s nice to be noticed, and just to be listened to for a bit, isn’t it?” ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/12/carmina-ripolles-smile-1.jpg) **1 Women at the Window** What I like about this picture is that, looking at it, you might think all the women in the picture, including me, knew each other, but we didn’t. I’d just met the three women looking through the window of this pub as I was contemplating how I’d be received if I went in and started taking pictures. In fact, they encouraged me to do it (that’s why they’re looking through the window). The woman counting her change didn’t know the woman waving at the three women outside, who in turn didn’t know the women she was waving at! We all came together in a happy mix. I think there’s a lot of humanity in it; it’s a natural impulse to wave and smile, even at strangers. By the end we all felt like we knew each other anyway. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/12/carmina-ripolles-smile-2.jpg) **2 Father and Daughter** I’d first met this man on the clifftop, where he was walking alone, barefoot in the grass on the most beautiful of summer days. I took his picture because he was so striking, and then he told me his wife and child were down on the beach, and asked if I could photograph them as well. I loved how proud he was at showing off his little girl, and I liked how bossy she was – understandably, she didn’t care about the photo at all, she just wanted her father to stop talking to this strange person and play with her in the sand. I think he really wanted the moment captured, though. I felt he was conscious of how lucky he was to be there, on that summer day with the people he loved most in the world, and it seemed almost natural that someone should just happen to be there to document that joy. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/12/carmina-ripolles-smile-3.jpg) **3 The Christmas Jumpers** There’s a café in Bridlington which I like because it’s open every day; they have the longest menu I’ve ever seen (which I know isn’t always a good thing, but sometimes it is), and they let dogs in. So I often go in hoping to find a photogenic dog sitting at a table, but that day, just before Xmas, I met the cleaner and an amorous punter. I got the feeling they weren’t actually a couple before I took the pictures, but by the end of my time with them I definitely decided they might be. She was so cheerful, festively dashing around the tables, wiping the surfaces, and he was just happy to have her around. There was a lot of flirting and innuendo, and I was happy to encourage it. There was a lovely little spark between them, which I like to think was ignited by my shutter clicking. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/12/carmina-ripolles-smile-4.jpg) **4 Woman Looking at a Red Dress in a Window** This was a quick shot because the woman was smiling to herself and I didn’t want to miss it. Her dog looking at her reminded me of Walt Disney’s Cinderella, and I imagined the dog turning into the coach driver to take her to the ball in the red dress. Of course, I didn’t mention any of that when I spoke to the woman. She said she thought it was a beautiful dress, and added she’d love to wear something like that, but in reality never would. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/12/carmina-ripolles-smile-5.jpg) **5 Northern Soul** I took this at one of the monthly Northern Soul nights in Hornsea, where I live. My eldest brother, who knows a thing or two about Northern Soul, had warned me old soulies can be very protective of their scene, and might not welcome me taking my camera, but he couldn’t have been more wrong. They were very welcoming and proud, and they were keen for me to photograph them dancing. This is a portrait, though, and one of my favourites. There was his whole Northern Soul history in ink on his forearms, and while that became the focus of the picture, I think his face tells you what a great night he was having. He was dressed up, with his people, and dancing to the music he’s loved all his life – that’s going to make any man smile. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/12/carmina-ripolles-smile-6.jpg) **6 The Girl and the Moon** It was January when I met this girl with her friend, on one of those clear, pink-skied winter evenings that you know will bring frost. Although you can’t see it too well in the photo, the moon was massive and seemed to pearlise everything. I thought she was such a beautiful girl, and her clothes were of the same hues as the sky, so it was almost as though she was meant to be photographed there. Her friend was less confident, and when I sent them both the pictures later – which looked so happy – she asked not to have her picture shown anywhere. It felt a very serene moment on the beach on that cold, crisp night, and I love how enigmatic she looks in this picture. I did think when I left them, though, that if I’d been her mother I’d have begged her to have worn a coat! It was January on the east coast after all – and it may have been magical, but it was nithering! ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/12/carmina-ripolles-smile-7.jpg) **7 A Smile is Just a Frown Turned Upside Down** It was at a country music tribute festival when the rain came down so hard, and, as they say in country parlance, "like a cow pissin’ on a flat rock". It was all a bit overwhelming. Adults, let alone children, looked like they didn’t quite know how to handle their emotions. This little girl was swept up by her mum and she really didn’t know whether to cry or laugh. Shania Twain (aka Nicola Marie Harris) had been brought to a sudden, fizzling end by the deluge. It really was a matter of whether you laughed or cried. I think the girl wanted to laugh and smile at the camera, like the rest of her family, but that frown refused to turn upside down and the result was a face as stormy as the weather. However, if you look just to the right you can see her friend was managing to see the funny side, and with a little bit of cajoling I think in the end she managed that too. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/12/carmina-ripolles-smile-8.jpg) **8 Ladies (and dog) in Christmas Outfits** I assume that a conversation had taken place between these three friends where it was decided that they should all dress in Xmas costumes for their meet-up that morning. I think the lady in red and fur probably made the call. Elf lady was very keen, I reckon, but I think the lady in the black coat and reindeer antlers probably needed a bit more convincing, and I’m sure me walking past with a camera was the very last thing she had on her Christmas list. I think the dog had a cataract, so he’s looking at the world through a semi-opaque lens anyway, and seemed quite happy to be photographed – I would say he’s almost smiling, in fact. The whole ensemble makes me smile. It was just one of those funny moments that, without a camera, you’d probably notice but just walk past, or continue to think about how to make parsnips taste nice. I was just happy to catch it, and at least three-quarters of the group look happy to have their moment documented. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/12/carmina-ripolles-smile-9.jpg) **9 North Face** There’s a small underpass in my town that runs underneath a little section of the Pennine Way, and that day, as I was walking my dog, I bumped into a group of kids there. They were just hanging around, listening to music and fooling about amidst the knob graffiti and puddles of pee, as you do in an underpass. They were really interested in the camera I was holding, and they were really up for having photos taken. This is the generation who take photos of themselves all the time, so it was heartwarming to see how thrilled they were to have pictures taken by someone else with a camera that didn’t look like a phone. They weren’t at all self-conscious and just naturally fell into happy, sassy posing. This girl had startling blond hair and I thought the contrast of that with the dark tunnel worked well in black and white. They were all so excited to see the pictures – you’d have thought they’d never had a photo taken before. They were very sweet and I felt happy to have made them feel happy. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/12/carmina-ripolles-smile-10.jpg) **10 The Aunties** I met one of the older ladies in this picture outside a toilet block on a very hot day, and I asked to take her portrait against the blue sky. I didn’t realise that she was waiting for the rest of her family: her sister and their niece and nephew. When they came out, they were surprised to see her having an impromptu photo shoot with a stranger. The nephew was particularly amused, and also slightly embarrassed by this, but the aunties were so excited and insisted that he and his sister pose for a family portrait. They were so good-natured about it, but I did feel sympathy for the boy – my own son is mortified at the thought of me taking pictures of strangers and won’t let me anywhere near him with my camera – but this lad and his sister smiled dutifully and showed real affection for their aunties, who had taken them over to Bridlington from West Yorkshire for the day. I think having it recorded was quite special for them. It felt like it meant a lot, that day out for them together, so I was pleased I caught a fleeting moment of it as a little souvenir. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/12/carmina-ripolles-smile-11.jpg) **11 The Christmas Kiss** So here they are again, but in this shot I think the camera turned into mistletoe and emboldened him to give her a smacker on the lips, which to me looks well received. I love a happy ending, and there’s so much Christmas fun in this one. I like to think of them still dancing round the tables, splashing cleaning fluid together and stealing kisses. --- [Tip the Bee](https://thebeemagazine.com/#/portal/support) All donations go towards supporting the Bee’s mission to nurture, publish promote and pay for the best new working-class writing. ### How I Ruined a Middle-Class Christmas URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/how-i-ruined-a-middle-class-christmas/ Last updated: 2025-12-23T18:10:08.000Z All heads swung in my direction. My fiancé’s mother threw a hand to her mouth to stifle a shriek. I found Tom’s face and saw my own horror reflected back at me. There was no getting away from it. I’d ruined Christmas. ### 24 hours earlier “A pavlova on Christmas Eve? Are you serious?” Tom laughed at me. “Deadly. She’ll be in the kitchen right now laying the finishing touches.” He flicked on the windscreen wipers just as a light snow started to fall over the sleepy village of Bourton-on-the-Water. We were en route to my soon-to-be in-laws, where we would stay until Boxing Day for our first Christmas as an engaged couple. And my first away from my family in Wales in 29 years. “We’ve had a pavlova every year for as long as I can remember.” “I don’t think I tasted my first pavlova until I moved to England. Christmas Eve is all about the sausage rolls in our house.” Every year, in the days leading up to Christmas, my mother would hole up in the kitchen, immersing herself in flour, pastry and sausage meat. Finally emerging with enough sausage rolls to see us through to the end of January. We’d store them in the second freezer along with the obligatory two turkeys, because Christmas was a time for too much of everything. It was a time for going very determinedly over the top. Normal service would be strictly maintained right up until the streetlamps came on on the 24th of December. At which point my parents would fling open the cupboards and unleash gluttony. And we always started with several mountains of hot sausage rolls, bowls of crisps, and a side helping of pickled onions. “Oh yeah, I told my mum about the sausage rolls,” Tom said. “She’s got you some, I think.” “That’s really sweet, thank you.” Guilt tugged at me. My parents had been understanding when I’d told them I’d be spending Christmas with Tom’s family this year. And to be fair, it was about time. But that wasn’t the real source of my guilt. Truth be told, I’d been secretly looking forward to a chocolate-box Christmas. With my family, I was an anomaly, the one who went away to university and never truly came home. With Tom’s family, I was Laura, a clever grown-up with a Master's Degree and a Waitrose clubcard. Tom’s family had accepted me as one of their number the minute I met them. There’d never been a hint of judgement about my brash accent or the council estate I grew up on. I mean, they’d never seen it, but they didn’t need to. Hard as I tried to blend in, there were plenty of clues that cropped up to give me away. Like when Tom told me about the time he’d gone to school without his dinner money, and his mother had driven there to drop it off. I’d always had free school meals, and my mother worked at my school as a dinner lady, so I’d had no such problems. The first time our parents met, I braced so hard I nearly shat myself. We’d gone for Sunday lunch at a rustic pub on the English side of the border. My dad baulked when they brought his fish and chips on a wooden board, then proceeded to complain about the portion sizes for the whole of the meal. Leaving a restaurant still hungry was up there with the worst things that could happen to someone in my family. When you ate out, you expected to come away well over the sated threshold, and safe in the knowledge that you’d got your money’s worth. I’ve never shaken this one, if I’m honest. Tom took me to a fine dining restaurant when we first started dating, and I hated every minute of it. I didn’t care whether he could afford it. It just seemed absurd to me to spend the cost of a small holiday on a series of delicate, if beautifully presented mouthfuls that didn’t fill you up. My mother nudged my father in the ribs to get him to shut up about the fish and chips, quietly whispering, *We’ll get something on the way home*. My father clapped back that they shouldn’t have to, *especially at this price*, and I nearly died. The front door burst open while we were still crunching up the gravel drive. “Darlings!” “Hi Wendy,” I said as Tom was enveloped in a beige poncho. “Come in, come in. Dad’s just getting started on the mulled wine.” We stepped into the warmth, with the spicy scent of wine stewing, and the melodious tones of Nat King Cole presiding. Their Laura Ashley home was scattered with tasteful twinkles and bursts of colour. The fire in the lounge was roaring, a few feet away from a Nordmann fir that was perfectly coordinated in smatterings of silver and gold. We always went full pine in my parents' house. But it wasn’t until I reached my teens that I realised people usually bought their trees, as opposed to “collecting” one from the woods on the edge of the estate. And my mother would let our collective creativity play full out when we decorated our tree. Colour coordination be damned. That’s not what Christmas was about. Tom’s father handed us each a glass of mulled wine, and Wendy placed two glasses on the mantlepiece next to a brass urn. “Merry Christmas, Mum and Dad,” she said, and we raised a glass to Tom’s deceased grandparents. I thought of my own grandmother, still living independently in a flat on the estate. *Don’t you dare put me in a vase*, she’s always said. *And don’t bury me with your grandfather either. Sixty years with that old bastard was more than enough.* When the time comes, we’ll scatter her to the four winds so she can roam the earth like the free spirit she was always meant to be. “Dinner will be ready in a few minutes. Laura, would you help me lay the table?” Wendy asked. Dinner? It hadn’t occurred to me that we’d be having a sit-down meal. I’d been expecting a free-for-all. Come to think of it, it was dark outside, the streetlamps were on, but when I looked around my soon-to-be-in-laws' living room, I saw no snacks. Just a bowl of nuts on the mantlepiece, and an unopened box of Thorntons chocolates underneath the coffee table. Where was the tin of Quality Street? The biscuits, the tinned ham, the mince pies nobody ate? I snuck a glance at Tom as if he might have some answers, but he just threw me a gormless smile. “Oh, I’ve got some exciting news!” Wendy said as she laid a Spode dinner plate on top of a gold-coloured charger. “I spoke to Annette last week. She said she can get you in at the Abbey for the wedding.” “The Abbey?” “And they’ve just got their licence for the new arch, so you’ll have the option of holding the ceremony in the garden. Weather permitting.” “Oh, erm, we weren’t planning on –” “More wine?” Tom’s father shouted from the hallway. “I’m good, thanks, David,” I shouted back. “Oh! Glasses,” said Wendy, and she bolted out of the dining room in the direction of the kitchen. Wendy had been dead set on the Abbey since Tom and I got engaged. She and David married there, and it’s now the place to tie the knot if you are a certain sort of person. The sort of person who wears a Dry Robe and drives a Range Rover. But I’d had my heart set on a venue back in Wales. A little place by the river, not far from where I grew up. Far enough away that I wouldn’t have to worry about my friends seeing where I actually grew up, but close enough that my parents wouldn’t think I’d abandoned my origins. We sat down to dinner, and I filed the wedding venue away for future me to deal with. Wendy served up a delicious gammon, followed by the famous pavlova. After dinner, we all helped clear up before settling down in front of the TV. As the starting credits of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang rolled, I wondered whether there were to be any snacks in my near future. I wasn’t exactly hungry, but my stomach didn’t hurt yet, and everyone knows that Christmas Eve is for grazing until you wish you were dead. I gave Tom the side-eye in the hope that my thoughts would somehow transmit to him, and he’d go to the kitchen to crack open some biscuits. Once again, he just smiled back and kissed me on the head before re-settling his attention on the movie. It wasn’t until an hour or so into Chitty Chitty Bang Bang that Tom’s father reached for the Thorntons. Hallelujah! It was a huge box. One of those family-sized ones. He unwrapped the cellophane with his eyes still on the TV, took a chocolate, then placed the box on the coffee table. Tom took a chocolate first, then Wendy. I wondered whether I should wait to be invited, but it didn’t happen. So, after about half a minute, I lunged forward and took two chocolates. An orange truffle and a chocolate-coated fudge. I lobbed the sorange truffle into the back of my mouth and swallowed without really tasting. Then I bit the fudge in half and savoured the rich, fluffy centre as the milk chocolate coating melted on my tongue. I popped the second half into my mouth and immediately reached for a third chocolate. “Slow down, Nelly!” Tom’s father said as he picked up the giant box, replaced the lid and settled it on a side table. Tom laughed and pulled me in for a cuddle. At first, I was mortified, but I soon switched to rage. Who opens a box of chocolates and only eats one or two before replacing the lid? And on Christmas Eve, no less? Were these people sociopaths? “Oh! I forgot the sausage rolls,” Wendy said. Thank Christ. Wendy eased herself off the sofa and disappeared into the kitchen, returning moments later holding a bag of 50 frozen sausage rolls. “I hope these are the ones you like?” My first thought was, are there going to be enough for all of us? But it was far, far worse than I could ever have imagined. Because when the cooked sausage rolls appeared 20 minutes later, Wendy carried them in on a saucer. A saucer. I counted the sausage rolls. Five. There were four of us, who the hell was the fifth one for? No doubt that one was just for show. Doomed to languish on the saucer for the rest of the evening because everyone would be too polite to take it. Right at that moment, my family would be gorging themselves while I was pondering the politics of a singular sausage roll. It was worse than having tapas with people you don’t know that well. That one sausage roll sat there for 15 minutes. Everyone else gave their attention to the movie while I kept one eye on the lonely snack. When Tom’s father picked it up and popped it into his mouth, I wasn’t sure I’d ever hated anyone so much. When the movie finished, Tom went to get the rest of our bags from the car, and his parents went off to start their nighttime routines. Naturally, I took the opportunity to slide over to the tree to squeeze a few presents. Squeezing gifts was a serious sport in our house. Over the years, we’d wrapped our gifts in increasingly ludicrous shapes with the intention of causing as much confusion and discomfort as possible to those receiving them. Obvious gifts like slippers and selection boxes were cast aside early. But the challenge of guessing the big ones was a source of exquisite torture in the days leading up to Christmas. And not a millimetre of Sellotape was spared, sealing any gaps that would otherwise fall prey to prying fingers. I picked up a shiny blue parcel with my name on it. *To Laura, Love Wendy & David xx.* I pressed my fingers into the wrapping, delighting in the crackle of the paper. “What are you doing?” Tom’s dad lunged toward me and swiped the gift from my hands. “That’s for tomorrow.” Tom came back in carrying a bag of gifts from the car. “I caught this one sneaking about by the presents,” David said, nodding at me. Tom laughed. “She does that.” Hot shame spread up my chest and into my cheeks. I’d thought everyone did. “You okay?” Tom asked me as we got into bed. “You seemed a bit quiet tonight.” “Oh yeah, I’m fine.” I wasn’t sure how to put it. Your family are weird, and they do Christmas wrong? He sat up in bed. “What’s the matter?” “It’s just. Your family do Christmas Eve differently to mine.” “I know,” he laughed. “Our families are *very* different.” Whatever he meant by that, it stung. “What do you mean?” “Well, when we have dinner at yours, your mum pours my gravy for me.” “She does that when she’s dishing up.” My mother always put the gravy on everyone’s meals along with the rest of the food. “She’s always done it.” “I know, I’m not criticising.” Then why did it feel like he was? “I just mean, your family are generally a bit more –” he paused to think of the word, “– rambunctious”. “Rambunctious?” “Oh, come on, Laur.” The first time Tom met my parents, my father announced that he could start relaxing whenever he liked because there were *no airs and graces in this house*. In fact, my father appeared to go out of his way to show Tom that he didn’t care what others thought of him. From then on, his usual brash self always got that little bit brasher when Tom was around. “Okay, my family might be a bit loud.” But at least they’re not boring. “Sorry Laur, I didn’t mean to upset you. I just mean, yes, our families are different.” He pulled me down under the duvet and kissed me. “I love them, though. They gave you to the world.” I smiled and kissed him back. Then I curled up next to him and tried to shake the feeling that Christmas was happening somewhere else without me. We woke the following morning to the smell of bacon wafting under the bedroom door, and David’s voice hurtling up the stairs. “Come on, you two. Breakfast’s almost ready.” “Breakfast?” I asked Tom. “Yeah. You’ve got to start Christmas day with a full English,” he announced as he climbed into yesterday’s jeans. What fresh hell was this? A full English breakfast on Christmas Day? We were supposed to start with presents. Then float around drinking cups of tea all morning while our stomachs groaned in preparation for Christmas lunch. If you really needed to eat something, you could have a bit of toast and some Quality Street – but a full bloody English? I sent a quick text to my family WhatsApp group, *Merry Christmas! Missing you all xx,* before padding downstairs in my pyjamas and joining Tom in the kitchen with his parents. “Merry Christmas!” Wendy sang at me. She was halfway through turning some sausages, while her husband piled French toast onto a plate. “Would you two mind carrying some of this into the dining room?” She gestured with a spatula to a row of tureens overflowing with bacon, scrambled eggs, plum tomatoes, hash browns, and black pudding. I sidled up to Tom as we laid the tureens out on the meticulous dining table. “Won’t this go cold while we open the presents?” “We don’t open the presents ‘til later.” “What? How much later?” “Sometime after Christmas dinner.” *Sometime* after Christmas dinner? Before I could say anything more, his father followed us with the French toast and a tureen full of spitting hot sausages. My phone pinged, and I broke polite protocol to pick it up at the dining table. “Sorry, that’s probably my lot.” My family had sent me a group photo of them gathered around a mountain of discarded wrapping paper. Aside from my brother, who had been tasked with taking the selfie, each person in the photo was holding up a piece of treasure. My mother was holding what I guessed to be the Red Letter Day spa vouchers we’d clubbed together to get her. My father held up a Timberland jumper. My little sister was sitting next to her boyfriend, showing off a ring on her right hand with a rock to rival my engagement ring. I winced. I knew that ring likely cost way more than they could afford, but that seemed to be the way of my clan – breaking the bank to buy your loved ones that thing they’ve had their eye on all year, no matter the dent it made or the length of time you’d have to spend paying it off. Christmas meant going to figurative Disneyland for the day. Peeking through the wardrobe into Narnia and grabbing as much Turkish delight as you could get your hands on. “Pass the bacon, Tom.” His father nodded over at the pile next to Tom’s plate. “So, I hear we’ve got the Abbey for the wedding.” I put the phone away. “Yeah, mum told me,” Tom said, handing over the tureen. I looked sideways at my fiancé. He’d known? “Well, I mean, it’s an option,” I said. Even though it wasn’t. “Now, we know the Abbey is probably more than you were planning to spend,” David added. “But your mother and I have discussed it.” He looked over at Wendy, who was beaming from ear to ear. “And we’d like to pay.” My jaw dropped. “Oh, that’s very kind but-” “I won’t hear any objections.” His father waved a hand in my direction. “It’s done.” “Dad, that’s amazing,” Tom said. Wendy raised a glass. “To the both of you.” Tom and his father joined in to clink glasses. “That’s really kind, but the thing is, we were thinking of having the wedding in Wales,” I said. Wendy’s face fell. David looked confused. “But we’ve got so much family here, Laura. I don’t think they’ll be able to travel that far.” Wendy said. “the Abbey has wonderful accommodation attached. And if it helps, we’re happy to contribute to your parents’ room.” “They can afford their own room, Wendy,” I said. Silence descended on breakfast. I picked at a hash brown, seething and dumbfounded all at once. I tried to imagine my gran in the Abbey. Jesus wept, it didn’t bear thinking about. Tom facilitated a swift change of subject, and we spent the rest of breakfast dissecting the internal politics down at the village hall. Apparently, there’d been some challenge from the committee about the upcoming am dram programme, and Majorie Green was up in arms over some raffle controversy; was it fair to allow the same person to win twice in the same evening? Meanwhile, I was questioning whether Tom had always been tied to his mother’s apron strings, and would she insist on naming our first child, too. I pulled Tom into the downstairs toilet as we collectively cleared the breakfast plates. “What are you doing?” He asked, balancing a mug in one hand and three stacked Spode pieces in the other. “You knew they’d booked the Abbey?” “No, I –” A greasy fork slid off the stack and clattered to the floor. He set the mug down on the toilet seat and reached down to collect the errant fork. “No, I knew she’d been talking about it, but I didn’t know it was a done deal.” “Well, apparently it is.” I folded my arms in the small space. “Why didn’t you say anything?” “I didn’t want to hurt their feelings. They’re both really excited about it.” “It’s our wedding.” “I know, I know. We’ll figure something out. Can we just leave it for today, though?” The fork slid off again. “Oh, for fuck’s sake.” I bent down to retrieve it. “Fine. But I am not getting married at the Abbey.” We left the toilet and joined Wendy and David in the kitchen. I scraped the leftovers into the compost bin, and Tom started loading the plates into the dishwasher. David was busy peeling vegetables while Wendy basted the bird. I handed Tom the plates I’d finished scraping and looked around for something to do. “Wendy, do you want a hand with the turkey?” I asked. David started laughing. “What?” “It’s a goose, darling,” Wendy said with a smile. “You’ve never seen a goose before, Laura?” David asked. Tom slid an arm around my waist. “Leave her alone, Dad.” “I just thought it was a turkey, I didn’t look that closely.” My cheeks burned. What kind of a person doesn’t get a turkey at Christmas? A message from my mother landed in the group chat. *How’s it going, Laur? What did you get? Xx* I replied, *Not sure yet. We’re going to open the presents later xx* The presents were the main event in our house, but Tom’s family just didn’t seem that bothered. It was as though the gifts were just a nice-to-have, a little token to sweeten the day, as opposed to the thing you looked forward to the most. The day you finally got those shoes you could never afford to buy yourself, or the watch you’d been eyeing up for months. You’d start with the stockings, before moving on to the medium-sized presents under the tree. And finally, the big event: The Main Present. The thing you’d been leaving clues about all year round, and you knew you were getting, but there was still a chance that you might not, which made it all the more wonderfully excruciating. Perhaps if I’d been more prepared, I would have found it easier to adjust. If I’d known in advance that the pavlova would be the least of my worries, I would have tempered my expectations. But it felt like the horror was being unfolded on a need-to-know basis, and I was being strung along for someone else’s amusement. We sat through the King’s speech while weeks of bottled Christmas excitement fizzled. Then dinner was served on more Spode, and the conversation turned once more to the wedding. “So, I was thinking about the colour scheme,” Wendy said. Fuck no. “Erm,” I started. “We’ve already decided-” “I think blue and pink go beautifully together. Don’t you think so, Laura?” “Well, actually-” “Mum, Laura’s already decided on some colours.” “Well, it’s not just Laura’s wedding.” She said it with a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. This was something I’d never get used to. The way people with money danced around conflict, handing out barbs wrapped in candy floss. With my family, you’d never say something with a smile when you actually meant fuck off. We said what we meant, and we meant things times eleven. The first time Tom saw me argue with my brother, he thought we were about to have a punch-up. But within an hour, we were laughing over an old rerun of The Young Ones, and all was forgotten. I poured myself some wine, deciding it was the only way to get through the meal. I swallowed the first sip, and it tasted so sweet, like apricots and honey. “Oh, Tom.” Wendy’s singsong voice was really starting to grate. “Amber and Seb have asked if they can bring the children and their plus ones to the wedding. I told them that would be fine, I hope that’s okay.” “Mum, Will and Ed are in their twenties. And I’ve never even met their plus ones.” “Yes, but you can squeeze them in, can’t you?” Wendy asked. “No. We only invited Seb and Amber out of politeness.” I took another gulp of the wine, then topped up my glass. Fuck it, it’s Christmas. “But they’re my cousins.” Wendy’s voice cracked like a child who’d just been told she couldn’t have an ice cream. I’d never even heard of Seb and Amber until we started working on the guest list. *They’re my mum’s cousins. No, I haven’t seen them in years*. I took another gulp of the wine. Christ, it was delicious. I’d never tasted wine like it. “Why don’t we ask Annette if there’s space?” Tom’s father chimed in. “It’s got nothing to do with Annette,” Tom said. “But this is the only chance I’ll ever have to be mother of the groom. I want it to be perfect.” “Could we just leave it for today? Please?” Tom asked. Nobody spoke for a minute or so. We sat there picking at our food to the sound of classical music. What was wrong with a bit of Frosty the Snowman anyway? Why was I spending Christmas in a John Lewis advert? Meanwhile, my head was starting to get fuzzy. This wine was strong. “Cracker, anyone?” Wendy lifted the peace offering and held it out to the middle of the table. Tom pasted on a smile and reached for the other end. His dad followed suit and extended his cracker to me. Then we all cheered as crêpe paper hats, bad jokes, and miniature gifts exploded over the table. I lifted my glass and noticed I’d emptied another one. Christ, this stuff was going down like pop. I reached for the bottle. “How much of that have you had?” Tom asked. “A few. Why?” “That’s dessert wine,” Wendy said. “Well, it’s gorgeous,” I replied. “You’re supposed to sip it,” said Tom. “Why?” “It’s 20% alcohol.” Oh piss. That would explain why I could see two Toms. One of the Toms poured me some water from a jug in the centre of the table. “You’ve never had dessert wine before, Laura?” David asked. “No, I haven’t, Dave. There’s not much of it knocking about on the estate.” “Well, I’ll just go and get dessert.” Wendy said, adding, “The pudding, I mean.” Tom got up to help his mother, and I decided to use the break in proceedings to use the toilet. There was just one problem. In order to get to the downstairs toilet, you had to go past the lounge. So, what happened next, really, was to be expected. The fire in the lounge was roaring, the gentle spit and crackle of the flames beckoning me from the doorway. Last night’s mulled wine was still sitting next to the urn above the fireplace, looking wasteful. I tiptoed into the room and found my target, lying there all shiny and inviting right at the foot of the Nordmann fir. The muffled sounds of Tom conversing with his mother floated out of the kitchen, and the clattering of dishes in the dining room told me that David was occupied in there. I probably had about five minutes before I was discovered. I padded over to the tree, knelt down, and flicked through the name tags until I found one with my name on it. An oblong-shaped parcel covered in gold wrapping. I squeezed it, freezing at the crackling sound lest I give away my location, but the clattering and the muffled voices remained where they were. I applied a little more pressure to the parcel. It was something soft on a hard surface. A book wrapped up with a scarf, perhaps? I ran my fingers along the tape and found a gap, just big enough for a finger to slide through. Rookie mistake. Clearly, this present had been wrapped by someone who hadn’t grown up around curious hands. I slipped my index finger inside and brushed soft fur. Any further and I’d tear the paper. “Laura!” I whipped my head up to see Tom standing in the doorway. I threw the parcel down, tearing it open in the process. I froze. “What are you –, that’s not yours.” “What?” I looked down at the now torn parcel, purple fur bulging out of the gap I’d just made. “That’s not for you. It’s for one of my cousins. They’re coming tomorrow.” “But.” I picked up the label. Oh shit. It was addressed to someone called Lorna. “Come on, get up before they notice.” Tom pushed the damaged parcel underneath some of its fellows, and I scrambled to get to my feet. But I was tipsy from the wine and disoriented by embarrassment. I lost my balance and instinctively grabbed the nearest thing to steady myself. The Nordmann fir. The next thing I knew, I was falling sideways, pulling the tree with me. I collided with the cream floor as the tree came crashing down next to me, scattering its needles all over the carpet. Then I saw it, and my stomach flipped into my throat. Lying there, spread across the carpet, were the ashes of Tom’s grandparents. Swiped off the mantlepiece by the top of the falling fir. Footsteps came down the hallway, and Wendy and David appeared next to a stricken Tom. Wendy stifled a scream with her hand. Holy shit, no. Tom and David ran to help me up. Tom asked if I was okay, and I barely nodded in response. Then they lifted the tree back to its upright position, with David mumbling that they would deal with the spilt soil later on. Then we all turned our attention to Tom’s dead grandparents. The ashes were everywhere, stretching across the lounge floor like a firework of devastation. Strangely, the mulled wine had survived. This was it. The moment it all came crashing down. I’d never be welcome in this house again. Tom would realise I’m nowhere near refined enough for him. The Abbey would be cancelled. I’d only been able to keep my rough edges hidden for so long. I was a duckling among swans, and now it was time to go back to my own kind. David put his hands on his hips. “Your parents never did like this carpet,” he said. A sound escaped Wendy’s lips, something halfway between a moan and a squeak. She started shaking and shrieking, and it took me a moment to realise that she was laughing. David chuckled, too. “I suppose we could hoover them up? Then pour the carpet bag back into the urn?” “I can’t have my parents spending eternity with the contents of a hoover bag,” Wendy said through guffaws. “I’m not sure they really wanted to spend eternity on a mantlepiece either,” David said. “Are you okay, Laura?” Wendy asked, still chuckling. “No. I just knocked over your Christmas tree and spilt your parents on the carpet.” Once the ashes were hoovered and stored away in a Tupperware box, ready for a later scattering, Wendy had a little cry. She also assured me that being in my very own Christmas catastrophe story meant that I was a proper member of the family now. And David let me in on the secret that the urn had always creeped him out. He’d never appreciated being watched by his in-laws on the daily, and it meant he’d always had to be on his best behaviour in his own lounge. Emotions in the house were starting to simmer down, and Tom went off to get us a round of mulled wine. But by this point, I was missing home so badly I wanted to cry, so I took the opportunity to FaceTime my parents to say Merry Christmas. “How’s your day been, Laur?” My father asked, holding the phone exactly two inches from his face while my mother tried to jostle her way into the shot. “I got pissed on dessert wine and pulled the Christmas tree over.” “Ah, all right. That the sort of thing they do over there, is it?” I laughed. “Yeah, it’s been a riot.” “Let me talk to ‘er, Mal.” My father handed the phone to my mother, and she proceeded to press her face even closer to the screen. “You ok, love?” “Yeah, Mam. Have you had a nice day?” “Oh, it’s been lush.” Then she shouted off-screen – “You’ll ‘ave to defrost some, they’re in the big freezer. Sorry love, your brother’s after more sausage rolls.” She raised her voice again, “The big freezer!” “Did you get everything you wanted?” “Oh yeah, and I loved the spa vouchers. We’ll ‘ave to book a date to go. Me, you, and your sister.” “Yeah, that’ll be nice.” “I said, look in the big freezer, I’m on the phone!” “Don’t worry, Mam, I’ll let you go. I’ll see you in a few days anyway.” “You sure?” “Yeah.” “You sure you’re okay, bach?” I nodded. “Alright then, bye love. Bye bye, ta-ra, ta-ra.” A light sadness settled in my chest. I’d thought I could always go home again. That even when I left for university, moved to England, and got engaged, nothing would change. But so much had changed. Truth be told, underneath all my frustration about the Christmas food and the presents was the sneaking suspicion that somewhere along the way, I’d lost the magic. My life was different now, and I liked it. But there had definitely been a leaving behind. Christmas was no longer a day in the upside-down world. And it wasn’t just Christmas. Would I have to spend forever with a foot in each camp? Trying to straddle two very different ways of being, and never fully feeling at home? My phone pinged, and a photo flashed up of my brother holding up a mountain of sausage rolls. “Laur! We’re opening the presents.” Tom shouted from the lounge. I joined my soon-to-be in-laws, and we gathered around the lopsided tree to finally open our gifts. Tom seemed pleased as punch with the driving experience I got for him, and David and Wendy said they were delighted with the his and hers robes. Once I’d finished opening some bits and pieces, we got to the main event. The main presents. Tom grinned like a Cheshire cat when he handed me the envelope. “What did you do?” I asked him as I tore open the flap of paper and pulled out the card. Inside, the message said, “I can’t wait to join our families.” He’d booked us a holiday, with both sets of parents. Oh shit. --- [Tip the Bee](https://thebeemagazine.com/#/portal/support) All donations go towards supporting the Bee’s mission to nurture, publish promote and pay for the best new working-class writing. ### The Working Class Library Episode 6: Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/the-working-class-library-episode-6-angelas-ashes-by-frank-mccourt/ Last updated: 2026-06-15T18:06:17.000Z In the sixth episode of the Working Class Library, Kevin Barry joins Claire Malcolm, chief executive of New Writing North, and Richard Benson, editor of The Bee, to discuss Frank McCourt’s 1996 memoir [Angela’s Ashes](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780007205233?ref=thebeemagazine.com). McCourt’s account of his poverty-stricken childhood in New York and Limerick has sold ten million copies to date, and has been translated into more than 25 languages. Previously reluctant to believe anyone would be interested in the story of a poor family, the former schoolteacher waited until he was in his 60s to write and publish the book. As Kevin Barry explains, the scale of its success, and perhaps its false association with the 'misery memoir' genre, can obscure the brilliance of McCourt’s craft. In their discussion, recorded live at Hexham Book Festival, Kevin, Claire and Richard set it firmly in the Irish literary firmament. Kevin provides special insight into the Irish setting of the story, as he reveals that his father knew the McCourts, and even went to the same school – Leamy’s – where young Frank was educated. At the end, we ask if it deserves a place on the shelves of our imaginary library of great books by and about ordinary people. If you have any thoughts or comments on the episode – and particularly if you’ve got any theories about exactly why the book is called Angela’s Ashes, then please share them with us on our social media channels. ### **Books and Authors Mentioned** Kevin Barry – [Beatlebone](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781782116165?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [City of Bohane](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780099549154?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [Dark Lies the Island](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780099575078?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [There Are Little Kingdoms](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781786890177?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [Night Boat to Tangier](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781782116202?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [The Heart in Winter](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781837260799?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [That Old Country Music](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781786891433?ref=thebeemagazine.com) Michael Curtin – [The Cove Shivering Club](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cove-Shivering-Club-Michael-Curtin/dp/1910670596/ref=tmm%5Fpap%5Fswatch%5F0?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [The League Against Christmas](https://www.amazon.co.uk/League-Against-Christmas-Michael-Curtin/dp/1910670618?ref%5F=ast%5Fauthor%5Fdp&ref=thebeemagazine.com), [The Plastic Tomato Cutter](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Plastic-Tomato-Cutter-Michael-Curtin/dp/1910670588/ref=tmm%5Fpap%5Fswatch%5F0?%5Fencoding=UTF8&dib%5Ftag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.7AQuRNexwCdYLjASuKsYizOQ%5FO0d8CRWdOFw5uEoDy4.6tWn%5FDMW8zQ1XcdHELEy9K--6OG4Cl6Ft%5Fdw7K7VHJo&qid=1766073135&sr=1-1&ref=thebeemagazine.com), [The Replay](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Replay-Michael-Curtin/dp/1910670626/ref=tmm%5Fpap%5Fswatch%5F0?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [The Self-Made Men](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Self-Made-Men-Michael-Curtin/dp/1910670553/ref=tmm%5Fpap%5Fswatch%5F0?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [Sing!](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sing-Michael-Curtin/dp/191067060X/ref=tmm%5Fpap%5Fswatch%5F0?ref=thebeemagazine.com) Frank McCourt – [Angela’s Ashes](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780007205233?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [Teacher Man](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780007173990?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [’Tis](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780007205240?ref=thebeemagazine.com) Máirtín Ó Cadhain – [Cre na Cille](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780300227062?ref=thebeemagazine.com) James Plunkett – [Strumpet City](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780717156108?ref=thebeemagazine.com) James T Farrell – [Studs Lonigan](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Studs-Lonigan-Triology-Comprising-Judgment/dp/0252062825/ref=tmm%5Fpap%5Fswatch%5F0?%5Fencoding=UTF8&dib%5Ftag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.hEncY5HLDZG5UtjQfGTGIRSisYHS9yimm%5FPU3Tuvfhww4pGXAO1EgyAE19Qmx8hWbr3B1PNElQb8aidn-cricgXRH%5F-j1WxYAgOszR-eYpRj-WzDGME-MCIbFLtaIb2bmzt2v5hMueoNU%5FPEx0jAaVTY46kCSGC8apObQc8pKyYdtdmntxx3dmxDtvBQz4l5uEQMDuyrdcGc7tItD2UEHaSL-2iYm8qNUrO%5Fve%5F9S9Y.xioOm7O8HxyeQcxioXviKs-yKFROWDWrOCvMio-egbM&qid=1766073523&sr=8-1&ref=thebeemagazine.com) [From the Republic of Conscience: Stories Inspired by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (anthology)](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Republic-Conscience-Inspired-Universal-Declaration/dp/1905483732/ref=sr%5F1%5F1?crid=3JXXR1VTSIY3X&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.5a1xyP54vxfkxrZ2uzqDjlHusShF-MvxGvRIF0ydP9PGjHj071QN20LucGBJIEps.Pt6ZFlk96HSb%5FVVnUiTUz66DIITuJWRgtPo7JMAgsH0&dib%5Ftag=se&keywords=From+the+Republic+of+Conscience&qid=1766073639&sprefix=from+the+republic+of+conscience%2Caps%2C186&sr=8-1&ref=thebeemagazine.com) [A Guide to Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourtSiobhan McShane’s introduction to the plot, characters and historical background of Frank McCourt’s working-class memoir of growing up in poverty in Ireland in the 1930s and 1940s.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/icon/favicon-ebb93e2d-1cc5-4c43-8db9-13e0a667b3fa.png)The BeeSiobhan McShane![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/thumbnail/mccourt-4feb45ff-bd69-40cf-8063-a80af6be7863.jpg)](https://thebeemagazine.com/a-guide-to-angelas-ashes-by-frank-mccourt/) --- [Tip the Bee](https://thebeemagazine.com/#/portal/support) All donations go towards supporting the Bee’s mission to nurture, publish promote and pay for the best new working-class writing. ### A Guide to Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/a-guide-to-angelas-ashes-by-frank-mccourt/ Last updated: 2026-06-15T18:05:39.000Z ### A Biography of Frank McCourt Frank McCourt was born in 1930 in New York and died in 2009, also in New York. However, his memoir Angela’s Ashes recounts his childhood in Limerick, Ireland. His parents, Angela and Malachy Sr, had both moved to New York from Ireland and met there shortly before his birth. Angela’s Ashes recounts the encounter that led to Frank’s conception, although the veracity of this account has been questioned, with one critic suggesting that Angela may have been sent to New York after she became pregnant by a married man in Limerick. Angela had five children in New York: Frank, Malachy, twins Eugene and Oliver, and a daughter, Margaret. After Margaret died when Frank was four, the family returned to Limerick, where the twins also died, but two more brothers, Michael and Alphie, survived to adulthood with Frank and Malachy. McCourt’s father, Malachy Sr was an alcoholic, mostly unemployed, and allegedly involved with criminal gangs in both New York and Ireland. Again and again in the memoir, McCourt describes his father returning home drunk and dragging his sons out of bed to make them promise to die for Ireland; he also describes how his father continually tells him stories, from Irish mythology, about their neighbours, about world news, and about Irish history. The family lived hand-to-mouth, relying on the dole (when Malachy Sr didn’t drink it), and charity from the St Vincent de Paul Society. Angela’s mother and sister also supported the family, and eventually they received government aid when Malachy Sr left for England and ceased any kind of support for the family. McCourt describes scavenging for coal dropped by wagons on the Dock Road, for fish and chips abandoned by drunk men, and for any kind of food at all when his mother fell sick and couldn’t care for the children. As well as poverty, sickness was a continual presence in McCourt’s childhood. Apart from the deaths of his baby siblings, McCourt describes the deaths of multiple children from TB and diphtheria, and his own stint in hospital for typhoid and, later, conjunctivitis. Adults also die. A number of older men become mentor figures for Frank, only to be taken sick before he can really benefit from their guidance. One old man gives him a brief job reading A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift, an author the adult McCourt would describe as “one of my idols”. By adulthood, Frank McCourt was desperate to return to New York, which he did at 19\. His life there as a young man is recounted in his later memoirs, ’Tis and Teacher Man. He initially worked odd jobs before joining the US Army for the Korean war. On his return, he exploited the GI Bill to train as an English teacher, even though he had left school at 13\. He taught at Peter Stuyvesant High School for most of his career, and started writing only on retirement in 1987\. He had, however, written and performed a comedy show with his brother Malachy called A Couple of Blaguards, first produced in 1985, which used some of the material found in Angela’s Ashes. The brothers started developing this show in the 1970s, initially for family and friends. McCourt considered writing the memoir as a cathartic experience which allowed him to get “a lot of the stuff out of my system”. Although he had wanted to write most of his life, and his daughter Margaret recalled that “long before Angela’s Ashes, I was aware of his writing ability, because he was always writing everywhere”. McCourt, however, felt that he lacked material, explaining many times that he had previously believed he didn’t have anything to write about, because no one wanted to hear about a family in a slum in Limerick. “We were worthless. Our concerns were irrelevant to the world,” he once said, ‘I would’ve been ashamed to write about the way I grew up.’ He was inspired by the autobiographies of the Irish playwright Sean O’Casey, which were ‘appealing because he grew up in a poor family’. This must have impacted him before retirement, because Margaret also recalls that in his teaching, McCourt told his students that ‘everyone has something to write about”. McCourt’s Irish heritage may also have been a barrier. His brother Malachy, an actor, described in an interview how “when an Englishman speaks well, they say he’s eloquent. When an Irishman speaks well, they say ‘Ah you have the gift of the gab. Ah you kissed the Blarney stone.’ It’s always that pejorative about our use of the language.” Historical discrimination against the Irish, particularly through language policies, may also have impacted McCourt’s confidence in writing. As the McCourts were growing up in Ireland, the Irish government was heavily focused on reviving the Irish language after years of language discrimination under English rule. This included favourable treatment for Irish-speaking children, and arguably an undervaluing of those like the McCourts, who spoke English at home. In Angela’s Ashes, McCourt describes his teachers disparagingly labelling the McCourts as “Yanks”, while other residents of Limerick looked down on them because their father was from “the North” – that is English-favouring Northern Ireland. Angela’s Ashes was a global best-seller, selling more than 10 million copies to date. It has been translated into more than 100 languages, and made into a film and a theatrical musical. McCourt wrote two sequels, ’Tis (1999) and Teacher Man (2005), which describe his adult life in the USA. Finally, in 2007, he wrote a children’s book called Angela and the Baby Jesus about his mother’s childhood, and this has been adapted into an animation called Angela’s Christmas. It was produced by his wife, Ellen McCourt. ### Frank McCourt’s Limerick McCourt grew up in the slums known as the “lanes” of Limerick. He describes living on three lanes in his memoir: Windmill Street, Hartsonge Street, and Roden Lane, before the family was taken in by relatives following the departure of his father. Robinson describes these lanes as being “not slums apart, but a working-class neighbourhood in-between”. The map below shows this with the closely packed houses of the lanes surrounded by more gentrified areas. The lanes have been redeveloped since McCourt’s childhood, when they lacked internal plumbing. Malachy McCourt describes being impressed by the “prosperity” in evidence on a visit in the 2010s, with people seeming less desperate to leave, and the river Shannon apparently a less threatening presence than in his childhood, when it was, in the words of Malachy Sr in Angela’s Ashes, “a river that kills”. The film of Angela’s Ashes had to use locations in Cork to film scenes from the lanes because there were none suitable left in Limerick; this can be disappointing for literary tourists who, as the Angela’s Ashes walking tour guide Michael O’Donnell has said, “want to see the Limerick from Angela’s Ashes”. Locals, he added, are proud that that Limerick now “doesn’t exist”. ### Publication and critical reception McCourt’s route to publication, as he writes in his acknowledgements, was smoothed by an “exaltation of women” who helped him find an agent and publisher. McCourt had a friend called Mary Breasted Smyth, who was a journalist and had a couple of books published. When she asked him at a party if he was “working on anything”, he shared the manuscript of Angela’s Ashes with her, and on reading it, she told him it was a “work of lyric and comic genius”. Mary’s poor experience trying to sell her own books to publishers through her agent, who had been told that “Irish books don’t sell”, meant she turned instead to another friend, literary agent Molly Friedrich. Molly, who had just suffered a bereavement, was initially unenthusiastic, looking on this ‘memoir by an unknown writer set in Ireland in the 1930s’ without much hope. As soon as she got around to reading it, though, she “went wild”, and took it on in its unfinished state. Nan Graham, editor-in-chief at Scribner, published the memoir in the US on 5 September 1996. The memoir was initially published in the UK by HarperCollins. The UK cover featured a class photo from McCourt’s school days in the top left corner, which caused controversy at a reading when one of McCourt’s schoolmates asked whether the author could identify him in the photo. McCourt could not and the schoolmate ripped up the book in response. It is noticeable that the 1997 Flamingo cover, an Australian imprint of HarperCollins, removed the class photo, replacing it with the photo of a little boy from the Scribner cover. On publication, Angela’s Ashes was in general very well received. Kakutani wrote in the New York Times that “McCourt does for the town of Limerick what the young Joyce did for Dublin”. Angela’s Ashes received a variety of prizes, including a Pulitzer Prize (1997) and National Book Critics Circle Award (1996). It remained on the New York Times bestseller list for more than two years. The report for the Pulitzer Prize describes it as “a glorious book that bears all the marks of a classic”. Early translations of the memoir continue to use the photo from Scribner on their covers, apart from a 1998 Czech edition, which interestingly used a contemporary photo of Frank and Malachy McCourt. The Czech blurb called the memoir “an aging man’s memories of his childhood”, highlighting the role of the author, Frank McCourt, which is elided through the child narrator in the memoir itself. The German edition also continued to use the original photo of a boy from the Scribner edition, but edited the subtitle of the novel to read “An Irish Memoir”. With the production of the Angela’s Ashes film in 1999, a still from the movie showing young Frank looking grumpy became the most common cover image and has become the visual most associated with the book. ### Angela’s Ashes and Misery Memoir Angela’s Ashes has been seen as belonging to a genre of childhood autobiographies known as misery memoir. Alongside Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club and James McBride’s The Color of Water, Angela’s Ashes has been considered responsible for the boom in this genre in the 1990s and 2000s. Douglas comments that “What is distinctive about this grouping is that each text \[depicts\] a lower-socio-economic experience of childhood and each depicts trauma. Each represents a rags-to-riches journey from a poor childhood and unconventional family life to adult success.” The critic Kate Douglas’ description of the memoirs as “rags-to-riches” tales highlights some of the controversy around these texts, as they portray working-class childhoods as traumatic experiences which the authors escape to more “successful” lives. Roger Ebert’s review of the film adaptation of Angela’s Ashes, published in 2000, states baldly that “There must have been thousands of childhoods more or less like Frank McCourt’s, and thousands of families with too many children, many of them dying young, while the father drank up dinner down at the pub and the mother threw herself on the mercy of the sniffy local charities. What made McCourt’s autobiography special was expressed somehow beneath the very words as he used them: These experiences, wretched as they were, were not wasted on a mere victim, but somehow shaped him into the man capable of writing a fine book about them.” Applied within the confines of the cultural product, this may be fair. However, Ebert’s dismissal of “thousands” of working-class children as “mere victims” captures the problematic impact of “rags-to-riches” narratives on the portrayal of working-class lives. Aoileann Ní Éigeartaigh suggests that although Angela’s Ashes was instrumental in creating the genre of misery memoir, in doing so McCourt subsumed his own experiences in a ‘collective of “miserable Irish Catholic” childhoods’ and ‘surrenders control of his own memoir to what he implies are the prevailing expectations of the genre.’ Since the genre had not yet been formed or recognised when McCourt was writing, this is hard to justify, but it does indicate how awareness of the genre can now colour impressions of an author’s work. Douglas highlights the problem of truth in these memoirs, an issue that was critical to the reception of Angela’s Ashes, especially in Limerick itself. This issue is closely related to the issue of genre. In the run-up to its publication, Angela’s Ashes was alternately identified as fiction and as autobiography; only by the time of publication did the book assume its final category of memoir. G Thomas Couser’s handbook Memoir: An Introduction opens the definition of memoir by emphasising that memoirs are non-fiction, depicting the “lives of real, not imagined, individuals’, but that they ‘often incorporate invented or enhanced material, and they often use novelistic techniques.” The decision to categorise Angela’s Ashes – in its subtitle, remember – as a memoir places it between fiction and non-fiction. Ebert connects these techniques to the idea of verbal history, since “the stories so unforgettably told in his autobiography were honed over years and decades, at bars and around dinner tables and in the ears of friends.” Verbal history plays a strong role in the novel itself, with the young Frankie McCourt listening to his father’s tales of Irish mythology and stories about people on the Lanes, as well as the constant and contradictory retellings by neighbours, teachers and family of the atrocities committed by the English against the Irish. McCourt’s use of memoir demonstrates the power and flexibility of this written genre and allows it to depict a working-class upbringing using the oral tradition in writing. It is no mean feat. As the writer Kevin Barry has suggested, literary snobbery may mean that the global success of Angela’s Ashes somewhat obscures its literary achievement. McCourt himself, incidentally, suggested that TV programmes like Oprah and Jerry Springer had more impact on the genre than his own memoir. ### Studs Lonigan and Tenement Fiction Tenement fiction is a genre associated with the late 19th and early 20th century and the growth of slums in England and America. It comprises fiction set in tenement housing. In the USA, it was particularly associated with New York and Chicago, and thus is relevant to the New York-born Frank McCourt. Writers, David M Fine argues, ‘sought to mirror in fiction what the social scientists, settlement workers and reform journalists were revealing about the new urban America.’ The stories are often narrated through the eyes of a middle-class observer. It may be tenement fiction to which Éigeartaigh is referring when she talks about the “prevailing expectations of the genre.” Sabine Haenni believes that tenement fiction aimed to make the slums of New York and their immigrant communities more visible to the middle class, thus reducing fear of the working class. However, this is not necessarily to the benefit of the working class, since “urban agitation and pedestrian confusion – along with working people’s point of view – are held at a distance so that the spectator can feel somewhat disembodied, not part of the scene.” Fine similarly argues that in tenement fiction, “poverty is rarely degrading; more often it is ennobling”, but this is because the characters are portrayed as innocents whose surroundings cannot blemish their purity. In this way, tenement fiction created a romanticised view of poverty that, while not inspiring pity and horror as in Victorian slum literature, instead inspired a voyeuristic interest in Bohemian lifestyles. McCourt himself criticises this when he describes middle-class writers who could afford to write while working low-paid jobs and who ‘affected poverty’ by slashing their jeans. However, McCourt was nevertheless influenced by this genre. He described being introduced to Irish-American literature by James T Farrell’s Studs Lonigan, a book about Chicago’s slums and Irish-American Catholicism. Since tenement fiction was closely associated with the immigrant community in Chicago and New York at the turn of the 20th century, and Irish and Jewish immigrants formed a large part of that community, US tenement fiction is closely associated with these two ethnic identities and their interrelation in public perception. The interrelation can be found in many examples of tenement literature, including Studs Lonigan. It is interesting, then, that the only neighbour mentioned in the New York section of Angela’s Ashes is the Jewish Mrs Leibowitz, since this may result from McCourt’s knowledge of the tropes of New York tenement fiction. McCourt was also heavily influenced by the Irish playwright Sean O’Casey, whose plays about life in Dublin tenements he enjoyed when he heard them on his neighbour’s radio as a child. It is also worth mentioning the Vaudeville tradition here. A Couple of Blaguards has been described as Vaudeville, and certainly reworks several old Vaudeville jokes. The show has many of the same scenes as the memoir, including, for example, Frankie’s first communion. Jennifer Mooney locates negative stereotypes of Irish-Americans in Vaudeville, including drunkenness and clumsiness, which results in loss of work, as well as being motivated by the American Dream (for men, while women who strayed from “their place” were portrayed negatively). Via the comic sketches in A Couple of Blaguards, these negative stereotypes about Irish men and women may have influenced McCourt’s portrayal of his mother and father in Angela’s Ashes. ### Criticism of Angela’s Ashes The techniques McCourt employs in the memoir have led to accusations of inauthenticity and untruthfulness. Some readers from Limerick considered that McCourt damaged the reputation of their hometown, producing a “highly distorted and inaccurate picture” of its inhabitants, including his own family and his mother in particular. McCourt himself was concerned about this, and Jones quotes him saying on a book tour: “It’s Limerick you worry about. Limerick is where the experts are.” It was on that tour that one of McCourt’s former schoolmates ripped up his copy of Angela’s Ashes in front of its author, showing that McCourt’s anxiety was justified, even if Jones suggests that this “vulnerability to those charges that he had embroidered the truth” was a ‘weakness’ of McCourt’s. Hannan relates this to the particular challenges of writing as a person from a working-class background about a working-class place, cheaply suggesting that “since the lives of Limerick’s working class rarely make it to the international stage, it is not unreasonable for them to want to see themselves portrayed accurately and sensitively.” This burden of representation stifles many working-class writers, and for a journalist to make this point feels very much like playing to the gallery rather than defending a writer’s freedom of expression. Hannan, a journalist who relies on interviews he has conducted with residents of Limerick for his material, considers that McCourt, as an underrepresented writer, has a heavy responsibility to portray his origins in a positive light to a world that is inclined to see them negatively. He does not interrogate the potential tension for McCourt between the “accurate” and the “sensitive” in his memoir. This dissatisfaction with McCourt’s portrayal of Limerick led some to write counter-texts. Hannan, who himself wrote a 1997 novel in direct opposition to Angela’s Ashes, entitled Ashes: The Real Memoirs of Two Boys from the Limerick Lanes, describes how “Frank’s venomous writing gave license to the Limerick storytellers” who ‘showed up in droves for the fight’ and ‘distorted the facts, twisted the realities, bent the truth and were as liberal with the actualities as much as McCourt did.” McCourt lost at least one friend through the fall-out from Angela’s Ashes. The actor Richard Harris, who grew up in Limerick and later reconnected with both Frank and Malachy McCourt in New York, “attacked” the author after reading Angela’s Ashes. Malachy McCourt retaliated on behalf of his brother Frank by portraying Harris negatively as “an upper-class ‘Limerick git’ in his own memoir A Monk Swimming, drawing further ire from Harris. It is noticeable how the McCourt siblings stuck together despite accusations against Frank from others; Margaret said that “one of the things \[Angela’s Ashes\] did was to bring our family closer together”. Nevertheless, it is not clear that Angela herself would have appreciated the memoir. When she attended one of their performances of A Couple of Blaguards, she stood up in the theatre and denounced it as “a pack of lies”. ### Differences in Irish and American responses to Angela’s Ashes McCourt walked a tightrope in presenting his working-class childhood to readers who consisted both of middle-class Americans with particular expectations of Irish working-class stories, and the Irish working-class people he grew up with. Some American commentators took the opposite view to Hannan and considered McCourt’s memoir to be a sanitised version of his upbringing. In her review of the film, Janet Maslin described how, for her, “McCourt summoned his anecdotes with indefatigable charm, no matter how dire the circumstances were, to the point where his autobiographical story became an exemplary pilgrim’s progress.” For Malcolm Jones, McCourt got the balance right, but only because he “sidesteps sentimentality with a litany of hardship that would make a cynic flinch”. For these readers, the grit and grime of his upbringing is the essential selling point of his memoir. In contrast to the offended Limerick readers, Maslin considers it to be underplayed. For some critics, such as James B Mitchell, McCourt leans too heavily towards his American readers, since he presents his time in Limerick as a disastrous mistake on his parents’ part and the whole novel is directed toward his eventual return to America, where he will achieve the American dream of escaping his impoverished working-class background and become a teacher through his own hard work. “Whether intentionally or not,” argues Mitchell, “Angela’s Ashes often seems to confirm the picture of Ireland as a superstitious, unhygienic, narrow-minded backwater of Europe. In this way, the book provides contemporary Americans with the unspoken guilty pleasure of slumming in mid-twentieth-century Limerick without ever having to leave the comfort of their clean, well-plumbed country.” ### The Classic of Irish-American Literature Critics who argue against this position compliment the hard-hitting descriptions of hardship in the memoir. Edward A Hagan argues that McCourt avoids the cliché of his American Dream narrative through ‘the poignancy of the suffering he details’. However, as Mitchell suggests, this suffering may also be seen as a cliché and stereotype held against the Irish working class. Hagan goes on to suggest that it is particularly Irish critics who find Angela’s Ashes problematic, showing that the divide in the critical reception of Angela’s Ashes can be mapped along national lines. McCourt’s divided identity as an Irish-American author thus makes itself felt through his memoir, inspiring different responses from different parts of the world. Éigeartaigh highlights this struggle between Irish and American identity as “the binary opposition at the heart of McCourt’s text”. Class could be added as another lens through which to view this binary opposition. McCourt’s own feeling was that he wrote Angela’s Ashes out of a sense of “responsibility to my family and to the people who lived around me.’ He sought, he told Terry Gross in a 2009 National Public Radio interview, to ‘convey the dignity of the people – the way they dealt with adversity and poverty and their good humour.” Douglas emphasizes that working-class memoirs, including Angela’s Ashes, “opened up literary spaces and language for the narration of working-class childhoods amid alcoholism, mental illness, poverty, and sexual abuse.” Angela’s Ashes was clearly impactful for many readers from working-class backgrounds. In a 1998 interview, McCourt described receiving a letter from a reader in India who said “I was his brother, because he had a poor upbringing.” McCourt’s tone in describing this anecdote is ironic and perhaps dismissive; it is far from clear that he feels any meaningful affinity with his reader. What it does show, however, is the impact this memoir had, and continues to have, on readers who saw in the poverty and resilience of McCourt’s characters, and in the beauty of his prose, something of themselves. --- [Tip the Bee](https://thebeemagazine.com/#/portal/support) All donations go towards supporting the Bee’s mission to nurture, publish promote and pay for the best new working-class writing. ### The Silence Between Fields URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/the-silence-between-fields/ Last updated: 2025-12-11T16:45:37.000Z The land was a teacher. And a judge. It remembered everything - your missteps, your loyalties, your name whispered through hedgerows. It repeated its lessons until you learned them, whether you wanted to or not. In the middle of all that, I grew up listening to things that didn’t speak, translating silence into meaning, letting the fields and ditches and shifting light tell me who I was long before I had language for it. Maybe that’s why, even now, when I think of home, the first thing I remember is the quiet - how it was never empty, never passive, but watching, waiting, shaping. I grew up in a place where silence wasn’t empty but thick, alive, and watchful. A place where the land didn’t just surround you; it absorbed you, named you, decided things about you long before you were old enough to decide anything for yourself. People imagine the countryside as gentle, peaceful, a balm for the soul. But the truth is that it is both softer and sharper than anyone from the outside could understand. The quiet there is not just the absence of noise. It’s a presence all its own. It seeps into you, shapes you, sets the boundaries of who you think you’re allowed to be. Our house sat on a narrow road where the grass grew confidently up the centre, as if it knew cars weren’t important here. The ditches flanked us like dark green ravines, deeper and wilder than they looked, holding secrets only local children were foolish or brave enough to disturb frogs, old bottles, the occasional thrown-away magazine someone’s father would never admit was missing. Every bend in the road looked the same, and yet we all knew exactly where we were by the angle of a hedgerow or the shape of a gate. It was the kind of place where light behaved differently. Summers stretched so long you could almost hear the heat humming across the fields, and winters tightened everything - the roads, the breath in your chest, the distance between neighbours’ windows. At night, the dark settled onto the land like something with weight. Thick. Absolute. If you stepped outside, you could lose your bearings in seconds, swallowed by a sky unspoiled by streetlights. People there knew the seasons like family. Silage season meant roaring tractors at all hours. Lambing meant early mornings and quiet worry. Winter meant watching the sky for snow not because it was beautiful, but because it could trap you, cut you off, make everything harder. My father came from the land even if it had never belonged to him. He was one of twelve, raised on a farm where work began before the sun and never really ended at all. My granda believed in labour like he did Catholicism - devoutly, fiercely, without question. The fields were both cathedral and classroom. Every child was expected to contribute, hands small but capable, backs bending under tasks they didn’t yet understand the weight of. By the time my dad was a man, work was carved into him like initials in bark. His hands had their own geography - ridges, cracks, old cuts from machinery and plasterboard. His shoulders carried the ghost of every load he’d ever lifted. He became a plasterer, and he was good at it. Quietly good. Not the type to boast or even acknowledge the skill, but you could tell by the way he ran his palm across a finished wall, eyes narrowing with a craftsman’s calm satisfaction. He was one of those men who read the weather like scripture. “A good drying day,” he’d say, and washing would appear on the line. “Rain’s coming,” he’d mutter, hours before the first drop. He didn’t check forecasts. He didn’t need to. His body had been trained by the land and it never forgot. My mother had her own kind of strength. Different. Quieter. But just as enduring. She had trained as a nurse once, long before I was born, long before life rerouted her into jobs she hadn’t planned for but somehow always excelled in. She worked more roles than I could keep track of - in offices, in shops, climbing into managerial positions without the vocabulary of ambition. She would simply see a problem, solve it, and suddenly find herself responsible for more than she wanted but never more than she could handle. What amazes me now and what I never understood then is how much they protected me from. Not by pretending life was easy, but by refusing to let difficulty harden the world around me. They absorbed so much so I didn’t have to. Our house was tidy. Warm, lived-in. A place where the kettle was always either boiling or about to be. Where neighbours arrived without knocking and left the same way. Where my dad’s work trousers always hung over the back of a radiator, drying for the next day, and where my mother somehow always knew exactly where everything was, even the things that were lost. I didn’t know it then, but they were building a buffer around me - a soft ring of protection against the harsher truths of rural life: the gossip, the rigid masculinity, the lack of privacy, the categories people placed you in without permission. And in that protected space, I grew - different, though I didn’t yet know the name for it. The countryside has its own way of telling you who you are, long before you figure it out for yourself. You are your father’s son, they’d say. Your mother’s boy. A reflection of the people who made you. You were your family’s reputation. Your grandparents’ history. Your surname, spoken in a tone that told others where to position you in their mental map of the village. People there didn’t ask what you wanted to be; they asked who you belonged to. The land held identity tightly. Too tightly for some. For me. Even as a child, there was a softness in me that didn’t quite match my surroundings. I noticed things longer than the other boys did - a bird’s wings flickering against sky, the shape of someone’s smile, the exact moment when light changed in a room. Beauty tugged at me, though I didn’t yet understand why that felt dangerous. I was gentle. Too gentle. And in a place like that, gentleness could be a liability. At school, I learned to adapt. In P.E., I ran harder than necessary, hoping effort could disguise inclination. On the pitch, I threw myself at the game with a ferocity I didn’t feel, because belonging had rules, and I was desperate to memorise them. Among boys, I laughed at jokes that unsettled me. Around girls, I pretended interest I didn’t possess. I fitted myself into shapes that didn’t quite fit, smoothing down edges that felt too visible. But even the best performance can’t contain a truth that’s determined to grow. There were moments - small, fleeting, but impossible to forget - where something in me sparked: A knee brushing mine under a table. A boy’s hand on my shoulder lingering a second too long. A glance in the changing room that felt like a question and an answer tangled together. I didn’t have a word for it. But I had a feeling. A pull. A recognition. And once you recognise something in yourself, you can’t unsee it. Yet, even as I was becoming aware of myself, the village’s gaze grew heavier. Rural places don’t need to speak to communicate. A raised eyebrow. A pause in conversation when you enter a room. A comment said casually but meant precisely. You learn, over time, to read silences with the same attentiveness other people reserve for spoken words. You become adept at interpreting the pauses, the glances, the small shifts in tone that convey more than entire conversations ever could. You learn to anticipate when you are being examined not through questions, but through the subtle tightening around someone’s eyes or the way a room goes slightly still when you enter it. And long before anyone asks you explicitly to shrink, you begin doing it instinctively, folding yourself inward to occupy a little less space, to keep suspicion at bay, to avoid drawing the kind of attention that makes your heart trip over itself. Still, for all the loneliness that came with this quiet self-containment, I wasn’t truly alone in my differences - though the revelation of that would come much later, and not in any grand, cinematic way, but in a small, unexpected moment, when another boy, just as unsure and just as watchful as me, leaned in and kissed me. It happened quickly, with an awkwardness so tender it startled me, the kind of clumsiness that comes only with firsts. He tasted faintly of grass and diesel, the scent of the pitch and the machinery that forever rumbled around our village, clinging to him as much as his nerves did. We were both trembling - partly from the cold, partly from fear of being seen, but mostly from the overwhelming rush of stumbling into something entirely new, something delicate and electric and terrifying and ours alone. The entire moment lasted no more than ten seconds, but in those ten seconds a door swung open inside me, one I had been approaching for years without realising it had been there all along.. And when it closed again, nothing about the world looked quite the same. Afterwards, we didn’t speak. Not to each other, not to anyone. We walked back to the group as if we had only stepped away to tie our laces or catch our breath, performing the same tired rituals we always had, pretending the ground beneath us hadn’t shifted. But everything had changed. The field looked different - the grass too bright, the sky too wide, the floodlights too harsh. Every boy I passed in the corridor the next day felt like a threat and a possibility entwined, and every conversation carried an undercurrent of panic: Do they know? Could they tell? What happens if they do? So I built silence around myself like armour. And while armour protects, it also isolates. It weighs you down. It restricts your movement, your breath, your sense of who you are beneath it. Carrying that silence into early adulthood became a kind of exile - not from my community, but from myself. I kept learning the lessons the countryside had quietly been teaching me for years: how to hide the parts of myself that felt too visible, how to adapt quickly enough to escape scrutiny, how to quiet the pulse of longing whenever it grew too loud or too brave for the place that raised me. But longing has a gravitational pull all its own, and it tugs at you until you either yield to it or break under the strain. Eventually, the pull became stronger than the fear. It grew larger than the village that tried to contain it. And so, without drama or announcement, I left. Leaving home wasn’t some cinematic escape. There was no slammed door reverberating down a hall, no final confrontation, no declaration that I was done with the place that had shaped me. My departure was softer, quieter - the kind of leaving that feels less like an act of rebellion and more like an inevitable unfolding. At eighteen, I headed for Cardiff with a bag far too small for the life I hoped to build, packed more with yearning than belongings. The moment I stepped off the plane, the air felt different. It moved differently - looser, lighter, carrying a sense of possibility that made my chest expand in a way it never had at home. The city felt bigger not just in size, but in spirit, as though the world had revealed an extra dimension I had somehow lived without until that moment. Cardiff was loud in ways that overwhelmed me at first. Cars weaving through traffic. People talking fast, walking faster. Music spilling from open doorways and windows. Arguments and laughter and movement everywhere, a constant hum that made the countryside’s silence seem impossibly far away. But the noise wasn’t what truly unsettled me - it was the anonymity. It was real freedom, and I hadn’t realised until then how tightly I’d been held by the expectations of the village. Here, no one knew my surname. No one knew my parents or my grandparents or the stories tied to them. No one had already decided who I was allowed to be. I could move without every step being traced, without every gesture being interpreted, without the weight of being known too well. And slowly, cautiously, I began to stretch into that freedom. I learned how it felt to say the word “gay” out loud without choking on it. I learned there were places where men walked hand in hand without flinching. I learned that masculinity wasn’t singular, but varied and textured and deeply personal. I learned that softness - the very thing I had once tried to bury - was not a fault line, but a characteristic that drew people to me, that made others open up, that allowed connection in ways I’d been starved of before. But the countryside never fully loosened its grip on me. Its habits lingered, stitched into my nervous system like old seams. Even in the city’s openness, I hesitated before speaking too personally, scanning rooms out of instinct, storing parts of myself away for safekeeping in case the wrong person, the wrong moment, the wrong tone made me revert to the boy who’d learned to survive through invisibility. You don’t shed survival techniques just because you change your postcode. Yet with each passing year, the influence of my childhood began to reveal itself in ways I hadn’t anticipated. I started to recognise that the silence I grew up with wasn’t just suffocation - it was also sensitivity. It taught me how to listen closely, how to catch the emotional temperature of a room before anyone spoke, how to pay attention to the truths that hide beneath the surface of things. The depth and attunement I carried weren’t weaknesses; they were the very tools that allowed me to navigate the world with compassion and precision. My parents’ love, too, came into sharper focus. I had always mistaken its quietness for distance, but with time I saw that their love was not the dramatic, declarative kind - it was steady, practical, expressed through actions that asked for nothing in return. My dad ferrying me about without ever mentioning it. My mum packing food into containers I’d discover later in my bag. The two of them pretending not to worry about how I was doing, though their eyes betrayed them every time I came through the door. They had given me room - room to grow, room to imagine, room to become someone they couldn’t yet picture but wholeheartedly hoped would thrive. They didn’t always understand me, but they supported me in the language they knew: effort, presence, consistency. And as I moved further into adulthood, the land of my childhood - with all its restrictions, expectations, and beauty - began to soften in my memory. I no longer saw it solely as a place that confined me, but as one that shaped my resilience and sharpened my sensitivity. It was both the boundary I had to cross and the foundation I still stood on. Now, when I return, I walk the same narrow roads, with my two children, and feel the strange, familiar ache of recognition. The area remains mostly unchanged, stubborn, unmoved by time, but I am different. I no longer see it as something I must escape, nor as something I must return to. Instead, I see it as part of me, a landscape I carry inside myself, one that I’ve grown around rather than against. I don’t dream of moving back. But I no longer run from what it made me either. Because this - the land, the silence, the people, the limits, the love - is where my story began. In the hush between fields. In the hands of parents who worked themselves into exhaustion to give me possibility. In the first trembling spark of truth that would, eventually, guide me far beyond the boundaries of the village. This is the beginning - the first opening in the long corridor of becoming. And every time I stand on that old road again, I feel something loosen in my chest, as though the land itself, in all its complexity, is whispering a quiet, almost-forgiving welcome. It opens. It lets me in. It calls me home. *Photo:* [*Mark Gunn*](https://www.flickr.com/photos/mark-gunn/36745568981/in/album-72157720044455921?ref=thebeemagazine.com) --- [Tip the Bee](https://thebeemagazine.com/#/portal/support) All donations go towards supporting the Bee’s mission to nurture, publish promote and pay for the best new working-class writing. ### Everything but the Kitchen Sink URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/everything-but-the-kitchen-sink/ Last updated: 2025-12-03T23:49:38.000Z “If the working class wants anything,” declares Sir Phil Redmond, creator of TV classics Grange Hill and Brookside, \[with decades of frustration/righteous anger in his voice\] “they have to build it for themselves”*.* The great talent of post-1960s British TV is talking to an audience of producers, creatives, academics and execs at the ‘Is TV for the working class – Bridging TV’s Class Divide’ conference at Manchester Metropolitan University at the end of November. The conference has been organised by a combination education and creative organisations to address the declining numbers of working-class people and their stories within the TV industry. It’s an issue not solely of social justice, says Redmond, who built predominantly working-class production teams to establish Grange Hill and Brookside, but also of quality and viability. Brookside, he says, was built on the idea of reflecting different class experiences and mixed social class communities – showing Britain back to itself through relatable and enjoyable storytelling. The production team was ‘full of working class warriors’, and middle-class directors asked why so much fighting took place in the scripts – seemingly oblivious to some people choosing slanging matches or a fist fights to resolve their issues. The period between the 1960s and the 1990’s now seems like rather a golden age for working class stories– the glory days of soap operas that were bastions of working class stories and actors) - and the era of Channel 4’s arrival with a new wave of groundbreaking shows such as Queer as Folk, Brookside, Scully, The Royle Family and Shameless. Channel 4 redefined what was acceptable on the telly, its daring programming prompting the Conservative government to rein it in with new ‘taste and decency’ regulations in the 1990 Broadcasting Act. That, according to Redmond, was the moment when, in a great many TV boardrooms, the tide turned against working-class stories, with cautious middle-class commissioners deeming them a bit too risky. That was compounded by changing leisure habits in the new century. Although on the whole we now owned ever-bigger and better tellies, we had more viewing and leisure options, which meant a decline in audiences and falls in revenue from ads. As money got tighter according to Redmond the first out were the working-class programmes and provisions like paid internships that levelled access to jobs. It also meant that commissioning budgets were tighter for both public and commercial broadcasters. Many viewers would be surprised at how most of the high quality drama that they now watch on terrestrial and streamed telly is paid for. Long gone are the days when the BBC could fund drama productions costing £2.5M an hour-long episode from our license fees; most drama now, whoever is making it, is created through investment partnerships, with money coming from many international sources – predominantly the US through cable channels like HBO and via global distribution partnerships. For example, *Coldwater*, an ITV Studios co-production, is an example an internationally orientated production model which sold to 40+ countries. There are dire consequences to this. Elsewhere at the conference, screenwriter Danny Brocklehurst, who wrote the hit Netflix series Fool Me Once and cut his teeth on Shameless, Clocking Off and Brassic, talked about how his TV commissions had moved “from the kitchen sink to the kitchen island.” Producers, often drawn from different countries and needing work that appeals to audiences across the world, tend to look for “aspirational” settings and characters: in practice, that means large, fashionably-decorated houses with fabulous kitchens, and well-dressed, young professional characters with great cars. Aspirational middle-class people are, the logic goes, recognisable and relatable across the globe; they work in all territories. This is why even Netflix shows shot in Manchester look as if the characters inhabit in a kind of default, beige, mid-Atlantic Nowheresville where even the cleaners wear Arket and drink Nespresso. Well, they might, but we never see them. Nowheresville: in TV land, it’s the new normal. 0:00 /1:27 1× Where are the working class stories in all this? Brocklehurst talked about the failure of the BBC’s plans for a TV adaptation of Douglas Stuart’s Booker-Prize-winning novel, Shuggie Bain. Executives came to feel the project was “too difficult” to finance, chiefly because of its Glaswegian accents, gritty setting and distressing story. It’s the kind of show you might think the BBC, with its commitment to Public Service Broadcasting and British talent and stories, should be prioritising, but it seems to present more problems than opportunities. Never mind that the story would resonate with many viewers who would see their own lived experience reflected and that it had already proved it had a massive audience through its book sales. If these new economic realities seem brutal, it’s because they are so, to an extent that would shock most British viewers. Bear in mind the case of the 2024 ITV hit Mr Bates Vs The Post Office, probably the most high-profile and socially-impactful TV drama of the decade. Yes, it was a critical and popular success, but nevertheless it turned out to be a financial disaster for its commissioners. Why? Simply because the domestic British setting and concerns meant it did not attract international investors or distribution. The current erasure of working-class people from our TV screens is all the more shocking because, to a very large extent, the history of great British TV drama and comedy is a history of working-class stories, and talent. So which class experience is now considered mainstream and exportable? If it’s the aspirational middle classes that fit this bill will this inevitably mean a decrease in working class stories? As Mike Benson, MD of Clapperboard Studios pointed out, this might be assumed, but in fact some of the most definitive international shows of recent times –The Bear, Peaky Blinders and Breaking Bad, for example – are in essence working class stories. Such shows appear to be losing ground to corporate and high net worth dramas: Succession, Severance, White Lotus. Yes, Happy Valley and Alma’s Not Normal and their ilk are still there but they are diluted by beigevision. Professor Beth Johnson, who researches working-class television and the experience of working-class people in the industry at the University of Leeds, argued that middle-class stories also closely mirror the commissioners’ own lives, as television’s powerful elite are still drawn from a very thin top sliver of society. The middle-class gaze rules them all, and the precarity that working class people suffer in the industry, said Johnson, means that they don’t survive for long enough to make any significant changes or to achieve positions of power. It is impossible to discuss class without race, and issues of racism and intersectionality were hotly debated throughout the conference. Lisa Nandy MP, the Secretary of State of Culture, Media and Sport, who spoke on stage, related how TV historian David Olusoga who had told her that gaining access to the TV industry as a working-class Black man had been difficult enough, but that his treatment once inside the industry had nearly driven him to suicide. She promised to hold the BBC and others to account for their practices and access routes, but until the industry improves its race and class representation at executive level, it’s hard to understand how this could improve. The indivisibility of race and class in this context was affirmed by Ali Naushani, a TV director whose work includes “Jane Austen: Rise of a Genius”. She was realistic about representation of race on British TV: "If you don't see your life reflected back at you it creates marginalisation. You see more brown people on TV now - but it's mainly posh people.” 0:00 /0:55 1× Period drama rarely seemed aimed at working-class people, as it hardly ever features them as characters except in below-stairs storylines, she said. “Working class audiences don't think period drama is for them. It's for people with elevated tastes”. She’s probably right, but she also noted that there was an opportunity when making contemporary historical dramas to “put some truth on the history” and foster a better understanding of the history of slavery and women’s rights. Looking at these through a contemporary lens, she added, enables us to ‘expose the truth about that time’. So what kind of working-class stories would we like to see? What’s missing? We’ve talked a lot at the Bee about how many producers and editors seem to regard misery or escape narratives as the default setting for working class storylines, and that joyful or contemplative narratives are seen as less authentic. This is clearly a gross distortion of most working class experience. One theme that is underexplored is close community; many working class stories, from Lark Rise to Candleford to Trainspotting to White Teeth, are distinct in their use of a whole community or group as protagonist, and in their interest in the close relationships found at work and in working class housing situations. Naushani pointed out the unique ability of working class stories to portray community and connection between people in ways that more middle - class stories never do. Are these omissions deliberate or unconscuious? Beth Johnson felt that “none of this is done in bad faith” by the commissioners and people in power, but nevertheless it *is* consistently done by them, and until we have more people from working-class backgrounds in authority the power dynamics of the television industry will make it impossible to challenge. It should be said, though, that some audience members felt some of this was in fact done in bad faith, and as one said, “the erasure of working class people and their stories in TV is absolutely intentional.” Whether or not middle- and upper-class people seek to eradicate working-class people from our screens (and possibly our whole culture) is a subject on which there is little consensus. Still, looking at our screens in 2025, it is easy to find evidence for a lack of representation. What struck me most about the issues that came up through the event were the similarities to debates in the publishing industries, and the differences in potential opportunities. The global financing of mainstream television seems set to unintentionally diminish the diversity of stories and deliver a monocultural vision of the world that ultimately won’t speak to most people’s experiences. At worst, it posits a set of norms – particularly homes and prosperity – that in reality are way out of reach for most of us. What is to be done? Well that remains unclear as yet – perhaps as Phil Redmond said, we will need to build something ourselves. In the meantime, let’s hope that the raising of these issues can at least exert some influence on how our bigger broadcasters and production companies think about their workforces, and their approach to commissioning work for the many, not the few. [Tip the Bee](https://thebeemagazine.com/#/portal/support) All donations go towards supporting the Bee’s mission to nurture, publish promote and pay for the best new working-class writing. ### The Working Class Library Episode 5: The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 ¾ by Sue Townsend URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/the-working-class-library-episode-5-the-secret-diary-of-adrian-mole-aged-13-3-4-by-sue-townsend/ Last updated: 2026-06-15T19:22:45.000Z For the fifth episode of the *Working Class Library*, the novelist [David Nicholls](https://www.instagram.com/davidnichollswriter/?ref=thebeemagazine.com) joins Claire Malcolm, CEO of New Writing North, and Richard Benson, editor of *The Bee*, and to discuss Sue Townsend’s 1982 novel [The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 ¾](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780141046426?ref=thebeemagazine.com). Having initially been written for, and broadcast on, BBC Radio 4, *The Secret Diary* was the United Kingdom’s bestselling book of the 1980s, and to date has sold over twenty million copies, and been translated into almost fifty languages. It transformed the fortunes of Townsend, who had previously lived in dire poverty as a single mother after being born into south Leicester working class. Many readers and writers who grew up with the novel name it as a major influence on them, and in the podcast, superfan David Nicholls considers how and why this is. Together, hosts and guest together show why if anything, Mole is underrated as a work of literature. Finally, we ask if it deserves a place on the shelves of our imaginary library of great books by and about ordinary people. Intellectual thoughts? Comments worthy of a letter to the BBC? Please share them with us on our social media channels, and we’ll tell the world — thank you. ### **Books and Authors Mentioned** Douglas Adams – [The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781529034523?ref=thebeemagazine.com) Jane Austen – [Pride and Prejudice](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780099589334?ref=thebeemagazine.com) Emily Bronte – [Wuthering Heights](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780007350810?ref=thebeemagazine.com) Pedro Calderón – [Life is a Dream](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781848420601?ref=thebeemagazine.com) Charles Darwin – [On the Origin of Species](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780141388519?ref=thebeemagazine.com) Simone De Beauvoir – [The Second Sex](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780099595731?ref=thebeemagazine.com) E.M. Delafield – [The Diary of a Provincial Lady](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780141191812?ref=thebeemagazine.com) Charles Dickens – [Great Expectations](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780241734339?ref=thebeemagazine.com) Helen Fielding – [Bridget Jones’ Diary](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781035038985?ref=thebeemagazine.com) Gustave Flaubert – [Madame Bovary](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781784878450?ref=thebeemagazine.com) Germaine Greer – [The Female Eunuch](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780007205011?ref=thebeemagazine.com) George & Weedon Grosmith – [The Diary of a Nobody](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780199540150?ref=thebeemagazine.com) Thomas Hardy – [Far From the Madding Crowd](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9789395229104?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [Tess of the D’Urbevilles](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781645178453?ref=thebeemagazine.com) Blake Morrison – [When Did You Last See Your Father? ](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781783787654?ref=thebeemagazine.com)David Nicholls – [One Day](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781399728621?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [Starter for Ten](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780340734872?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [Us](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780340897010?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [You are Here](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781444715460?ref=thebeemagazine.com) David Nobbs – [The Fall and Rise of Reginal Perrin](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781409067528?ref=thebeemagazine.com) Edward St Aubyn – the [Patrick Melrose](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781509897674?ref=thebeemagazine.com) novels Leo Tolstoy – [War and Peace](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781454959885?ref=thebeemagazine.com) Sue Townsend – [The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780141046433?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 ¾](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781405932189?ref=thebeemagazine.com) Keith Waterhouse – [Billy Liar](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780241973646?ref=thebeemagazine.com) Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle – the [Molesworth](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780141186009?ref=thebeemagazine.com) books [A Guide to The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4 by Sue TownsendGeorgia Poplett’s introduction to the plot, characters and historical background of Sue Townsend’s novel about a young working-class intellectual in 1980s Leicester.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/icon/favicon-e3ec4e75-82c9-4062-91bd-c5449af41852.png)The BeeGeorgia Poplett![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/thumbnail/amscene-f2bcc6bd-1fe3-4f97-9bb0-91b157f7801a.jpg)](https://thebeemagazine.com/a-guide-to-the-secret-diary-of-adrian-mole-aged-13-3-4-by-sue-townsend/) --- [Tip the Bee](https://thebeemagazine.com/#/portal/support) All donations go towards supporting the Bee’s mission to nurture, publish promote and pay for the best new working-class writing. ### A Guide to The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4 by Sue Townsend URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/a-guide-to-the-secret-diary-of-adrian-mole-aged-13-3-4-by-sue-townsend/ Last updated: 2026-06-15T19:22:25.000Z Sue Townsend (née Johnstone) was born in Leicester on 2 April 1946\. She was the eldest of five daughters; her father was a jet-engine factory worker turned postman, and her mother worked in the factory canteen. Townsend disliked primary school, where she was frequently punished by having her legs slapped by a teacher and made to do handstands. It was her mother, not a teacher, who eventually taught her to read at the age of eight using the Just William series by Richard Crompton. When Townsend failed the 11-plus examination, she went on to South Wigston high school but left just shy of her fifteenth birthday, having already started writing in secret by this time: “Stories about a teenage girl, much influenced by the Russians. She certainly suffered privations,” she once said. The tone is pure Mole; in his aspiration and his inability to find support for it, he was far more like his creator than is generally credited. As a teenager and young adult, the aspirant Leicester Tolstoy moved between jobs, working in retail and at a garage where she spent most of her time reading books on the forecourt. She was sacked from a clothes shop for reading Oscar Wilde in the changing rooms. Her first pay packet was £3 a week (equivalent to around £84 today) at a print factory that made merchandising displays. Aged 18, she married a sheet-metal worker and quit her job to have her first baby, after which she worked night shifts selling hot dogs at a bus station. By 22, she was living on the Saffron Lane estate in Leicester with three children under five. She divorced her husband in 1971 and became a single mother, living a precarious financial existence. One familiar anecdote has her making pea soup out of one Oxo cube and a tin of garden peas. Unable to afford mascara, she made do with boot polish, applied in the style of Juliette Gréco. Such stories, typically, made jokes of the situation. Less amusing was her tale, told to the Daily Telegraph in 2012, of having “to keep my children off school because it was raining and they didn’t have suitable shoes to wear \[…\] That was so humiliating for them, but it’s something you don’t forget and makes you value what you’ve got.” The change in her fortunes began with a job at an adventure playground. It was while working with under-18s at a site in Leicester that Townsend met her second husband, Colin, who, she said, impressed her by trying to remove his jumper while simultaneously smoking a cigarette. Colin would become a pivotal believer in Townsend’s writing, encouraging her to participate in a writers’ group hosted by Leicester’s Phoenix arts theatre. Her first play, Womberang, set in the waiting room of a gynaecology clinic, won the 1979 Thames Television Playwright award and earned her a bursary to write more for the theatre. She then excavated the earlier-begun bones of what would become Adrian Mole and shared the script with a friend, the actor Nigel Bennett. Bennett responded positively and spoke about it to contacts at the BBC. This then led to the play being commissioned and broadcast on Radio 4\. Methuen Publishing Ltd (whose rights have now largely been purchased by Penguin) commissioned the novel shortly afterwards, with the caveat that the titular character, “Nigel”, be renamed Adrian to avoid any IP conflict with the Molesworth series. Townsend rectified the situation by swapping the original Nigel for Adrian. Townsend wrote multiple plays after Womberang, notably: The Ghost of Daniel Lambert (1981); Dayroom (1981); Captain Christmas and the Evil Adults (1982); The Great Celestial Cow (1984); Bazaar and Rummage (1984); Groping for Words (1983); Ear, Nose and Throat (1988); Disneyland It Ain’t (1989); Ten Tiny Fingers, Nine Tiny Toes (1990); The Queen and I: A Play with Songs (1994); and Plays 1 (1996). She also wrote two works of non-fiction, Mr Bevan’s Dream (1989) and The Public Confessions of a Middle-Aged Woman (2001). Her other novels include Rebuilding Coventry (1988); The Queen and I (1992); Ghost Children (1997); Number Ten (2002); Queen Camilla (2006); and The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year (2012). It is a significant body of work. Some of us who admire Townsend’s work feel that if she had been French, say, it might be taken more seriously by British scholars. In Europe, she has long been regarded as a rewarding subject for critics and postgraduate students. Her series of Adrian Mole titles, written between 1982 and 2009, did garner her a global fanbase. It comprised The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4 (1982); The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole (1984); The True Confessions of Adrian Albert Mole (1989); Adrian Mole: The Wilderness Years (1993); Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years (1999); Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction (2004); The Lost Diaries of Adrian Mole, 1999–2001 (2008); and, finally, Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years (2009). The collective success transformed her life, not least because the series has been adapted for radio, TV and stage multiple times, with Townsend writing the screenplays for the first and second books. As writer Toby Litt wrote in 2024, “Once the money from Adrian Mole – the original book, the follow-ups, the TV shows – transformed (or attempted to transform) Sue’s life, she was able to have an architect design and build for her a top-floor workspace with large windows and a huge writing desk and bookshelves and whatnot. It was intended to create perfect working conditions.” (“I’ve never written a word up there,” she later admitted. “I can hardly bear to go in \[…\] I’m so embarrassed by it \[…\] I still write in the corner of the front room, or on the kitchen table,” she said. “With the ironing off to one side, if I can make space.”) In later life she was bestowed the freedom of Leicester, made a Doctor of Letters at Loughborough University, and became a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Additionally, Townsend was a vocal supporter of the Labour party, despite her disappointment in New Labour. She invested a significant portion of her earnings into her hometown, including buying up two Leicester pubs at risk of closure. Adrian Mole is particularly affixed, however, to its temporal context and geography. Leicester in the 1980s was, like many regions of the UK, affected by the hot-button issues of the decade: the Falklands, second-wave feminism, mass unemployment, and unrest in Northern Ireland. This was a largely working-class, multicultural, youthful population, which reflected liberal attitudes towards political issues of the time (and, indeed, today), including race and immigration; Leicester was one of the UK’s first cities to found a Race Equality Centre in 1967, and the creation of De Montfort University in 1992 attracted a wealth of young people to the city, as well as global musicians such as Iron Maiden. Professor Corinne Fowler notes that Townsend was “very connected to the region” and insisted on retaining the original Leicester cast for the Adrian Mole musical’s London outing. Similarly, her original manuscripts contained “a few references to Leicester \[…\] but it seems the editor must have asked them to be removed. I think that tells you something about literary culture. Anywhere outside London risked being seen as parochial if it includes the local references for a region.” Her life was blighted by ill health, and it became worse as she got older. She was diagnosed with TB peritonitis at age 23, suffered from Charcot joint degenerative arthritis, and experienced a heart attack in her thirties. She was also diagnosed with diabetes early in life and spent a significant sum adapting her home to accommodate her wheelchair. In 2001 she was registered blind and dictated her later books to her son, Sean. In 2007 she suffered kidney failure; Sean donated a kidney to his mother in 2009\. She died at home on 10 April 2014 following a stroke. She left behind £1.1 million, divided between her family and the anti-torture charity Freedom From Torture. ### The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole: Background Adrian Mole began as a stage play in a drawer, famously inspired by a chance remark from one of Townsend’s children. “He came into my head when my eldest son said, ‘Why don’t we go to safari parks like other families do?’ That’s the only real line of dialogue from my family that’s in any of the Mole books. It’s in because it triggered it. I remembered that kind of whiny, adolescent self-pity, that ‘surely these are not my parents’.” In an interview with The Guardian in 2009, Townsend remembered that she “heard \[Mole\] first, and then saw him, but I only saw him from the head down; I didn’t see his face, didn’t know what he looked like – well, not until I saw John Major on the telly \[who has\] a lovely face when he takes his glasses off.” Initially, Townsend explained that she wrote what would become *The Secret Diary* as a stage play. When Nigel Bennett – whom she met through her work with the Phoenix Arts Theatre – needed a monologue for a *Huckleberry Finn* audition, she shared some excerpts. Bennett, in turn, sent it to the BBC’s deputy head of radio drama, John Tydeman. After much debate, Adrian’s age was settled at 13¾ due to Tydeman’s concerns that placing him any older risked discounting the “considerable physical changes” which can occur at the entrance to teenage boyhood. The show was popular when transmitted for the first time on radio in 1982, and Tydeman commissioned six episodes, which were broadcast at 8.45am. It became something of a phenomenon. There were newspaper stories about people staying in their cars to listen before going into work, including a High Court judge who was late for court because he had been sitting in the car park catching the end of the episode. “When the first book was published I received a £500 advance, but didn’t think it would sell. I worried that most of the first print run of 5,000 would end up being remaindered,” Townsend later said. For her first meeting with Tydeman, she could not afford the train ticket back to Leicester, so Tydeman took her to the accounts department and arranged for her to be paid the fare. Commissioned as a novel by Methuen shortly after its first broadcast, the hardback was published in the autumn of 1982\. It was helped by a memorable jacket illustration from Caroline Holden: “With its Noddy toothbrush to one side, razor and shaving-brush to the other,” wrote Alex Clark, “the book captured the painful drama of adolescence, of feeling caught between two worlds and belonging to neither, down to the last detail.” Townsend and her agent had both raised the possibility of including comic illustrations in the finished script, which her editor Geoffrey Strachan encouraged: “I believe Mole's surname came from a much-loved teacher of Sue’s who had thrilled her at school by reading aloud to his class. I had suggested changing his Christian name, to avoid any possible confusion with Geoffrey Williams’ Nigel Molesworth books (a very different schoolboy hero), and she simply, neatly swapped the names of her hero and his best friend, Nigel and Adrian. Janet Fillingham had suggested illustrations, and I thought pictures would lighten the page and draw readers in. But I wanted to avoid any attempt at a likeness of Adrian – or Molesworth-like ink blots on the cover. The reader (like the listener to the radio) must see the world through Adrian’s eyes and take him seriously.” *The Secret Diary* quickly sold its first 7,000 hardbacks and became the No 1 Sunday Times bestseller of 1982, with sales numbering seven million by the end of the decade alone. (It should be noted that Townsend gives varying figures in different interviews with respect to the first print run.) In a 1989 interview, when Townsend was asked about the popularity of her creation, she replied, “People have tried to supply the answer by saying that there is something universal about Mole because we have all gone through adolescence; it is a shared experience.” This statement is borne out by the novel’s translation into nearly 50 languages as of 2024\. Townsend later added that she felt readers identified with Adrian on account of his good nature. In an early interview, Townsend clarified that she intended her books to illuminate only “what it’s like for one particular class of people in one particular town.” The Secret Diary became the bestselling book of the 1980s, with over twenty million copies sold to date and translations into nearly fifty languages. What is interesting is that its cover designs through the ages might appear to position it within a children’s or YA market; however, the bulk of Townsend’s fan-mail indicates that Adrian Mole captured the nostalgia of an adult generation reminded of their own youth, whose children were a similar age to Adrian. She herself said that she would prefer “an adult reading.” ### The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole on TV and in the theatre The Adrian Mole series was adapted for television three times: The Secret Diary on ITV by Thames Television in 1985, starring Julie Walters as Pauline and a purpose-written theme song by Ian Dury and the Blockheads, Profoundly in Love with Pandora; Townsend herself wrote the screenplay. The second was based on The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole in 1987, and *The Cappuccino Years*, starring Stephen Mangan as Adrian and Alison Steadman as Pauline, aired in 2001. The first book was also adapted for the stage in 1984, again by Townsend, featuring music and lyrics by Ken Howard and Alan Blaikley. The script was later published by Methuen. It was first performed at the Phoenix Arts Theatre in Leicester, where Townsend joined her first writers’ group, before travelling to Wyndham’s Theatre in London. Together with Pippa Cleary and Jake Brunger, Townsend worked on another musical adaptation before her death, with the finished production staged at Leicester’s Curve Theatre in 2015\. The musical debuted in Southwark in 2017, joined the West End in 2019 at the Ambassadors Theatre, and moved to Hornchurch in 2022. Both The Secret Diary and The Growing Pains were adapted into computer adventure games in the 1980s by Level 9 Computing. According to a user review, “The player reads passages of text (many of them from the book) and is given three choices as to what to do, which lead to other events unfolding. You can also use a help option which displays information about characters featured in the diary. Your aim throughout all of this is to make Adrian as popular as possible. The player’s score and ranking is displayed at particular times during the game. The percentage achieved relates to the rank, with 26% being ‘a spotty creep’ and 38% ‘a middling thicko.’” Adrian Mole himself featured in regular character appearances on the BBC Radio 4 programme Pirate Radio Four. ### Comedy and social class in The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole The fictional diary form has its origins in some of the earliest surviving literature. In 935, the Japanese writer Ki no Tsurayuki composed *Tosa Nikki*, an account of his journey from Shikoku to Kyoto in the form of diary entries allegedly authored by his (non-existent) female companion. This was the first known departure from earlier examples of the diary genre, which were written exclusively in Chinese to detail governmental affairs. The adoption of a female narrator allowed Ki no Tsurayuki to inhabit a more aesthetic perspective, including the use of Japanese kana characters. The diary form was highly exclusionary, privileging the perspective of those who had the time, materials and ability to write. Indeed, Adrian’s obsession with being (or becoming) an intellectual is framed through the diary form paratext, as a historically highbrow activity. However, from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries onwards – with George and Weedon Grossmith’s *Diary of a Nobody* (1892), *Gentlemen Prefer Blondes* by Anita Loos (1925) and *Diary of a Provincial Lady* by E. M. Delafield (1930), to name but a few – the development of the diary form shifted into the mode of wry societal critique, which deliberately captured marginalised points of view. In late twentieth-century Britain, the diary form underwent a further transformation. The political diary, historically published as propaganda to increase the popular appeal of a particular candidate, became a staple of the publishing landscape with such offerings as *The Benn Diaries* (first published in 1989) and Alan Clark’s diaries, published in three volumes from 1993\. *The Secret Diary* – and, indeed, all the Adrian Mole books – riffs off these examples, bridging political wit and comic timing to effect a wry portrait of working-class life under Thatcher. Townsend’s creation also crested a wave of comic fiction diaries which dominated the bestseller lists in the late twentieth century, notably Helen Fielding’s *Bridget Jones*(1996) and Posy Simmonds’s *Mrs Weber’s Diary* (1979). These two titles, however, are distinctly (and, in the case of the first, often obliviously) middle class; Adrian Mole, by contrast, is explicitly class conscious, perhaps more so in *The Growing Pains* than *The Secret Diary*. A more relevant comparison might be Louise Rennison’s stratospherically successful *Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging*, published as a YA fictional diary in 1999 and rebranded as *Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging* for the 2008 film; a key plot point revolves around the protagonist’s father emigrating to New Zealand to look for work amidst mass unemployment in England. (Interestingly, the film adaptation altered this detail, with the father emigrating to pursue a prestigious promotion within his industry instead.) Teenage diaries in and of themselves appear to have become widespread in the nineteenth century, when literacy rates increased and the cost of paper production decreased. Several fascinating examples of historical diary entries – both girls’ and boys’ – have been digitised by the Diary File project. In 2010, the Dear Diary: Secrets and Struggles from Kenya to the UK exhibition was curated by experimental youth initiative Ctrl.Alt.Shift to accompany the publication of *Cringe*, a selection of teenage diaries from the late 1980s and 1990s, edited by Sarah Brown. Townsend’s departure from screenwriting in favour of a fictional diary through the eyes of a pubescent boy both makes sense, then, and is a striking choice. Adrian certainly yearns for the masculine intellectualism of Pepys, while producing an unwittingly captivating portrait of the dramatic socioeconomic changes engulfing Leicester in the early 1980s – a period much in common with the dramatic biological changes engulfing poor Adrian himself. The role of puberty in the novel also adheres to a broader literary tradition of young (if not always teenage) masculinity, such as the Molesworth series, which originally influenced Townsend; Roddy Doyle’s 1993 Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha; and David Mitchell’s 2006 Black Swan Green. However, Townsend’s choice to narrate the perspective of a teenage boy as a woman in her thirties – albeit one in close proximity to teenage boyhood via her young sons – seems to be a singular one. (Strikingly, the construct of “girlhood” is prevalent on social media sites now – was this era the “boyhood” equivalent?) She also worked at youth clubs and trained as a social worker for boys with behavioural difficulties, affording her a unique insight into the teenage mind and cultivating her understanding of it as an ingenuous space for social reflection. The diary form, then, was distinct from other modes of fiction, which might demand such political critique in less nuanced ways. *Mole* is also a comic novel, a rarer thing today than then. Comic novelist Alexander Larman writes that “the reason why it is so difficult for comic novels to be published, despite their enormous popularity with readers, is that most editors and publishers are cautious of its potential difficulty as a genre.” Certainly, in the UK market, comic novels are classed as commercial publishing; those authored by women especially fall under the umbrella of “chick lit,” with the most successful (such as Nina Stibbe and Sophie Kinsella) garnering upwards of six-figure sales and supermarket distribution deals which, nevertheless, diminish their perceived “literariness.” Book awards honouring this kind of fiction are few and far between in comparison with the wealth of prizes for “literary” fiction, with only the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize and Comedy Women in Print, founded in 2018, widely known and respected. The Bollinger in particular, which has run for twenty-four years, has been criticised for its overwhelmingly white, male, middle-class winners; as Larman puts it, “The award didn’t take place at all in 2018 because the judges failed to find anything worth shortlisting, let alone winning. One looks at some of the award winners over the past two decades – Ian McEwan’s Solar? Arguably Edward St Aubyn’s weakest book, Lost for Words? Will Self’s The Butt? – and wonders how miserably unfunny most of the books submitted must have been.” The working-class comedy novel is a rarer thing still, although working-class comedy on television has been a staple since the 1950s. Working-class domestic humour – i.e., comedy both for and about working-class families – is a knowledge gap in scholarly literature, with such discussion as there is tending to be limited to the anecdotal. “The working classes are best suited to making people laugh because their lives are more ‘extreme’, they’ve got more experiences to call upon,” runs one typical sentence from a postgraduate paper on the subject that I shall leave nameless. “Working-class people are definitely livelier. They’re not afraid to express themselves. Let’s just say they’ve hung out their dirty washing in public (laughs). So, there’s nothing to hide… middle-class people, I just think the defences are up.” Hardly serious language, and not something that would be accepted in discussions of bourgeois literature. What needs more serious study is the way British sitcoms tackled class distinctions in the second half of the twentieth century, as TV ownership became more widespread. Reflecting on this era, Tim Strangleman has noted that “the working-class characters who populated primetime television schedules were presented as intelligent, thoughtful individuals who were part of a wider mass culture. \[British comedy from the 1960s and 1970s\] enjoyed puncturing the pomposity and pretensions of the middle classes, but it did this while reflecting on the poverty of cultural aspiration and the sense of blinkered horizons and geographical immobility.” This theme is undoubtedly visible in *Adrian Mole*, if not via Adrian’s own visions for his future, then via proximal figures such as his parents. The representation of “upward mobility” in such cultural works from the 1990s and early 2000s, Mike Wayne suggests, may be an import from American narratives, especially the model of the working-class gifted artiste who manages to “break out” of class structures through talent, hard work, and a big break. This narrative is certainly one which Townsend satirises in *Adrian Mole*. However, her novel simultaneously adheres to the idea of the safe, comfortable working-class home. Nicola Wilson’s book Home in British Working-Class Fiction is an extensive meditation on this subject, investigating “home” and “family” as key emotional sites for class feeling and identity. They are “hard-wrought and precarious \[…\] a place that needs cleaning and slaving, where the weekly wage packet is crucial to make ends meet.” Crucially, the working-class home has historically been figured through a voyeuristic literary lens in the vein of the Christmas Day neighbours in Little Women, an encounter designed to further middle-class character development; by contrast, texts written “from below”, as Wilson states, embrace a sentimentality and an emotional security epitomised by the language of Lancashire writer and social activist Ethel Carnie: “You aristocrats \[…\] will never know the delight with which the toiler looks around his home on Sunday afternoon \[…\] You take all the shine and cleanliness for granted – servants have done it and the labour of others has made you rich enough to obtain this lovely thing and that – but we know the price of our belongings.” Adrian’s interactions with “the dog” (it is never named) seem interesting in this context. The dog remains consistently nameless, goes missing more than once, and is frequently “locked in the coal shed” – but is also the last family member to have its rations cut in challenging times, and is rushed to the vet on many occasions. “It was nice to see its happy face,” Adrian reflects, upon bumping into one another out and about. This affectionate dynamic is at once obscured by tortured, intellectual Adrian. Simultaneously, his love for his dog is so obvious as to be not worth stating in his precious diary pages. Likewise, Adrian’s relationship with his parents is largely positive despite their respective infidelities, mental health struggles, and affectionate dismissal of his literary aspirations (although one might wonder who it was that gifted Adrian his diary to begin with). Indeed, it appears that Pauline does not read Adrian’s diary during his tonsil surgery, having promised “on the dog’s life” not to. While the electricity is cut on more than one occasion and Social Services frequently fail to deliver Pauline’s giro, Adrian’s distinctive narrative voice reinforces that this is a domestic space in which he feels safe and sufficiently loved to be himself. You have to wonder whether novels that might have been packaged as working-class “comedy” in the late twentieth century are today rebranded as literary fiction to avoid being pigeonholed as two-dimensional (and, perhaps, to give them a better stab at prizes). *Queenie*, by Candice Carty-Williams, for example, is hailed as “brilliant, timely, funny, heartbreaking,” and follows a working-class British-Jamaican woman as she navigates early adulthood in London. The novel won British Book of the Year at the Nibbies, as well as a runner-up place for the Comedy Women in Print Prize. Similarly, Paul Murray won the Bollinger prize in 2016 for The Mark and the Void and was later shortlisted for the prestigious Booker in 2023 for The Bee Sting. It is almost as though a comedy novel pitched as a comedy novel is delegitimised in its capacity to engage serious themes like racism and misogyny/misogynoir. How might Townsend’s genre of observational humour now have been published today? The YA market’s pockets are colossal, as it is the demographic most reachable through social media. Would we be seeing The Secret Diary on BookTok if it were published today, despite Townsend’s preference for parents, and not children, to read her work? Why was The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4 so successful? The book’s popularity was rooted specifically in its historical and national setting, whose references to popular culture and current affairs tap into a very British kind of framework. Adrian’s reaction to Thatcherism is both politically astute and an insight into the thorny, often distressing, events of the Eighties for working-class people. The intimacy of the diary mode is also a further appeal for this readership, as is Townsend’s accessible style. What is clear is that Townsend was able to attract a demographic that was not typically targeted by the publishing industry, with immensely lucrative results. She allegedly once bumped into a woman in a bookstore purchasing The Growing Pains, who said that it was “‘the first hard-book I’ve ever bought’ – she didn’t know the right expression for it.” The diary form also allowed for a reading experience characterised by brief dips into a text, suitable for those without much time or ability to read uninterrupted. Townsend herself, at the Brussels launch of her novel The Queen and I, admitted that she did not feel capable of writing long descriptive passages without boring her readers. H. Porter Abbott writes that the diary form “invokes an intensity of privacy, cloistering, isolation” that other literary forms do not; Townsend thus ushers her audience into a reading experience in an inclusive and intimate way. Adrian Mole also did not exclude readers from other demographics that were more popularly catered to, however; as David Nicholls identifies, “Adrian was entirely average; a middle-achieving Everyboy from the Midlands, not as posh as Pandora or Nigel, posher than the terrifying Barry Kent \[…\] smartly written, stuffed full of in-jokes and references to Orwell and Flaubert and Simone de Beauvoir, but it made sense to people who weren’t quite sure what a campus looked like, and there was also a compassion so much other comedy seemed to lack \[…\] Boys and girls read Adrian Mole, adults and teenagers, all of us wondering the same thing: “How does Sue Townsend know?’” This wholesome kinship chimed with other popular cultural landmarks of the Seventies into the Eighties – the Victoria Woods and Alan Bennetts of the age, alongside more sanitary comedies such as Blackadder, Morse, Brideshead Revisited, Yes Minister, Red Dwarf, ’Allo ’Allo, and Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em, and soap dramas like EastEnders. Channel 4 was launched in 1982, the first real competitor to the BBC and ITV, and became known for its risk-taking broadcasts aimed at working-class audiences (despite, unfortunately, a reputation among staff as being “Britain’s poshest broadcaster”). Townsend may not have initiated this moment, but she was certainly a part of it, and “enriched the tradition of British comic writing”. In the end, it doesn’t matter how she knew, but if there was a secret, it was probably as predictable and familiar as writing what she knew. Undoubtedly, her perceptions of the workings of an ordinary human heart touched readers from all classes and backgrounds, but as a working-class writer, Townsend was also reaching a working-class audience that, once reached, showed itself to be huge. She herself was little changed by the experience. She was vocal about the fact that Adrian Mole brought her financial stability, up until which point she had been living “a hand-to-mouth existence in a council house with no phone or car”. Nonetheless, in the Observer in 2005, she wrote: “I am from the working class. I am now what I was then. No amount of balsamic vinegar and Prada handbags could make me forget what it was like to be poor.” --- [Tip the Bee](https://thebeemagazine.com/#/portal/support) All donations go towards supporting the Bee’s mission to nurture, publish promote and pay for the best new working-class writing. ### Are working class people saints? URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/are-working-class-people-saints/ Last updated: 2025-09-11T17:48:08.000Z She offered as her pitch for the job… ‘I’m working class...’, like it is a special dust and inheritance that so obviously makes her ideal for the job,” fumes Giles Dilnot on the [ConservativeHome](https://conservativehome.com/2025/09/10/when-did-we-accept-the-sanctification-of-being-working-class-we-shouldnt/?ref=thebeemagazine.com) website. “When did we adopt this sanctification of working-class credentials?” He is talking about Bridget Phillipson’s candidacy for the deputy leadership of the Labour party, and her campaign in which she has spoken about her working-class background. Your class, he says, doesn’t make you more talented, and anyway, “I thought we were all pretty keen to make that a thing of the past … I have no idea what my ‘class’ was or is, nor do I much care.” (Middle class, then.) The idea that class belongs to the past is patently nonsense, but it was Dilnot’s interpretation of Bridget Phillipson’s references to her background that struck me. He clearly hears it as boast, a means to getting something. Most working-class people, surely, would hear her saying she understands, and will try to represent them. It’s also a way of her saying she’s not the sort of person who pulls up the ladder behind her. As for “sanctification”, a lot of us will be interested to learn society regards us as saintly, as we had gained rather the opposite impression. For me, this was another of those moments when you realise that some middle- and upper-class people have quite strange ideas about what being working-class actually involves, and feels like. I was reminded of a wealthy photographer I once met who seemed genuinely surprised when I told him I’d never witnessed knife crime when I was at school. It's so absurd it can almost seem funny. It’s also annoying, though, because this projection of untruths and misapprehensions onto people perpetuates the very class prejudices that Dilnot wishes gone. Class isn’t only about what you make of yourself, boastful or not. Class is also something that is done to you. Quite often by weird accusations and claims like Mr Dilnot’s. --- [Tip the Bee](https://thebeemagazine.com/#/portal/support) All donations go towards supporting the Bee’s mission to nurture, publish promote and pay for the best new working-class writing. ### Selina Nwulu’s Other Green World URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/selina-nwulus-other-green-world/ Last updated: 2025-09-09T17:01:41.000Z Selina Nwulu, former Young Poet Laureate for London, works both as a creative writer and a consultant in the social and climate justice sector. Her poetry has been featured in Vogue, i-D and ES Magazine, translated into number of different languages and exhibited worldwide. Her collection*,*[ *A Little Resurrection*](https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/little-resurrection-9781526649966/?ref=thebeemagazine.com)(Bloomsbury 2022) was a Poetry Book Society recommendation and an Irish Times book of the year, and her work was longlisted for the 2023 Forward prizes. In her debut essay collection, Black Climates: Notes on Race, Our Environment, and Visions for Equitable Futures, reframes the crisis by asking: what might a saved planet look like for a Black collective? As Selina points out, in order to want to save the planet, a person must feel they belong in it. Yet Black people are often told they do not belong in certain places. What’s more, climate change – with roots in colonialism and exploitation – can feel inherently racist. Black Climates deals imaginatively with these questions, and evokes Selina’s close engagement with the natural world around her. In August we caught up with her to explore some of the issues in the book, and ask why mainstream environmental movements can seem so exclusionary. **Richard Benson**: *Black Climates* covers a wide range of subjects, and blends personal and more political perspectives. Was there a catalyst that got you started on the book? **Selina Nwulu**: My work, in general, aims to blend the personal and political, often in ways that may seem unexpected and interpersonal. So *Black Climates* was really the continuation of this thinking, and a culmination of 10-plus years of thought about race and the climate crisis.I’ve given talks about how we need more interesting and accessible ways of talking about climate change, so this was a chance for me to put my money where my mouth is! It felt important to weave some personal anecdotes into the book to show how my life, and by extension all of our lives, fit into the broader context of climate breakdown. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/09/71fQddbiErL._SL1500_.jpg) **RB**: Were there any things you discovered in the course of researching the book that changed how you saw the climate crisis? **SN**: I mention in the introduction that the central point in every chapter is the matter of what has been taken from us, and the question of how we reclaim it. This was the conclusion I found myself coming to at the end of every topic covered, and is essentially the overarching question of the book. But I think it’s a question that can only be truly answered as a collective. Another realisation was something I already knew on some level, but that was reawakened in writing this book. It’s that beneath all the pain and exploitation we face, the planet is actually a living miracle. It’s a miracle that we live on a planet that has the potential to offer us everything we need to live fulfilled and healthy lives, whether via the air we breathe or food that grows. And the key to accessing it is none other than living in sync with the natural world and its seasons, not against it. It’s so simple we often take it for granted. **RB**: Although you make the point that we have differing relationships with the planet… **SN**: Yes… I don’t think the main message of the climate movement is inherently wrong – this is our only planet and we need to do our best to save it. But we don’t all have the same relationship to the planet, particularly those of us who have been marginalised. This too needs honest interrogation, and ultimately means we need to take necessary steps to repair the disconnect and systemic violence many of us experience, if we are all to have a stake in a more sustainable future. **RB**: I detected behind your highlighting of problems a great love of nature on your part. Was that correct? **SN**: Writing this book showed me that perhaps I am, more than I think! I think a love for the natural world was the antidote to some of the heavier, more painful topics that I discussed. For all the difficulties of the crisis, the natural world also offers us an opportunity to be more connected to it, and to belong to it in a way that marginalised communities are rarely afforded elsewhere. **RB**: Is there one particular place where you might go, as a personal choice, to really feel that beauty? **SN**: I wouldn’t say I had one specific place to go, but I think over the years I’ve begun to witness the ordinary. The way that the trees and wildlife in my local area change with the seasons, or even just how my houseplants are coming along. I realised that for every passing year there’s something new I always notice, that nothing is ever staying the same. I look out for specific trees to blossom again in spring and imagine the wisdom they hold. It’s made me understand everyday green spaces, big and small, in a new way. **RB**: I came away thinking that the mainstream green movements have basically failed to build much of a movement or consensus outside a narrow group of people. Would you agree? **SN**: I definitely agree, and this is the feeling that I and many others have had about mainstream green movements for some time. While I think there have been some intersectional changes within environmental activism more recently, a movement that is inherently white, without concentrated effort, will frame its thinking and behaviours in whiteness, which by extension excludes and undermines non-whiteness. This is how “neutral” narratives can actually be quite violent. So, while typical messages to “save the planet” and “protect green spaces” aren’t wrong, if you are ignoring other human lives that also need to be saved and protected as part of the planet you say you care about, then it’s a one-dimensional and exclusionary idea. **RB**: One of many moments that made me stop in my tracks as I read was the start of chapter 2, where you use the words “I can’t breathe” to link police brutality and the brutality of people who enable air pollution. In newsrooms or in academia, these areas would usually be compartmentalised. Your writing, however, makes connections between the ideas. Do you see that compartmentalisation as a kind of luxury that ruling groups can afford? **SN**: Yes, and I think this builds on my last answer – we need more interconnected ways of thinking about the world. I think there’s something in us that craves simplicity, and to be able to think about the world in ways that are more clear-cut. Certainly, within many public spheres, such as within mainstream media, we’re given tidy soundbites that don’t often allow for nuance or complexity, especially when it comes to matters of race. But the world doesn’t exist in these neat and tidy ways. Everything is interconnected and often non-linear. Our understanding of the climate crisis needs to also hold space for such messiness and complexity. **RB**: You mention moving past the rigidity of Blackness when it’s reduced to an acronym or defined solely as a contrast to whiteness. Mainstream arts and culture still seem at a point where Black nature writing is seen as a kind of sub-genre or special interest section in a genre dominated by white middle-class men. If you could wave a magic wand, how would publishers’ presentation of work, and critical responses, be different? **SN**: This speaks to a point I make in the introduction of the book – white people make up to 15% of the global population. Which means when speaking about stories that affect all of us, industries and movements that seek to sideline the global majority are missing out on the bigger picture. It affects how we’re able to see, know and understand the world, and this lack of real global representation leaves us all the poorer. This means moving past tokenisation and there “already being one BPOC” talking about the crisis, and instead giving space for many of us. This isn’t just about equity – though there is a case for that – but it’s also about how we learn the real truths and wisdoms of the world that can best equip us all as a collective in the face of an existential threat such as the climate crisis. **RB**: At the end of the book you talk about the value of the radical imagination and of being unrealistic. Do you feel this is important as a reaction to capitalism? **SN**: I have to believe that things feel so extreme and challenging precisely because we are witnessing the end of many of the structures that have held capitalism, and now late-stage capitalism, in place. We have been spoon-fed this reality, and have never been encouraged to question or consider alternatives beyond what we are experiencing in the here and now. So, I think it’s on us all to think about other possible ways we get to exist, beyond violence and exploitation. It’s pretty daunting, but I think part of the work of believing we can exist beyond the cruelties of late-stage capitalism is practising alternatives. **RB**: The issue of social class felt present as an idea in *Black Climates*, without being made explicit. **SN**: Yes, on a practical level, writing *Black Climates* made me understand why writing a book is something marginalised people rarely get to do. You need time, experimentation and space. It was very hard to write a book like this and do my day job at the same time. Trying to balance the book and other life responsibilities was a constant navigation for a lot of this process. More conceptually, class, alongside other marginalised experiences, was present in my thinking in this book. My starting point for this work was the question: who gets to feel and worry about the climate crisis, when already constantly in navigation of other crises, whether that be the cost-of-living crisis, disability cuts and ableism, transphobia, racial violence or growing anti-immigration sentiment? While I can fully understand how the climate crisis may not be something a person feels they have headspace for, I hope this book offers a way of thinking about climate change in ways that intersect with a person’s life and concerns, rather than distracting from and undermining them. **RB**: Are you working on anything else, or are you taking a break? **SN**: Definitely a break! And taking some time for thinking about the next creative project. I’d also really love to be in conversation about many of the topics I discuss in the book. Buy Black Climates in our shop at [**Bookshop.org**](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781784744885?ref=thebeemagazine.com) Contact Selina Nwulu about Black Climates at [www.selinanwulu.com](https://www.selinanwulu.com/?ref=thebeemagazine.com) --- [Tip the Bee](https://thebeemagazine.com/#/portal/support) All donations go towards supporting the Bee’s mission to nurture, publish promote and pay for the best new working-class writing. ### The Working Class Library Episode 4: Lark Rise to Candleford by Flora Thompson URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/the-working-class-library-episode-4-lark-rise-to-candleford-by-flora-thompson/ Last updated: 2025-09-05T12:56:45.000Z For this episode, Richard and Claire are joined by novelist [Sarah Hall](https://www.sarahhallauthor.com/?ref=thebeemagazine.com) to consider Flora Thompson’s memoir [Lark Rise to Candleford](https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/lark-rise-to-candleford-flora-thompson/4850914?aid=15568&ean=9780198796695&&ref=thebeemagazine.com). These days, Lark Rise to Candleford is perhaps the best-known English rural memoir in print. Thanks in no small part to the BBC’s 2000s TV adaptation, and historic class-washing in its jackets and illustrations, it is commonly thought of as a rather cosily nostalgic book. In reality, however, it is strongly class-conscious and political. Why is Thompson’s trilogy not celebrated as a classic of working-class literature? If you have any thoughts or comments on the show, please come and chat to us on our social media channels. ### **Books and Authors Mentioned** Elizabeth Gaskell – [Cranford](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781838573751?ref=thebeemagazine.com) Sarah Hall – [Burntcoat](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780571329342?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [Haweswater](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780571315604?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [Helm](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780571383559?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [How to Paint a Dead Man](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780571315635?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [Madam Zero](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780571290024?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [Sudden Traveller](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780571345052?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [The Carhullan Army](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780571315628?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [The Electric Michelangelo](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780571315611?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [The Wolf Border](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780571258130?ref=thebeemagazine.com) Barbara Hammond & JL Hammond – [The Village Labourer](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781845880569?ref=thebeemagazine.com) DH Lawrence – [Lady Chatterley’s Lover](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781454953128?ref=thebeemagazine.com) Charles Dickens – [The Old Curiosity Shop](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781528716918?ref=thebeemagazine.com) Flora Thompson – [Bog-Myrtle and Peat](http://johnowensmith.co.uk/flora/BMP-A5.pdf?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [Lark Rise to Candleford](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780198796695?ref=thebeemagazine.com) ### **Other Links:** [The Catholic Fireside](https://www.victorianperiodicals.com/series3/single%5Fsample.asp?id=125622&ref=thebeemagazine.com) [Laura’s reading in Lark Rise to Candleford](https://bagfullofbooks.com/2022/09/23/over-to-candleford-and-candleford-green-by-flora-thompson/?ref=thebeemagazine.com) [The Juniper Hill enclosures](http://www.stevebishop.net/flora-thompson-didnrsquot-mention-the-guerilla-war-of-juniper-hill?ref=thebeemagazine.com) [An Introduction to Lark Rise to Candleford by Flora ThompsonLark Rise to Candleford is a classic of English working-class literature, but is commonly thought of as a cosy, nostalgic memoir. Why?![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/icon/favicon-12.png)The BeeGeorgia Poplett![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/thumbnail/flora-thompson.jpg)](https://thebeemagazine.com/an-introduction-to-lark-rise-to-candleford-by-flora-thompson/) --- [Tip the Bee](https://thebeemagazine.com/#/portal/support) All donations go towards supporting the Bee’s mission to nurture, publish promote and pay for the best new working-class writing. ### An Introduction to Lark Rise to Candleford by Flora Thompson URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/an-introduction-to-lark-rise-to-candleford-by-flora-thompson/ Last updated: 2025-09-05T12:57:34.000Z [The Working Class Library Episode 4: Lark Rise to Candleford by Flora ThompsonRichard and Claire are joined by novelist Sarah Hall to consider Flora Thompson’s memoir Lark Rise to Candleford.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/icon/favicon-10.png)The BeeRichard Benson![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/thumbnail/lark-rise-to-candleford.jpg)](https://thebeemagazine.com/the-working-class-library-episode-4-lark-rise-to-candleford-by-flora-thompson/) In the late 1930s, prompted by her increasing unease at class divisions in Britain, the rise of the Brownshirts, and those who had “left village life and all it stood for behind them”, Flora Thompson, who ran a provincial English post office, began to explore the prospect of writing her childhood memoirs. She felt part of a class that had been forced to “choose between merging themselves in the mass standardisation of a new civilisation” and “adapting the best of the new to their own needs while still retaining those qualities and customs which have given country life its distinctive character”. Stanley Baldwin’s 1927 speech, *What England Means to Me*, epitomised a growing national nostalgia for “the last load at night of hay being drawn down a lane as the twilight comes on, and \[…\] that wood smoke that our ancestors, tens of thousands of years ago, must have caught on the air when they were still nomads” Meanwhile, writers such as Stella Gibbons were parodying the peculiarities of rural life with *Cold Comfort Farm* at the same time as Mary Webb and her Shropshire romances sold like the hot cakes their protagonists were endlessly baking. The repeal of the Agricultural Act in 1921 slashed the minimum wage for farm labourers, with arable farms arguably the worst hit. As a result, working-class country people were forced to migrate beyond the villages in which their families may well have spent generations, looking for work. This cultural moment was reflected in the literature of the time; Alice Spawls, reviewing Richard Mabey’s biography of Flora Thompson in the *London Review of Books* in 2015, observes: “Forster wrote a pageant in praise of the Surrey village of Abinger; Ravilious, Nash and Piper created iconic images of cornfields, cliffs, country houses, hay bales and ploughs. HV Morton’s record of his journey around the countryside in a Bullnose Morris, *In Search of England*, was a bestseller (30 editions in less than six years). He wasn’t alone in being more concerned with the country as metaphor than as fact.” Similarly, in the US, Laura Ingalls Wilder had in 1935 published *Little House on the Prairie*, her bestselling children’s series which sanitises the dark history of settler expansion in the American Midwest during the late 19th century. Thompson’s drive to compose what would become the *Lark Rise to Candleford* trilogy may have been a response to the pastoral genre’s popularity and market boom in the early 20th century. She was also a political writer, however. That she writes about the Lark Rise families’ poverty, and the tensions of party-political allegiances in the hamlet, is well known, even if these subjects tend to be downplayed in adaptations. But it is less remembered that she tackles inequality, post-enclosure oppression and class solidarity with a sharper edge than she tends to be credited with. In a passage about the harvest celebrations, she undercuts the bucolic scene by noting that the “joy and pleasure of the labourers in their task well done was pathetic, considering their very small share in the gain”. Later, when describing the celebratory feast, she goes further: “the farmer paid his men starvation wages all the year and though he made it up to them by giving that one good meal. The farmer did not think so, because he did not think at all, and the men did not think either on that day; they were too busy enjoying the food and the fun.” If the difference between working-class writing, and writing about the working class, is the class-consciousness of the author, then Thompson certainly qualifies as the former. She clearly shows a class solidarity in operation at work – one that cuts across age and gender. “A new field had been thrown open for gleaning... Bob Trevor had been on the horse rake when the field was cleared and had taken good care to leave plenty of good ears behind for the gleaners. ‘If the foreman should come nosing round, he’s going to tell him that the rake’s got a bit out of order and won’t clear the stubble proper. But that corner under the two hedges is for his mother.’” With characters like Queenie, Thompson evokes a recent, pre-enclosure past when people enjoyed freedom, access to land and a life in which work and pleasure were not cleanly separated. By contrast, in the present they are wage earners only, keeping their families on starvation wages of 10 shillings a week. She depicts bourgeois, urban ignorance of the injustice in the form of the interlopers from towns who exclaim over the cottages of rural working-class people, wondering how “they brought up ten children there! Where on earth did they sleep?” (For Thompson, of course, the answer was obvious: not all at the same time.) Thompson’s trilogy appears to have been positioned by OUP to appeal to middle-class, Victorian-esque sensibilities and a notion of the English countryside as a soft and gentle place. Consequently, her class consciousness has rarely been much present in the presentation of the book, whether that be the received pronunciation of the narrator in audio, the permanent golden-hour light and soap opera-esque characterisation in the BBC TV adaptation, or the cover designs of print editions. The Oxford University Press’s original slim standalone volumes are simply designed clothbounds, featuring elegant art deco bevels and foil lettering. By contrast, the first trilogy republication takes on a significantly more baroque look, with Victorian pastoral imagery littering the dustcover front: haymaking, corn sheaves, blacksmithing and penny-farthings abound. Prominently advertised on the cover are Julie Neild’s original wood engravings, which appear as chapter headings within. It is striking to revisit this text, and especially its opening chapter – “Poor People’s Houses” – in the context of class. Despite Mabey’s attempts to reclaim her, Thompson is not primarily remembered as a nature writer from her era; it is all reminiscent of the treatment of John Clare, the lauded working-class Romantic poet famed for his descriptions of the English Midlands countryside, whose name is frequently excised from certain canons in favour of the middle- to upper-class Keats, Shelley, Byron and associates. Subsequent *Lark Rise to Candleford* covers retained the quaint botanical feel of the first trilogy, from the 1954 OUP reissue to the 1973 Penguin Classics paperback, the 1979 Book Club Associates hardback, the 1984 Penguin Modern Classics paperback, the 1986 Century clothbound, the 2008 PBS and BBC adaptation tie-ins, the 2020 Macmillan Collector’s Library edition, and the 2021 Oxford World’s Classics paperback. The latest Slightly Foxed series cloth hardback from 2022 is a striking departure, featuring the series standard blank teal front, coloured endpapers, silk ribbon and spine gold blocking. Thompson’s archive in the University of Exeter’s special collections includes her correspondence with her friend Mrs Tylor, and the main subject of their letters is their reading, and they often discuss lending each other books. The books Thompson mentions reading or wanting to read appear to be predominantly by women, including Emily Carr, Gertrude Bell, Winifred Holtby, Vera Brittain, Fanny Burney, Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell. It is striking that Tylor and Thompson were clearly reading and discussing the works of radical women writers similarly working within the pastoral tradition. (I was quite delighted on doing some further digging in the collections’ index to discover that in one letter, Thompson specifically mentions her love of “betting on horse racing”.) She remained adamant throughout her life that *Lark Rise to Candleford* was produced first and foremost as fiction and should be read as such. In her letters, the feeling becomes stronger as she gets older. Considering this in the light of her reading and her politics as expressed in *Lark Rise to Candleford*, you wonder if there was a frustration that she had wanted to present a world, and instead was allowed only an opinion. It is true, as Mabey says, that she lacked sufficient “skills of empathy and character development and plot construction necessary for a sustained work of fiction”. *Lark Rise to Candleford*, particularly in its first part, lacks a real protagonist; you might argue that she tries to make the hamlet, or the class, play that role. Nevertheless, it is impossible not to feel some sympathy with her feeling of somehow being sold short. Some of us may wonder how differently this conversation might have gone if Thompson had been perceived to be middle- or upper-class by her publishers. \* Flora Thompson, née Flora Jane Timms, was born on 5 December 1876 (although this date is disputed by some sources as 1877) in Juniper Hill, Oxfordshire. She was the eldest of six children born to Albert, a stonemason, and Emma, a nursemaid. Thompson’s favourite brother, Edwin – the fictional “Edmund” in Lark Rise – was killed near Ypres in 1916; her sister Betty also became a successful author with her 1926 children’s book The Little Grey Men of the Moor. The Timms household was a challenging one, plagued by poverty and the effects of her father’s alcoholism. He had been a talented stone carver involved in the restoration of Bath Abbey, but the financial pressures of marriage and family life put a stop to his professional ambitions. A lifelong socialist and agnostic, Albert Timms was also a social outcast in the rural community to which the family belonged. Thompson’s mother, by contrast, was a creative spirit who encouraged her children to make up stories and taught them to read by the time they started school. As Thompson herself remembered: “My brother and I used to make up verse and write stories and diaries from our earliest years \[…\] No one saw them; there was no one likely to be interested.” Unlike most of her schoolmates, who left school at 12 to take up work in the fields or in service (the Elementary Education Act 1880 mandated education only up to the age of 10), Thompson left school at 14 to work as a post office clerk in Fringford. During this time, she remained a keen observer of parish affairs, and would later conjure these scenes for her novels, including “the naughty children who pulled her hair, Queenie who spoke to bees, the annual pig killing, May Day, the harvest”. (“Even decades after leaving the village it seemed she could recall a life long left behind, the geraniums on the windowsill, the cottage smell of ‘apple and onion and dried thyme and sage ... a dash of soapsuds’, even the way the pig-sticker fastened a piece of the animal’s fat over its foreleg as it hung to drain, ‘in the manner in which ladies of that day sometimes carried a white lacy shawl’.”) Indeed, Thompson had no shortage of books with which to nourish her love of literature; her local Mechanics’ Institute library supplied her with British classics including Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. During this time Thompson lived with her mother’s cousin, Kezia Whitton, who owned her own post office and introduced Thompson to a grander quality of life than she had been used to at home, with two eggs for tea and “canary dip” baths (a few inches of warm water scented with eau de cologne). Thompson’s years in Fringford would later inform the third Lark Rise volume, Candleford Green, which partially documents the shifting social boundaries of the turn of the century. The “newly built villas” were soon filled by, as she would write, “journalists, army pensioners, Nonconformists, progressive aristocrats and middle-class families”. Although Whitton planned to bequeath Thompson the post office, at the age of 22 she decided to transfer instead to another post office in Grayshott, Hampshire. Grayshott was home to the Hilltop set, which included such literary giants as Arthur Conan Doyle, George Bernard Shaw and Christina Rossetti. Thompson felt out of place in this environment, hoping at once to be noticed by “the Hilltoppers” and also to remain invisible and undisturbed. She also attended political rallies and speeches. In one alarming incident, her landlady Mrs Chapman was murdered by her husband while Thompson was, it appears, present in the house; Thompson recorded only that “Women \[were\] running into their houses and locking their doors when they heard a madman was at large ... then the arrival of the closed carriage ... and the dazed culprit ushered into it, arm in arm with doctor and policeman, while all the time, but a few yards away, the sun shone on the heather, pine-tops swayed in the breeze, birds sang and bees gathered honey, as on any ordinary summer morning.” Thompson found her future husband in a fellow clerk, John Thompson. They married in 1903, and their daughter Winifred was born the same year, followed by a son, Henry (sometimes known by his middle name, Basil) in 1909\. Thompson left the postal service to care for her children at home after her marriage. Her husband has sometimes been characterised as a disapproving presence who discouraged Thompson from her writing endeavours, but nonetheless she continued to write, winning a literary essay contest in The Ladies Companion magazine in 1911 for a 300-word piece on Jane Austen. A year later, the magazine published her first short story, The Toft Cup. The same year, she won a Literary Monthly competition for her response to Ronald Macfie’s poem about the Titanic. Macfie became a mentor to Thompson; they corresponded all his life, but after his death the first president of the Poetry Society, Margaret Sackville, saw “no point in keeping such rubbish” and burned their surviving letters. In 1918, Thompson gave birth to her third and final child, a son named Peter. Not long afterwards, in 1921, she began penning the Out of Doors column for The Catholic Fireside. Philip Allan & Co also published her collection of verse, Bog-Myrtle and Peat, that year. By this time, Thompson was a wife and mother in her mid-40s, living in a terraced house in Liphook and embarking on 20-mile daily walks up into the nearby pines. To her readers, she characterised herself as an unmarried middle-class woman living a country life alone amongst her “books and pictures, the old writing table at which my father wrote out his prescriptions, my grandmother’s blue and white china, and the samplers of my great aunts”. As Alice Spawls writes in the London Review of Books, “the ‘good life’ that she created in the column was not that of a famous writer, nor of a housewife or rural villager, but of a comfortable single woman who wrote in order to live as she pleased”. The column was subsequently renamed the Peverel Papers when the fictionalised Thompson decided to move to a cottage beside the Peverel Downs in the New Forest. It is striking that the unreligious Thompson wrote fervently until 1927 for The Catholic Fireside, which had originated as a monthly penny magazine directed primarily at working-class Irish Catholics in Britain. As the second world war inched closer, and by then well into her 60s, Thompson sent some 15 chapters of her childhood memoirs to Oxford University Press. These would become the spectacularly successful memoirs Lark Rise (1939), Over to Candleford (1941), and Candleford Green (1943). The prodigiousness of Thompson’s writing in this vein meant that the books could be republished as a cohesive trilogy in 1945, almost as soon as the third had come out. That trilogy was titled Lark Rise to Candleford. Thompson was not able to enjoy her sudden literary celebrity, however. The books became bestsellers for OUP, but Thompson herself felt she was “too old to care much for the bubble reputation \[…\] Twenty years ago I should have been beside myself with joy”. Shortly after Thompson and her husband retired to Brixham in Devon, her 22-year-old son Peter was killed when his ship was torpedoed in 1940\. By all accounts, Thompson never recovered and died of a heart attack seven years later, on 21 May 1947\. At the time of her death, she had been working on an unfinished novel about a retired teacher, Charity Finch, titled Dashpers. Her memoirs Still Glides the Stream and Heatherley were published posthumously by OUP in 1948 and 1979 respectively. \* The Lark Rise books were positively reviewed from the off: an early review praised their rendering of “the separation that lies between the state of happiness and what is known as progress”. In his 1957 introduction to the trilogy reissue, H J Massingham wrote: By the playing of these soft pipes the hamlet, the village and the small market town are reawakened at the very moment when the rich, glowing life and culture of an immemorial design for living was passing from them, at the precise point of meeting when the beginnings of what was to be touched the last lingering evidences of what was departing \[…\] A triumph of evocation in the resurrecting of an age that, being transitional, was the most difficult to catch as it flew; another in diversity of rural portraiture engagingly blended with autobiography; and the last in the overtones and implications of a set of values which is the author’s “message”. There is, however, an argument that the books are of their time. Thompson’s prose is simplistically structured, with a transparency of phrase and descriptive power reminiscent of George Orwell’s advocacy of prose “like a window pane”, in which the lightest-touch narration falls away and the reader is fully immersed. Spawls gestures towards Thompson’s tendency to “soften \[…\] the darker realities” of rural life, noting that “Death (half of Thompson’s siblings died before adulthood), drinking, destitution, violence: all are treated lightly, if at all \[…\] In part, Lark Rise has no real plot; her best writing was recounting. Her powers of observation, so finely attuned to the natural world, could not get beyond the surface of the people around her \[…\] If Thompson was guilty of disingenuousness – the most common criticism levelled at her – subsequent editions and interpretations (especially the cakes-and-ale BBC adaptation) have done little to right this, portraying her Oxfordshire village as the last bastion of a harmonious way of life threatened by modernisation from without, rather than by poverty and cruelty within.” The modern reception of Thompson’s work as a semi-autobiographical bildungsroman set in a rural farming community sheds some light on Mabey’s perplexity that, despite the trilogy’s popularity, “the web of authorial legend and topographical curiosity that builds up around nationally popular texts simply hasn’t gathered around Lark Rise”. Indeed, Thompson’s entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography plays into this nostalgic sentimentality, lamenting that “few works better or more elegantly capture the decay of Victorian agrarian England”. One passage in particular stands out as an example of realist reportage of contemporary working-class rural life: “There must have been hundreds of tramps on the roads at that time. It was a common sight, when out for a walk, to see a dirty, unshaven man, his rags topped with a battered bowler, lighting a fire of sticks by the roadside to boil his tea-can. Sometimes he would have a poor bedraggled woman with him and she would be lighting the fire while he lolled at ease on the turf or picked out the best pieces from the bag of food they had collected at their last place of call \[…\] Where all these wayfarers came from or how they had fallen so low in the social scale was uncertain. According to their own account, they had been ordinary decent working people with homes “just such another as yourn, mum”; but their houses had been burned down or flooded, or they had fallen out of work, or spent a long time in hospital and had never been able to start again. \[…\] “Laura’s father, coming home from work at dusk one night, thought he heard a rustling in the ditch by the roadside. When he looked down into it, a row of white faces looked up at him, belonging to a mother, a father, and three or four children. He said that in the half-light only their faces were visible and that they looked like a set of silver coins, ranging from a florin to a threepenny bit. Though late in the summer, the night was not cold. “Thank God for that!” said the children’s mother when she heard about them, for had it been cold, he might have brought them all home with him. He had brought home tramps before and had them sit at table with the family, to his wife’s disgust, for he had what she considered peculiar ideas on hospitality and the brotherhood of man.” The spatial arrangement of Laura’s father literally “looking down” upon the itinerant family in this section extends a striking metaphor to the way in which the trilogy was published – a kind of rural, mid-20th-century version of poverty porn. \* Despite Mabey and others’ suggestions that Lark Rise to Candleford – and Thompson’s work more broadly – now sits in a neglected corner of literature, the trilogy has apparently never been out of print. It is intriguing that the books have largely been sold and marketed as a single-volume edition since they were originally combined in 1945\. Was this decision in some way responsible for the novel’s breakout success, when the original three volumes might otherwise have slipped below the noise of pastoral novels in the first half of the 20th century? It appears that this move may have been more economic than editorial, given that it occurred during the Paper Salvage campaign, which attempted to mediate the national wartime paper shortage by encouraging the recycling of paper waste. Lark Rise may have had the effect that it did on British ruralist writing because of some happily serendipitous timing; after all, Thompson had been writing in a similar vein for some years by the time of its publication. She was likely unable to commit to more intensive novel-writing earlier while her children were young, but by the late 1930s, when she approached OUP with those first 15 chapters, her youngest child was in his late teens. Equally, in the period immediately preceding and following the war, “the myth of Rural England as the wellspring of national greatness”, as Phillip Mallett writes, was grasped at with increasing urgency by cultural productions. Lark Rise to Candleford belongs to a rich tradition of English memoirs, essays and journals about the countryside. This is a tradition in which one can detect two impulses, at variance with each other but often to be found side by side. One is ostensibly historical, or documentary. Its ambition is to report on the condition of rural England \[…\] The other is imaginary, or mythical, though it rarely confesses itself so. It invests equally in the countryside as the home of virtue and independence, typically in contrast with the corruption of the city, and in the restorative power of landscape itself. It conjures an ideal England, sometimes envisaged as a project for the future, but more often found in an earlier Golden Age, when people lived in rhythm with the land and the seasons. Lark Rise to Candleford can be and has been recruited for both aspects of this tradition, as an authentic record of a way of life which in the 1880s stood on the brink of modernity, already vanishing and now vanished, and as an example of the nostalgic strain in ruralist writing, which harks back to a time when men and women were happier, and perhaps better. In his biography of Flora Thompson, Dreams of the Good Life, Mabey notes how her rural classic “rises like Excalibur” to the tune of national crisis. Its adaptation to the National Theatre stage first appeared during the winter of discontent between 1978 and 79, while 1983’s illustrated edition sold a million copies at a time of high unemployment and industrial conflict, and the BBC TV series was broadcast in 2008 at the peak of the financial crash. A two-part radio adaptation for BBC Radio 4 was also released as Lark Rise to Ambridge in 2023 while energy prices soared and the “cost of living crisis” set in. It is difficult to put forward any singular explanation for this strange pattern without surfacing the recursive causation/correlation debate, but as Agnes Arnold-Forster puts forward in Nostalgia: The History of a Dangerous Emotion, “Expressions of nostalgia are one way we communicate a desire for the past, dissatisfaction about the present, and our visions for the future”. As Thomas Waters puts it: “Since Thompson’s death in 1947, \[Lark Rise to Candleford\] has come to be considered as a – indeed, perhaps the – classic account of life in the late Victorian countryside. That much, at least, is suggested by its popularity, which exceeds that of the other esteemed works of rural history and literature, such as Joseph Ashby of Tysoe, The Wheelwright’s Shop, Kilvert’s Diary, and even Laurie Lee’s Cider With Rosie.” The statement indicates the extent to which history has largely sanitised the portraits of poverty and hardship in Thompson’s work, as well as its frequent foregrounding of social class. After all, she herself was hardly an “esteemed” writer for most of her adult life, having navigated an uneasy line between her working-class upbringing and later co-option into the emerging demographic of the lower-middle class in the South Midlands with varying success, sometimes costuming herself in the guise of the middle class to further her writing’s appeal, as in The Peverel Papers. In her [preface to the 2022 *Slightly Foxed* edition](https://nicolachester.wordpress.com/lark-rise-to-candleford/?ref=thebeemagazine.com), Nicola Chester writes: “In her mind Flora never left Lark Rise entirely – and nor have I. We seem always to be walking away, distracted by the wayside flowers, but casting lingering last looks over our shoulders even as we move inexorably forwards.” She laments the ravage of urban change on rural life today, which feels an ironic point of comparison given that *Lark Rise* is itself not a stable category of rural bliss. What strikes me is that this text carries so many hallmarks of being a “woman’s” book: its female protagonists are often spirited and vividly drawn, unlike certain other giants of the pastoral genre such as Thomas Hardy’s Tess. Chester quotes Thompson’s own wistful idea “had she lived later she must have made her mark in the world, for she had the quick, unerring grasp of a situation \[…\] but there were few openings for women in those days, especially for those born in small country villages”. Indeed, *Lark Rise to Candleford* affords a meaningful window into the lives of rural working-class women in England during the late nineteenth century via “a fascinating system of respectful borrowing (a spoonful of tea or the heel of a loaf to tide a household over until pay day, when it would be repaid) and the appearance of ‘The Box’, containing a baby’s layette that was shared around after each new birth”. “The women wished above all things to be on good terms with their neighbours.” The BBC TV adaptation, which ran from 2008-2011, reflected this representation of women. It was also similarly nostalgic and starred a number of well-known comedy actors including Dawn French and Mark Heap, which cemented its reception as a “lightweight” drama. Its TV slot at 8pm on Mondays also followed the very popular Downton Abbey’s primetime Sunday night on ITV, which dealt similarly (and largely toothlessly) with entanglements of class tensions in rural England around the turn of the twentieth century. The BBC adaptation of *Lark Rise* also played up the middle-class overtones, with decadent costumes and set designs as well as increasingly outlandish storylines such as the Christmas ghost story which opened Season Two in 2008-9. Audio editions of Thompson’s work dominated by middle and upper-class voices, not least the Karen Cass-narrated edition released in 2019 and [available on Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/show/7CUoNOTA9iSBLPT9atR0Cw?si=DyrFYF7MSUy7vLMwPCFKKw&ref=thebeemagazine.com). Cass is an acclaimed voice actor with a strong RP southern accent. The old Oxfordshire regional accent which would have belonged to Thompson, by contrast, has been compared to a modern-day West Country accent by native speakers. [Voice experts for the BBC](https://www.bbc.co.uk/oxford/voices2005/message%5Fboard.shtml?ref=thebeemagazine.com) add that “Oxfordians don’t open their mouth as much as other places. That makes our pronunciation different. I would say ‘kid-lit-en’ instead of Kidlington”; “Our local Oxford delivery was much slower, and I found myself at a disadvantage at first with much quicker speaking Surrey or London folks”; “When I went to University, people often mistook my Oxfordshire accent, with its drawn out a’s, with a west country accent \[…\] Certainly, the older generation still refer to youngsters as ‘My duck’ (pronounced durrck)”. Perhaps the “original” Oxfordshire accent which would have permeated Thompson’s work is rapidly dwindling out of existence, and has become less associated with the Oxfordshire of Lark Rise to Candleford than th RP you might more commonly find there today. Likewise, there is a class-washing factor to this evolution. In a [BBC Inside Out feature on accents](https://www.bbc.co.uk/insideout/west/series7/accents.shtml?ref=thebeemagazine.com), members of the West Country public decried the derogative “local yokel” stereotype that has become attached to this particular accent. “If you were to speak like Vicky Pollard \[a West Country, working-class satirical alter ego created by the public-school educated comedian Matt Lucas\], you’d be classed dumb, lower-class and not very intelligent,” as one person said. Thompson’s own accent remains something of a point of contention. Mabey puzzles over the fact that no one truly knows whether she was still speaking with a rural Oxfordshire accent at the end of her life. He draws a comparison with her contemporary JB Priestley, who featured regularly on wartime radio, and wonders why Thompson was never similarly recorded. As Kathryn Hughes writes in her review of Mabey’s biography, “it suited everyone to think of Thompson not as a journeyman writer but rather as a hedge-scribe, an empty vessel through which the rural England of the 1880s had channelled its dying song. To drag Thompson from behind the counter of the village post office, where she was fondly believed to have spent her adult life, and put her on air would be to spoil the myth of *Lark Rise* \[…\] While the middle-class folk revival that ran parallel with her own childhood in the 1880s had been all about retrieving an ageless Arcadia, she was more interested in mapping rural England’s undoing.” Hughes adds that *Lark* Rise to Candleford’s “generic instability” as it hovers between fact and fiction may be at the root of its lack of critical acclaim, painting Thompson as “a class traitor who peddled sloppy rural fairytales for wistful suburban readers”. While Lark Rise to Candleford has certainly achieved cult classic popular status, its literary prowess is less certain. Hughes claims that “If it were published today, we would have no problem with its inbetweeness”, but the publishing industry has always enforced commercial boundaries to an extent, and boundaries between genres and class and much more. Hughes ends by writing, poignantly, that at its heart, “Lark Rise is a fable that can be constantly reworked to suit the changing moment. That is why you can read it as a celebration or condemnation of technology, a love song to old hierarchies or a cry to knock them down, a blissful acknowledgement of the community’s nurturing nature, or a sharp kick against its confining walls”. The trilogy was adapted for the stage again by Keith Dewhurst in 2005 at the Finborough Theatre in West Brompton, a Time Out Critics’ Choice “two play adaptation” which, interestingly, “can be seen in any order, separately or together”. According to the website, Dewhurst “creatively reinvents the tiny Finborough theatre as the highways, outhouses and smoky taverns of Flora Thompson’s Oxfordshire hamlet, bringing every aspect of this lost lifestyle to the stage, from the midwinter fox hunt to the midsummer harvest, from climbing trees to throwing snowballs\[,\] connecting with our continuing struggle for a national identity”. Perhaps we are due another adaptation of *Lark Rise to Candleford* in 2026. --- [Tip the Bee](https://thebeemagazine.com/#/portal/support) All donations go towards supporting the Bee’s mission to nurture, publish promote and pay for the best new working-class writing. ### Extract: The Parallel Path: Love, Grit and Walking the North by Jenn Ashworth URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/extract-the-parallel-path-love-grit-and-walking-the-north-by-jenn-ashworth/ Last updated: 2025-08-19T19:46:48.000Z I bought my boots on the first day of a late-arriving spring. The man in the shop had measured my feet and ankles in eight different places and got me walking on a machine that recorded how much weight I was putting on each foot. He had me try on six different pairs and pace about the shop until he identified exactly the right brand for my narrow feet and rickety knees. There was a room upstairs to try them on and, nearby, a machine he took them to that fired steam through the leather at the heel and toe to soften and stretch and make tiny adjustments. He knelt in front of me to lace them as I sat up high on a raised chair. There was a right and wrong way to lace up these boots and he asked for my phone and filmed himself as he did it so I’d have it to refer back to later. On a shelf by my elbow were larger-than-life-sized bony anatomical models of feet and ankles that you were allowed to touch if you wanted to. “What kind of walking will you be doing?” he asked, as he pulled the laces tight. I felt like a child being fitted for school shoes. “I’m going to walk across the country,” I said. ‘All the way. Roads, fells, fields, moors. Bogs. All kinds of walking.’ The man looked at me, his expression unreadable. Did I look like someone capable of walking across the entire country? That’s what I wanted to know. He saved the video and handed my phone back to me. “You’ll want good socks,” was all he said, and brought me a few pairs to look at. When we went down to the counter and I got out my purse to pay he said I should get an extra pair of laces ‘for emergencies’, and though I suspected he was only trying to extract more money from me, I chose some anyway. He threw them in for free and wished me luck. Back home, Duncan and our son were out in the garden making the most of the first sunny day in a long time. They were mowing the lawn, sorting out the plants, playing with the dog. I’d been out for ages; choosing boots had turned out to be a task that required more effort and precision than I’d anticipated. “Are you pleased with them?” Duncan asked. I pulled the new boots out of the box and handed them to him. He turned them over in his hands and made admiring noises as he examined them. I was pleased. But all I said was: “They were really expensive,” though I knew he wouldn’t care. *Get the good ones*, he’d said that morning, as I set out in the car. *Don’t cheap out on yourself*. It was me: I have always struggled with buying a good version of what I need. Now he tried to persuade me to enjoy what I’d bought. “They’re nice. They’re really good. Aren’t they?” He waited as I put them on and humoured me by watching the film that demonstrated the correct way to tie their laces. I walked up and down the half-mown garden, kicking the grass clippings around and repeating what the man in the boot shop had promised me: these boots were so well fitted they wouldn’t even need breaking in. “They’re great,” I said, finally allowing myself to have that little pleasure. Such a small thing, though it wasn’t about the boots, not really. Buying them had turned a wish into a plan. I paced another little circle around the garden, feeling the thrill of a pipe dream becoming real. I’d been talking to Duncan about the idea of a really long walk for months. The desire came from nowhere: it was out of character. During the spring lockdown I’d walked my government-mandated hour like everyone else: traipsing around the park near where I lived, or up and down the canal. The spring of 2020 was tough, but at least the weather was good and walking in circles around the park felt more like leisure than punishment. When the country shut down again that December, I was already in the habit of getting outside to rest my eyes on the distant view of the sea and the western Lakeland fells at the end of each day. So all through the winter of 2020 and early 2021 I carried on walking. A friend dubbed this dark time “the winter of fractions” as we both tried to work and teach our sons primary school maths. My daughter stayed in her bedroom, toiling through her GCSEs and becoming more despondent by the day. Duncan is a radiographer: he went to the hospital, he worked, he slept. When he was in the house, I locked myself away to talk to my students on Microsoft Teams. Other mothers seemed to handle this time better than I did: they arranged Zoom quizzes and online drinks parties and enjoyed socially distanced carol concerts in the street with their neighbours. I managed none of this. In the evenings, I went out into the city and paced but the darkness came earlier and earlier and the fells on the horizon disappeared into the streetlight-stained dusk. In the dark early mornings, I took the dog out in our morning circle, down the canal towards the hospital and back through the emptied town centre. The streets grew icy, and I looped around the city, looking at unlit Christmas trees in the shop windows. My new walking habit was compulsive, metronomic, habitual: I imagined wearing a groove in the pavements I walked on but the pavements wore their groove into me. Kinhin is the Zen practice of slow, deliberate walking in circles. I have spent some time practising kinhin in Lancaster cemetery, following a black-robed priest between the stones with my head bowed and ignoring the flashy view out towards Morecambe Bay’s shining sandflats. When you slow walking down like that, balance becomes difficult: what was easy and thoughtless becomes awkward, ungainly and difficult. Like all good spirituality, kinhin is also practical; it provides a break from extended periods of sitting zazen, which tends to give you pins and needles in your feet. At the time, I thought this practice – to walk slowly and to pay attention to motion without destination – was about trying to learn self-control and balance. I thought walking like this was supposed to be a reminder of the human’s two-footed state of rational uprightness – something that separates us from the other animals. I was never very good at it, and would lurch and wobble, sometimes bumping into the walker in front of me as the urge to get it done surfaced in my body. I tried to bring a patient curiosity about the experience of getting nowhere to the circular lockdown walks I traced around Lancaster that winter. But the walking seemed to cause and not ease a steadily increasing sense of constriction. There’s a scene in *The Wicker Man* when Sergeant Howie, who has been sent to the remote Scottish island of Summerisle to investigate the disappearance of Rowan Morrison, visits the local school where she is supposed to be. He’s enraged by what he finds there: the children have lessons in elementary witchcraft rather than reading, writing and arithmetic. One pupil lifts the lid of her desk to reveal not books, but a beetle tied to a nail by a thread. Howie watches the beetle in horror as it circles the nail. It scuttles slowly but determinedly, as if walking this way is work, as if it chooses its own route, as if there is a point to this. The girl whose desk it is laughs at his reaction: ‘The little old beetle goes round and round. Always the same way, y’see, until it ends up right up tight to the nail. Poor old thing!’ she explains. That’s what it felt like: my lockdown walking made that invisible thread tethering me to home, to the desk, to the kitchen gradually grow shorter. It was as if I was both inscribing and reducing the edge of my own world, hemming myself in, building a prison by pacing out the perimeter of it. Even in less dramatic times, most of the walks I went on were circular ones. My dog and I would start and end from home or the car. The walk itself was sometimes a break, sometimes a duty, sometimes a treat, but it was always an interruption to the real substance of my life: one spent inside and in company; at home, at work and at the shops. The idea of reversing this and making walking the real thing, and my life indoors a mere interruption to it, started to intrigue me. How long and how far would I need to walk before walking would turn my life upside down and inside out? There was no chance of testing this. I would stretch that government-mandated hour to its absolute limit but home and the computer always lay in wait. Sometimes I set an alarm on my phone and at the half-hour point it would vibrate in my pocket and that string attaching me to the house like an umbilical cord would tighten and twitch and haul me back. Plenty has been said about the benefits of slow strolling through the city. Walter Benjamin’s *Arcades Project* and Virginia Woolf’s Street Haunting both give the reader the *flâneur*, the urban idler, the people watcher. Woolf insists that to walk through London is “the greatest rest”, because her imaginative contact with others freed her from the lonely prison of self. Benjamin understands his strolling through Paris as a means of subversion. The urban walker’s purposeless meandering resists the oppressions of designed spaces, loitering refuses the busy ritual of the commute and idling enacts a creative “no” to the city’s ceaseless imperative to buy things. Both writers consider city walking a way to shatter ego: there’s something truthful, necessary and humbling about being just one of a crowd. Walking could change the walker and the world. And though I couldn’t take the kind of long walk that would let me turn the way I lived on its head, maybe circling around my home city could create its own kind of change. But as the French philosopher Frédéric Gros says, “This form of strolling presupposes three elements, or the presence of three conditions: city, crowd and capitalism.” That winter I still had a city to walk through, but lockdown had cleared out the crowds and stilled the shopfront manifestations of its capitalism. I walked through Lancaster town centre in the middle of a Saturday afternoon, and it was quieter than at two in the morning. Ghost town. Crossing a footbridge over the M6 during rush hour presented me with an uncanny view of an emptied motorway: I could have sauntered across it safely. Though I did see more Amazon and supermarket delivery vans than usual, the shut-up shops kept their Christmas decorations in the windows until March and there were no commuters, only empty buses advertising films that had never been released and police cars circling the pedestrianised areas. Woolf may have found her refuge by disappearing into London’s crowded streets, but I found you cannot *flâneur* properly if they’ve closed the cafés and put police tape over all the benches. Winter passed. Spring returned, as it always does, and I carried on my walking in circles even as I began to know I needed a different way to stretch my legs and ease my mind. A couple of Google searches later and I found it. Alfred Wainwright’s Coast to Coast Walk; not a loop and not an amble through a city but a determined beeline slicing its way through the entire North of England. Wainwright, the Lancashire-born author of the intricately illustrated series of books known collectively as *The Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells*, devised this walk in the early 1970s. I lay in bed and studied it obsessively, the laptop screen glowing in the dark. Wainwright’s walk begins at St Bees headland and crosses three national parks – the Lake District, the Yorkshire Dales and the North York Moors – on its way to its final destination, the tiny fishing village of Robin Hood’s Bay in north-east Yorkshire. The successful coast-to-coaster crosses seven rivers (the Ehen, Derwent, Rothay, Lowther, Eden, Swale and Esk) and completes a range of ascents and descents equivalent to getting up and down Everest. Could I do that? And if I did, would it make me different? The desire started to bloom. Wainwright’s books are small, his cramped handwriting not always easy to read. His tone is superior and sometimes bossy: he always assumes a male reader, someone who needs to convince his wife to let him out into the countryside, who needs advice about how to avoid barbed wire snagging the testicles on an awkward clamber over a fenced-off right of way. I read and reread a book that was not for me, giggling at the thought of doing this. Even imagining the walk felt both silly and joyful – mainly because it was not the sort of thing someone like me (bookish, poor with directions, fond of warmth and home comforts) would do. The possibility of stepping out of character for a time and of being someone other than myself became as tempting as truancy. Wainwright’s walk has always attracted the competitive. Fell runners and army cadets get it done in relay shifts with support teams carrying their kit. In 2021 Damian Hall did it in 39 hours and 18 minutes, beating a record held by ultra-fell runner Mike Hartley since 1991\. He’d done it in 39 hours and 36 minutes. While Wainwright himself intended his book more as a set of suggestions than a strict guide, he also endorses this effortful, self-propelled style of walking. No strolling for him: the way a person walks is also a reflection on the way a person lives: ‘One should always have a definite objective. In a walk as in life – it is so much more satisfying to reach a target by personal effort than to wander aimlessly. An objective is an ambition, and life without ambition is … well, aimless wandering.’ Reading that, the wild giddiness I felt at the prospect of setting out ebbed away and I closed the book. The midlife aimless wander my life had become had been seen and disapproved of. The end of the pandemic and the return to normal life had brought rapid changes to the lives of every member of my family but me. My son moved from primary school to high school and my daughter from high school into sixth form. Duncan changed his job and moved from radiography into CT, involving an adjustment to his working hours and a long period of training. The three of them were leaving the pandemic behind them, finding their new “objectives” and “ambitions” – to take Wainwright’s words – and emerging – not unscathed – into the next part of their lives. It wasn’t like that for me. I stayed where I was to welcome in the next influx of students who were also alive with their own hopeful ambitions; and when I wasn’t working, carried on wandering with my dog around the park, a part of me still locked down inside my own head. Some anxiety had gathered in my body and when I sat in front of a computer I started to fidget, wanted the windows open, wanted to rest my eyes on some point in the distance, some fell or sea view. When I was in a meeting on campus, I wanted everyone to hurry up and stop talking so I could get out, so I could breathe, so I could rest myself in silence. I had become difficult, I think, to live with. Impatient, irritable, impossible to please. It was hard to work out what the problem was. I was healthy. I enjoyed my work and was lucky to have it. It wasn’t quite depression and not quite anxiety. The fact that I had nothing to complain about but the routine ordinariness of being needed by people who were important to me made it worse. I only knew I had felt like this before, a long time ago, and back then, walking was an instinctive thing my body did when it tried to soothe itself. Read our [interview with Jenn Ashworth](https://thebeemagazine.com/jenn-ashworth-steps-out-of-character/). --- --- [Tip the Bee](https://thebeemagazine.com/#/portal/support) All donations go towards supporting the Bee’s mission to nurture, publish promote and pay for the best new working-class writing. ### Jenn Ashworth Steps out of Character URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/jenn-ashworth-steps-out-of-character/ Last updated: 2025-08-19T19:48:41.000Z Jenn Ashworth is an award-winning novelist, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and a professor of writing at Lancaster University. She is known for her claustrophobic and emotionally intensive novels such as the Betty Trask Award-winning *A Kind of Intimacy* and *Ghosted: A Love Story*, and for her unflinching memoir in essays, *Notes Made Whilst Falling*, which was shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize. *The Bee* caught up with her to discuss how her childhood shaped her ambitions to be a writer, class consciousness at university, walking, finding your way, and unexpected events and destinations. **Claire Malcolm**: I’m fascinated by how your childhood experience of growing up in a strict working-class Mormon family in Preston in the early ’80s has shaped you. You’ve talked in other interviews about how difficult, restrictive and controlling this context was for you. Were you always writing and reading – was it encouraged beyond religious scripture? **Jenn Ashworth**: I was certainly always the kid happier indoors with a book, or haunting the library, rather than out on my bike or feeling at home with the other kids. It wasn’t so much that reading and writing were discouraged – only that what reading and writing were *for*, and what sort of things could be read and written, were limited in this very direct, prescriptive way. Mormon kids are encouraged to write journals, to use their talents, to take their education seriously – but the purpose was always fairly devotional. Fiction was for creating uplifting stories for others, and memoir or journal-keeping was to collect evidence of God’s working in your life. I wrote ghost stories in private, and little skits and plays and poems for performance at church youth groups in public, and I knew very early on what sort of writings and selves were acceptable in which places: there was a doubleness to who I needed to be. This was absolutely restrictive in some ways, but helpful in others. I was part of a group that had been founded by a man – Joseph Smith – who was either a prophet or a novelist: nobody ever needed to convince me that writing and storytelling were absolutely fundamental to the way people could understand themselves and relate to each other and the world. I was born into circumstances that dramatised the potential for stories to be these machines of control, as well as connection. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/07/The-Parallel-Path-hbk-jkt-1_1000px.jpg) **CM**: Your teenage years were very challenging and unhappy. You were a school refuser and, following that, were inducted into the system of welfare, psychologists, and a medicalisation of your unhappiness. How do you look back and understand this period of your life now? **JA**: I hope a child in my circumstances would be treated differently now. I hope someone behaving as I behaved at that time would be listened to a little more, rather than told stories about illness and moral failure and psychological dysfunction. I look back and what I see is someone acting out, very clearly, and in very bold language, a kind of unhappiness and anger that, to my adult mind – and as someone who has mothered teenagers myself – seems fairly reasonable and logical given the circumstances I was existing in. **CM**: You made it through your childhood and were accepted at a women’s college at Cambridge University, which you found to be a haven – and you say that you bloomed there. How was your experience of entering Cambridge as a working-class kid from the North? **JA**: Again – there was this doubleness. This has been an absolute touchstone throughout my life: existing in two lives at once, and never quite belonging to either. I was an ordinary working-class northern kid, able to blend in, more or less, with others like me, and I also had this secret life belonging, more or less, to this very squeaky-clean American high-demand religion that was both other and strange, and also a really knitted-in part of Lancashire history. Similarly, at Cambridge, there were all the class-based microaggressions about accent and manners and background that you’d expect. I have plenty of those sorts of stories, and I understand the expectation that those are the stories someone like me would tell about a place like that. It’s part of the truth: being repeatedly asked if I had any books in the house when I was growing up, being told that there was more dog food sold in Lancashire than there were dogs – because, apparently, we all liked eating it. But there is another story too – one that’s unacceptable in some circles, and no less true – which is that being at Newnham felt like a home and a gift: the space to read, to think, to be in this absolutely demanding environment and have the parts of me that weren’t very welcome in the places I’d been before taken extremely seriously. I told them in my interview that I wanted to be a writer, that I was working on a novel. It wasn’t shameful, wasn’t remarkable – it was utterly the sort of thing expected of a bright, bookish girl. I cherished that and felt cherished by it: nobody had ever wanted that bit of me before. **CM**: Social mobility can be a liminal experience in terms of where you end up and where you feel that you belong. You’re now a professor of creative writing. How do you think about your class identity now, and do you think it shaped or obstructed your ability to follow your desire to be a writer? Do you think it shapes your writing? **JA**: So this experience I have – of being mildly unacceptable wherever I am – not properly working class because of the Mormonism, then not properly Mormon ever, for many reasons, then at Cambridge, not properly the sort of Cambridge student that was expected, then after leaving and going back to Lancashire, not only having the expected horror stories of middle-class Cambridge people, but also the stories of being valued, cherished intellectually, of having my ambitions taken seriously – what that did for me was absolutely turn me into a writer. I can float between these places, more or less comfortably. Code-switching, I guess it’s called. I have all these different buildings I’ve had to find some relation to – a pupil referral unit, a Mormon temple, a local authority children’s home, dinner with the Cambridge fellows – and in each of these places, parts of me have been absolutely unacceptable to someone and have offended their sense of what sort of person I should be. I had really early experiences of understanding what that sort of persistent discomfort meant. It is in my writing and in that attitude to making fiction and memoir – curiosity and openness to contradiction – that I can feel at home. Everywhere else I am a bad fit, and I’m interested in the texture of that, and that interest is what drives me to the page. **CM**: In your new book, *The Parallel Path*, you shake off the constrictions of lockdown and set forth on a 190-mile walk along Wainwright’s famous Coast to Coast path, which crosses the country from your home in Lancaster to the east coast. You write that even considering the Coast to Coast walk felt both silly and joyful, as it’s not the kind of thing that you would usually do. What got you to the point where you bought the boots and booked the B&Bs? **JA**: I think another version of the discomfort that I’ve just been talking about. I was at this mid-point in my life, safely grown up, had a respectable job doing something I loved, I’d bought a house – I had achieved this comfortable, middle-class existence. Lockdown didn’t threaten that: I was very lucky in many ways – but it did pin me down to the house in a way that gave me this really deeply felt, physical restlessness. It took doing the walk, then writing about the walk, to really and truly understand what was going on for me then – at the time, it was just something my body was urging me to do. I felt it in my muscles. **CM**: I was interested that when you set out to buy the walking boots your partner says: “Get the good ones, don’t cheap out on yourself,” and you note that “I have always struggled with buying a good version of what I need.” Is this to do with your class background? **JA**: Yes, I think so. This tendency was invisible to me until I came into contact with people who lived differently and had the expectation that safety and comfort were the normal state of affairs – and that any departure from that needed repairing or amending. I also think it was a little to do with motherhood. I had my eldest when I was 22, so I’ve been a mother about as long as I’ve been an adult, and that sense of making sure someone else is comfortable and has what they need before I attend to myself has been very deeply stitched into me. Not that I’ve always succeeded in doing that: I’m ordinarily distracted and selfish – not a saint, not mother of the year by any unit of measurement. But my sense that it was OK for me to be in various kinds of discomfort – that that was the way things should be – is deep-rooted. **CM**: Did you always plan to write about the experience of doing the walk? And if so, as it’s a walk that has been recorded and written about before, how did you plan your approach? This was always going to be an interior experience as well as about you taking on an epic walk. **JA**: I think I had the idea that I might write an article about it – perhaps something for a weekend newspaper. I hoped to get paid enough to offset the cost of going, which I felt guilty about. The letters I received from Clive made it obvious I’d need to write about the experience in a more expansive way. The questions I had – why I wanted to do this, and what happened because I did it – felt book-shaped, memoir-shaped. There are a lot of walking books, a whole genre of walking literature – and I wanted to engage with some of that too: the things other people have said about the north, about solitude in nature, about endurance and sublime experiences – and consider my own experiences against these ideas. **CM**: Alfred Wainwright authored a number of intricately illustrated walking guides (known collectively as *A Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells*). In the book you note that his style is often “superior and bossy” and that he’s a bit cantankerous. Did he grow on you as you did the walk? **JA**: He did! It was easy to be annoyed with him: the grumpiness, the not wanting to be around other people, these very quick judgements he makes about the places he passes through, this insistence that his way of seeing places is the best way to see them. I am allergic to all of that. He assumes his reader is a man, all the way through, and that was annoying too. It’s easy to caricature that side of him. But what changed, I think, both doing the walk and writing the book, was seeing how much I had in common with him – I also had this grumpiness, this urge to be left alone, a kind of irritated and fed-up relation to other people, a sense of general unsatisfactoriness, wherever I was. That’s the state I was in when I set out on the walk, and I recognised myself in him. Re-reading Wainwright also let me find this very delicate sense of grief, or loss, or mourning in his writing. His knowledge of these landscapes was lifelong and intimate, which meant he could see the ways they were changing – and he mourned those changes. He mourned himself too: the way his body was ageing and the high fells, in his last years, out of reach. I got to that place too – a sadder, gentler, more real relationship to people and places. **CM**: Wainwright wasn’t the only person that you were taking this journey with. Your friend Clive was following your progress and sending you letters to your stopping-off points along the route. Clive is on his own path with a cancer diagnosis. When did you meet Clive, and how did he end up in this story? **JA**: Clive is a neighbour of mine – an artist and filmmaker who I met online. Clive had asked me, originally, if I wanted to take part in a project he was curating at the time – he was talking to artists who had something to say about death. And we did have those conversations, sure, but shortly after that I had this more powerful sense that I wanted to hear what Clive himself had to say about that – and about lots of other things too: about home, and sickness, about being involved with doctors and hospitals, about his memories growing up in Morecambe, about his own art practice, his creativity and sense of joy at the world. Clive had told me before I set off on the walk he was going to write to me, and it became clear, really early on, that if I was going to write about the walk, the letters from Clive – and the way thinking about what he had to say had changed me – would have to be the absolute spine of the book. Clive was responsible for turning what might have been a fairly run-of-the-mill story about solitary walking into this other thing – a meditation on friendship, on how to live well with sickness, with grief, with this sense of mortality that we both share. **CM**: You turned 40 just before embarking on the walk, and this is a time when children are grown, life moves on, and your identity changes – or is up for change. You write about how you felt that your children and partner were moving on after lockdown, but that you felt constricted still and had a strong urge to ‘step out of character’. Did you manage to? And if so, where have you arrived at? **JA**: One of the things that was chafing at me before I left was this sense of arrival, of settledness, of life more or less having taken its final shape. The urge to walk was a surprise – and what happened afterwards, another one. I prefer that, really – that knowledge that life will still offer up some unexpected discomforts. I don’t want to feel like I’ve arrived anywhere until I am dead! **CM**: You set off on this walk to feel better but ended up discovering that you had a brain tumour, the diagnosis and treatment of which sent you off on a very different journey. How has that been? **JA**: I don’t think it was a very different journey. The Coast to Coast was an odd training for having a brain tumour, but that is how it worked out. The walk required me to pay attention to my body, to care for myself in a very skilled, committed way – to understand my smallness in relationship to big fells, the weather, my own capacity to keep going, the insufficiency of my willpower, the complicated and beautiful way I needed to depend on other people. To deeply know that being sick or vulnerable or grief-stricken does not mean you’re unable to care for or offer something necessary to others – the gentleness inside endurance. All of that happened on the physical journey of the walk and during this conversation I was having with Clive, and they were all exactly the things I needed in order to be alive and awake during my own illness. **CM**: Illness brings a very specific kind of vulnerability with it, doesn’t it – especially if you’re a tough person used to putting everyone else’s needs before your own? You write that: “To show care in the north is often done through humour and practical action, and there’s still a bit of shame around the softer aspects that word implies.” Did you find it easy to give in to being cared for? **JA**: No! I hated it! I still find it hard – it wasn’t that walking transformed me into this saintly, more evolved being. I remember insisting on washing my own hair after my surgery – I could smell the blood in it and it was knocking me sick – and having this row about whether it was OK for me to do that or not, and just being absolutely hell-bent on doing what I wanted when I wanted it. I remember all these horrible ableist ideas bubbling up in me – that I could try harder not to be deaf, or that if I put some proper willpower into it, I could cut what was usually a six-month recovery into something more like three months. But what changed, I think, slowly – in fits and starts – is that I could start to feel some pleasure in being cared for, and that in my own desires for comfort and to be comforted, I wasn’t really being a burden on other people, but showing them myself more clearly, being more available for a deeper sort of relationship. There was something very joyful about that, even though it also involved codeine and a sick bucket. **CM**: The book seems to have a lot of tension between psychological constriction challenges – lockdown, and then at one point you are lying in hospital facing a wall for two weeks – and the wildness and freedom of walking unhindered by others in nature. You write towards the end of the book that you are “changed, not cured”. What have you learnt from this experience, the recovery process, and where you now find yourself? **JA**: I think we have a desire for transformation stories – something novelistic or even miraculous – a wish for our experiences to make us entirely different (which is a way of thinking about cure, isn’t it?). I’d set off on the walk hoping for that: that the world would adjust me in some way. And my experience isn’t like that. I am just as tough and independent and full of the sickness of willpower and the delusions that I can do things on my own as I ever was. I am still grumbly and cynical and judgemental – a touch of the Wainwrights about me – and less sorry about it than I probably should be. What changed is that I have some other things too – some extra parts of me that have come onstage – parts that get a lot of pleasure from the softness of being cared for and looked after, that understand how much a sick or disabled person can give to someone else. An understanding that freedom and space and joy can be found in all kinds of places, and not just at the top of a fell you’ve flogged yourself to get up. **CM**: Do you have a writing routine? Has your new situation changed how you write and your productivity, or feelings about what you want to write next? **JA**: I *wish* I had a writing routine. I have a fantasy of some sort of regular practice – same time each day, same place, the habit of sharpening my pencils and getting right to it. I have experimented with that, and the idea of routine has been more or less useful to me at various points in my life. But I think I have to let each book teach me the way it needs to be written, and a lot of that depends entirely on what else is happening. My new situation is quite like my old one: I have a job, I have kids, I exist in the normal, very lucky thick of a family life. Which means sometimes there are long quiet days in a room full of books, and sometimes it’s late at night or early morning, and sometimes not for ages because every time I sit down someone sends an email or spills something or needs PE kit washing. And sometimes my body needs me to rest when I’d rather write – and that really, really makes me mad. What’s changed is a sense that ease and pleasure are a little nearer and easier to have than they used to be, and that I am trying to bring the contradictory things I learned on the walk about commitment and endurance – how soft and flexible and fluid these can be – to the writing. And I am slowly writing a very big novel, and I am finding such utter, bone-deep joy in it. Buy The Parallel Path: Love, Grit and Walking the North in the [Bee bookshop](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781399725057?ref=thebeemagazine.com). Read an extract [here](https://thebeemagazine.com/extract-the-parallel-path-love-grit-and-walking-the-north-by-jenn-ashworth/). --- [Tip the Bee](https://thebeemagazine.com/#/portal/support) All donations go towards supporting the Bee’s mission to nurture, publish promote and pay for the best new working-class writing. ### Mark Gatiss, the boy that Dr Who books made URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/mark-gatiss-the-boy-that-dr-who-books-made/ Last updated: 2025-08-15T19:37:04.000Z Mark Gatiss is probably best known as a member of *The League of Gentlemen*, and as the co-creator and executive producer of the BBC’s *Sherlock,* in which he played Mycroft Holmes. But having created and written for various hit TV series (including the current *Bookish* and *Doctor Who*) and several books (including a biography of James Whale, and *The Vesuvius Club*, his first Lucifer Box novel), he is also one of the 21st century’s most successful British working-class writers. He may sometimes be taken for a middle-class Oxbridge graduate (see below), but Gatiss grew up in a working-class family in the north-east of England, and is a champion of working-class talent, which he believes is being denied a fair chance in the arts. As this is a point on which we very much agree, he met up with Bee in London to talk about his childhood, family and work, his advice for writers, *Bookish* – and the life-changing phenomenon that was Terrance Dicks’ *Doctor Who* novels. **Richard Benson:** Can we start by talking about you at school? Readers may know that at junior school you wrote a story about a “noise machine” that was printed as a booklet by Darlington Council, and then a story about the tennis at Wimbledon that impressed your teachers. Were you always interested in writing? **Mark Gatiss:** Well, when I was very young I was in Mrs Wiggington’s advanced reading group. I got a house point for being able to pronounce “subterranean” when I was five. And I always loved English composition, and I always loved horror stories – I’ve still got a school report on which I got A+, and it said, “excellent work, even if it does all resemble scripts for Hammer Horror films”. That’s my proudest review. Then I wrote the thing about Wimbledon, and they were endlessly encouraging after that. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/07/8afcbea0-616b-11f0-9fbf-8e134e131c66.webp) **RB:** You were from a working-class family – was there anything in your background that foretold such talent? **MG:** No, but you know, it wasn't like *Sons and Lovers.* My dad was a colliery engineer and then a hospital engineer, but there wasn't \[ironic tone\] “the fear of book larnin’”. My parents worked from the age of 14, and had come through the aftermath of the war. My mum worked as a secretary in a paint factory, and she hated her job. I'm not sure why, but it was terribly stressful. One Friday night when I was young she eventually said, it’s going to put me in an early grave, I’ve got to stop – and my dad vociferously argued against it, because we'd only have a single wage. And I remember hearing the deadly words from him as he went upstairs: “Right, there's going to be some changes in this house.” And I went absolutely cold, thinking I'd be down the pit the next day. Of course, absolutely nothing changed. **RB:** Were your parents readers? My dad in particular was a voracious reader all his life. He used to say \[adopts broad north-east accent\] “I like being taken out of myself, Mark”. We had a bookcase – that’s what we always called it, *The Bookcase* – and it was full of my dad's books, which were Ian Fleming, Dennis Wheatley, Hammond Innes, Alastair MacLean – adventure books, spy stories and stuff like that. He always loved books like that, and I read them as soon as I could. I still love those things so much. **RB:** Was it them that got you started? **MG:** No, the thing that taught me how to read was *Doctor Who*, because the stories were novelised mostly by an amazing man called Terrance Dicks. Doctor Who was my favourite show. I watched it because my dad and brother loved it. The first one I saw was Jon Pertwee’s first episode, and I can still remember it, sitting in front of the TV and seeing these shop window dummies coming to life, which traumatised me forever. I was instantly and totally hooked. Then one hot Saturday afternoon I went to Strikes Garden Centre in Darlington with my mum and dad, and there was a display of Doctor Who novels next to the plants. I got The Three Doctors, and I sat in the hot car and read it cover to cover while my parents were in the garden centre. I read so many of those novels after that and I learnt so much from reading them, so much. They had words that I’ve never used or even seen used anywhere else, like “capacious”. They were published by Target Books. You could talk to anyone of my age who grew up with them, and they’d tell you the same story. They were everywhere – Binns in Darlington, WHSmith, Dressers \[a department store\] – so there was something wonderfully democratic about them. We weren’t a bookish household, it wasn’t a bookish world, but that was a way of smuggling it in, in a way, without us even knowing it. **RB:** What do you think it was about them that appealed to you? **MG:** Whatever it is magic is, you can’t really define it. Doctor Who is a strange combination of science fiction and whimsy and literary roots. There’s a lot of Sherlock Holmes in it, a lot of HG Wells in it – it’s a wonderful combination of things. Plus it was a TV original. But you can’t really analyse it. Some things just work. The other one I really cherished was one called The Making of Doctor Who. It was a slim book, a sort of kids’ way of looking at how a TV show is put together. I read that hundreds of times because I was so interested in the process. **RB:** So were they your first books? **MG:** No, the very first book I ever had was Great Expectations, which was a Christmas gift from Santa Claus at Fenwick’s in Newcastle. I didn’t read it for quite a long time, but when I did, it blew my mind, because of the twist. And that was a genuinely formative moment – I remember just, like, jaw-dropping moment. The other books I really loved were the Willard Price adventure books. My brother and I absolutely loved that. **RB:** Doctor Who, being science fiction, is classed as “genre” TV, and as a writer and actor you’ve worked a lot in genre – sci-fi, crime, fantasy, thrillers. These are still looked down on by what you might call the publishing and critical establishment. How do you feel about that? Do you notice a snobbery? **MG:** Well it never ceases to amaze me that these things are still somehow regarded as “cult” when they’re literally the predominant popular art form in the whole fucking world. It’s extraordinary. Of course there’s snobbery. There’s particular snobbery about comedy that has always been there and always will be. Never wins the Best Picture Oscar. A comic play isn’t allowed to be as good as some searing three-hour Eugene O’Neill drama. Yet it’s the thing that people love the most and really want. Sometimes when I see a snotty sneer in a review, I want to say, “YOU do it then. You have a go. You make this room of 700 people laugh.” It’s really difficult. The only thing that still really gets me excited is that snobbery. I can’t bear it. It’s as if we’re all living in a sort of priestly conclave which doesn’t like laughs. All right, some people don’t like laughs, but they’re not people you want to hang around with. Comedy is the big one, as far as snobbery goes. Horror has always been *déclassé*, but so it should be, because its disreputability is half its charm. **RB:** Who gets to decide what constitutes a “classic” and a “literary” work is an interesting question – **MG:** I’ve forgotten who wrote this \[*We think it was Andrew Motion*\], but someone made the point that something happened whereby all the great classics were in the hands of the population, and they had to be downgraded into children’s classics. And then after that, literary stuff became hyper-literary. I think there’s something really odd going on there about a basic human failure to understand what we’re all like, and how popular work doesn’t have to be dumb, and ideas don’t have to be spelt out. You can have a really good time in the movies, on the page, in a concert hall, without feeling that you’re somehow just part of some great unwashed rabble. **RB:** Do you see class operating there? **MG:** I think class remains one of the biggest barriers, it really does. We don’t really talk about it. It was one of those things that we thought we had kind of got through. We were getting through it for a while. I think of my great hero Alan Bennett – his journey would have been impossible without the scholarship to Oxford. Those avenues have narrowed to the point of strangulation, and I really fear for it. All I can say is I just want to do whatever I can to try and help people from my kind of background to find a way through. It’s all about representation. It’s about seeing people like you who have done it. **RB:** Has that class snobbery affected you personally? **MG:** Not so much, except in a sort of weird inverse way, in that people assume I went to Oxford. At the beginning of The League of Gentlemen, even though the show was absolutely, defiantly northern, they thought we were like the Cambridge Footlights. One in Time Out said, “Why should I care about three posh Billy Bunters from Oxford?” A cursory investigation would have revealed we were all from the north and from defiantly working-class backgrounds. But there’s an expectation that if you’ve done well, in entertainment particularly, you know… “which college did you go to?” – meaning which college in Oxford. I’ve had that a few times. I enjoy saying “Woodham Comprehensive School”. **RB:** Was there a moment when you thought, “I want to be a writer”? **MG:** That’s very different to thinking it might actually happen. I always used to say I wanted to be an actor, and I wanted to write, but what version of writing I had in mind I’m not sure. I used to dream about writing sitcoms or films or whatever, but there’s a big gulf between hope, expectation and result. I do remember once having to write a poem as homework for \[secondary\] school, and doing it very quickly, and getting an A. That was a moment of thinking, “Maybe I’ve got a facility here… maybe I can do something with this.” In Bookish, in the edit, there were certain things that needed a bit of tying together, and I ended up writing three poems, which I do in voiceover in the recorded show. And I remember thinking, this is just a version of writing that poem at school. **RB:** Do you write quickly now? **MG:** If the fit is on me, yes, I can write very quickly. If it’s really flowing, then it comes to me quickly, but then, of course, there are horrible, aching voids when it doesn’t come at all. I have routines, which everyone has, but they’re not fixed. If I’m working on something, I try to write 1000 words a day because that’s an achievable goal. It means if you get it done by ten o’clock, you can guiltlessly enjoy the rest of the day. And sometimes, if you do 3000, you can have two days off. But that rarely happens. I’ve been writing series two of Bookish solidly since before Christmas. And it’s all about refining and writing some of it with Matthew \[Sweet, co-writer\], back and forth, and then bringing it all together, and then writing bridging scenes. This is where Doctor Who has been hugely useful over the years, because I know from my very early knowledge of Doctor Who what the producer and script editor do. **RB:** “Writing” tends to be depicted as the solitary, first-draft phase, but you must find much of the creative process comes after that? **MG:** Writing is rewriting, isn’t it? That’s the fun bit, because at least you’ve got something to work with. It’s the blank page which is the terrible thing. **RB:** What do you do when you’re stuck? **MG:** Just staring into space doesn’t help. What I’ve learnt to do is try and surprise myself. I just do something different, and it usually throws up some answer. Also, sometimes a problem shared is a problem solved. You ring someone up and start telling them the issue, and I often find, as I’m saying it, something occurs to me. It’s really weird. The advice I always give is, there’s no such thing as a would-be writer. If you want to write something, you can do it right now. It doesn’t mean it’ll be great. It doesn’t mean you’ll be immune from self-doubt. You don’t even have to show it to anyone. But you can do it right, right away. There are very few things you can say that about. **RB:** Bookish has been well received, and of course you’ve been very successful. But like everyone, in the past you’ve had ideas rejected. How do you cope with rejection? **MG:** Sanguinely, I suppose. I’ve been very blessed, but luck plays a huge part. I was talking to someone at a party on a Saturday night who said, whenever you see those life coaching things, no one ever talks about luck. You can’t factor that in. There’s loads of incredibly talented people who have never had the luck. But that’s life. Life stinks. What you can do, practically, is turn up. If you get an opportunity, join the dots. If someone likes your work, or does you a favour, keep in touch. Drop them a line. Drop them a card. Write them a letter. It sounds basic, but a lot of people don’t do it. My friend John Castle, a great actor, said the best advice he’s ever known was written on the doors at RADA: Push. That doesn’t mean you have to be aggressive, just remember 90% of anything is turning up. And I know it’s hard if you’re getting rejection after rejection after rejection. But persistence is hugely key to it. **RB:** Television is a notoriously difficult industry to penetrate… **MG:** Television is complicated because there’s a lot of gatekeeping. It’s a bit like music – you need to sort of get to the A&R people to get the contact to get there. And they have a lot of power. I spent years throwing rocks at that, on radio particularly, trying to get a way in and just getting nowhere. And it always seemed to be the same sort of people who were saying no. It’s also difficult because inevitably, people follow trends and they’re afraid of putting their money where their mouth is because it’s expensive. So, you know, everyone will be saying “Family viewing is dead”, then Doctor Who comes back, and family viewing is very much alive. “Why don’t we do more family viewing?” And you start to get new shows trying to capture that. Or, “There are no watercooler moments anymore.” Then The Traitors happens. It always frustrates me that if you have a big hit like Miranda, suddenly all comedy has to be physical and people falling over. It’s like all or nothing. It’s so counterproductive. These lessons just go round in a circle. And you can guarantee whatever is dead today is tomorrow’s new hit. Follow the trends. **RB:** So the real secret is to have that strong, original idea? **MG:** Absolutely. It is exactly that. The idea is the thing. **RB:** How do you see comedy right now? **MG:** British TV comedy is in crisis. Not because there isn’t great stuff, but because there’s no commitment to it. All we ever bang on about in this country is “Where’s the new Dad’s Army?” Why is no one making it? When we did The League of Gentlemen, BBC Two had an unrivalled worldwide reputation for comedy. And it’s all dissipated. That’s not the BBC’s fault, though – it’s just the way that the broadcasting environment is fractured. But this is the sort of thing we should be hanging on to, because it is genuine soft power. It’s one of the things Britain still does very well. It’s an amazing thing, and we absolutely lose it at our peril. **RB:** Looking back on your career, what would you say are the advantages that being working class has given you as a writer? **MG:** That’s a great question. I mean, it’s really… it’s about perspective, isn’t it? It sounds like a terrible cliché to say, but I feel grounded by it. I mean… I remember going on school trips and opening my Tupperware box and there were two corned beef sandwiches in clingfilm and a Club biscuit and an apple. And there was always a kid – many kids – who would open their picnic hampers, and I used to feel ashamed. I still remember that feeling. But not long before she died, I talked to my mum and she said, “I know we were very careful, but we were just so frightened of getting into debt.” And I said, well, thank God you were. And, you know, I still feel that weird burning shame, but I know what was offsetting it. And that’s a really good thing. I don’t want to be pejorative about someone who happened to be born in a very upper-middle-class background, because it’s not a competition in that way. But one advantage is definitely a grounding. It’s really good to know where you come from, and to feel that earthing, and to appreciate stuff, you know? I may be romanticising, but… I never had a sort of false romance about a world beyond mine. I wanted it, and I wanted to be on the telly, and I wanted to fly the Tardis, and I wanted to be my own detective. But I knew where I was coming from, and I knew it wasn’t something that would fall into my lap. *Bookish* is on U&Alibi in the UK and HBO Max in Australia. *Photo: Bertie Watson* --- [Tip the Bee](https://thebeemagazine.com/#/portal/support) All donations go towards supporting the Bee’s mission to nurture, publish promote and pay for the best new working-class writing. ### Akan: A New Space for Diverse Writers URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/akan-a-new-space-for-diverse-writers/ Last updated: 2025-08-01T15:27:29.000Z Launched in 2025, Akan Books is a new imprint of HQ (part of HarperCollins) led by author, broadcaster and diversity and inclusivity advocate June Sarpong. Akan is overseen by leading publisher Lisa Milton, one of the women behind the Primadonna Festival and Prize, and a lifelong champion of new voices across literary and commercial fiction. Sarpong herself authored the groundbreaking book Diversify back in 2017, which anticipated much of the increased debate in the creative industries, calling for a wider understanding of how ethnicity, disability, gender and class need to be considered in society. The name Akan is inspired by Sarpong’s own West African Ashanti heritage. The imprint’s colophon depicts Anansi the spider, a master storyteller. The aim of the imprint is to give a voice to, and make a home for, writers from as yet underrepresented communities, with a special focus on ethnic minority voices. The imprint is taking a new approach to working with authors, offering a wraparound support programme to help writers navigate the writing industries with editorial development, matched by professional development support and help with finding an agent aligned with the vision of developing long-term careers for the writers they publish. Milton says that Akan Books aims to remove the barriers that block writers from having their stories read and told. This includes being open to submissions of work from writers who do not yet have literary agent representation. As part of the first list of books, Sarpong has co-authored Calling Una Marson with Jennifer Obidike, a biography of the BBC’s first black female broadcaster. This pioneering journalist was discovered by Sarpong as part of her work as a diversity champion at the BBC. As well as Jenny Knight’s Wild Moon Rising, the list also includes Overspill by Charlotte Paradise, a literary novel about a young woman “overcoming trauma and finding self-acceptance”. Akan is open for submissions of work now and is focusing on the following: In fiction: crime and thriller, psychological suspense, romance, historical, contemporary/book club and family drama. In non-fiction: self-help, smart thinking, memoir and parenting. Find out more at [akanbooks.co.uk](http://akanbooks.co.uk/?ref=thebeemagazine.com). --- [Tip the Bee](https://thebeemagazine.com/#/portal/support) All donations go towards supporting the Bee’s mission to nurture, publish promote and pay for the best new working-class writing. ### Jenny Knight’s in Ascendence URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/jenny-knights-in-ascendence/ Last updated: 2025-08-03T13:05:37.000Z Jenny Knight has worked on farms, in pubs and factories, as an actor and a roadie, and has even renovated a former pigsty. She is now a debut novelist. Jenny is a prize-winning fiction writer whose work featured in Kit de Waal’s celebrated anthology of working-class writers, Common People, in 2019\. She has worked extensively as a copywriter and editor, and taught creative writing in prisons and worked on storytelling projects in Somalia and Kenya. In her new novel, Wild Moon Rising, newly separated Claire moves back to Suffolk to a run-down rural cottage with a wild garden. Here she hopes to find solace and solitude and have some time to herself to reflect on her relationships with men and her former marriage, and to work out what comes next. In an unexpected turn of events, she ends up falling into friendship with Tansy, her octogenarian neighbour, under whose guidance she begins to bring her garden – and herself – back to life. The Bee caught up with Jenny to discuss reframing female desire, ambition, wisdom and the solace of gardening. **Claire Malcolm**: Your biography lists a wide variety of jobs that you’ve done. How do you get from working in a factory to a career as a published novelist? **Jenny Knight**: That’s a good question! I’d wanted to go to drama school, but my folks were having none of that (education was the “way out”), and being the first in my family ever to go, I had no real idea what came after graduation. I loved writing and had a lot of acting and sketch writing under my belt, but what to do with that – with no contacts or cultural capital? After a gruelling time trying to live and work in London, I won a journalism traineeship in Ipswich – but I really didn’t want to be a reporter. There followed many unhappy times trying to find my “thing” – my CV is a chequerboard, plus I could rarely afford to do just one job – before a chance to work for the Emergency Pastoralist Assistance Group, an NGO on the Kenya–Somalia border, which perked me back up. Back home, I got a typesetting job with a local editorial firm that led to copywriting (mostly household-name holiday brochures, which I did for years), worked for BBC local radio, then did freelance editorial after my first son was born. With two small boys, I did a short story writing course just to escape one night a week – I had no time or energy for novels – and trained to be a part-time adult learning tutor. Then I won some competitions, one an Arvon course after which I wrote a novel and spent a *lot* of time being rejected. Rinse and repeat. I applied for Common People not expecting anything – and that was *the*gamechanger; I’d written a memoir by then and it all led from there. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/07/WMR-jacket_1000px.jpg) **CM**: When you were growing up, was the idea of being a writer something that occupied you? Was it something that you thought was possible coming from a working-class background? **JK**: I wrote my first “book” at seven, about a dentist talking a giant into having a gold tooth so he wouldn’t eat him. My mum was district nursing back then and took it to read to elderly patients – one, an ex-bursar of a school Princess Diana once attended, suggested helping me apply there, and the ensuing debates (I didn’t want to, and Mum wisely saw the issues I’d face) taught me a lot about class. As a teen, music and acting were more compelling anyway, though writing was the thing I really excelled at. I wrote sketches at high school, again at uni, and loved writing. But as a job? Never! My sixth-form tutor told me not to bother applying to university; not to “kid myself about who I could be”. It was partly a desire to flick him the bird that drove me to work hard. I got heavily into “exuberant” essay writing once at uni, and one personal tutor loved them – asking once if I’d ever considered being a writer. I laughed; it was that kind of inaccessible. I wanted to write comedy sketches and non-fiction then, but couldn’t see a way to do it. So much of writing is about belief – the belief that you can, deserve to, aren’t just wasting time, and that people like you *do* this. In order to believe that, you need to see it – because you won’t get external validation very often, financially you’re on the back foot, and self-confidence is a huge issue for a working-class kid in a middle-class world. **CM**: Your debut novel, Wild Moon Rising, has just been published. Often when debuts happen, we conveniently forget the long journey that a book has had before it gets into the hands of readers. When did you start writing the book? **JK**: I began shortly before the pandemic – though not in any way writing the book it is now. I had a vague idea of *something* I wanted to do/say, and began writing thoughts, sentences, scenes, so when I sat down to write an actual book I had these tens of thousands of words – utterly daunting – of which only about ten percent are in the novel now. I applied for an Arts Council grant to buy time, and finally got one in 2021; late that year I could afford to begin properly writing – though this iteration of the book came to me in spring 2022\. Once I knew what I wanted to do, I wrote it relatively quickly – I wish I could plot, but I have to write my way in and *find* the book in that way. **CM**: Your novel is one of the first books published by Akan Books, a new publishing imprint led by June Sarpong. It was set up to “remove barriers and make space for voices and stories that have been overlooked”. How was the experience of working with them? **JK**: I can’t praise Akan highly enough. I’ve had some awful experiences with publishers over many years, so I was wary, to say the least. But Akan have given me trust – in both the joy of writing and in the publishing process. They get it. They know how hard it is, they know how writers who want to be authors feel – what it’s like not to get feedback, or be ghosted, for example – and so they don’t do that. They offer a lot that most publishers don’t, and they care about their authors – it’s not just about the market, it’s about *you* as a person, a part of a team, and they want you to be happy. They’re strong women with strong views, and they’re committed to Akan 100%, but they’re also real people with real insight into what and how life is. **CM**: Your novel has arrived at a time when women’s midlife experiences have gone mainstream, with dramas such as Jilly Cooper’s *Rivals* being such a hit, and with groundbreaking novels like Miranda July’s *All Fours* becoming bestsellers – plus other authors energising conversations about the menopause, midlife sexuality and relationships. Do you feel like you are part of a new movement? **JK**: Yes – in that when I was writing *Wild Moon Rising* it felt like a total risk. I’d sit at my desk thinking, *Who’s going to want to read this?* High-profile women were hitting 50 and being laid off very publicly; older women actors weren’t getting roles – 84% of 50+ roles in Hollywood still go to men. We didn’t see older women being strong or main characters in books, and so on. For me, it started with Kristin Scott Thomas’s *Fleabag* speech – I inadvertently air-punched at it – and it fascinated me to see, when I googled it, that it was the most searched-for speech of any in *Fleabag*. That, and the conversations I was having, overhearing or reading about with my peers and other women, made me want to write about this part of life – a sense of rage at being written off because we’re no longer ‘desirable’ or seen as relevant, with anything to offer. What kind of patriarchal, male-gaze bullshit is that? A man in his 50s writes a midlife crisis novel – it’s literature. A woman does it – and it’s ‘domestic’... It’s a fascinating time in our lives: our mothers were not like us, so there’s no roadmap, but we have so much more life to live in this new, very liberating era – more new chapters to open. We are over half the world’s population, we have a good few decades left, and a very varied life experience to bring to the table. Women go through so many changes in life, and this part of the changing is both seminal and seismic. In other cultures, this is revered – as it once was here. Earlier this year I heard June Sarpong talking about her Ghanaian heritage, and explaining how in that culture women actually look forward to getting older – it’s seen as a badge of honour, a time of wisdom, respect, strength, prestige and power. *They* are the aspirational model. Having been raised by women who fought for equality, and that famous 90s ‘women can have it all’ lie, women here now actually want to see it in action. **CM**: You’re upfront about writing about sex, the workings of bodies, and how women’s bodies change as we grow up and age. Your character Claire tracks her life through her relationships, and her bold desires are not always socially acceptable – even to herself. Did it feel liberating to be writing about sex so openly and acknowledging the role of desire in shaping women’s lives? **JK**: Yes. I’ve always found it strange – the dichotomy between what women acknowledge among ourselves – sex was, often still is, the famous 20-minute mark of a conversation – and how women’s desire is perceived societally. None of us felt immune to that, whether that desire was rampant or stagnant. It surprises me that in the 21st century, girls still worry about being seen as “freakish”, “dirty” or “slutty” for having or expressing strong desire. For around half a woman’s life, we are shaped by our reproductive cycles, so there are times when we are as subject to the animal in us as men are openly acknowledged to be – and that doesn’t always respond to the ‘sensible’ stuff of the brain. Hence, some of our choices. Desire is hugely important to women, in my experience – and complex, too. Often, it’s *being desired*that creates desire, and we definitely desire different things at different points in life. There is a great deal of the primal still in us, and a lot of women hold this in secrecy. It felt liberating to just write it. In your 50s, no one expects you to write sex as titillation, either. I wanted it to be honest and as ‘wild’ as it can be – good and bad. In some ways, that goes against the norm and social perception – which appealed. It felt almost transgressive, rebellious – a lot of post-menopause echoes the teenage-girl self in this respect. Again, it felt like a risk – I’ve several friends who didn’t like that aspect of WMR, and who openly said sex didn’t bother them anymore. “Just give me the dog and a cup of tea, thanks...” But I do feel for many of us, it’s as if we redefine and reclaim the *whole self* again, rather than the roles we may have played for years – and, very importantly, once we’re free of cyclical hormonal input. Fewer fucks given, as one of my editors said – if not necessarily less desire for sex! **CM**: The two characters in your book find solace in each other, though they are of different generations, have very different temperaments, and are from different social class backgrounds – with Claire working class and Tansy solidly middle class. What made you interested in bringing together these two characters? **JK**: I was interested in exploring intergenerational friendship – though initially, Tansy was a device to get Claire talking to someone! – and then came the different classes and temperaments, because I’ve been surprised in life by the unexpected value and joy that comes with these kinds of friendships. I had a male neighbour almost old enough to be my grandfather who, for years, I was very close to, and I’ve had both young and old friends through work, hobbies, writing, in my jobs in shops and pubs – friendships I’ve been both surprised and enriched by – so it was very much something that appealed. A dear writing friend, much older than me – sadly dead now – advised me to keep in touch with the young as I aged too, or “you’ll have no idea how the world is working”. We have so much to learn from and give to one another – it’s another thing you realise as you get older: there is huge value and joy in being both the recipient and the giver of all this. **CM**: Your novel feels class conscious to me, but it wears it very lightly. Was it important to have an exploration and acknowledgement of class feature as part of how we understand the characters? **JK**: Yes. There’s a huge amount about where you come from which hits all over again in the second half of life. You begin to see things differently – in that, you have a deeper insight into how it affects life. As a younger working-class person, you want to believe that all you need do is be passionate, talented and hard-working to achieve your dreams. But as you age, you see how deeply unequal many things still are – how where you’re born and to whom affects the chances in life, but also the more subtle, deeply inner things like confidence, aspiration, self-belief. Tansy and Claire are women from different places in life who’ve both felt restrained or held back by where they came from to an extent, and yet they bond and manage to explore this together. I wanted to examine that from Claire’s part, too – younger – because it is so hard when you find yourself, as a fellow *Common People* writer put it, trying to play your part in the middle-class world so unfamiliar to you: not knowing what to do, finding yourself still just tying your boots on the ski slope while everyone else is already hurtling down the slopes. **CM**: The connections between postmenopausal women and their deep love and appreciation of gardening is well-trodden territory in both biography and fiction. What’s your take on this, and how did you decide to approach it in the novel? Are you a gardener? **JK**: I had a big cottage garden previously – and I missed it badly: being able to go out and hack hell out of things, or rip them up, or dig holes and weed when writing wasn’t going well, or as a physical antidote to all the sitting. So I thought I’d give Claire a garden – also to give her something else to do, given she’s so solitary – and then I got to thinking how like life gardening is; a total storehouse of metaphor and analogy. Then one day I looked up what one particular plant stood for symbolically, out of sheer curiosity, and that was a lightbulb moment. I felt like I’d found the key to a door. My mother is an amazing gardener, Dad grows veg, and I’ve always loved plants and nature, so I did get into gardening myself in my thirties – but I think older women come to feel that deeper connection with Mother Earth, as it were. Nature can’t be anything but feminine, so with gardening it’s about the creation of it, the nurture, the joy and satisfaction without the absolute drain of giving, caring or proving ourselves – it gives as much as it takes, and not many things in a woman’s life can claim that. **CM**: Has the experience of publishing your debut novel and seeing it out in the world in the hands of readers lived up to your expectations? Has anything surprised you? **JK**: It’s been such a surprise – all of it! I loved working with my wonderful editor, Hannah Boursnell, and I had no idea how vastly editing can improve your own book – even though I also work as a developmental editor! The validation of it all helped, too: it’s no longer a pipe dream, but an actual job – that changes a lot of things internally. But I didn’t know what to expect, and I had no idea how completely terrifying it can be thinking about it being read. For so long, this was the goal – and then when it came, I felt more nervous than I could have thought. I also didn’t expect to feel so blown away by how it would feel to hold my book in my hands – that rendered me speechless. Or to see a box full of them, or see your name on the inside, your photo, your acknowledgements. Among the most surreal and lovely surprises have been how it felt to talk about my book on a panel, or at my local writing centre; how supportive people are. And the really big one – how it feels to see it in a shop, or be asked to sign it. One thing I’ve learned for certain is that you are always, always learning in this writing life… Read [an extract from Wild Moon Rising](https://thebeemagazine.com/the-gift/). And you can buy the whole beautiful thing at [the Bee bookshop](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780008650292?ref=thebeemagazine.com). --- [Tip the Bee](https://thebeemagazine.com/#/portal/support) All donations go towards supporting the Bee’s mission to nurture, publish promote and pay for the best new working-class writing. ### Extract: Wild Moon Rising by Jenny Knight URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/extract-wild-moon-rising-by-jenny-knight/ Last updated: 2025-08-19T17:32:24.000Z She’d always had a bit of a thing about Guitar True-Love. Ever since he ran across a playground early in high school, stooping to scoop up a tennis ball in front of her and she stood shock-staring at the black-black hair and striking green eyes. Trying to work out why her chest felt as if it took not just the strike, but the shape of lightning. She’d watched him spin on one foot, arm drawn back, shirt lifting – oh! – as he dipped a knee, bent back like a Greek statue, hurling the ball high, arching, long. The way he’d caught her eye, stared back, smiled. He was the son of a surgeon; as far from her council-house league as her touching the top of the netball ring. Yet it became evident, fast, the magnet pulled both ways. If she was walking past where he was playing wall-ball, and he had the ball, he’d always aim for her arse. “All right, Texas?” he said one time, as she rubbed the welt and flicked him the bird; the nickname bestowed by some other boy, thanks to her breasts (soon to be so covered by her arms she’d have a slight hunch for years), and a TV chocolate bar ad – Texan: The Big One! “All right, Danger Mouse?” Her TV nod now, him shorter than so many of his peers. She was never not aware of him; felt his presence on her skin, the roots of her hair. They had a sweet, childish relationship that first year – you ‘went out’ with boys then mostly because they asked ¬– but an attraction that clicked on and off for years. They dated properly once, but it ended because of how he tried to get his hand in her pants on the overnight bus to the school exchange: fierce, relentless; his urgency stunning, repulsing, thrilling. She fought because she knew she should, but she hadn’t wanted to. She knew even then she could take his fingers as deep as he wanted to thrust them – and love every single second. But that was just it, wasn’t it? She smoked, swore, liked a dirty joke, masturbated like a teenage boy. A freak, a nympho, a dirty bitch. That was her secret. Her shame. The thing that still at times made her want to pray herself good. His girlfriends were always posh, sweet as brandy snaps stuffed with the creamy pout of them. And yet she saw how he looked at her, barely able to admit how much she wanted to impress him. “Texas! I see you won that competition. Did you get someone else to paint it?” “Mousey! I saw you in that band that weren’t shit. Did you feel out of place?” She went out with Splatty Kev instead, because he asked, but also because she liked where he came from. He was son of Artex Tony, the dad of messy overalls and smoke-smelling van, his mum an Avon lady, and she and Kev often went to his at lunchtime, where Claire found all the things familiar to her: smoked glass mugs of tea that steamed on tables with meals, flowery carpets, fake wood Formica, ‘naff’ china ornaments of ‘ladies’ or robins on spade handles, Old Spice and Silvikrin – and no en suites. And then came Cherry Boy. “See you got a boyfriend with a car now, Tex? Does his guide dog drive it for him?” “See you’re going out with Jayne’s ickle baby sister. Buy her an ice cream for me?” But as they got into A levels, her girlfriends, boy friends, began to blossom, beard: the reader-writers understanding Shakespeare, the maths and sciences revelling in infinity; languages chattering, humanities wanting to hold the planet in one hand. She grew, too: her mother’s lurching yucca painted life-size, the Suffolk sea on an old piece of plasterboard Artex Tony was throwing out, her self-portrait now in squares of blue, her Freud-inspired Woman in Red, all the tiny illustrations she’d sketch on bar mats, menus, anything; her appetite never sated, merely teased. She used pub work to save for university, but also to stretch herself a canvas, buy a camera to take good photos. Won herself a couple of prizes. They kept a good friendship, she and Guitar True-Love; in the same school house, always bantering in competitions and assemblies, but always two of the first to shout about one of the better teachers getting sick or losing a loved one, head to the town florist after arranging a whip-round. “I don’t know – which ones do you think they’ll like the most, Mouse? What the hell do you buy someone whose husband just died?” “Any. Because of what they mean. You’re the arty one – and actually the one who stood up and said we should, so you choose. And good on you, Tex.” Two of the first, too, to be reprimanded for never quite adhering to the rules. Him with his cheeky songs – The Tie of the Agar, ripping into the music teacher who often turned up skew-whiff, reeking of booze – her with her cartoonish lampoonings. When not worried about treading on her mother’s *nerves*, or dealing with the ghost-home of a mother in hospital again “for a rest” or “recuperating” in Norfolk for months, she loved nothing more than to laugh. Her dad worked all the hours then, and with Stephen at uni, she had to learn to live with watchful sleep, terrified of the Rippers treading the bills marked Urgent as they headed to her room with their knives. School was safe and, in sixth form at least, fun. She didn’t want it to end as much as she needed to escape; the desire for city life – *life* – pressing. When they danced, she and Guitar True-Love, learning a waltz for the leavers’ musical, she sweated such animal musk she’d clamped her arms so tight her ribs ached for an hour, just in the hope he wouldn’t smell the strength of her want at the ebony hair peeking where throat pooled to clavicle. The night they finally got together at the leavers’ party in a barn on someone’s farm – *as you do*, she joked – they took off for a walk in search of fags, got lost, walked for hours and ended up in the soft scrub of headland of a stubble field, ghost-lit by a harvest moon as he took her top off and both lost track of time. She fell. Hard. *You’ve got a hell of a mind*, he told her, and it meant more than any profession of unlikely beauty. The best she was used to was “more attractive than you think/when you take your glasses off”. Attractive: older actresses, other people’s mothers. With Cherry Boy she had found a way to be a woman, but she still hadn’t felt like the real deal; the girl still playing with the grown-up clothes to find her style. With Guitar True-love, the woman in her sang like the strings of his guitar. First love. So beautiful and so brutal at the same time. “I love the way,” Guitar True-love said in the hot summer before university, “you always answer questions with another question.” “How do you mean?” “Very droll, Tex. I’m impressed.” She always laughed when he said that – *impressed* – which he did often; no way around his seeing through any of her guises. They’d known each other too long. He pulled her close, into the clean, ironed linen smell of him. “Because it’s sexy. I love your confidence, your energy. You’ve got a way about you and —” “Don’t say it. Big tits? Yawn.” “Not as big as your feet. It’s like going out with a duck.” He wrote her a song called “Number One” because: “You are curves and circles and squares at the same time. You’re the number one because you’re infinite, you’re perfect.” “I love your body,” he said, when she, premenstrual, pulled it to pieces, wished she were thin; snake-hipped and small-breasted *like all your other girlfriends*. “What was it you said – Rubenesque? And no, not just your gorgeous, amazing… those. I’m even getting used to your massive feet.” “Built for comfort not for speed,” she said; a quip-shield used about various body parts to many men, many times, in the pubs she worked in. “I love watching you play,” she said to him one afternoon off from their respective jobs. “The way you get so lost in your music, that look when you can’t get the notes, and then you can. I even like this” – she stroked his Eighties stubble – “ridiculous bumfluff of yours.” “I love it when you have red lips,” he told her, smooching at the last of their friends’ 18ths, after he’d just sung along to Barry White, parody-style, in her ear. “I don’t care if it’s meant to work like a baboon’s arse like on *Life on Earth*; I love it all the same.” “So, what about when I’m not wearing make-up, then; as in, most of the time?” “Even better. Ohhh don’t go changin’ / tryin’ to please me…” There was nothing to change for him. Nothing else to be but entirely herself. He’d say he loved it even when she kissed him and had flecks of cucumber left in her teeth from a sandwich. When she sweated that musk, and he drew her close and inhaled her deep. *I love it when.* Neither committing to making that sentence just the three words. Not so little, after all. She drew him: sideways in charcoal as he drove, the shape of him bent at his guitar; her passion for him, like his for music, big and bold in paint. She took photos to catch that exact black curl, that fork of hair rising from nape of neck; the way he looked at her from the other side of a room; how she loved to catch his eye at a party when they were talking to other people. That thrill that sent a charge to deepest her: her sex, yes, but also her soul. He watched her paint, something she usually avoided, never happy to be on a stage, on show, like him; though the aphrodisiac of talent only made her want him more. He said the same to her when he kissed her neck from behind as she stabbed, stroked, tickled paper with brush, laughing as he crooned “Vincent” in his best John Denver. Most times, though, he’d sit strumming the guitar that rarely left his side, to the point other girls complained, he said. “Play something for me,” she told him then. “Not something I know, something you’ve made up. I’ll paint whatever it makes me think about. Or feel.” He played small tributes to Spanish guitar and she painted a patchwork red sky, a mountain, a hint of the squares and alcoves of Moorish architecture in rusty brown, the swirling white skirt of a woman dancing in the forefront of it all, waist down only, as if witnessed by a child; rudimentary, but free. He did the same with music, he said. “Give me something. A person, word, image. A feeling, anything.” “Okay. Sing me a song about summer. No Louis or Ella allowed.” He fiddled for a few moments, mutter-singing, testing chords. And then broke into a bluesy, rock and roll rockabilly riff in the same beat as “Heartbreak Hotel”: *We-e-ll in summer my baby wears san-dals / But she don’t got painted toes* *And I stare at those ten little pig-gies / And that’s just the start of my woes* *Cos my baby got Suff-olk ham feet / Yeah, baby got feet like ham* *And I can’t tell my baby to paint them / Cos baby don’t hear no man* *She got ind-epen-dent feet, yeah / ind-epen-dent feet* *Her feet just so big they don’t play by the rules / And* *I cannot cope ’less them hams is in shoes…* “You’re a goddess,” he said later. “You make me feel like I’m the best version of me.” For her part, it seemed impossible she’d ever been told to watch for being too much – too argumentative, too questioning, too sensitive – by her parents. Too “full of ideas above your station” by the teachers not her beloved head of art Mrs Sanders, “bearing in mind where you come from”. By boys who hadn’t wanted her but said she was “fucking great. Like a woman who’s also a bit of a bloke”. A backhanded compliment – it meant she could hold her own in a conversation and had a mind that evidently matched theirs, so Stephen said – and one she took, but still smarted at. She took comfort her best girlfriend was the same: how many pints and games of pool where they slurred to one another *If you were a bloke, I’d bloody fucking marry you*. But she was aware now of her talent, her potential, her passions full of this new adult voice of hers. Protests, marches. Free Nelson Mandela and Fuck Off Clause 28. “I love a woman with a mouth on her,” Guitar True-love said another time. “I love how you’re not scared to say what you think, care about, how you just get gobby and speak up, speak out. I want to sing you all the time, Claire. I want to fucking rock your gypsy soul.” He hadn’t known then it was one of her favourite songs: how it spoke to her of the agelessness of the sun, sea, her secret woods; the shed skin of forest in her hair when she lay on its crackling floor shortly after their first real date and slid her hand to find herself so slippery her orgasm felt like spinning silk. Hours just talking, laughing, unearthing thoughts and realisations to catch the light, marvelling at this horde of secret treasure as they stared at skies that turned the world upside down; sheets of summer black littered with crumbs of stars. With him she learned the erotica of kissing; dizzying, sweet intoxication that left her face sore to simple water. The urgency of him left her breathless; passion that matched her own for the whole of him, as yet still caged in the electrified bars of the unconsummated. Despite, or even because of that, her heart opened as the flower of her cervix once had. One late summer dusky evening, a hot day softened to shadow and swoop, they stared into each other’s eyes as she sat astride him staring and kissing, kissing and staring, deep in each other below the ombre of a September moon. She would never again feel such unsullied intimacy. The actual act hadn’t been all that at first. Issues. Nerves. Not that it mattered. It seemed there’d be no end to the falling, like the long summer before they all migrated off to uni. She loved him, loved him; taught him how to sexually love a woman. They fitted – body, mind; how he held, kissed, touched her. It was pure. It was beautiful. It was never just about the sex. ***Return to sender.*** Three of the worst words she would ever read in her life. She left for uni first, his accommodation problematic, not yet assigned. To this day she’d no idea how she managed to give him the wrong postcode. A world of no mobile phones, then: he thought she hadn’t replied to his letter, a storybook mistake rectified on a mid-term trip home, followed by a heady weekend in his Edinburgh halls; so in love she didn’t know how to say it for fear he no longer felt the same (sender has lost heart?), that he’d say they should make the most of this new life and not chain themselves down like his older sister: “Talk about ‘Too Much Too Young’…” The power and the danger of words unsaid. Three years of (hard, intermittent) friendship later before she’d tell him how much she’d loved him; both drunk, him confessing his terror of her hurting him, too: why, that first Christmas, he ended it. For the rest of her life, if only occasionally, gently prodded by something seen, read, heard, she’d wonder what was in his letter. The seam of her altered after that – broken and glued, yes. But never the same. The light was beginning to fade, a half-moon low at one side of the sky: a side-on jellyfish in the cloudy sea of blues, blacks, smoky silvers. She wished she could swim out to it. She used to swim so much, younger. Rivers, lakes, open-air pools, anywhere devoid of chlorine; queen of them all, the sea. “So good at control, you and me.” Emma’s voice ricocheted around her head. “And look how we ended up.” How impossible it seemed, after all those years of marriage, motherhood, demises and deaths, that she’d once been the carefree girl whose only control issues had to do with avoiding pregnancy. She looked at the text from Ben: *just checking in*. Wondered how he was outside the good days, not so good days, *busy*. *Staying positive*. Admittedly, at times adult control had looked a lot like fast-tracking herself a Diploma in Drinking Solo. But it felt, at some point, like all she had for company as she’d watch Ben watching TV, envying his ability to lower his antennae, let go, lose himself so easily. There is no loneliness like married loneliness. At least alone there’s no expectation: that lack of another underlined in **big black boldface** every time she entered or left a room. The feeling that it really, really shouldn’t be like this. At least by now she understood so much of life worked like any other theory on the expansion of time: things can only go so far forward before they begin turning back on themselves. Strange, though, how it still felt selfish to focus on herself after all those years of growing boys and goodbyes, rarely reaching out because that’s what *flaky people* did. But how to survive this particular pruning – how to be an individual, how to be a woman? She looked at the patch of earth around a primrose not yet in flower, a little “oh” escaping her at the sight of the striated purple and white flower on the spindly crocus she’d cleared around earlier, the soil still so raw she wanted to wrap it up like a baby. She hoped it would survive. It wasn’t always true that whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Or not at first, at least. Read the Bee’s [interview with Jenny Knight](https://thebeemagazine.com/the-gift/). --- --- [Tip the Bee](https://thebeemagazine.com/#/portal/support) All donations go towards supporting the Bee’s mission to nurture, publish promote and pay for the best new working-class writing. ### The Gift URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/the-gift/ Last updated: 2025-07-11T17:12:54.000Z It was the coldest night of the entire winter. Inside the house the gas fire had been lit so that the artificial coals glowed red. Outside, the wind blew bitter cold and raw, sending gusts of snow sweeping across the roads to gather in pockets in the kerbs. It was early evening and as the daylight sank away it left the winter sky clear and inky blue. At the window, half hidden by a curtain, a man stood watching, and by his side, but separate from him, stood his son. To a casual observer it might look as though these two figures had been frozen by the winter weather; that it had somehow managed to penetrate the red brick walls of the house and creep, unnoticed, into the room. But if you were to take a closer look you would see that one of them was breathing slow and shallow and the other had a salt tear gathering on his lower lashes. Across the road, not twenty feet away, the East Kent Company number 51 bus belched exhaust fumes into the cold night air. It was one of the new buses that didn’t need a conductor, just a driver and a metal ticket machine mounted on a bracket next to him. This was the end of the line and was an ideal spot for the driver to drink tea from his flask and have a quick smoke before heading back into Margate. The bus was empty but for one passenger who sat halfway down the seats on the lower deck. A handsome woman with ash blonde hair that fell over the collar of her pale green overcoat, she sat staring straight ahead so that she was in profile to the two figures silently watching her. Her face remained passive; her mouth, her eyes, gave nothing away. The woman was the man’s wife and the boy’s mother and she was leaving them both, and she was never coming back. The tear broke over the boy’s lashes and as it did he reached out for his father. For a moment the boy could feel the warm roughness of his father’s fingers – but the moment was fleeting, and his father pulled his hand away, so filled with shame was he at such an intimate thing. “Please,” the boy said. His father didn’t speak immediately but then he said: “She’s made her choice.” The boy made to protest further and his father turned to confront him. And so neither of them saw the woman’s head turn, fleetingly, to look at them, as the bus pulled away. Another tear gathered. “Enough,” his father said. “Come on, the table needs clearing.” \~ The next morning the overnight ice had formed delicate frosted patterns on the inside of the boy’s bedroom window. The boy, warm as toast under his blankets, watched his breath form steam-plumes in the air and imagined he was a smoker enjoying the first smoke of the day. After a while he sat up and, pulling on his jumper, he began to read a dog-eared Eagle Annual. Sammy, the ancient and one-toothed cat, appeared on unsteady limbs at the bedroom door and meowed until the boy got out of bed and headed downstairs. The smell of tinned cat’s meat made the boy want to heave but he held his breath until he had spooned enough of the pink mush onto the cat’s saucer. As Sammy ate, the boy made a lemon curd sandwich using the last two remaining crusts of bread and a thin sweep of the curd. After he’d finished eating he went into the front room and turned on the gas fire, switched on the Christmas tree lights and waited for his father to wake. By ten o’clock the boy was still alone but he was sure he had heard his father moving about in the bedroom above. At midday the boy made a cup of tea and took it upstairs. Knocking on the bedroom door he waited. Eventually there was a muffled reply and so the boy went in. The room reeked of sweat and cigarettes. His father lay on top of the bed still wearing the clothes he’d had on the night before. In the far corner of the room was a discarded bottle of whiskey. The boy set the mug of tea down on the bedside table, but his father made no sound and no attempt to drink it. So the boy sat down on the lino, crossed his legs and waited. The tea grew cold. After some time his father started to move, so that he was sitting on the side of the bed, his feet planted on the lino opposite the boy. Without lifting his eyes, he said: “You’ll need to toughen up now she’s gone.” But the boy knew he could never toughen up, that he would always be a disappointment to his father. Because, right at that moment, the boy wanted, more than anything else in the world, to cry. And worse. He wanted his father to cry too. He wanted his father to cry so that he could comfort him. He wanted to tell his father that everything would be all right. And more than that. He wanted to know that his father loved him. And he felt sure he would know he was loved if his father held him. But the boy knew that real men didn’t go on like that. He knew the rules. His father had taught him well – and so had his mother, to some extent. But the boy didn’t care about all that anymore. And so he got up off the floor and moved to the side of the bed. And he reached out and took his father’s hand. Once again he felt the roughness and the warmth of his father’s fingers. His father, his head bowed, his face hidden in shadow, made a half-hearted attempt to pull away but the boy held on. The two of them froze then, as if neither one wanted to move for fear of what might become of them. Gently, the boy took his free hand and rested it on his father’s shoulder. “It’ll be okay, Dad,” the boy said. And a salt tear gathered on the lower lashes of his father’s eye as the boy wrapped his arms around his shoulders. Outside, the wind blew bitter cold and raw, sending gusts of snow sweeping across the roads to gather in pockets in the kerbs. It was early evening, and as the daylight sank away it left the winter sky clear and inky blue. *Photo:* [*David Duran*](https://www.flickr.com/photos/davidduran/?ref=thebeemagazine.com) [Tip the Bee](https://thebeemagazine.com/#/portal/support) All donations go towards supporting the Bee’s mission to nurture, publish promote and pay for the best new working-class writing. ### Beat the Sick URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/beat-the-sick/ Last updated: 2026-06-18T13:57:03.000Z The Government is still planning to go ahead with the cuts to Personal Independence Payments and disability benefits, reiningin the workshy disabled, living it up on their £73.90 a week. Never mind that you have to pass intrusive and humiliating assessments to get these benefits. Never mind that you might actually be ill, or that jobs that you could do don’t exist. They don’t want the burden of the workshy disabled people on the welfare state; you’re a scrounger, that’s the story they tell. It’s not easy to live with that story. A story about people like me, women like me. On benefits. On PIP. PIP gets the headlines but this is about changes to a lot of payments. They will be taking payments away from a lot of people, and if you’re on the receiving end, you know what it’s really about. It’s making it about ‘them’ and ‘us.’ The deserving and undeserving. It’s about sowing social division to justify political ends. The story is about making me a scapegoat for the country’s financial woes. It’s not an easy story to ignore. The one where I’m not like you, just doing my best to get on in life, but instead a burden on my family, on the welfare state, and on society as a whole. The one where I’m a liar or a cheat, squandering your hard-earned taxes on custard and cake. I hear these stories all the time. From the man in the blue van shouting, ‘Get a fucking job’ as news stories blasted that I’m a workshy scrounger, sat at the traffic lights waiting to cross the road in my wheelchair. From the builders, wondering how sick disabled people are if they’re out protesting against the cuts. From the woman in the library who wonders if ‘they’ (she doesn’t mean me, I’m the deserving poor, apparently) should be given special vouchers so they don’t squander their benefits on stuff they don’t need. It’s hard not to feel small, other, ashamed. It’s hard not to feel scared, or scrutinised, or rush to parade the intimacies of my illness to justify being treated with basic dignity and respect. For the longest time, I swallowed these stories until they made me sick. But I’m already sick. For the sake of my health, vomiting up their tales, I refuse to be defined by anyone else’s story, to make myself appear human among their lies. If you can’t see that already, then there is little hope for either of us. ### When Girls Fight URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/when-girls-fight/ Last updated: 2025-06-16T19:06:30.000Z Scrunchies would go flying when the girls were fighting. Faux velvet, leopard print, denim and gingham. There were often two scrunchies per high ponytail in early noughties Scarborough, and hair was always harnessed for a girl fight. The reason for the fight didn’t have to be more than a wrong look, and often wasn’t. Some of the lasses were like cans of Lynx in a bonfire. It wasn’t a question of if they would blow but when, and who would get taken out by the explosion. News of impending violence was the sheepdog to the flock, and all would race to the yard and make a circle around whoever was fighting. You expected to see some girls, like Shelly B who lived on our street, but others were unwillingly dragged in. Whip-crack slaps to faces and upper arms would precede the clawing of cheeks with chipped-glitter nails. When the lasses were finally dragged apart, hair sculpted that morning with samurai-precision would be a mousse-stiffened cloud, like feral candyfloss. The smell of girl fights was post-PE sweat and Impulse body spray (02 or Vanilla Kisses), and their colour was often green. One of the popular lads might have dumped this lass for the other, or this lass might be known to fancy the other’s lad. Maybe the lad had given the lass a grot at a party, fuelled by Hooch or kiwi MD2020, and there was no foundation makeup thick enough to hide it. It wasn’t just the girls who fought. Sometimes the mums did, too: Mrs Romano and Mrs East, for example, going at each other outside the primary school gates. Over an affair, my mum later explained, and (not to worry) the tangled mass on the tarmac afterwards was just hair extensions. A girl fight could be worse than any fight between the lads when someone like Shelly B was involved. Blood on the rim of the sink in the girls’ bathroom was the aftermath of a smashed-in head. The police came for Shelly that time, but she was back at school soon enough, ponytail three scrunchies high and magnificent as a Harbour Bar ice-cream. A lot of us wore our white slouch socks two pairs deep for volume, but Shelly’s were always the biggest, pushed down to reveal legs that looked to have built-in shin pads, and knees made for winter hockey. If it was possible for a school tie to look intimidating then hers did, worn as stout and wide as possible. At the time, she seemed to be made of something completely different to me, like a firework compared to a soft-boiled egg, even though we had grown up on the same street. Shelly lived three doors down from us, with her mum and a cat called Shammy Leather. When we were small, she had fed a cake made of mud and PVA glue to my little brother. At the park she liked to melt things with a cigarette lighter: black plastic swing seats and seesaw handles. “Your mum’s a fucking lezzer!” she’d announce to me in front of the Rawton boys. She never brayed me, but that regular taunt stuck like Hubba Bubba on tarmac. Braying was different to fighting, because it was about one lass giving another a bad kick-in. The hardest girls weren’t the prettiest, so just being fit, even if you didn’t mean to be, could make you a target. So could being a swot, or being bad at sports. And if you were all three, God help you! I swiftly learned to keep academic enthusiasm to a minimum when, on my first day at secondary school, an eager response to a teacher’s question about the features of a motte-and-bailey castle earned me a dead arm. Hand raising was strictly rationed after that. Luckily, although Scott Newbold once told me I was pretty at a party before throwing up all over my trouser skirt, none of the popular lads fancied me, and my willingness to get knocked out on the netball court as a decent Goal Defence earned me another level of immunity. The PE changing rooms were one of the hotspots for getting brayed. One excuse for it might just be that you had the wrong kit. When it came to trainers, Adidas Galaxies and Reebok Classics were best, but anything Hi-Tec could get you a kick-in. Kickers were the only acceptable shoe, and you wanted the tags to be showing. Jackets and bags needed to be brands; a Kappa jacket was a prize possession. The vicar’s daughter had a pretty face *and* she had a camel coat from Marks and Spencer, facts that inevitably led to her being shoved, coat and all, into a freezing shower. “I’ll do something good one day, and you’ll be in the gutter!” I remember her saying to the jeering lasses as she stood there dripping, and I thought, ‘Wow, believing in God must give you balls! The threat of violence was something I never questioned at school. You just carried it around with you, as surely as the pair of compasses in your pencil tin. Even now, when I spot lasses in the street or on the bus I can sometimes feel the sense of built-up pressure. And I keep a wide berth, if I can. It’s funny, though: I don’t really think about Shelly much, or the other hardest girls from school. They’ll just be mums with their own kids now, dealing with bills and illnesses and divorces; all the things our mums were dealing with then. Maybe the rage can be accounted for if you look hard enough at circumstances, but in a way it’s bigger than that, just part of the fabric of the town, like the amusements, and the fish and chip shops. I reckon there’ll always be lasses getting brayed in Scarborough, and other lasses watching, and one day telling stories about it. [Tip the Bee](https://thebeemagazine.com/#/portal/support) All donations go towards supporting the Bee’s mission to nurture, publish promote and pay for the best new working-class writing. ### I’m a Leaseholder Get Me Out of Here! URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/im-a-leaseholder-get-me-out-of-here/ Last updated: 2026-06-11T19:23:57.000Z Dear Director of Housing at the Council Thank you for confirming that “human impact isn't a consideration” when planning and costing building works on your housing estates. I’d hosted a meeting at my flat the Friday before last. The Council vs the leaseholders. Three officials representing different departments in the huge mess of a local authority: Mr Repairs, Ms Collections and Ms Housing. Four of my neighbours – leaseholders like me who’ve been landed with a bill of £58,500\. And of course, my partner and me. It was a squeeze to get everyone in my living room, which has one L-shaped sofa and a small Formica dining table with four chairs around it. When I spoke, I could see Mr Repairs looking at the wall behind my head, where a dozen photos of my two children were displayed in a big Ikea frame. When I asked at what point the Council considers the impact of repairs programmes on leaseholders, also known as human beings, Ms Housing replied instantly that they don’t. They didn’t do it because they didn’t have to. I’d switched my phone’s audio recorder on before they arrived. I really thought I was on to something significant: an admission that the Council don’t think about how a bill for £58,500 might affect the recipients. Not before, during or after the works. Ms Housing said it with such blasé confidence, as if it was a line from a play that she knew by heart. I shook my head slowly, unable to find a riposte. I might have cried at this point were it not for the fact she was perched awkwardly on my son’s wooden highchair, which was the only seat available. Later that day, when I emailed a higher-up to divulge my scoop, Ms Head of Home Ownership replied confirming it in writing: “Human impact isn't a consideration.” Thank you for confirming you have made no steps to ensure leaseholders understand a) the contents of this notice of estimate, and b) its implications. Every time I tell someone the amount they say, “Whoa, and how much does that work out per flat?” This is a reasonable response, because what’s not reasonable is getting a bill through your letterbox for £58,500\. For some of my neighbours who aren’t fluent in English or legalese, it can be hard to grasp the significance. It’s as if they worded the letter to be as unclear as possible. My 82-year-old neighbour from number 35 didn’t get it. I mean, literally. He said he’d never received the letter. Sat next to him on my sofa, I pointed out the total amount at the bottom of the page, circling my finger around the biggest figure. He then didn’t get it for a second time. “What’s that? Who’s paying that?” Thank you for confirming you did not a) speak to residents before deciding on the works that needed to be carried out, b) explain why they were necessary, or c) make any attempt to listen to concerns residents may have. My fellow leaseholders and I, we are not wealthy people. Let’s face it, if I had a spare 58 grand knocking around, I’d have bought a freehold house rather than an ex-council flat in a run-down estate. A bill of this size for people like us is life-changing. For some people it can be life-ruining. Florrie’s Law is supposed to stop the life-ruining part. It's a relatively recent piece of legislation that caps the amount councils and housing associations can charge London homeowners for building works to £15,000 every five years. It’s named after Florence Bourne. Aged 93, having never been in debt in her life, she received a £50,000 bill from Newham Council for a new roof. Soon after, she had a heart attack and died. Her family said she “died of shame”. Turns out the roof didn’t need to be replaced after all. Thank you for confirming you have not checked to see if any residents are vulnerable in any way. Thank you also for confirming that no support is available for residents who may be severely affected, mentally or physically, by this bill of £58,500\. Having established that the Council doesn’t consider the impact of works or costs on residents, I enquired about follow-up support ‘in the event of severe psychological impact. Ms Home Ownership replied that there wasn’t any. “This is not a service we provide.” I was thinking of myself, but also my family, my neighbours, and all the other leaseholders up and down the country getting fleeced by near-bankrupt councils, and greedy freeholders and managing agents. I was thinking of Florence Bourne. The thing is, Florrie’s Law only applies to building work paid for by certain central government funds. Ms Collections couldn’t wait to point out that the legislation didn’t apply in our situation. Apparently, the Council is funding our works. Well, the Council together with us leaseholders. In which case, paying tens of thousands of pounds over five years is deemed completely reasonable. Thank you for sharing a copy of the income expenditure form which must be completed to prove exceptional hardship, in the event that residents aren’t in a position to repay over five years at £980 a month. I notice the planner requests that we declare our monthly expenditure on cigarettes and alcohol, as well as ‘court fines’. The Council’s selection of itemised expenditure should have surprised me more than it did. I don’t smoke and I’ve never been to court. The amount I spend on alcohol is not what’s stopping me from having a spare £980 a month. My children’s music and sports classes cost a lot more than a few bottles of wine, but I’ll have to include these in the ‘other’ box. They don’t think our expenditure looks like that. You can tell by the way they communicate that they think you’re a certain kind of person. A person far away from power and choices. They refer to us as ‘lessees’ – it’s about as close to ‘lesser’ as you can get. Thank you for agreeing to provide a breakdown of service charges so I can try to understand the 150% increase despite the fact the estate has fallen into a state of disrepair. For years we’ve been complaining that the estate is falling apart and for years we’ve been fobbed off. Our monthly charges soar while the building crumbles. There’s no doubt about it: the extent of repairs needed are the result of insufficient maintenance over the years – maintenance we pay for with our service charges. Since 2021, scaffolding has been preventing our walkway from collapsing after I gave a manual demonstration of the wobbly balustrade to a contractor who happened to be passing through on another job. On one site visit, Mr Asset Management told me, “It’s really not that bad compared to some of the other blocks in the borough. You should see the state of them.” I felt insulted, and I told him so. He asked for advice on how to communicate bad news to residents. After I gave him some, free of charge, he stopped replying to my emails. He ignored my advice, too. Thank you for explaining I’ll need to submit a freedom of information request to find out whether other estates in the borough have received bills as high as this, and how much you’ve spent on defending complaints at Tribunal level. Every morning I scroll through the National Leaseholders Campaign group on Facebook. There are 33,000 members. The posts become familiar after a while –“I feel like such a fool for buying my leasehold flat.” “Can they really charge this much?” “It’s like I’m a prisoner in my own home.” That’s the crux of it for me. I spent my life’s savings on this property. My savings, not my parents’, because they never had any. But I’m not really a home-owner - the freeholder is. In my case, that’s the Council, also known as a ‘social landlord’ (which sounds a lot more avuncular than it is). The word ‘freehold’ means ‘permanent and absolute tenure of property with freedom to dispose of it at will’. I’ll continue to challenge these exorbitant proposed costs as well as what we consider to be a dereliction of contractual duty. Not everyone is in a position to navigate this untransparent, complex and stressful process. My neighbours and fellow leaseholders consent to me challenging this injustice on their behalf. I’ll be in touch shortly with next steps. Regards, Rebecca White [Tip the Bee](https://thebeemagazine.com/#/portal/support) All donations go towards supporting the Bee’s mission to nurture, publish promote and pay for the best new working-class writing. ### Don’t Kill Count Crabula! URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/dont-kill-count-crabula/ Last updated: 2025-06-16T19:07:09.000Z The men in my family came to England from Malaysia and Singapore, and once here they were introduced by mutual friends to my mum’s family, who were mixed Punjabi-Malaysian-Irish, and had lived here for years. My mum and dad had an arranged marriage. My only little brother, the princely Rachi, and I grew up in Bedford in the 1980s and 1990s as children of parents with mixed heritage-Punjabi, Malay and a splash of Irish cream. When I was 12 my very pious paternal grandma (or dadima, in Punjabi) came to live near us, and in 1994 my little sister Kally entered the world via birth canal. I have learned, when asked about my family, to give simplified answers. My grandfather had a corner shop called Singh Stores in the Queens Park area of Bedford, and my father worked as a labourer in the Brickyard, which was back-breaking work and a hostile environment for an immigrant. The religion I was born into was Sikhism – a monotheistic religion founded in 15th-century Punjab. It emphasises devotion to one God, equality of all people, selfless service, and honest living. My brother and I went to a Church of England lower school, where I loved singing hymns, but it was from my family, community and Gurdwara that I took my spiritual sense. At the heart of that spiritual community were the Punjabi and Malay-fusion Chinese, Tamil and Portuguese dishes that each family would cook for each other, dishes that captured the colonial and migratory history of Malaysia. Gathered around the modest narrow rooms of our small Victorian rows of houses in decaying streets, we shared this food, and consumed the lushness of the finger-licking memories of our heritage, our homeland. We would usually go once every few years to Malaysia and Singapore (the more affluent of the two countries), where we would stay with one of my dad’s seven sisters. My mum’s cousins all resided in Singapore. The food we ate on these visits was joyful, and it stands out in my memory even now. Curry laksa noodles from street and store food courts; Hainanese chicken rice; sweet, piquantMalaysian limes; fresh rambutan and lychee bought from markets and wrapped in transparent red plastic bags. A particular favourite was air sirap, the fragrant drink usually consumed at Malaysian wedding parties. A saccharine streak of bubble-gum pink inking the water, the syrup is brewed with rose petals and, when concentrated, it has a magenta hue. Glassy ice is poured into the glass, along with spices, pandan leaf, ruby colouring, sugar and delightful condensed milk. I used to have mine with fresh coconut juice and extra sugar cubes. It wasn’t just the colours and the flavours of the food that made it memorable. It was also the preparation – so often a collaboration, a familial drama, and always an act of love that was bone deep, marrow deep. It began as soon as we arrived. After the exhaustive, sticky 14-hour flights from the UK in July, I would have a sumptuous nap under the turbine-like fans, lying on one of the charpais that stood on the chilly tiled floor. My Bali Puha brewed some sweet, cardamon-laced Punjabi chai in her patali, silver and well worn, with the patti aromatic as fuck. As well as curry puffs, and kaya with thick and glutinous rice sesame balls, and jian du. Sometimes we visited Port Dickson and its secretive little Edens like Panti Tujung Tuan (Blue Lagoon) to see my Kinti Puha and Dastar uncle. We visited Monkey Beach, where my Kent Puha was. There my family, especially my dad, loved to cook Malaysian crab curry. They looked out for the black, or mud, crabs that are mostly found in estuaries and among the mangroves, shell colours varying from a dense mottled green to a deep brown. My dad loved them because they had such succulent meat. He bought them still alive with their claws tied, then banged each one over the head with a hammer, cracking their shells and then tossing them in the handa or sabji with lots of spicy thari. The recipe was my family’s. Usually in the quiet heat of a clammy afternoon, the scent of crab curry would rise like incense from my grandmother’s kitchen — a potent concoction of turmeric, cumin, and coconut, wrapped in the acute sweetness of curry leaves and mustard seeds popping in spitting oil. She was Punjabi and my Dada Malaysian and, in their kitchen, borders blurred. The curry she made was a fusion not found in cookbooks — mud crab marinated in salt and golden turmeric, then gently lowered into a masala so deep and red it felt just born. Tomatoes melted down with garlic, ginger, and green chilies until they became the soul of the dish. Then came the coconut milk — lush, cooling, with a whisper of fennel — and the crabs, turning orange and defiant as they simmered. We’d eat with our fingers, the spice clinging to our skin, the sweet meat of the crab coaxed from its shell. I suckled the masala from my wrists, laughing, alive. Years later, recovering from ovarian cancer, I wanted to eat like that but couldn’t, because I thought people would judge my etiquette — but the memory of that curry was its own medicine One oily, almost moonless night, when the stars were silver balls of acid fizzing above the indigo blue sky and I was just seven years old, my family gathered on Monkey Beach: three uncles and three puhas, my mum, my dad, my brother, four cousins and myself. My Kully Puha was renting a chalet on the beach. We were lit up by a furnace-like bonfire we had made. The bonfire was blazing flaming gold, nectarine orange, and claret, and if you stared long enough you could see mirages: apparitions of nuclear yellow and apocalyptic blue. “Ah Nitty, stay away from the kebarkaren!” called my Kent Puha. I mouthed the words as if mimicking her. I was wearing an all-in-one ThunderCats romper suit and sucking on some sticky fruit jellies. At her call, I ran to her and jumped into her lap. I snuggled into her jelly belly and bosom. I was tired, drool and fruit-jelly saliva oozing from my pert red mouth. “Hantu in the fire, lah!” my Peritah uncle laughed, bottle of Tiger beer in his hand as he sat cross-legged in casual blue shorts and a counterfeit Armani t-shirt, looking magnificent with his onyx beard and dastar in menstrual red. Peritah was my favourite uncle: jolly, kind and trusting. They had caught some crabs, although I didn’t know it was for a curry. Watching the glittery bonfire, I was blissfully ignorant of their fate, despite the big cast-iron cooking pot and culinary utensils glinting in the firelight. I watched the crabs squirming on the beach in a red plastic tub, their claws bound with red plastic ties. Suddenly one, a fiddler crab, escaped and zigzagged towards me across the beach. When it stopped, uncertain, my uncle scooped it up expertly. “NO!” I yelled. “DON’T KILL COUNT CRABULA!” I began to bawl my eyes out, big tears spilling down my cheeks, viscous snot running down my face. I wiped the snot with the back of my hand, and my uncle’s black eyes looked at me with pity. “Ok lah Su-nee-tha, you keep this ketam as pet,” he said, placing it in a separate bowl. I hugged him and smiled at him in hisdastar, my hero. I would have a pet – a haiwan pehilaraan – all of my own! The wind had softened. Inhaling the salt air, I stood over the fiddler crab. I asked my uncle to take the ties off Count Crabula’s pincers. I pointed excitedly at the scissors. Count Crabula had also somehow acquired a little bow on one of his legs made from the plastic string food hawkers used when wrapping their goods in cellophane bags. I watched the crab for a while, trying to feed it bits of seaweed. My Kent Puha humoured me, and looked for more seaweed. Gradually, I lost interest and went off to play, leaving Crabula to his own devices. After a while, we all sat down together to feast on the delicious curry. Later, in the glittery hinterland of Monkey beach, I spotted a charred crab claw with a bow attached. Realising that they had killed and consumed Count Crabula, I ran into my Kully Puha’s kitchen half-crying, half-screaming. “You ate my pet!” I sobbed, swamp-green snot running over my lips. My Kully Puha, standing in her maxi loose batik nightdress looked pained. She hugged me. “Your crab escaped,” she explained. “And one of us plopped him into the curry.” “It was your Charan uncle, he was a little drunk dahhling,” my Kinti Puha said in her sing-songy accent. I was distraught, but suddenly my Peritah uncle was there. He rubbed my back and squeezed my hand. “Darling,” he said. “We have one or two spare live crabs you can set free!” He wiped away myears with a screwed-up tissue which was crisply clean. I trusted him , so I knew it was going to be all right. Later, he carried me in my pink swimming costume to the edge of Monkey Beach and allowed me to pour water and two bright-tangerine crabs into the ocean. ### Short glossary I use Malaysian and Punjabi words in my work to reflect my experience. In case you don’t know them, here’s a list. **Punjabi** - Charpai – traditional Indian beds made with wooden frames and woven rope or jute surfaceDada - grandfather - Dastar – turban - Gurdwara – Sikh temple - Handa – heavy pan - Hantu – ghost - Kebarkaren – fire - Kaya – coconut jam - Patali – saucepan - Patti – tea leaves - Puha – father’s sister; ‘aunt’ is the easiest translation. Unlike in English, the name goes first, so Bali Puha means Aunt Bali. - Sabji – curry - Thari – a soup-based dish **Malaysian** - Ketam – crab - Haiwan pehilaraan – pet - Jian du – a deep fried Chinese pastry made from rice flour [Tip the Bee](https://thebeemagazine.com/#/portal/support) All donations go towards supporting the Bee’s mission to nurture, publish promote and pay for the best new working-class writing. ### Tracksuits and Me URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/tracksuits-and-me/ Last updated: 2025-07-29T13:33:48.000Z “You dress like a cartoon character,” people say, and I smile. Always the same colours, always the same cuts, as though consistency itself could define me. As though repetition could render me safe, accepted, and beyond their casual judgment. “Please just stir it up a bit”, some prod. “Can’t you afford any other clothes?” others ask. I bat away these questions with flimsy shrugs and sighs, like I don’t want to get decision fatigue from thinking about what I wear, or I have OCD, or I just don’t care about what I’m wearing. I’m lying. Ever since I was 17, I’ve always lied about my clothing. That’s because how I dress changes the way people see me**.** My uniform is heavily curated. Comfortable, black, made-in-the-UK New Balance trainers. Classic Levi 502 jeans, slightly faded and softened from wear. A jumper, red or blue, reliably soft. Probably cashmere to serve as a gentle indulgence, preferably bought by a friend. I know precisely what this uniform is saying. No statement, no threat, no edge to catch your eye. Just polished enough not to provoke judgment. Just casual enough to blend in. Clothing is camouflage, armour, diplomacy. How we dress determines how we’re seen. Before this uniform of blandness, I had a different outfit: the tracksuit. An arsenal of catalogued shades of rebellion. Navy blue Fred Perry for the everyday. Black Nike Tn for special occasions. A grey Nike comfysuit for hazy summer days. And a baggy blue and white Reebok tracky, loose and forgiving, dotted with hot rocks, for moments when escape came in hotboxed smoke clouds and laughter. Tracksuits so loud they gave the entire room tinnitus. The beauty of a tracksuit is that anyone can wear it at any time. It’s accessible to everyone. I loved my tracksuits, and I wore them proudly and defiantly. Each zip pocket was a protest, each hood a refusal to lower my eyes, each elastic waistband holding tight the secret ache of growing up in care. But clothing can tell a louder story than any children’s-home boy could. In my tracksuit, I became shorthand: a signal, a warning sign, the butt of middle-class scorn. Middle class whispers of chav, scumbag, yob, dangerous, wrapped tight. Their assumptions gripped me as tight as the elastic cuffs around my ankles. Class has a uniform. Zipped up to the neck, with bottoms to match, pockets that zipped shut to hold the little we had safe: secrets, fists, and truths. Now, I dress in the uniform of carefully constructed acceptance. It’s served me well. In my work, I’ve earned respect. But I still own some tracksuits. Whenever I slip back into them, Tesco staff follow me around the store, and the cashiers ask for ID. If I go for a run, police stop me and ask why I’m running. People avoid me. The assumptions come back. No matter how high I rise, the tracksuit returns me to my assigned class and place in society. So, I have learned what is safe. What makes assumptions vanish. What makes doors open. What grants respect. My uniform may be heavily constructed, but not by me – by the middle-class society I live in. Now, when I buy a coat, although it may be expensive and ‘nice’, I make sure it has zipped pockets so I can secure my secrets, my fists, my truths. Every day, in quiet defiance beneath this bland cashmere jumper, a chav still breathes, with classic Reeboks and tracky bottoms tucked in socks, ready to run. [Tip the Bee](https://thebeemagazine.com/#/portal/support) All donations go towards supporting the Bee’s mission to nurture, publish promote and pay for the best new working-class writing. ### In Search of The Perfect Mushroom Omelette URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/in-search-of-the-perfect-mushroom-omelette/ Last updated: 2026-06-18T13:45:23.000Z Mum’s birthday was approaching so I suggested taking her out for lunch. Somewhere special. I knew she’d order fish and chips. She always does. She’ll peruse the menu as though she’s giving every item its due consideration, but it’ll be cod and chips regardless. But what she *really* wants, she’ll say, is a mushroom omelette. It’s part of family lore now: Mum’s as-yet unfulfilled quest for the perfect mushroom omelette. An omelette she refuses to make and refuses to seek out. An omelette she likes the idea of. The amount of times I’ve heard her say “I could murder a mushroom omelette”. Not just any kind, mind – “a nice one”. I Google diligently. Maybe they do omelettes at Bill’s Food. Or Côte Brasserie. An image of an omelette pops up on TripAdvisor under The Delauney in Covent Garden. A close-up. Lurid yellow (shouldn’t have turned the flash on). A bit too unctuous for Mum’s taste (and mine to be honest). Some chef-y snips of chive sprinkled on top. I don’t detect any mushrooms but surely they can knock one up. \- Mum, they do omelettes at The Delaunay. \- Who?! Mum always says “Who?!” instead of “What?” or “Where?”. With an exclamation mark as well as a question mark. Always. \- The Delaunay. It’s a posh restaurant on the Aldwych. \- Well that’s just silly. You don’t go to a restaurant for an omelette, do you \- No, not really. We’re agreed. ‘Nice’ does not mean ‘gentrified’. Gentrified omelettes are an appalling concept. I mean, look at them. They’re bashed up eggs, for God’s sake. \- Do you want me to make you one instead, Mum? \- No, you’re OK, love. \- Do you ever make yourself one at home? \- Not really. Sometimes I’ll make a cheese omelette. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/06/mushrooms_500px.png) It takes me back to the Beefeater we used to go to when I was small. It’s where, as kids, we learned How To Behave In A Restaurant, which my parents thought was a critical component of bringing up children. It’s where my sister would order a ‘Philip steak’ because that was Dad’s favourite, and I’d order rump because it was cheaper. It’s where I saw Mum standing up from the table to go to the loo, flushed and upset, a large smudge of deep red on the back of her long, white, linen dress, and I realised what it can mean to get your period. It’s where Dad would borrow the waitress’s glasses flirtatiously in order to read the menu, and Mum would go quiet, and they’d row loudly about it later when I was in bed pretending to sleep. Mum last took me there about ten years ago. Fish and chips for her, rump steak for me. She ate her last chip and wiped her mouth with a serviette. \- Right then, I’ll get the bill. \- Don’t you want a coffee, Mum? \- No, it’s OK, I’ve had enough. \- OK. Shall we just stay a bit and chat? \- OK… Why? Because that’s what people do. Because I want you to ask what I’ve been up to and how that job interview went and how things are going with M. Because I want to tell you that I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up even though I’m all grown up. Because I want to talk about how I saw someone on the 37 bus the other day that reminded me of Dad and it made me cry. Because I want to know if you’re happy and tell you that I’m happy, despite it all. I said nothing. The Beefeater’s not there anymore. It’s been turned it into flats. They didn’t do omelettes anyway, not that Mum would have ordered one if they did. She’s right – you don’t go to a restaurant for an omelette. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/06/eggs_500px.png) Last week I offered to make her lunch, but she wasn’t hungry. I don’t know which it is – the chemo or the radiotherapy – but she can’t face eating much at all just now. I prepare meals for her in little plastic Tupperwares that I’ve saved from my takeaways. Single portions ready for the freezer. Four lots of Nigella’s cauliflower soup. I found the recipe in the Royal Marsden’s Cancer Cookbook while I was waiting for her to finish her first radiotherapy session. She loves cauliflower, but I’m not sure she can manage that either yet. It made me think of the red lentil soup she’d always make for me when I was ill as a child. Red lentil soup and Lucozade. When Mum feels better I’m going to get some free-range eggs and some closed-cup white mushrooms, and make her the most perfect, straightforward omelette. No parsley, because she can’t stand it. Says it tastes like grass. In the meantime, we sit together in the living room, in the kitchen, in the car on the way to and from the hospital, day after day after day. I don’t need her to talk now. I don’t need her to ask questions or answer them; to laugh with me or to hear about the bad dream I had last night. I don’t want to know if she’s happy or why she never makes herself a mushroom omelette. I’m there and she’s there and it’s enough. I call her more often now, too. Just to check how she’s feeling. I can tell it means a lot, even though she always initiates the end of the conversation within a few minutes with the same prompt: \- I’ll let you go then. \- OK!, I say brightly, warmly. When all I want to say is, “Don’t let me go, Mum.” [Tip the Bee](https://thebeemagazine.com/#/portal/support) All donations go towards supporting the Bee’s mission to nurture, publish promote and pay for the best new working-class writing. ### Working Class? Congratulations, you’re a fashion accessory URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/working-class-congratulations-youre-a-fashion-accessory/ Last updated: 2025-06-16T19:08:00.000Z First Rachel Reeves at the Rochdale bus factory, now Nigel Farage with a Welsh steel worker. It turns out that 2025’s must-have fashion accessory for politicians is a real, live working-class person – Funny, really, as it doesn’t seem all that long since they were clearing the prole stuff out of their closets. That’s fashion for you. Nigel Farage has gone even further this time, though, and told us that if Reform were elected to run the Senedd, he’d like to re-open the pits. It’s bizarre for those of us old enough to remember 2015, when Jeremy Corbyn said he’d like to look at the same thing — and was universally laughed at by journalists and other MPs alike. We all know — and Farage knows most of all — that this isn’t going to happen. But what’s rotten about it is that a lot of ex-mining villages and towns never really recovered after the closure of their pits. I grew up in an old pit village in South Yorkshire, and there, the past could seem very attractive, because people had a strong identity then, and they were recognised for the massive service they gave to wider society. To dangle the idea that you might somehow be able to go back is just callous — because you know how alluring it is. It’s predatory, trying to seduce people with the promise of time travel. Obviously, it’s hypocritical. About the 1984–85 strike over the Thatcher government’s attack on mining, Farage once boasted: “I supported Margaret Thatcher. She was right… It may have caused a little pain for some, but it had to happen.” Everyone knows that strike was about breaking the unions — the unions that fought for the safety measures in coal mines. What someone should have asked Farage is: would you have full union representation in your new fantasy mines? Of course he flipping wouldn’t. And that’s where you see how the likes of him really like the working class to be: doughty, picturesque, but behaving how they think working-class people should behave — and not organising and sticking up for themselves, how they want to. He’s far from the only one, to be fair. But he’s getting a bit ridiculous now. [Tip the Bee](https://thebeemagazine.com/#/portal/support) All donations go towards supporting the Bee’s mission to nurture, publish promote and pay for the best new working-class writing. ### The Working Class Library Episode 3: Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/the-working-class-library-episode-3-trainspotting-by-irvine-welsh/ Last updated: 2025-06-17T15:50:12.000Z For this episode of the *Working Class Library*, the writer Craig McLean joins Richard Benson, editor of *the Bee*, and Claire Malcolm, CEO of New Writing North, to discuss Irvine Welsh’s 1993 novel *Trainspotting*. *Trainspotting* has become, as McLean says, a multi-media “literary industrial complex”, with prequels, sequels, films, theatre productions and a mooted TV series having given its characters lives far beyond the pages of the original book. Given its fame, and the dark slapstick with which it is sometimes associated, it is easy to overlook Welsh’s serious intent in writing the novel. Using heavy dialect, he set out to write a representative account of a generation’s suffering under 1980s economic policies, a popularisation of heroin, and an AIDS epidemic. He has since made it clear that he intended this to be part of a working-class saga. In the podcast, aided by McLean’s recollections of Edinburgh’s 1990 book scene, we ask if it deserves a place on the shelves of our imaginary library of great books by and about ordinary people. Thoughts? Comments? If yous’ll share them with us on our social media channels, that wid be braw — thank you. ### **Books and Authors Mentioned** Phil Collins – [Not Dead Yet](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781784753603?ref=thebeemagazine.com) Fyodor Dostoevsky – [Notes from Underground](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781847493743?ref=thebeemagazine.com) Bret Easton Ellis – [American Psycho](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781529077155?ref=thebeemagazine.com) Mark Hodkinson – [Nobody Round Here Reads Tolstoy](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781838850012?ref=thebeemagazine.com) James Kelman – [How Late It Was, How Late](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781529112702?ref=thebeemagazine.com) Duncan MacLean – [Blackden](https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/364982/blackden-by-duncan-mclean/9781784707927?ref=thebeemagazine.com) J.D. Salinger – [The Catcher in the Rye](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780241950432?ref=thebeemagazine.com) Tom Sheehan – [Climbing Up the Walls](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781802798012?ref=thebeemagazine.com) Jeff Torrington – [Swing Hammer, Swing!](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781784870126?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [The Devil’s Carousel](https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/364709/the-devils-carousel-by-jeff-torrington/9781473545502?ref=thebeemagazine.com) Alexander Trocchi – [Cain’s Book](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780714544601?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [Young Adam](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780714544625?ref=thebeemagazine.com) Alan Warner – [Morvern Callar](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781784870102?ref=thebeemagazine.com) Irvine Welsh – [The Acid House](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780099435013?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [The Blade Artist](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781784700553?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [Marabou Stork Nightmares](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780099435112?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [Porno](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780099422464?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [Skagboys](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780099535584?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [Trainspotting](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780749336509?ref=thebeemagazine.com) [An Introduction to Trainspotting by Irvine WelshWhatever you think about Trainspotting, 30 years after publications, it’s a book that deserves to be taken seriously.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/icon/favicon-3.png)The BeeGeorgia Poplett![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/thumbnail/irvine-welsh.jpg)](https://thebeemagazine.com/an-introduction-to-trainspotting-by-irvine-welsh/) [Tip the Bee](https://thebeemagazine.com/#/portal/support) All donations go towards supporting the Bee’s mission to nurture, publish promote and pay for the best new working-class writing. ### An Introduction to Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/an-introduction-to-trainspotting-by-irvine-welsh/ Last updated: 2025-06-16T19:57:21.000Z [The Working Class Library Episode 3: Trainspotting by Irvine WelshCraig McLean joins us to consider the place of Irvine Welsh’s novel in our library.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/icon/favicon-5.png)The BeeRichard Benson![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/thumbnail/trainspotting-1.png)](https://thebeemagazine.com/the-working-class-library-episode-3-trainspotting-by-irvine-welsh/) *‘You can only live in the world you ken. The rest is just wishful thinking or paranoia.’[\[1\]](#fn1)* Irvine Welsh was born on 27th September 1958 in Leith (although his birth certificate records his birth year as 1951).[\[2\]](#fn2) His mother worked as a waitress and his father was a dock worker.[\[3\]](#fn3) At the age of four, his family moved into social housing in the working-class district of Muirhouse in Edinburgh. The reality of his early years remains uncertain: Welsh became notorious for telling grandiose fabricated versions of his autobiography to journalists in the Nineties, after the success of *Trainspotting*.[\[4\]](#fn4) Welsh disliked school and left at sixteen to move to London in the late Seventies, working a variety of manual jobs (dishwashing, portering, and paving roads among them) and playing in punk bands. At one point, he enjoyed a lucrative period of flipping houses: after being injured in a bus accident, Welsh received a £2,000 payout which he used to secure the mortgage on a flat in Hackney. This seed money funded his lifestyle as he navigated the booming London property market. In his early twenties, he experienced heroin addiction until quitting, ‘cold turkey’, at twenty-four. After receiving a suspended sentence for vandalising a North London community centre,[\[5\]](#fn5) Welsh returned to Edinburgh and completed an MBA at Heriot-Watt University, where his thesis was based on the creation of equal opportunities for women.[\[6\]](#fn6) During this time he also worked in a senior role for Edinburgh Council’s housing department. His first piece of fiction – ‘The First Day of the Edinburgh Festival’ – was published in the *New Writing Scotland* anthology by editor Duncan McLean, who described Welsh’s style as ‘a kind of working class, everyday voice of the East Coast of Scotland’.[\[7\]](#fn7) *Trainspotting* started life in this way: as a series of diary-entry style vignettes which were published separately in a variety of independent Scottish magazines, before being knitted together later by linking chapters. At twenty-eight, during the process of writing the book ‘proper’, Welsh experimented with injecting heroin again but has described the adverse effects as though ‘every single comedown had just come back’.[\[8\]](#fn8) After the staggering success of *Trainspotting* in 1993, Welsh published a collection of short stories called *The Acid House* (1994) and a second novel, *Marabou Stork Nightmares* (1995). These were followed by the three-novella series *Ecstasy: Three Tales of Chemical Romance* (1996); the novels *Filth* (1998); *Glue* (2001); the *Trainspotting* sequels, *Porno* (2002) and *Dead Men’s Trousers* (2018); *The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs* (2006); *If You Liked School You'll Love Work* (2007); the first book in the *Crime* series (2008), later comprising *The Long Knives* (2023) and *Resolution* (2024); the short story collection, *Reheated Cabbage* (2009); the *Trainspotting* prequel *Skagboys* (2013); *The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins* (2014); *A Decent Ride* (2015); *The Blade Artist* (2016); and *Resolution* (2024). In addition, he wrote the plays *Headstate* (1994); *You’ll Have Had Your Hole* (1998); and, with Dean Cavanagh, *Babylon Heights* (2006). Welsh is also a vocal antiestablishment advocate, known for his high-profile run-ins with the law. As McLean describes it in the *Vice* writeup: ‘He’d have a book out, and a week later he’d be arrested at a Hibs game, and it would be in the paper.’ Similarly, Welsh developed a penchant for penning profane letters to *The Scotsman* under increasingly outlandish pseudonyms. In a 2023 piece for *UnHerd*, he wrote: ‘The decline of class politics and its replacement by the schisms of identity is an integral part of the neoliberal order \[…\] White working-class males are now recast as the establishment’s salivating attack dogs; the overseers of imperialism, enforcing the bidding of their wealthier masters. Their role in securing most of our human rights – through workplace struggle in the trade unions, strikes, demonstrations, wars and riots – is to be erased from our collective consciousness.’[\[9\]](#fn9) Welsh is an important figure on the Scottish arts and literature circuit as a patron of Leith Theatre and the experimental Neu!Reeki! collective in his hometown of Edinburgh, which supports the new generation of practitioners in poetry, animation and music. His first marriage to Anne Antsy (to whom the first edition of *Trainspotting* is dedicated) ended in divorce in 2003, as did a second subsequent marriage to Beth Quinn in 2018.[\[10\]](#fn10) He married Emma Currie in 2022\. Welsh spent most of the last decade living between Chicago and Miami but now lives in Oxfordshire. ### Publication *Publishing’s capitalisation on the end of the ‘rights ay working people’ in Scotland?* ‘Scargill’s got the megaphone and he launches intae one ay his trademark rousin speeches that tingles the back ay ma neck. He talks aboot the rights ay working people, won through years of struggle, and how if we’re denied the right to strike and organise, then we’re really nae better than slaves. His words are like a drug \[…\] these c\*nts really want us deid.’[\[11\]](#fn11) Trainspotting was published in August 1993 by Secker and Warburg (now [Harvill Secker](https://www.penguin.co.uk/company/publishers/vintage/harvill-secker?ref=thebeemagazine.com), an imprint of Vintage owned by Penguin Random House following a series of mergers and acquisitions in the late Nineties and early Noughties). It had an initial print run of 3,000 copies and appears to have gone straight to paperback. Ordinarily, new titles will be published as B format paperbacks for their second edition, but Trainspotting does not look like a B format – given that it has French flaps, I would guess that [this first edition](https://johnatkinsonbooks.co.uk/book/irvine-welsh-trainspotting-first-uk-edition-1993/?ref=thebeemagazine.com#:~:text=A%20first%20edition%2C%20first%20printing,Secker%20and%20Warburg%20in%201993.) was a Royal paperback, which is slightly larger. This is an interesting decision, and one which may have been spearheaded by the author as paperbacks were considerably cheaper to print than hardbacks and thus retailed for less. (Nonetheless, *Trainspotting* remains the ‘most shoplifted novel in British publishing history’, according to *The Guardian*.)[\[12\]](#fn12) The cream-and-red cover features a photograph of two young men wearing skull face masks and an extensive quote from Glaswegian novelist Jeff Torrington, famous for his novels *Swing Hammer Swing!* (1992) and *The Devil’s Carousel* (1998), both focused on the lives of working-class Scots.[\[13\]](#fn13)The back cover is a slightly unnerving headshot of Welsh, with his name underneath. Welsh has been vocal about the fact that he has never had (and continues not to have) an agent, so *Trainspotting* made its way to Secker and Warburg’s then-editorial director Robin Robertson via a recommendation from Duncan McLean.[\[14\]](#fn14) Robertson acquired the novel, despite allegedly believing it was unlikely to sell any copies at all. In reality, the novel was an almost instantaneous success, and to date has sold more than a million copies in the UK alone and translated into more than thirty languages. Why, then, did an experimental novel from a complete newcomer pegged to sell poorly generate sales into seven figures in a pre-social media marketing era, seemingly in an instant? The most popular response is that it spoke to a demographic so often overlooked by mainstream publishing; in Jenni Fagan’s words, it vividly represented ‘a world that I recognised, and a language that I recognised, written in a way that I recognised’.[\[15\]](#fn15) However, given Robertson’s hesitations, it seems unlikely that Secker and Warburg would have switched all their marketing engines on, so how was the book publicised? Or – and this is my hunch – is *Trainspotting*’s success a comment on how working class readers may not necessarily scour *The Times Best Books of 2024* to dictate their next read, but rather source reading materials via a different, dynamic system of word of mouth? Picking up the themes of the Arthur Scargill quote, the power of people talking may be the answer. *Trainspotting*’s acclaim may also lie in the rapid production (and subsequent success) of Danny Boyle’s film of the same name, released to immense critical acclaim in 1996, which reached audiences who may not be regular consumers of the publishing industry. The book’s reception amongst the middle-class world of publishing and prizes was similarly explosive. It was positively reviewed by Tom Adair in *The Scotsman* the week of its publication,[\[16\]](#fn16) by Nicholas Lezard in *The Independent* the week before that,[\[17\]](#fn17) and by Mark Jolly in *The New York Times* to coincide with the film release in July 1998.[\[18\]](#fn18) Interestingly, *The Herald* does not appear to have reviewed the book during its first year. A month before its publication, however, Ian Bell wrote scathingly in *The Guardian* that Welsh’s prose was ‘flat, distanced, almost a monotone \[…\] The shadow of James Kelman lies over Irvine Welsh’s first novel’; despite this, ‘the novel manages to draw great wit and energy from its wasted souls’.[\[19\]](#fn19) Returning briefly to the point above, the fact that many reviews appeared in print in the lead-up to publication does suggest that Secker and Warburg went to the trouble of securing publicity for *Trainspotting* by way of disseminating proof copies to major news publications. Despite these high-profile reviews, *Trainspotting* missed out on the Booker Prize shortlist that year for allegedly offending judges with its profanity and graphic scenes, such as the death of baby Dawn and one iconic moment in which Renton combs through his own excrement to retrieve heroin suppositories.[\[20\]](#fn20) *The tip of the ‘drugs and literature’ iceberg* As Welsh himself put it, ‘The horrible thing is that *Trainspotting* was supposed to be a cautionary tale in some ways \[…\] 30 years on \[it\] almost becomes some kind of inspiring clarion call: let’s do fucking drugs, man. We’re fucked anyway. Let’s just go for it.’[\[21\]](#fn21) However, perhaps it is reductive to cast *Trainspotting* as stratospherically successful in large part due to its risqué and graphic encounters with hard drugs. Rather, my hunch is that it is precisely these encounters set within its specific class and time context which has sustained the novel’s resonance for generations of readers. Commercially, too, it did not make sense; short stories rarely sell, and even the tenuous links between *Trainspotting*’s chapters fail to really cement it as a cohesive and linear narrative. Like George Gissing’s works, there may be an element of the privileged middle-class reader vicariously ‘cosplaying’ the lived experience of 1980s Muirhouse heroin addicts, but *Trainspotting* nonetheless catapulted this representation into the literary mainstream in a way that fundamentally changed the shape of Scottish (and British more broadly) fiction for years to come. Welsh’s is a novel in direct contrast to the predominant representation of drugs and drug-taking in earlier literature, from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s opium-inspired ‘Kubla Khan’ to *The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde* written during a six-day cocaine binge by Robert Louis Stevenson.[\[22\]](#fn22) Charles Baudelaire even founded the Club des Hachichins in the 1840s, a collective of intellectuals who engaged in opium use to generate what they called ‘fantasias’, or psychedelic visions which could fuel their artistic pursuits.[\[23\]](#fn23) The prevalence of drugs in British literature was almost always ‘respectable’ by virtue of the arenas in which it took place – largely the homes of middle- to upper-class men, and often to fuel the creative spirit in the production of works of genius. (This does, of course, overlook changing historical attitudes towards what substances constitute ‘drugs’; Coleridge, for example, was prescribed laudanum to manage what may have been chronic pain.)[\[24\]](#fn24) In the twentieth century, too, upper class novelists such as Edward St Aubyn regularly used heroin, whose depiction featured prominently in the Patrick Melrose novels (a loosely fictionalised character bearing a heavy resemblance to Aubuyn himself, as well as events in his own life). So too might we consider there to be a Scottish literary heroin tradition: Alexander Trocchi wrote openly about his heroin use in the 1950s during his time in Paris. More recently, Will Self’s 2019 auto-fictional biography *Will* was reviewed in *The Telegraph* as ‘a deliberately repulsive portrait of the author’s junkie years’ and praised for its literary conceit, stopping just shy of the suggestion that Self’s heroin addiction was in some way a brilliant and deliberately engineered artistic move.[\[25\]](#fn25) In the aftermath of Emerald Fennell’s 2023 film *Saltburn*, a rash of reporting sprang up devoted to increased scrutiny of British ‘narco-toffs’ whose heroin-fuelled escapades (often literary) were an open secret among the upper classes.[\[26\]](#fn26) In energetic contrast, Welsh’s Skag Boys operate in profoundly different class and physical contexts. Arguably, the historical moment at which the book appeared was during a psychotropic zeitgeist either triggered or amplified by the economic crises of the Eighties and Nineties; general studies have indicated that during economic downturn, young people are more likely to consume illegal drugs in a specific way.[\[27\]](#fn27) Even more strikingly, there is a distinction in precisely which drugs are consumed more frequently during these periods: while cannabis and amphetamine use increases during recessions, sales of more expensive drugs like cocaine and heroin decrease.[\[28\]](#fn28) At the end of the debilitating Seventies recession, however, markets were flooded by the supply of cheap heroin from Pakistan, which travelled straight to the UK’s heroin-producing hub: Edinburgh.[\[29\]](#fn29) During the late Nineties, in UK urban areas with such established user/dealer networks – specifically Edinburgh – heroin deals were pitched at between £5-10 (approximately £10-20 today) and popularised by the alternative music and club scene. A 1998 Home Office review into contributing factors for increased heroin use during this period was linked to ‘a dearth of services for young people in general’.[\[30\]](#fn30) The study also makes a clear link between heroin usage in the Eighties and Nineties and ‘acquisitive crime, notably burglary, shoplifting, fraud and theft’. *Trainspotting* responds to this in interesting ways; strikingly, that the very final scene depicts Renton ‘stealing’ from Sick Boy in order to break the cycle of addiction. The distinction between state and social deviance is thereby inverted by the novel in a way that spoke to communities which have been particularly marginalised by both government policy and publishing. *Dialect: From patronising ‘gimmick’ to counter-culture manifesto* Perhaps one of the key factors for *Trainspotting*’s shock emergence as a publishing underdog is its episodic structure and heavy reliance on Dunediner dialect, which makes for a powerful reading experience for the uninitiated – and a stark departure from other Nineties bestsellers, including Donna Tartt’s *The Secret History* and the second *Harry Potter* book from JK Rowling. Pithily, in a piece for the Royal Literary Fund, Ray French writes, ‘Just what is publishing’s problem with British dialect? It seems that American and Caribbean English are seen as “exotic”, while British regional dialects are not. In publishing a regional accent is still a rarity, and how can that monoculture not percolate through to some extent into the attitudes of people who work in it? Publishing has finally, belatedly woken up, to some extent at least, to its blind spot about race, but there’s still progress to be made when it comes to class.’[\[31\]](#fn31) Publishing is ripe with examples of authors toning down dialect on the advice of their editors; Charlotte Brontë herself obliged when her publisher asked her to amend her sister Emily’s *Wuthering Heights* with a view to excising much of the dialect, in order to appeal to southern readers.[\[32\]](#fn32) There may also be a problem with regional working-class dialects appearing as a kind of gimmick within fiction written by middle-class writers. For example, the playwright (and baronet’s daughter) Nell Dunn wrote most of Poor Cow in Cockney slang she learned from her fellow factory workers in Battersea in the Sixties. More recently, American novelist Kathryn Stockett was criticised for remarks she made about co-opting a Black Southern US dialect in her novel *The Help* as a self-described ‘privileged, spoilt little white girl’.[\[33\]](#fn33) During a public event at the Dallas Museum of Art, Stockett is quoted as having said, ‘You learn the turn of a phrase and, if you read it enough, you can rip it off \[…\] There are those who are truly gifted – Hemingway, Steinbeck – but really, I’m just makin’ shit up.’[\[34\]](#fn34) It should be noted that these alleged comments have appeared on multiple blog sites online as opposed to being reliably reported; they should also be considered in their national and racialised context, perhaps more so than their class context. However, there is an important cultural myth to be aware of here, in that writing dialect risks being received as the preserve of ‘clichés, sentimentality, and stereotypes’ and avoided in more ‘literary’ (read: all too often middle-class) fiction today.[\[35\]](#fn35) *Trainspotting* could hardly be characterised as ‘sentimental’ fiction, presenting instead a dialect which empowers as opposed to patronises working-class vernacular from the inside, as it were, which may speak to its resounding success amongst a demographic so excluded by mainstream publishing. Indeed, its indelible position in literary history amongst such counter-culture titans as *Rebel Inc.* magazine, founded by Welsh’s friend and associate Kevin Williamson, cements its appeal for both working-class and perhaps disillusioned (or rebel-without-a-cause) middle-class readers, who migrated between the alternative publishing and music scenes of the Nineties. (*Rebel Inc.* famously printed an unedited three-hour-long interview between Welsh and Williamson in 1993 during which both took an ecstasy pill.)[\[36\]](#fn36) In an interview for *Renaissance One*, during which Williamson was asked which creative masterpiece he wished he had written, his answer was immediate: ‘*Trainspotting* by Irvine Welsh. It’s more than the sum of its pages. It was a weaponisation of working class culture and internationalised the legitimacy of the Scots language.’[\[37\]](#fn37) Strikingly, after James Kelman’s dialect-heavy novels *A Disaffection* (1989) and *How Late It Was, How Late* (1994) won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction and the Booker Prize respectively, the Scottish novel experienced a major cultural revival with a clear emphasis on working-class experiences. This was in contrast to the literary darlings of Nineties London, who largely comprised white, wealthy, male themes produced by authors famously including Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, and Julian Barnes. As one *Prospect* essay puts it: ‘It’s now almost funny to think that Martin Amis was once considered the bad boy of British fiction. Welsh tends to have made news for being arrested at a football match in Glasgow, or for distressing passengers on a train to Exeter, rather than sacking his literary agent or falling out with Julian Barnes. More importantly, though, the controversies that have dogged this lanky, shaven-headed Hibernian supporter involve a fictional treatment of underworld substance abuse, sexual depravity and recidivism that makes the armchair macabre once practiced by Amis and Ian McEwan seem a mere brand of nastiness-lite.’[\[38\]](#fn38) More than this, however, is the suggestion that what has truly defined *Trainspotting* as the novel for a generation is the runaway success of the Danny Boyle film. *Class, cults, and ‘the Queen’s fucken English’* The idea of the ‘cult novel’ is an imperfect science. Why *Trainspotting* should continue to endure today as opposed to novels such as Denis Johnson’s *Jesus’s Son* or Luke Davies’s *Candy* – both of which follow the exploits of a group of individuals deep in the grip of heroin addiction in 1970s Midwest America and 1990s Sydney – is tricky to define. Both texts were adapted as commercially successful films in the early 2000s (perhaps off the back of *Trainspotting*’s success?), with *Jesus’s Son* starring Billy Crudup and *Candy* starring Heath Ledger. However, although each novel was billed as a bestseller, neither appears to have achieved cult status within their respective national contexts in quite the same way as Welsh’s novel. Johnson himself allegedly called *Jesus’s Son* ‘a rip-off of Isaac Babel’s *Red Cavalry*’: a twentieth-century Russian literary classic, set during the Russian-Polish campaign.[\[39\]](#fn39) All this is to suggest that how and why certain texts become ‘cultish’ is not a question of the simple grouping of certain themes or even qualities. Academic Joseph A. Barrerira has written on cult novels, suggesting that ‘cult fiction originates outside the production of the literary establishment. It is a type of fiction that inspires quasi-religious fervour from its readers – the cultists – a fervour that is not of the ephemeral or trivial type, but one that grows exponentially over a long period of time, thus an essential component of a particular work of fiction’s “cult” status.’[\[40\]](#fn40) Similarly, Kelly Fann writes: ‘This is what cult fiction books do to their faithful followers: they inspire, amuse, and amaze their readers, they stir the emotions and mesmerize, they evoke passion, and they etch themselves into their reader’s memory.’ There is thus something ethereal, some mood or quality which appeals to the senses and emotions, that is difficult to qualify here. Another major reason for cult status is that these texts ‘defy standard genre classification \[…\] a classic genre bender’ which tends towards the groundbreaking, ‘either through its prose style or through the subject matter the author has chosen to discuss. Subjects often cover lurid topics such as sex and drugs, or will include criticism of the establishment through exploration of the human condition or creation of dystopian societies.’ These texts erupt into the literary institution, apparently without warning (although, as we have seen above, *Trainspotting* may actually have tapped into the incipient strains of a broader global literary trend). They are controversial or titillating – often both – which grabs attention. Bonus points if they are banned somewhere. More than anything, these texts address themselves to socially disenfranchised readers – however, in light of *Trainspotting*, I would suggest that over time these readers may not be *actually* disenfranchised (e.g. middle or upper class teenage boys for whom *Trainspotting* has attained a kind of cult gritty glamour) but may rather *feel* themselves to be.[\[41\]](#fn41) ### Exploitation *Trainspotting* is one of a few literary texts whose cinematic adaptation is perhaps as well-known as the novel itself. Its adaptation was the brainchild of filmmaking team Danny Boyle, Andrew MacDonald and John Hodge, who were looking for a project to follow up their BAFTA award-winning 1994 film, *Shallow Grave*.[\[42\]](#fn42) Although a stage-play was already showing at London’s Bush Theatre, the film rights had already been sold to Noel Gay who had no plans to actually dramatize the novel, but wanted to be co-producers in light of all the hype around Boyle, MacDonald and Hodge. Hodge drafted the script, as Welsh allegedly asked to have no part in it (but was apparently pleased by the purchase – as MacDonald recounts, ‘When Irvine heard about our plans, he wrote us a brilliant letter saying we were the greatest Scotsmen since Kenny Dalglish and Alex Ferguson.’) With a budget of £1.5 million courtesy of Channel 4, the rights were finally secured by Spring 1995 and pre-production could begin. ‘One of the key issues was not to make a film that cost a lot of money. You can get carried away with people offering you money and end up making a film that's out of proportion with your kind of audience,’ Boyle commented at the time; as a result, over the following seven weeks, they worked to source a cast from relatively unknown actors as closely resembling the novel characters as possible. The majority of the crew were Edinburgh locals. Ewan McGregor was cast first as Renton, having previously starred in *Shallow Grave*. He was then followed by Ewen Bremner as Spud and Bobbly Carlyle as Begbie. Despite Jonny Lee Miller’s upbringing in an affluent borough of London (Kingston), he was finally cast as Sick Boy. To locate a suitable teenage Diane, flyers were shopped around clubs, clothes stores and hairdressers advertising the part. Nineteen-year-old Kelly MacDonald landed the part after one caught her eye during a bar shift she was working. The cast were not subject to drastic diets to alter their appearances, but were asked to abstain from alcohol during filming. Filming commenced in June 1995 around Glasgow and Edinburgh and lasted just over a month. MacDonald, Hodge, and Welsh all played cameos: MacDonald a prospective London tenant, Hodge the police officer in pursuit of the Skag Boys in the opening scene, and Welsh as Renton’s drug dealer. Editing took eight weeks. During this process is when the lines between text, film, and music started to blur: MacDonald was the brains behind securing the now-iconic soundtrack, negotiating with indie bands and celebrities alike to engineer the perfect soundscape. Miraculously, all the tracks were donated or licensed for use within the film’s total budget; four tracks were composed from scratch for the purpose. Allegedly, Oasis did not contribute anything towards the soundtrack as Noel Gallagher believed the film was about actual trainspotters.[\[43\]](#fn43) As established, Welsh was well-known on the acid house and rave circuit also populated by the big hitters in Britpop, which may have been a further connection used to broker the soundtrack. As Boyle put it, ‘One of the ways we can actually identify the period is to move from Iggy Pop through to dance music \[…\] The film’s timespan is impossible because Renton doesn’t age and they don’t cut their hair, but you feel you’ve moved through a period of time on a sensual rather than documentary level.’[\[44\]](#fn44) Interestingly, the *Trainspotting* poster design was part of a Student Railcard promotion deal, whereby students could exchange an HMV voucher for one of eight pre-selected posters after purchasing a railcard. This gestures firmly towards the target market: young, energetic British twenty-somethings (although still troublingly drawn along class lines given higher education’s status as the preserve of the wealthy; just a year later, Tony Blair’s government would reintroduce tuition fees and the students loans system.)[\[45\]](#fn45) The film was finally released in February 1996, following a rejacket of Welsh’s novel as a tie-in, and was an immediate success: its gross worldwide was close to £13 million, or just over £30 million today. It remains the eighth highest-grossing UK film to date. *Trainspotting*’s sex appeal – primarily in the form of its leading cast and soundtrack, courtesy of big Britpop names in vogue – lent it a popularity amongst younger people which catapulted it into the mainstream in a big way. In part, this was because of the precise ways in which Boyle framed the collision of music and cinema. Rejecting a more traditional cinematic sound-piece, he instead prioritised tracks which spoke to the novel’s themes of intense or exaggerated reality under the influence of addiction. The majority of artists featured on the soundtrack were explicitly namechecked in Welsh’s book, creating a strikingly meta cinematic text. The film also coincided with a noteworthy cultural moment as the economy was steadily growing, on top of which young people were significantly discouraged from drug-taking by certain high-profile drug-related deaths. The death of Leah Betts in particular – an Essex teenager who died after taking an ecstasy pill and drinking an unsafe quantity of water – triggered an outpouring of anti-drug sentiment.[\[46\]](#fn46) In the nearly thirty years since the film’s release, it has become a favourite of Reddit film subreddits and online forums, on which users discuss the novel and film’s enduring popularity. Broadly, the general impression from these posts is that *Trainspotting* captures the lived experience of addiction for a reader or viewer who may be unfamiliar, without necessarily perpetuating typical stigmas associated with heroin addiction. For example, Lesley and Sick Boy are not demonised for their parental neglect but instead shown to be grieving the accidental death of their baby, Dawn. What is especially interesting about *Trainspotting*’s acclaim, then, is that it detailed an experience which many of its viewers were not necessarily having, but its popularity still endured, perhaps evoking broader claims on the power of peer groups and drug culture (if not consumption) in the Nineties. *Other media* Boyle’s critically acclaimed film was followed in 2017 by *T2 Trainspotting*, produced again by the Boyle, MacDonald and Hodge dream team. Based on Welsh’s sequel *Porno* and set twenty years on, Renton – now a successful nightclub owner – returns to Edinburgh where Spud is on the cusp of divorce, Sick Boy has inherited a failing pub, and Begbie has just been released from prison. The film inverts ideas of authorship, ending with Spud composing a memoir provisionally titled *Trainspotting*. With a production budget of £18 million, *T2* was a commercial success, grossing £17.1 million in the UK and £31.9 million worldwide.[\[47\]](#fn47) The novel was also adapted by Harry Gibson to create [Trainspotting Live](https://www.trainspottinglive.com/?ref=thebeemagazine.com), a 75-minute immersive experience billed as ‘no-holds-barred immersive, in-yer-face theatre \[which\] left Irvine Welsh feeling “blown away”’. Perhaps most surprisingly, a musical adaptation of *Trainspotting* is scheduled for the near future. Together with songwriting-producing duo Steve McGuinness and Phil McIntyre, in his own words, Welsh was initially unconvinced: ‘\[Phil McIntyre\] kept saying to me: “We’ve got to do Trainspotting as a musical.” I just said to him: F\*\*\* off, you couldn’t do it as a musical. But maybe once a year he would send me a little card with “Trainspotting the musical” written on it. I just thought: Well, in a few years’ time, I am going to be an urn on some poor b\_\_\_\_\_\_\_ mantlepiece and (someone like) Andrew Lloyd Webber is going to come along, so maybe I should be the one that makes the money.’[\[48\]](#fn48) *Choose Irvine Welsh*, a documentary on the author’s Edinburgh childhood, was released in 2023.[\[49\]](#fn49) #### Further reading In addition to the footnotes, the below articles may of particular interest: Jeffrey Karnicky, ‘Irvine Welsh’s Novel Subjectivities’ in *Social Text* 21:3 (2003) - Establishes a canon of Scots versus ‘the Queen’s fuckin English’ within Welsh’s texts, from *Trainspotting to Filth*, alongside drawing a throughline to his main characters’ frequent existential angst and how this is worked out through ‘non-standard’ dialect. Aaron Kelly, *Irvine Welsh* (Manchester University Press, 2005) - Part of the Contemporary British Novelists series, this is one of the first full-length studies of Welsh’s canon with an eye on the contextual conditions surrounding its development. Kelly locates him as a seminal figure within the ‘brat pack’ of influential Scottish writers and actors in the Nineties, based on an extended interview between Welsh and the author in 2004. Hele Priimets, ‘Non-standard Language in Irvine Welsh’s *Trainspotting* and in Olavi Teppan’s Translation of the Novel into Estonian’, *CORE* MA thesis database (2017) - Priimets does not appear to have published her thesis more widely post-graduation, but makes a fascinating case for the translatory choice not to substitute the strong dialect in *Trainspotting* for a regional Estonian equivalent as in most translated editions of the novel, instead employing Standard Estonian which incorporates an informal register and phonetics. (Notably, *Trainspotting* has never been ‘translated’ into ‘Standard English’.) Ed Day and Iain Smith, ‘Literary and biographical perspectives on substance use’ in *Advances in Psychiatric Treatment* (2018) - Maps out a possible relationship between substance use or abuse and the contexts of production around specific classic texts, including *The Great Gatsby* and *The Bride of Lammermoor*. Day and Smith consider the theory that there is something about ‘the creative character’ that lends itself to engagement with certain drugs, especially alcohol, cocaine and opium. --- 1. Irvine Welsh, *Filth* (Jonathan Cape, 1998) [↩︎](#fnref1) 2. ‘Irvine Welsh’, *British Council for Literature* <[https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/irvine-welsh](https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/irvine-welsh?ref=thebeemagazine.com)\> \[accessed 7 August 2024\] [↩︎](#fnref2) 3. Simon Hattenstone, ‘Irvine Welsh: “When you get older, it’s harder to be a bastard”’, *The Guardian* (17 March 2018) <[https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/mar/17/irvine-welsh-when-older-harder-be-bastard](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/mar/17/irvine-welsh-when-older-harder-be-bastard?ref=thebeemagazine.com)\> \[accessed 8 August 2024\] [↩︎](#fnref3) 4. Tristan Kennedy, ‘How Irvine Welsh Went from Enfant Terrible to the Scottish Tourist Board’s Favourite Guy’, *Vice* (18 December 2019) <[https://www.vice.com/en/article/irvine-welsh-profile-scotland-trainspotting/](https://www.vice.com/en/article/irvine-welsh-profile-scotland-trainspotting/?ref=thebeemagazine.com)\> \[accessed 8 August 2024\] [↩︎](#fnref4) 5. ‘Irvine Welsh’, *Waterstones* <[https://www.waterstones.com/author/irvine-welsh/12925](https://www.waterstones.com/author/irvine-welsh/12925?ref=thebeemagazine.com)\> \[accessed 13 August 2024\] [↩︎](#fnref5) 6. Craig Lamont, ‘Irvine Welsh’, *Oxford Bibliographies* (24 February 2021) <[https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780199846719/obo-9780199846719-0170.xml](https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780199846719/obo-9780199846719-0170.xml?ref=thebeemagazine.com)\> \[accessed 13 August 2024\] [↩︎](#fnref6) 7. Tristan Kennedy, ‘How Irvine Welsh Went from Enfant Terrible to the Scottish Tourist Board’s Favourite Guy’, *Vice* (18 December 2019) <[https://www.vice.com/en/article/irvine-welsh-profile-scotland-trainspotting/](https://www.vice.com/en/article/irvine-welsh-profile-scotland-trainspotting/?ref=thebeemagazine.com)\> \[accessed 8 August 2024\] [↩︎](#fnref7) 8. Tristan Kennedy, ‘How Irvine Welsh Went from Enfant Terrible to the Scottish Tourist Board’s Favourite Guy’, *Vice* (18 December 2019) <[https://www.vice.com/en/article/irvine-welsh-profile-scotland-trainspotting/](https://www.vice.com/en/article/irvine-welsh-profile-scotland-trainspotting/?ref=thebeemagazine.com)\> \[accessed 8 August 2024\] [↩︎](#fnref8) 9. Irvine Welsh, ‘The betrayal of white working-class men’, *UnHerd* (27 May 2023) <[https://unherd.com/2023/05/irvine-welsh-the-betrayal-of-white-working-class-men/](https://unherd.com/2023/05/irvine-welsh-the-betrayal-of-white-working-class-men/?ref=thebeemagazine.com)\> \[accessed 13 August 2024\] [↩︎](#fnref9) 10. Teddy Jamieson, ‘“I hated Thatcher, but I was one of the people who benefited. It was a kind of liberation”’, *The Herald* (14 April 2012) <[https://www.heraldscotland.com/life\_style/arts\_ents/13055436.i-hated-thatcher-one-people-benefited-kind-liberation/](https://www.heraldscotland.com/life%5Fstyle/arts%5Fents/13055436.i-hated-thatcher-one-people-benefited-kind-liberation/?ref=thebeemagazine.com)\> \[accessed 13 August 2024\] [↩︎](#fnref10) 11. Irvine Welsh, *Skagboys* (Jonathan Cape, 2012), pp. 12-13 [↩︎](#fnref11) 12. Simon Hattenstone, ‘Irvine Welsh: “When you get older, it’s harder to be a bastard”’, *The Guardian* (17 March 2018) <[https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/mar/17/irvine-welsh-when-older-harder-be-bastard](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/mar/17/irvine-welsh-when-older-harder-be-bastard?ref=thebeemagazine.com)\> \[accessed 8 August 2024\] [↩︎](#fnref12) 13. ‘Swing Hammer Swing, blow by blow’, *The Herald* (1 February 1993) <[https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/12623330.swing-hammer-swing-blow-by-blow/](https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/12623330.swing-hammer-swing-blow-by-blow/?ref=thebeemagazine.com)\> \[accessed 14 August 2024\] [↩︎](#fnref13) 14. ‘Irvine Welsh’, *BBC Two Writing Scotland* (September 2004) <[https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/profiles/27h8d0xjjCVtTSnW5zbNF0V/irvine-welsh#:\~:text=Duncan McLean recommended Welsh to,it was unlikely to sell](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/profiles/27h8d0xjjCVtTSnW5zbNF0V/irvine-welsh?ref=thebeemagazine.com#:~:text=Duncan%20McLean%20recommended%20Welsh%20to,it%20was%20unlikely%20to%20sell)\> \[accessed 14 August 2024\] [↩︎](#fnref14) 15. Tristan Kennedy, ‘How Irvine Welsh Went from Enfant Terrible to the Scottish Tourist Board’s Favourite Guy’, *Vice* (18 December 2019) <[https://www.vice.com/en/article/irvine-welsh-profile-scotland-trainspotting/](https://www.vice.com/en/article/irvine-welsh-profile-scotland-trainspotting/?ref=thebeemagazine.com)\> \[accessed 8 August 2024\] [↩︎](#fnref15) 16. Tom Adair, ‘Tom Adair reviews Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh’, *The Scotsman* (5 September 1993) <[https://www.scotsman.com/arts-and-culture/books/from-the-archives-tom-adair-reviews-trainspotting-by-irvine-welsh-1458416](https://www.scotsman.com/arts-and-culture/books/from-the-archives-tom-adair-reviews-trainspotting-by-irvine-welsh-1458416?ref=thebeemagazine.com)\> \[accessed 14 August 2024\] [↩︎](#fnref16) 17. Nicholas Lezard, ‘BOOK REVIEW / Junk and the big trigger: “Trainspotting” – Irvine Welsh: Secker, 8.99’, *The Independent* (28 August 1993) <[https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/book-review-junk-and-the-big-trigger-trainspotting-irvine-welsh-secker-8-99-1464158.html](https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/book-review-junk-and-the-big-trigger-trainspotting-irvine-welsh-secker-8-99-1464158.html?ref=thebeemagazine.com)\> \[accessed 14 August 2024\] [↩︎](#fnref17) 18. Mark Jolly, ‘Books in Brief’, *The New York Times* (28 July 1996) <[https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/01/05/13/specials/welsh-trainspotting.html](https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/01/05/13/specials/welsh-trainspotting.html?ref=thebeemagazine.com)\> \[accessed 14 August 2024\] [↩︎](#fnref18) 19. Ian Bell, ‘Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh review – last exit to Leith’, *The Guardian* (15 August 1993) <[https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/1993/aug/15/featuresreview.review](https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/1993/aug/15/featuresreview.review?ref=thebeemagazine.com)\> \[accessed 14 August 2024\] [↩︎](#fnref19) 20. Craig Lamont, ‘Irvine Welsh’, *Oxford Bibliographies* (24 February 2021) <[https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780199846719/obo-9780199846719-0170.xml](https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780199846719/obo-9780199846719-0170.xml?ref=thebeemagazine.com)\> \[accessed 13 August 2024\] [↩︎](#fnref20) 21. David Barnett, ‘“Choose drugs?” 30 years after he wrote Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh says life is tougher now’, *The Guardian* (2 July 2023) <[https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jul/02/trainspotting-author-irvine-welsh-book-choose-life-young-people](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jul/02/trainspotting-author-irvine-welsh-book-choose-life-young-people?ref=thebeemagazine.com)\> \[accessed 14 August 2024\] [↩︎](#fnref21) 22. Mark Townsend, ‘Drugs in literature: a brief history’, *The Guardian* (16 November 2008) <[https://www.theguardian.com/society/2008/nov/16/drugs-history-literature](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2008/nov/16/drugs-history-literature?ref=thebeemagazine.com)\> \[accessed 21 August 2024\] [↩︎](#fnref22) 23. Andrew Hussey, ‘Heroin: art and culture’s last taboo’, *The Guardian* (22 December 2013) <[https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2013/dec/22/art-heroin-christiane-f](https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2013/dec/22/art-heroin-christiane-f?ref=thebeemagazine.com)\> \[accessed 28 August 2024\] [↩︎](#fnref23) 24. John Worthen, *The Gang: Coleridge, The Hutchinsons & the Wordsworths in 1802* (Yale University Press, 2002) [↩︎](#fnref24) 25. Duncan White, ‘Will by Will Self review: a deliberately repulsive portrait of the author’s junkie years’, *The Telegraph* (9 November 2019) <[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/self-will-self-review-deliberately-repulsive-portrait-authors/#:\~:text=Will is the story of,twenties%2C hurtling toward rock bottom](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/self-will-self-review-deliberately-repulsive-portrait-authors/?ref=thebeemagazine.com#:~:text=Will%20is%20the%20story%20of,twenties%2C%20hurtling%20toward%20rock%20bottom)\> \[accessed 23 August 2024\] [↩︎](#fnref25) 26. Tom Sykes, ‘“Saltburn” for Real: Meet the Young, Rich “Narco-Toffs’” Who Party Hard’, *Daily Beast* (26 April 2024) <[https://www.thedailybeast.com/saltburn-for-real-meet-the-young-rich-narcotoffs-who-party-hard](https://www.thedailybeast.com/saltburn-for-real-meet-the-young-rich-narcotoffs-who-party-hard?ref=thebeemagazine.com)\> \[accessed 29 August 2024\] [↩︎](#fnref26) 27. B Casal, B Rivera and C Costa-Storti. ‘Economic recession, illicit drug use and the young population: a systematic literature review and meta-analysis’, *Perspectives in Public Health* (2023) <[https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17579139231180751](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17579139231180751?ref=thebeemagazine.com)\> \[accessed 21 August 2024\] [↩︎](#fnref27) 28. Geert Dom et al. ‘The Impact of the 2008 Economic Crisis on Substance Use Patterns in the Countries of the European Union.’ *International journal of environmental research and public health* 13:1 (2016) <[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4730513/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4730513/?ref=thebeemagazine.com)\> \[accessed 21 August 2024\] [↩︎](#fnref28) 29. Aida Edemariam and Kirsty Scott, ‘What happened to the Trainspotting generation?’ *The Guardian* (15 August 2009) <[https://www.theguardian.com/society/2009/aug/15/scotland-trainspotting-generation-dying-fact](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2009/aug/15/scotland-trainspotting-generation-dying-fact?ref=thebeemagazine.com)\> \[accessed 28 August 2024\] [↩︎](#fnref29) 30. Howard Parker, Catherine Bury and Roy Egginton, ‘New Heroin Outbreaks Amongst Young People in England and Wales’, Home Office Crime Detection and Prevention Series Paper 92, edited by Barry Webb (1998) <[https://www.drugsandalcohol.ie/3604/1/Home\_Office\_New\_heroin\_outbreaks.pdf](https://www.drugsandalcohol.ie/3604/1/Home%5FOffice%5FNew%5Fheroin%5Foutbreaks.pdf?ref=thebeemagazine.com)\> \[accessed 22 August 2024\] [↩︎](#fnref30) 31. Ray French, ‘In Praise of Dialect’, *Royal Literary Fund* (17 December 2018) <[https://www.rlf.org.uk/posts/in-praise-of-dialect/](https://www.rlf.org.uk/posts/in-praise-of-dialect/?ref=thebeemagazine.com)\> \[accessed 28 August 2024\]. [↩︎](#fnref31) 32. *The Letters of Charlotte Brontë:* With a Selection of Letters by Family and Friends, Vol. 2: 1848-1851 ed. by Margaret Smith(Oxford University Press, 2000) [↩︎](#fnref32) 33. Elizabeth Day, ‘Kathryn Stockett: “I still think I’m going to get into trouble for tackling the issue of race in America”’, *The Guardian* (9 October 2011) <[https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2011/oct/09/kathryn-stockett-help-civil-rights](https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2011/oct/09/kathryn-stockett-help-civil-rights?ref=thebeemagazine.com)\> \[accessed 28 August 2024\]. [↩︎](#fnref33) 34. Pamela Tooley Hammonds, ‘Lessons on Writing from Kathryn Stockett’, *What Women Write* <[https://whatwomenwritetx.blogspot.com/2011/05/lessons-on-writing-from-kathryn.html](https://whatwomenwritetx.blogspot.com/2011/05/lessons-on-writing-from-kathryn.html?ref=thebeemagazine.com)\> \[accessed 28 August 2024\]. [↩︎](#fnref34) 35. Ed Davis, ‘The Transformative Power of Writing Dialect’, *Writers Digest* (12 July 2021) <[https://www.writersdigest.com/write-better-fiction/the-transformative-power-of-writing-dialect](https://www.writersdigest.com/write-better-fiction/the-transformative-power-of-writing-dialect?ref=thebeemagazine.com)\> \[accessed 28 August 2024\] [↩︎](#fnref35) 36. Tristan Kennedy, ‘How Irvine Welsh Went from Enfant Terrible to the Scottish Tourist Board’s Favourite Guy’, *Vice* (18 December 2019) <[https://www.vice.com/en/article/irvine-welsh-profile-scotland-trainspotting/](https://www.vice.com/en/article/irvine-welsh-profile-scotland-trainspotting/?ref=thebeemagazine.com)\> \[accessed 8 August 2024\] [↩︎](#fnref36) 37. Melanie Abrahams, ‘Interview with Kevin Williamson, Neu! Reekie!’ *Renaissance One* (12 April 2017) <[https://www.renaissanceone.co.uk/blog2/2017/4/12/interview-with-kevin-williamson-neu-reekie](https://www.renaissanceone.co.uk/blog2/2017/4/12/interview-with-kevin-williamson-neu-reekie?ref=thebeemagazine.com)\> \[accessed 28 August 2024\]. [↩︎](#fnref37) 38. ‘Irvine Welsh’, *Prospect* (19 May 2001) <[https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/essays/56268/irvine-welsh](https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/essays/56268/irvine-welsh?ref=thebeemagazine.com)\> \[accessed 28 August 2024\] [↩︎](#fnref38) 39. Nathan Scott McNamara, ‘Is “Jesus’ Son” a “Red Cavalry” Rip-Off?’, *The Millions* (20 January 2015) <[https://themillions.com/2015/01/is-jesus-son-a-red-cavalry-rip-off.html](https://themillions.com/2015/01/is-jesus-son-a-red-cavalry-rip-off.html?ref=thebeemagazine.com)\> \[accessed 2 September 2024\] [↩︎](#fnref39) 40. Joseph A Barreira, ‘The Cult Novel: Three Paradigmatic Cases—L’Immoraliste, Bonjour Tristesse, Extension du Domaine de la Lutte’ (December 2015) <[https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311543309\_The\_Cult\_Novel\_Three\_Paradigmatic\_Cases-L'Immoraliste\_Bonjour\_Tristesse\_Extension\_du\_Domaine\_de\_la\_Lutte](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311543309%5FThe%5FCult%5FNovel%5FThree%5FParadigmatic%5FCases-L'Immoraliste%5FBonjour%5FTristesse%5FExtension%5Fdu%5FDomaine%5Fde%5Fla%5FLutte?ref=thebeemagazine.com)\> \[accessed 2 September 2024\] [↩︎](#fnref40) 41. Kelly Fann, ‘Tapping into the Appeal of Cult Fiction’, *Reference & User Services Quarterly* (2011) pp. 15–18\. [↩︎](#fnref41) 42. Caroline Westbrook, ‘Trainspotting: The Complete Behind-The-Scenes History’, *Empire Magazine* (March 1996) <[https://www.empireonline.com/movies/features/trainspotting-behind-scenes-history/](https://www.empireonline.com/movies/features/trainspotting-behind-scenes-history/?ref=thebeemagazine.com)\> \[accessed 28 August 2024\] [↩︎](#fnref42) 43. Telegraph Reporters, ‘Noel Gallagher snubbed Trainspotting soundtrack “as he thought film was about railway enthusiasts”’, *The Telegraph* (18 October 2016) <[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/10/18/noel-gallagher-snubbed-trainspotting-soundtrack-as-he-thought-fi/](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/10/18/noel-gallagher-snubbed-trainspotting-soundtrack-as-he-thought-fi/?ref=thebeemagazine.com)\> \[accessed 29 August 2024\] [↩︎](#fnref43) 44. Matt Glasby, ‘How Trainspotting’s iconic soundtrack shaped the film’, *GQ Magazine* (10 June 2019) <[https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/trainspotting-soundtrack](https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/trainspotting-soundtrack?ref=thebeemagazine.com)\> \[accessed 29 August 2024\] [↩︎](#fnref44) 45. Robert Anderson, ‘University fees in historical perspective’, History and Policy Policy Paper (2010) <[https://www.historyandpolicy.org/policy-papers/papers/university-fees-in-historical-perspective](https://www.historyandpolicy.org/policy-papers/papers/university-fees-in-historical-perspective?ref=thebeemagazine.com)\> \[accessed 29 August 2024\] [↩︎](#fnref45) 46. Katrina Chilver and Brad Gray, ‘Leah Betts’ tragic story that shocked a nation – and stopped many people taking drugs’, *EssexLive* (9 February 2024) <[https://www.essexlive.news/news/essex-news/leah-betts-25-years-on-4704289](https://www.essexlive.news/news/essex-news/leah-betts-25-years-on-4704289?ref=thebeemagazine.com)\> \[accessed 29 August 2024\] [↩︎](#fnref46) 47. *T2 Trainspotting* (2017), *The Numbers* <[https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/T2-Trainspotting-(UK)#tab=summary](https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/T2-Trainspotting-%28UK%29?ref=thebeemagazine.com#tab=summary)\> \[accessed 29 August 2024\] [↩︎](#fnref47) 48. Brian Ferguson, ‘Irvine Welsh lifts lid on plans for ‘Trainspotting the musical’ and a 30th birthday party in Edinburgh for the novel’, *The Scotsman* (12 October 2023) <<>> \[accessed 29 August 2024\] [↩︎](#fnref48) 49. ‘Irvine Welsh’s life and childhood in Edinburgh to be focus of new documentary’, *Daily Record* <[https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/entertainment/irvine-welshs-life-childhood-edinburgh-27006815](https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/entertainment/irvine-welshs-life-childhood-edinburgh-27006815?ref=thebeemagazine.com)\> \[accessed 13 August 2024\] [↩︎](#fnref49) --- *Georgia Poplett is a researcher who worked with The Bee and New Writing North as part of a placement supported by the* [*Northern Bridge Consortium*](https://northernbridge.ac.uk/?ref=thebeemagazine.com)*, a Doctoral Training Partnership funded by* [*the Arts and Humanities Research Council*](https://ahrc.ukri.org/?ref=thebeemagazine.com)*.* [Tip the Bee](https://thebeemagazine.com/#/portal/support) All donations go towards supporting the Bee’s mission to nurture, publish promote and pay for the best new working-class writing. ### The Thin Places of the South Wales Valleys URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/the-thin-places-of-the-south-wales-valleys/ Last updated: 2025-06-16T19:09:24.000Z In the autumn of 2004 I got a job as the photographer at Jumpin’ Jaks nightclub in Cardiff, which was a notorious place in South Wales, now sadly closed. Being the official photographer meant taking photos of people in the club, and taking their orders for prints, which, this being before phones had sophisticated cameras in them, was quite lucrative. I met lots of people who’d come into Cardiff for the night from the South Wales Valleys, and I always got on with them well: they were friendly, quick-witted and dry, and always saying to me, you should come up the Valleys and see us. So I started exploring the places people had told me about. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/06/DSC_2658-copy.jpeg) This is taken from Bwlch Mountain, overlooking Cwmparc Treorchy one New Year’s Day. I’m more influenced by painters and cinema than other photographers, and to me this was like the figure in Caspar David Friedrich’s **The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog* painting. I don’t know where the guy was going, he just walked in front of me, and I thought, Oh, that’s a bit rude. And then I was, oh, actually, it looks good. This is quite an important area. It’s the top end of the Rhondda Valley, and there were two pits within this view here, and in Treorchy there was the Park and Dare, a famous institute housing a theatre, library and bar. The Park and Dare, which is still going, was paid for by the miners, who contributed a penny in each pound they earned. On the other side of this mountain, you can see all the way to Port Talbot. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/06/DSC_3511.jpeg) This is Abertillery, a town that was the home of the Six Bells colliery. It was taken on the day that the local council installed a massive steel sculpture called the Guardian, which is a memorial to the 1960 disaster that killed 45 miners at Six Bells. To me it shows the vibrancy of the valleys, where it’s all terraces, but each house is completely different. Some people have criticised this picture for sentimentalising the valleys, but that’s what they look like! I feel that if you ignore visuals like this you’re denying the place its visual identity. That area, if you don’t know, is a series of long, wide valleys where much of the coal mining and steel industry in Wales was located. Along the flat bottoms run roads and towns famous in British history: Merthyr Tydfil, Pontypridd, Aberdare, Ebbw Vale, and Treorchy and the Rhondda. The steep valley sides and tops, though, are often wild moorland marked by former industrial workings. The Valleys have an incredible history of institutions like theatres and libraries for working-class people being built from contributions from the miners who lived and worked there, paying the Penny in the Pound. Most of the communities were badly affected by the closure of mines and other industries in the 1980s and 1990s, and the area often gets a bad, sensationalised press now. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/06/DSC_0601-copy.jpeg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/06/DSC_4369-copy.jpeg) The first is Ynyshir, and Walsh Street is in Abercynon. I just love the texture and the kind of the way that you can see the kind of skeleton underneath. I like textures, especially when you can see underneath. I love to see torn billboard posters. It’s a kind of art-historical thing. I found them friendly and welcoming. My visits really started with me looking for old cars in the Free Ads, and ending up in some incredible-looking places. I once bought an Allegro in Newbridge for £70\. But I loved the light in the Valleys, and the sense of place is as strong as I’ve ever experienced; it was probably those two things that got me interested in photographing them when I started visiting. I’ve got a friend from Merthyr who said he couldn’t believe I didn’t get my head kicked in, looking like I do (big beard, long hair) but I’ve never had any problems like that, because people are always just interested in what I’m doing. When I went to the Gurnos \[a large council estate in Merthyr Tydfil, used as the location for the third series of Channel 4’s *Skint*\] a bloke came up to me and said, quite abruptly: “What you’re photographing?” I just told him, and explained why I wanted to take the picture of the estate. We ended up standing there talking about it for an hour. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/06/_DSC1953-copy.jpg) I was in a place called Blaenavon, looking at an old chapel. I looked in a door at the back, where there was an old schoolroom, and in the room was this lady, Sheila Hawkins. She sold pet food there. All the furniture was either from the 1970s, or Victorian, and she sat by a coal fire in an armchair, reading a book. I asked her if I could take her picture, and she invited me in. I photographed her on and off for six months, including on her last day there, when she retired. I said I’d go to visit her after, but then her daughter got in touch with me and said, ‘I’m really sorry to let you know that my mum has passed away.’ She had had cancer all that time, but hadn’t told me. I still feel sad about it. At Blaenavon there was a colliery and a big iron works. The colliery is now the Big Pit mining museum. Some places I photograph remind me of “thin places”, where you’re supposed to feel closer to God. I have a similar feeling, except that instead of feeling close to God, I feel close to the past, and the spirit of cooperation and wanting to take care of the communities. Photographing Sheila was when I felt closest of all. I have always found spots in the Valleys that I think of as thin places. The idea of “thin places” comes from the ancient Celts, and the phrase describes a place where the veil between us and God, or you could just say the spiritual, is thinner. In my thin Valley places it isn’t God I feel though, it’s the past; the recent past of the old community relationships that were being forged in the homes and the workplaces, when people believed they were building a better world for themselves. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/06/DSC_2582.jpeg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/06/DSC_2207-copy.jpeg) I was passing by one day when I spotted this boy, and asked if I could take his portrait. He looked surreal standing there with his dog, and the number on his hat. I emailed the photo to him, but he never replied. The valleys have got sheds and garages everywhere. Let people see any bit of land, they’ll put a garage or a shed on there. God knows what’s in any of them. I need to explain that this is not just about nostalgia, but more a reaction to the sort of “urban renewal” that has obsessed the local authority in Cardiff for the last 30 years. As in other industrial British cities, scheme after scheme has clumsily wiped out streets and buildings people related to, and replaced them with glass and steel structures that you could find anywhere. It is possible to do this and acknowledge your history, as was shown by the Kings Cross development in London or the Angel of the North. In Cardiff it makes you feel as if all that history, all those feelings and ideas, has been written off, which is why sometimes I stand outside an old shop or see a certain detail in a window frame, and feel like I’m looking at a sort of talisman. It comes back to what I mean when I talk about a sense of place. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/06/DSC_4772-copy.jpeg) This is a place called Cwm, which means “valley” in Welsh. That’s a colliery spoil heap at the end of the road – there are spoil heaps everywhere like this in the valleys. The picture is quite one-point perspective, and the area itself is a one-point perspective place, because you’re always just following the road through the valley. But this one just comes to a dead end. The house with the pebble dash and red frames is typical of the region, you could call it a vernacular style I think. The aquamarine is more modern! I didn’t come from Wales originally. I was born in Castleford, in the Yorkshire mining country. My parents split up after arguments about the 1984–5 miners’ strike, and I ended up moving around a lot as a kid. I’m an only child, and I always used to notice we were in a new place because there’d be different roof tiles, or street signs, and when we were driving in the car I’d look out for signs. I remember sitting in the back and looking out of the window at night seeing distant lights, and thinking, I wonder what the people who live there are like? What will they be doing, sat watching telly, or what? As an only child you learn to entertain yourself thinking about stories like that, so I’d draw and paint pictures of them, and think of their stories. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/06/DSC_2348-copy.jpeg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/06/DSC_0946-copy-2.jpeg) In the valleys everyone needs a car, really, because lots of places are isolated from public rail transport. There’s buses, but buses take so long to get anywhere. The car on the right is a Ford Mustang, in Pentwyn. It never moves. The other is a Sunbeam Rapier. It doesn’t move either. I think the owner tried to put a V8 engine in, but it didn’t work. To me, it feels like quite a valleys thing to just… leave something, to abandon it, you know. Or to put it in a shed and forget it. My grandfather, a mining engineer and mines rescue in World War II, died in 1946\. He was a keen amateur photographer and my grandmother gave me his Voigtländer camera. I played around with that, and then she gave me an SLR for my 17th birthday, and that was how I started, really. I went to Cardiff to study at the Art School, but it didn’t work out. There was this sort of class divide – if you did Fine Art you got all the studios and facilities, but if you did Art and Aesthetics like me, there was next to nothing. I never even had a tutor, just locked myself in the darkroom for three years and taught myself 35 millimetre photography, with the help of one of the technicians. But then I met my partner, and after the course I stayed in Cardiff and got a job in a commercial photography studio. It was after a few years there that I got the job at Jumpin’ Jaks. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/06/DSC_3086-2.jpeg) On one street in Treorchy I noticed a window with hand-painted scroll-font writing saying just **Tom Jones*, which obviously is quite a famous name. I decided to investigate, and found myself in this ancient barber shop, with just one man, the barber, in there. He was happy for me to photograph the shop, but he passed away not long afterwards. The window is still there. I think they probably just locked up the shop and left it. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/06/DSC_3093.jpeg) Many Italians came to the valleys, some to work in the mines, and many to open cafés – I believe most of them came from Bardi in northern Italy. There were 300 Italian cafés in the valleys and along the coast at one time – they were famous for what’s called a steam pie, which is like a pie in a foil case that was cooked in the back of the coffee machine with steam. This one, Carpanini’s, is in Treorchy, but it’s closed now. It had a great frieze on the ceiling, which you can see. It’s very sad that it closed. For once I wished that a hipster would come and keep it open! ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/06/DSC_5267-copy-1.jpeg) I loved this boy’s haircut. I asked his mother if I could take his picture, and she said yes, and then asked if she’d like me to send the portrait. She said “No, I’ve got loads of pictures of him.” I used to drive to the Valleys and take photographs casually for a few years. Sometimes it would be to do a commercial job, PR photos for a new building or a windfarm or something, which was good because it would take you into these corners you might not think to go to. I don’t have the words to say how much I loved it, every place seemed to open up a new view or perspective, or lead to meeting new people. Ten years ago, we moved from Cardiff to live here, in Treforest, and we are very, very happy here. Around that time I began to notice how other photographers, doing stories about the region, seemed fixated on poverty, misery and the bleak run-down streets and buildings; I specifically recall a photo of a run-over fox, as if you don’t get run-over animals everywhere, and the Welsh Valleys are full of murdered animals. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/06/DSC_4473-copy.jpeg) This was at the opening of the Guardian sculpture in Abertillery (see above). Hundreds and hundreds of people came, and Rowan Williams did the dedication speech. It was an important, serious day. At this point I turned around and I just took this picture. I thought what each person was doing was interesting. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/06/DSC_0306-copy-1.jpeg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/06/DSC_6866-copy.jpeg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/06/DSC_6741-copy.jpeg) The first is a knitting shop. I just love the opening hours, particularly that five-minute difference on a Monday. What was different on Mondays that gave her that extra time? I don’t think it opens now. The other two are my local hardware shop, which is where I go to buy bird feed. I use it religiously because I don’t want them to shut down basically. In fact, things are working better for them now, because Vinted parcels and that sort of thing are dropped off there. Whenever you go in they’re sorting out all these packages. It was those photographers who inspired me to try to photograph the Valleys in a way that reflected not just the harder sides of life, but also the beauty and the joy and the humour and the cultural heritage that characterise actual, lived life here. I have a very positive response when I show them, although the arts establishment isn’t keen; my work is often dismissed as “sentimental”. I find it hard not to see in this the imposition of a middle-class gaze in which working-class people are overwhelmed with misery, and lack individuality or agency. It’s interesting that among commissioning bodies, there appears to be far more interest in inviting people from outside Wales to photograph the Valleys than there is in local work. Anyway, I’ve decided to publish my work myself now, and have a crowdfunder for the production that ends next week, hint hint. There’s been a great response, and I have felt pleased to have recorded this most wonderful of the world’s landscapes in a way that its people have enjoyed – and not a dead fox in sight. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/06/DSC_8947-copy.jpeg) The Station Café is next to the station, obviously, and the Park and Dare. It’s amazing inside, and the outside is brilliant as well, there’s talk of it being put in the National Museum of Wales. It was a key part of the community for an awful long time – I got to know the old owner, Dom, well, and now I know his son. There is an image of the valleys being entirely depressed, but they vary, and Treorchy is very lively. It has loads of independent shops, and they’ve made a big effort to attract businesses and organisations coming here. I think arts establishment type people categorise it as “depressed and miserable” and don’t really encourage other representations, but there is a lot of joy and laughter here too. I live here, so I know. Jon’s Valleys book will be published in July. To order a copy and/or donate, go [here](https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/qr/vnG9R3zl?utm%5Fcampaign=sharemodal&utm%5Fmedium=referral&utm%5Fsource=shortlink) [Tip the Bee](https://thebeemagazine.com/#/portal/support) All donations go towards supporting the Bee’s mission to nurture, publish promote and pay for the best new working-class writing. ### The Fugitives URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/the-fugitives/ Last updated: 2025-06-16T19:09:42.000Z When I started taking these photographs of people in my town, a friend said to me that any photo says as much about the photographer as it does about the person being photographed. I think they might have been quoting someone famous, I’m not sure, but anyway, at the time I didn’t see that in any photos I’d taken. Looking at the pictures in hindsight now, though, I sort of do. It makes me realise that the reasons I’m drawn to the people I photograph probably do say something about me and how I ended up here in Hornsea. Hornsea is on the Yorkshire coast, but I grew up inland, in a little market town about 12 miles from here. Eighteen years ago, I had my first child, a beautiful girl we called Rose. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/02/Dot-andSharon_2500px-1.jpg) I thought they were mother and daughter, but it turned out that they were just friends. Dot loved Hornsea, and Sharon was taking her for a day out. They were so giddy and happy – it was the start of their day and they were really looking forward to it. They said they’d been friends for years because they made each other laugh. They did laugh a lot. It’s one of my favourite pictures. I thought everything was fine at first, and I had a very happy six months with her – some of the happiest months of my life. Gradually, however, I realised Rose wasn’t doing what other children her age were doing. We were referred to see a hospital paediatrician, who did a lot of tests and mentioned “developmental delay”. After that, Rose’s lack of development became more pronounced in contrast to other children, and I felt very isolated. Rose’s dad coped with it better than I did, really. He was certainly more noble: he loved her as she was, and would say, “She’s just Rose.” Of course I loved her too, as I love her now, and always will, but I couldn’t stop myself wondering how life might have been for her. I don’t know if that’s wrong of me, but there it is. It is unjustly hard on him for me to say it, but Rose’s dad’s ability to cope left me feeling a bit alone. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/02/image00014_2500px.jpg) This is one I really like, mainly because of the light and the fish and chip shop, but also because of the kid on the right who’s giving the middle finger to his brother. It was a hot summer evening and they’d come over to Hornsea from Hull with their dad. I remembered my own son Edward on his scooter practising his jumps on the seafront when he was their age, so they really appealed to me. It was complicated, it was painful, and it became hard to be around people I knew, especially people with young children. I didn’t want people feeling sorry for me or feeling awkward, which people naturally did, and it all made me want to run away from my old life. We moved to Hornsea, a place I barely knew, because no one knew me or my baby, and because I thought Rose would enjoy the beach – she loves sensory things like sand. It could have been any faded, end-of-the-line northern seaside town really, but it felt good breathing in the sea air and having nobody notice me. Unfortunately, things didn’t go smoothly, because I had a couple of miscarriages, which were more sorrow piled on at a time that was already heavy with it. In the end, we did have a son, Ed, but then my partner and I split up (although we stayed friends). After that, I kept myself to myself, and just got on with life on my own with my children. Then came Covid-19\. In lockdown, I bought a secondhand camera because I thought I’d have the time to learn to use it, and I could try make a record of Hornsea during this period. Rose’s dad started having her at weekends, and by now Ed was old enough to be left if I went out for a walk, so it was the first time since having Rose that I could do anything by myself. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/02/image00028_2500px.jpg) I took this picture of the twins when I’d just started photographing people. They are from Hull and come to Hornsea for a holiday for two weeks every year, always staying in the same hotel. They were exactly as you’d expect twins to be – finishing each other’s sentences and sharing mannerisms – but what most struck me was their absolute devotion to each other. They had this love that was really tangible. They were really exuberant and fun, and I remember them both kissing me a few times when I was leaving. I’m quite a friendly person, but even for me that seemed a bit comically over the top. I joined a couple of online photography groups – they used to set indoor challenges like “take a still life picture” – and I took pictures of Rose and the dog to learn how to use the camera. After a few weeks, I braved the Hornsea Photography Club. Initially I found it intimidating because most of the members were older men, but they gave me a lot of encouragement. We did have chats about the laws of photography and whether I was breaking them (I love a lot of negative space! I *like* to see people walking into or out of frame!) but it all helped. I did realise I wanted to do street photos, though, not the sunsets and garden birds that a lot of them prefer. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/02/image00003_2500px.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/02/image00004_2500px.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/02/image00016_2500px.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/02/image00025_2500px.jpg) These two boys came over from Hull one summer day, and were really keen for me to take pictures of them. One of them could backflip, the other one just threw stones in the sea – but I took some pics anyway and sent him them. They’d cycled over on the railway line and were just full of energy and life. Just as I was about to go, I took the picture of them with their arms up – and it’s one of my favourite shots. Not much of a story there, but one of those serendipitous moments that only seem to happen when I have my camera with me. I started taking pictures of people’s backs as they looked out to sea. Something about them just looking moved me, and also I could take the picture without asking or having to talk. I liked those backs, but then someone said it was lazy photography, and I thought I should try to get close up and in front of people. I began taking candid, spur-of-the-moment shots, just smiling and then walking away, but then one day after taking a picture of a woman outside a café, I stopped and showed her the raw picture on the display on the back of my camera. She didn’t mind, but she didn’t see why I thought it was a good picture – generally people don’t. So I offered to send her the picture later, which she liked. It felt good being able to give her something. After that, I started asking more people if I could take a portrait of them, and almost everyone agreed. (I think the fact that I’m an ordinary, unassuming middle-aged woman means they trust me. Also, this was still in lockdown, when people craved connection.) The camera allowed me to make those connections and to continue to do that. And I really enjoyed it, because it was really lovely to chat to people about their lives. Everybody has something to tell you. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/02/image00006_2500px.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/02/image00013_2500px-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/02/image00018_2500px.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/02/image00019_2500px.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/02/image00026_2500px.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/02/image00033_2500px.jpg) Another set I took when I first started. His name is Declan – again he’d cycled over from Hull with mates just for the day and he was in a holiday mood. He loved playing up for the camera and was really enjoying himself. I remember when I left he said it was the best day he’d ever had. What I came to understand, talking to people, is that in a seaside town, most people have come to escape something. I know people escape to all kinds of places, but the sea and a seaside town, however run down, represent something distinct – even if it’s just peace after people come here to retire after stopping work. We get a lot of transient people just holing up here for a while until something passes, and they move on to another place. Other people come because of the anonymity you get in places where people go for breaks and holidays. That anonymity makes people feel carefree. I’m not entirely sure what people feel they’re escaping *to*, but maybe it’s something to do with a perceived sense of safety remembered from their childhood. A lot of people tell me they’ve ended up here because their parents loved it, and they came on holiday as a family, out of Hull and the industrial West Riding. All the benches with memorial plaques testify to that. I see a lot of elderly people holding hands, something I’ve not noticed so much elsewhere, and I like to think they’ve found contentment here after lives lived. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/02/image00005_2500px.jpg) I met this joyous Lithuanian woman swimming in the biting November sea the other afternoon. Her son, who was with her and watching from the beach, told me that when she’s stressed she likes to swim. The cold waves help her forget her troubles. He also reckoned it was because she was a Pisces. She was pink and glowing when she came out, and her happiness really made me smile on a grey day. I suppose I’m sensitive to the escape urge, because that’s what brought me here, too. It sounds a bit clichéd, but walking by the sea everyday, and the rhythms of the sea, soothed me a bit at a time when I needed soothing. The photography itself was a kind of escape for me, because it was a way of creating order out of chaos. Having a disabled child means that you are totally out of control; in fact other people, bodies of people, agencies, come in and try to take control for you. I really didn't like that. I needed help, but I didn't want it. I suppose I didn't want to have to need it. When I take pictures, I find everything slows down. I'm totally absorbed in the moment and getting the picture I think I can get. I do have an idea of how I want them to look, and this is where the issue of exploitation can come in, but I think talking to people and understanding them counters that. People have to trust you, though,, and that's where empathy is so important, I suppose. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/02/image00023_2500px.jpg) This is one of my favourite photo spots, just because I like the 1980s canopy and the warm pocket of light it creates. I was going in just as this woman in green, wrapped against the cool night, walked into the scene. She looked deep in thought, and her distracted mood was a nice contrast with the gaudy amusements. She was also colour-coordinated with some of them, so it just all worked. Now I look back on the photographs I’ve taken here over the years, I can see something else of me reflecting in some of the pictures, maybe a mood that on a subconscious level is about feeling lonely and isolated. It feels strange writing that down, although I’m not embarrassed to say it. I’m not burdened with those feelings everyday, and I think they’re just part of the human condition, but I do feel it a bit and perhaps it’s what I’m drawn to a lot in other people. I probably look for it because I feel it. Having said all this, I do also find a lot of humour in the pictures I take, and I take great pleasure in the warmth of the everyday. I hope that outweighs the gloom. I sometimes get a better picture of someone if I shoot them in an unguarded moment and then talk to them. Of course, there’s an ethical issue, but no one has ever minded yet. The problem with asking people – although I do if I’m taking a portrait – is that invariably people change and put a camera face on for you. That’s why talking to them is important: if someone’s chatting to you, the picture will be more like the real them. You tread a very fine line photographing people you don’t know, because they’re not in control of the picture. Sometimes I’ve stopped myself taking a picture because I think a photo would just look mean and mocking. You can enjoy human nature being a bit ridiculous, without setting people up to make fun of them. I love taking pictures of children because they’re much less guarded. Older men like being chatted to, and young men think I’m like their mother – it’s all personas, I’ve come to realise – but I enjoy photographing and talking to everyone now. I really love the process – the whole process: from taking the picture to seeing what I’ve got, to making something out of it that other people enjoy looking at. I do take it seriously, and I’d like to get really good at it. I’m still learning, but ultimately I want my pictures to be beautiful- ordinary, so that everyone looking at them feels a connection with something they see in them, but with a visual aesthetic that people can enjoy at the same time. Last year, I was lucky enough to meet Ella Murtha, daughter of the photographer Tish Murtha. She told me to keep connecting with people. She said just connect, connect, connect. I can see now that that’s really important, and I think I’m learning to be quite good at it. --- [Tip the Bee](https://thebeemagazine.com/#/portal/support) All donations go towards supporting the Bee’s mission to nurture, publish promote and pay for the best new working-class writing. ### Terminus URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/terminus/ Last updated: 2025-06-16T19:09:58.000Z I know where I’m going. To reach the hospital my dad is in I need to catch the 97 bus eastwards in the direction of Chelmsley Wood: a bus which runs every four minutes and which, like most buses in Birmingham, take people from the centre, where the city misspends its money, out to the places where it should be spent. What hasn’t been rebuilt is tatty and what has been rebuilt is shoddy. Before I leave New Street concourse I call the consultant, who’s given me his pager number to ring, and tell him I’ll be 20 minutes depending on the bus. Some people leave and never go back. By contrast, I seem condemned to find myself on the 97 bus, out to the terminus and back, out and back again, for eternity. The house I grew up in was at the final stop, where the road meets the motorway. My dad, fittingly, is in hospital halfway along the route – half the way from home, half his way towards the city centre pubs he spends most of his time in. The driver pulls in just beyond the shelter, rests a few minutes with a copy of the Metro, and adjusts his wing mirrors before turning around and opening the doors to let us on. For the next 50 minutes, the bus will crawl, more or less in a straight line, for nine miles out of the city, but for now, the journey commences by getting stuck at the lights outside Digbeth Coach Station. The bus sighs and judders, its passengers sighing in sympathy, as it lets through a chain of National Express coaches setting out to all the places from which people struggle to make their way: Skegness, Doncaster, Sunderland, Birkenhead; Hull, Wrexham, Dundee. Birmingham is an interchange: it sits in the middle – an “ignored void at the heart of the country” according to the critic and filmmaker Jonathan Meades – rather than in the centre of things. Its most famous landmark is not a beautiful building, but Spaghetti Junction, an eyewatering tangle of express roads designed to enable people in cars to avoid the city centre on their way to other places. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/02/50428128763_776cc1d59e_o_2500px.jpg) **Photo:* [**Damien Walmsley*](https://www.flickr.com/photos/damienwalmsley/?ref=thebeemagazine.com) By contrast, any traffic trying to leave the city centre has its work cut out. At Digbeth, the 97 turns left next to a pub, The Old Crown, that has stood since the 14th century. On the top deck, numbed people from all corners of the world clutch half-litre cans of Monster and wriggle bitty content out of their phones. We pass boxing gyms and Lidls, a drive-thru carbs emporium called Big Johns, Birmingham City Football Club, a naval college converted into a mosque, and a rusted piece of 1980s public art, before it attempts to squeeze through narrow thoroughfares never intended for modern-day Birmingham traffic. There are BMWs parked on both sides of the two-lane street, spliced in with white vans and minicabs. People try to cross the road, halfway between two sets of pedestrian crossings, by waving distractedly at approaching vehicles, while our bus, never made for such a scene, gets jammed like paper in a printer. There is nowhere else for it to go. The previously silent, sullen top-deck passengers start swearing out of the window, and my teeth start to grind in anticipation of the racial tension that was an inevitable feature of this journey while I was growing up. An urban bus trip of this length has phases; spatial sections that play out, each with their own scripts, whenever it’s made. On the way into town there would be a sudden shift at the point where the streets and houses became infinitely more cramped and the faces more varied. The change in mood would be perceptible enough for me to feel a bodily clenching for the last ten minutes of every trip. Sometimes younger men would square up to each other at the squeeze point between the driver’s cab and the seats, impossible to pass through without invading other people’s personal space. White pensioners would suddenly start to grumble and turn to whoever was sitting next to them, anticipating an exchange of performative tutting. Once bus routes were opened to competition in the mid-1980s, you would get streams of racing buses – sometimes just a bloke in a clapped-out minibus – collecting fares along the 97 route by overtaking the regular services and racing each other into town at full pelt. One dark, wet Saturday evening in November 2001, short of cash, I jumped on one of these in town as it was 20p cheaper and I thought it would get me back quicker. (Moor Street to Chelmsley Wood on an old minibus in the cold, dark and rain: there was something inherently self-punishing about my determination to make *this* journey in *this*way. Mind you, I can’t drive, and taking a nine-mile taxi journey in those pre-Uber days seemed profligate, so I didn’t have much choice but to pay a quid and suck it up. But if you are going to choose to return, do it willingly, do it kindly, not as if you are being subjected to divine retribution.) Several of us piled on to this bus and moved towards the back; five of us strangers sat in a row chatting merrily about how Bonfire Night means Christmas is next. The older woman next to me seemed particularly sweet, taking delight in the small children sitting next to her and asking them what presents they were hoping for. As she chatted, two young Asian women in floral headscarves got on and sat in the seats nearest the driver. A beat was missed. “Here come the terrorists,” said the woman, nodding judiciously. Always at this point on the journey I remember – not that I ever really forget – why I ran for my life away from this fate, and why I am pathetically grateful that I did. Eventually, the knot of traffic resolves itself and the 97 double-decker creeps on, as far as the huge 1930s pub that was converted into a McDonald’s just before I left home in 1994\. The narrow street splays out into an expansive dual carriageway, marking the point at which Birmingham spread east in one of the city’s successive concentric circles of growth. From here it will move through the 1930s ring, the 1940s, the 1950s, and finally to its late 1960s terminus – each time the roads widening, the houses changing, the centre of the city becoming more distant. Every journey taken leaves its residue. At every point you pass there’s an image, a sensation, pleasant or otherwise, associated with it, to the extent that you know you would half-disappear if that route, that possibility, were removed or obliterated. I imagine the journey taken by my great-grandparents, who moved from Ladywood in the city centre to Lea Village two or three miles away: a new, curly-mapped settlement of council homes on this route in the early 1930s. They got around by trolleybus and bike, my grandad cycling out to Chelmsley Wood when it still was a picnic spot. I wonder what went through his mind when he learned that the picnic spot – a cherished bluebell wood – was going to be flattened by 18,000 houses. Did he ever try to find the paths he used to take? Was he able to trace them in his mind? Chelmsley Wood was built on a significant fragment of the historic Forest of Arden; it is bordered by the M6 and M42 on one side and Birmingham Airport on the other, where the city was permitted to sprawl into the Warwickshire green belt. As a child, I never once thought about bluebells, or what stood under my house or my grandparents’ house, but now it’s all I can think of. Another mile or two further out, we pass the gaping hole that once housed the shopping centre where I got my first job at a branch of Greggs when I was 16\. I remember feeling that having my own cash put me on a par with royalty, surreptitiously checking my £10.02 wages at the bus stop going home every Saturday and seeing if I could wolf a whole custard slice before the bus showed up. The wide Meadway drops and climbs here like a big dipper, swooping down at Stechford junction where it meets the number 11 – the Outer Circle, notable for being the world’s longest bus route. (The number 50, which runs from Birmingham city centre to the southern peripheries every two to three minutes, is touted by its operator, National Express, as the most frequent service in Europe.) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/02/52705611070_66ac22d034_o_2500px.jpg) **Photo:* [**Damien Walmsley*](https://www.flickr.com/photos/damienwalmsley/?ref=thebeemagazine.com) To say things like that makes it sound as though Birmingham is an easy place to get around, when in reality its population is choked by traffic. Birmingham is the ultimate case study for digging down into the confluence of social, technological and historical factors that go into making a city work well or work badly. In the 1950s and 1960s, the city was seduced by a transatlantic, rather than European, concept of urban glamour. Birmingham was going to become known not for the casual way you could amble through the city admiring its neo-classical architecture, but for how you could see it on the skyline as you raced past it in your car. To the historian Simon Gunn, postwar Birmingham was “Britain’s premier motor city”, pummelled into its concrete corset by the city’s chief engineer, Herbert Manzoni, who believed that civil engineering could cure what he had once called the “cancer” of traffic congestion. Manzoni was prepared to bulldoze his way through the city in order to let motorists move freely, not anticipating that the more roads you build, the more cars you’ll get on them. Buses were an afterthought. An underground rail system was dismissed by Manzoni as “hopelessly uneconomic”, while trams were dismantled, near-simultaneously, in the mid-1950s by just about every town and city that had them. Manzoni reshaped Birmingham around cars, which in turn shaped the lives of the people who lived there, for better or worse according to whether or not you had a car of your own. “In ten years,” he said, in 1959, “we are going to have one motor car per family. It is the aim of every family to own a motor car – and I would say the right in modern conditions of every family to own a motor car. Restriction is not the way. You have got to welcome the traffic. You have got to realise that it is an indication of a high and increasing standard of living.” Needless to say, no one in my extended family ever owned a car, which has led to my lifelong obsession with buses. We weren’t practically locked out of the city by having to rely on buses, but in spirit we were, and so was any other Brummie who didn’t drive – who didn’t want to or, more likely, couldn’t afford to. Our relationship to the centre was defined by how much harder it was to leave the periphery. You know you are – finally – three-quarters of the way home when you pass Richard Gilbert Scott’s striking 1967 church at Kitts Green, opposite which my mum spent most of her childhood in a now-demolished block of tenement flats. Seeing that church reminds me of the untold thousands of journeys on the 97 made by my parents – halting, sometimes nausea-inducing, endless-seeming – to and from work, for decades, to which, without question, I attribute my lifelong determination to avoid having a proper job. When I was a toddler they made the decision to move from a “starter home” – a glorified wendy house – near a train station to a slightly larger starter home on a council leasehold: cheaper, marginally bigger, but meaning my dad could now only get to work on the bus. My dad’s drudging commute, which would have taken a quarter of the time if there’d been a tram or fast train to take him to work, now took an hour. Twice a day for 15 years, with rigid, depressive discipline, he took this bus from one terminus to the other. You could deduce how well he was coping by how long he took to read a book on the daily journey, and that he wasn’t coping when he stopped taking a book at all. By the time he got transferred to an office in Sheldon, a mere 20-minute bus ride away, he was already halfway to being broken by it. Birmingham was cruel to my parents: it contained rich resources that they struggled daily to access, for the simple reason that the city was not built with their needs and means in mind. They – we – were constantly told that Birmingham was the city of the future, when all the while they could barely make use of the present. Reaching the hospital at East Meadway, I disembark at a tatty shelter pocked with cigarette burns, bordered by verges made of equal parts mud and empty Lucozade bottles. Bus shelters in Liverpool aren’t allowed to get this messed up: it’s a matter of civic pride. Shattered panels are replaced within a day, and are regularly repainted in cheery sunshine yellow, even if they do get splattered with takeaway rice. I cross the road at the traffic lights, an experience akin to taking part in Wacky Races, and register that the bus shelter on the other side of the road is in just as dire a condition. Throughout the day the shelter fills with nurses and porters coming off shift, vaping and waiting tiredly around its edges, unable to see buses approaching through the scoured Perspex windows. Most will have to change waiting again, in the city centre for buses to other peripheries, alighting in the dark and having to do it all again the next day. When you are paid hourly, you aren’t paid for the hours you spend getting to and from work, no matter how long it takes, and you have to pay for the privilege of getting to work in a place that doesn’t pay you enough to live closer by. Low pay, inadequate housing and exhausting commutes are a vicious cycle to which no one should be subjected, but they work in tandem. Spend 12 hours working in a hospital or a care home every day, and you should be ferried to and from your home on a golden cloud, not cast out to dark bus stops in the rain. Time and again I return to the geographer Doreen Massey’s observation that “much of life, even in the heart of the first world, consists of waiting in a bus shelter with your shopping for a bus that never comes”. What distinguishes bus travel from other forms of mobility is the fact that you can rarely guarantee exactly when a bus will show up. To drive, walk or cycle, you simply set off. To catch a train or plane, you consult the timetable and have a reasonable chance of setting off when you expect to. Buses and their drivers are themselves at the mercy of the circumstances in which they operate. Traffic doesn’t part for them. Passengers don’t always have the right change (which you have always needed in Birmingham in order to board), or will hold a bus up in order to complain that their bus was held up. You have to become inured to, or ground down by, the loss of control that such uncertainty involves if you are not to go mad. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/02/30831838537_2b0ac16780.jpg) **Photo:* [**Damien Walmsley*](https://www.flickr.com/photos/damienwalmsley/?ref=thebeemagazine.com) The waiting becomes part of the work, and in so doing, every part of life becomes hard. This is what ages people, makes them ill, gives them walking sticks. The conditions in which we wait matter, not least because the people who do the most waiting for the buses that never come tend to be either very old or very young, tend to be women, are more likely to be people of colour (which makes waiting less safe), and are likely to be variously penalised for having their time stolen in this way. When we are told we must not wait, that time is money, what does it say about our notions of social worth when people are forced to wait anyway? So if you ask me what motivates me to write about buses – why I think they’re worth paying close attention to – it’s that so little attention is paid to the significance they have for people who have no other means of getting around. The quality of their commute is their quality of life. Later, my dad at last safe in the arms of the NHS, I walked the mile or two back to the hospital exit, where outside it was now dark and raining heavily. I negotiated the car park and the relentless flow of minicabs, to get back to the bus shelter crowded with tired hospital staff on their phones, pulling themselves and their wet coats over the damp threshold of the 97 when it finally came. Everyone was silent. I collapsed into a seat, on the top deck again, and focused on the sound of the windscreen wipers, the thought of being warm and dry again, against the retching of the aged diesel engine dragging us home. A couple of days later, I did the whole trip again: the bus from my home to the station, the train to Birmingham, and the 97 out from town to the hospital. I was coming to collect my dad, who had been deemed ready to be discharged back into the world. As we approached the automatic doors, he patted his pockets and asked, “Have you got my bus pass?” --- [Tip the Bee](https://thebeemagazine.com/#/portal/support) All donations go towards supporting the Bee’s mission to nurture, publish promote and pay for the best new working-class writing. ### As Council as They Come URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/as-council-as-they-come/ Last updated: 2026-06-11T19:18:15.000Z Posh and Becks. Working class heroes with a net worth of £455m, and, to me, right up there with the Tolpuddle Martyrs and Nye Bevan. The empire built on the pillars of Brand Beckham are as council as they come: a love of family; chimney-sweep levels of formative graft; and the humility of knowing the difference between sharing success and shoving the public’s faces in it. Add the questionable tatts, marriage dramas and Instagram posts from the pie and mash shop, and they’re solid gold “boy done good” material. Top it off with the [news of David’s knighthood](https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/articles/cm2309dlepno?fbclid=IwY2xjawKv0BhleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBicmlkETBCZ3dsdXhoMHhoWUZsVWxHAR4e7tX4TK5QyQuYSe8GYAHXpxFU4nVGOlHkXtMaPzqQLbRoawumhP2NIcMbug%5Faem%5FnP97%5FfRAVoAmWDb8ss%5Fmeg&ref=thebeemagazine.com#comments) and - perfection. It is a tale as old as time. Watching them use those classic escape routes of music and sport to claw their way out of the prole pile, I have revelled in their 30-year masterclass in dynasty building genius and – unlike bourgeois pearl-clutchers – think “go on my son” every time there’s talk of Lord and Lady Beckham. Let’s be frank about it – a lot of educated middle- and upper-class people recoil from the Beckhams, and are mystified by the affection in which they’re held. Do you think they care? Victoria’s own mother clocked her Vera Wang wedding gown and commented, “Johnny Rotten in a dress”. Being plonked firmly in your place is part of being working class, the ultimate training for styling out schadenfreude snobs and making your own way. Maybe the haters don’t see themselves in the Becks’ success, but the working class do, and that’s what makes it sting so much: “wannabe” on one side, and a snidey “who do you think you are” on the other. They say luck is what happens when opportunity meets preparation, and whether it was David, aged 11, bursting into tears of relief when a Man United scout showed interest, or Victoria answering an ad in The Stage that asked “RU STREETWISE, OUTGOING, AMBITIOUS AND DEDICATED?”, both were primed for everything fame and fortune could fling their way. They may have been in the right place at the right time, but they could back it up because of the graft they’d already put in to chase the dream. David Beckham wasn’t the best player, but he trained his golden balls off until he was, nabbing 50p from his old man every time he scored. Victoria certainly did not have the voice of an angel, but she capitalised on that “point and pout” for all she was worth. Talent, or lack of? That’s not the point. What’s God-given is their gifts for work, self-promotion, and keeping the wheels of industry turning through the scandals, slaggings off, and inadvisable sarong wearing. They’ve done it for every girl giving it eyes and teeth at tap/ballet/modern and every boy kicking a ball against the wall of an outside lavvy. Brought up in working-class-made-good Spam Valley, Glasgow, I was among people with the same star potential. Some made it – pop moguls, industrialists, soap stars, bestselling novelists – and none had a leg up or a family name to trade on. Was there something in the water? No, just nothing else to do and no money to do it with. So, they’d start a band, do the hustle, take over the kitchen table with some madcap project. The Beckhams would have fitted right in, with ideas above their station from the start. Not necessarily above their class, though. That’s a bit different, and more complicated. When, in the 2023 Netflix documentary Beckham, Victoria claimed to be working class despite her dad dropping her to school in his Rolls-Royce, we questioned ourselves. In the week the documentary first aired, UK Google searches on the debate about class were in the millions. Since 2020, the only week they have been higher was one in July 2022 when the Tories forced Boris Johnson’s resignation and the country was beset by strikes. For Victoria, there was a “be honest” ribbing (not least from David) but then, to be fair, Tony and Jackie, her mum and dad, were originally from the working class. Materially she might have been light years away, but culturally it’s more complicated. As a bullied kid who begged Tony to use his white van instead, Victoria just wanted to fit in. How should you act when your family background says one thing and your bank account another? You vow that you’ll stay true. That famous black bandeau dress we all presumed was Gucci was in fact bought at H&M, and she wore it ragged; the Posh in the Spice Girls mix (their names were allotted by a journalist and picked up by the media, not self-chosen) was a parodic pee-taker who arrived at at rehearsals in a clapped-out Fiat Punto. This is where politicians who think social mobility equals individual working-class people transforming into middle-class ones get it all wrong. Yes, Victoria and David want the material rewards and grounded kids. What they do not want is to be Margot and Jerry from The Good Life. Strangely, it might not be quite so straightforward for the Beckham offspring. Damned if they do, damned if they don’t, it’s been a struggle to keep credibility. Brooklyn’s been ripped apart for his efforts in photography, content creation and, er, condiments. Romeo retired from professional football at 22, having hit the giddy heights of the Brentford FC reserves, to sign with a Parisian modelling agency. Cruz has been at band practice for what seems like eons without release, not down the local scout hut, but rather in LA with a team who’ve worked with Beyoncé and One Direction. Thirteen-year-old Harper – fashion mad and a diffusion line in waiting – will hopefully do the clever thing and train to be a tax accountant. When you are peak-level nepo baby, your brain is about the only thing no one can say you were handed on a plate. My own kids, who guess “dunno, dirty hands?” when I ask what makes someone working class, have been brought up in a jumble of class confusion. With a builder dad whose family had jewels and ocelots till Indian independence ruined the Raj party, their forebears escaped to a council flat in Highbury and become postmen and brickies. But, like my own parents in the shipyard and social work, these were jobs for life with a magically replenished pay packet every week. This generation of Joneses lives in the precariat, self-employed world of feast, famine and freebies. There have been times when they’ve helped me review five-star hotels, but they’ve also had their birthday money raided for the gas bill. They seem contentedly skint, on zero-hours contracts and minimum wage, with no hope of escaping the family home in their twenties, living on Poundland ramen and Klarna buys, determined not to ask me for a payday loan since AI came for us journalists. Back in 1995, the world may have been as grey as John Major’s socks, but the blossoming Beckhams had it easier. Charles and Di’s fairytale may have fucked up, just a bite of beefburger could rot your brain, and the police had new powers to piss on ravers’ chips. But it was also when David made his debut at Old Trafford and when the Spice Girls signed to Virgin, segueing nicely into the whole mood of “things can only get better” when they hooked up two years later. I fell in love with them even more after their subsequent wedding. Why not survey the room from gilded thrones and dress your infant in posset-daubed Cavalli? This was going to be the one time when shaking your moneymaker was acceptable. The Chingford nans birdy dancing in their fascinators and the blingtastic Cartier diamonds for best man and bridesmaids were the splicing of two worlds: a huge piss-take of themselves that the haters took at face value. They have so much in common with the common, it’s a joy. Even David’s masterful handling of his affair with Rebecca Loos was very much a keep-your-neb-out blank, the public sympathy for Posh the equivalent of your maw commenting, “Her man might be a shagger, but those net curtains are immaculate.” So good on them. They love their kids, slog like dogs, make the most of what talent they have, and seem like good people in a world of celebrity shits. They’re working. And they’re class. --- [Tip the Bee](https://thebeemagazine.com/#/portal/support) All donations go towards supporting the Bee’s mission to nurture, publish promote and pay for the best new working-class writing. ### Willy Vlautin’s Everyday People URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/willy-vlautins-everyday-people/ Last updated: 2025-06-16T19:10:45.000Z Understated, emotionally-rich novels like *The Motel Life*, *Lean on Pete*, and *Don’t Skip Out on Me* have earned Willy Vlautin high praise for their intimate depictions of marginalised lives in the American West. His last, *The Horse* (2024), tells the story of a young man named Cale, a horse trainer, trying to re-find his footing after a serious injury, has just been awarded this year’s prestigious Joyce Carol Oates. Like most of Vlautin’s work, it documents a dogged individual’s journey through a world of difficult, precarious lives, and the effort involved in dragging yourself clear of destructive forces. The Bee met him to talk about *The Horse*, and his career as a writer and musician. **Richard Benson:** Willy, congratulations on winning the Joyce Carol Oates prize with *The Horse*. It was a book a lot of people we knew s you know, the Bee is all about writers writing about working-class people, and you’ve attracted a lot of attention and admiration for the way you do that. Did you set out to write about working-class people with a sense of a mission? **Willy Vlautin:** Okay. Yeah. I mean, my whole life I’ve wanted to write working-class stories, with hopes that working-class guys would read my novels. You know, it’s really hard to get men to read novels, and particularly working-class men to read novels. And it’s hard for working-class novels to be sold. As you know, in the US the majority of novel readers are women, middle- to upper-middle class women. And so you know that their desire to read about working-class issues is lower… obviously, the great readers go across the board. But it’s still hard. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/02/Unknown.jpeg) **RB:** Do you think that the way the market leans in the US is partly because working-class stories aren’t represented so much, though? I mean, it’s not such a problem with music, which deals much more with working-class lives. **WV:** Well yeah, that’s the question, right? It’s a subject I think about a lot. I’ve tried hard to get working-class buddies of mine to read novels, and it’s difficult. I think it's always been a struggle for working-class stories to get out. It’s easier with music, obviously. I don’t know. The reading public is more attuned to what they’re interested in. **RB:** It’s interesting in your case, because some of your lyrics are like microcosms of your books, and the themes are certainly similar. **WV:** Yeah. You could argue that what appeals to a working-class audience might be horror, or fantasy. Realism and working-class stories I think \[are\] more difficult to get across to people. I mean, even movies struggle with it. I mean, they do it, but they do struggle with it. **RB:** Yes, and often in films with a working-class character, there will be pressure to make them an underdog who overcomes the odds to succeed. That’s different to a lot of your stories, where you’re often writing about people whose lives are chaotic, and who don’t learn from the mistakes. **WV:** I mean, I don’t really think about that, to be honest. I just kind of tell the stories. With *Don’t Skip Out on Me*, my intention was for people to be really mad at the end. I get so tired of seeing broken kids. I’m like, why did you have these kids if you’re not going to try to take care of them? So I write with ideas like that, more than thinking about endings. My goal was that anyone reading the book, I wanted them to throw it across the room and say, “How, why would he kill this kid?” It’s because this is what happens if you don’t pay attention to your kid, you know. **RB:** To shock people out of their comfortable… **WV:** It was about me being angry. I’m like, man, you know… so many people have kids, and they don’t take care of them. They abuse them by neglect; they abuse them by not showing up for them, and not caring about their school, not caring. But they still have them. And then those kids go off sideways. **RB:** Right now in the US the MAGA movement celebrates traditional family values, but at the same time its led by a president who hardly exemplifies them. Do you see anything in current American culture endorsing or encouraging that selfishness that is damaging kids? **WV:** I don’t know. It’d be foolish of me to say I knew. I mean, in general, I think America is a dog-eat-dog society. We do have some really good infrastructure, but all the infrastructure and the social system is always against what runs through the blood of America, which is just straight capitalism. My take is that in America, working-class people think rich people are better. They think that they’re smarter, and that they have the answer, because they’re rich. I think that’s part of the problem with their fascination with Trump. I’ve always battled against that idea. One of the big wounds \[sic\] of America is, are we a society that cares about people, or should it be a dog-eat-dog world? We have the opportunity, America gives you the opportunity, but the social safety net, which we have, it’s always on the cutting block, and it’s always getting fought against, too. **RB:** When we talk about someone as a working-class writer, there’s a danger that we see the raw materials determining the work more than the artist’s vision and ability. But your work has distinct framings and emphasis and style. How far would you say your take reflects your own personal experience? **WV:** You know, the only reason I write about the things I write about is because I don’t know anything else really. I’ve never had, I’ve never – the only glimpses I’ve had of people with money is my dad had money. But I never lived with him. My mom didn’t have money. My mom took two days off: a Friday and a Monday and the weekend, only four days off for 25 years. And she’s worked and worked, drove the same car for 32 years or 33 years. And had nothing. I was a house painter for 12 years, and I painted really rich people’s houses. Like really rich people’s, which is a great gig. So I don’t have a glimpse into writing about anything but what I write about. That being said, I also write about emotion. And I’ve always felt broken, I’ve always felt beat up. And I’ve always been a dark-minded man. So I write about darker subjects with people that are beat up. That was my anti-war State of the Union of America address (laughs). **RB:** Could we talk about how you got started writing? **WV:** I was in bands playing music since I was 11\. I wasn’t very good at it. My high school bands never did good. One day, I just started writing a story. I hadn’t found a book lately that I really liked, and I hadn’t seen a movie that I really liked, so I wrote one. I love to disappear and stuff… you know, I can see a movie and then think I’m living in the movie for a week. And so I just sat down, right, wrote a story, and I realised that I could do whatever I want, I could live inside it, I could make my own movie in my head. And I wasn’t bothering anybody. Like, no one was yelling at me that I was too loud, or asking why I was playing the same song over and over or blah, blah, blah. I found I could just be in a corner and no one cared. Career-wise, I didn’t have any kind of gifts, except maybe perseverance. My mom thought the best that would happen to me is if I could get a job at the post office, you know. But I just liked writing and trying to get better at it. I love the power of a good novel; man, there’s nothing as powerful. If you find the right novel for you, you know… it’s such a difficult thing to give the right novel to the right person to get them connected to literature. It’s really tough. I struggle with it. But I always try. **RB:** Which writers helped you with your prose style? You’ve talked about Carver and Steinbeck in the past. Are there others? **WV:** Carver was important to me early on, he’s so simple. And there’s such beauty in it. Steinbeck is pretty simple. A little more flowery, but, I mean, he has that real stripped-down style. There’s a guy named Larry Brown I really liked, a Southern writer. But, you know, in my early 20s, I discovered the noir writers like James M Cain, Jim Thompson, Charles Willeford, David Goodis, these maniacs, and they kind of taught me a lot. Barry Gifford. They taught me that side... those writers I mentioned, that kind of noir, is psychologically damaged writers writing about psychologically damaged people. So you have these kind of crazy guys writing about crazy people in a really simple, straightforward, noir story. **RB:** Do you have a writing routine? **WV:** No, because I like it so much. I just do it until somebody, my wife, will go, “Come on, man, you got to do something. You got to do other stuff.” **RB:** When some people start out, they inhibit themselves by feeling like their work’s got to be a certain way. Was that ever how it was for you? **WV:** I think you have to make your story yours. You have to fall in love with it, and not worry about publishing or anything. You can’t do anything if you don’t love it in your heart. If you wouldn’t run in front of a truck to save the people in your stories, then probably no one else will. You know, it’s okay if you’re not very good. It takes a long time and it always will take a long time. **RB:** There’s that balance between pushing yourself and pushing so hard you kill it… **WV:** A lot of artists don’t think they’re good. Some do think they’re okay. And that’s good. But for the ones that are really hard on themselves, that’s just as detrimental to them as anything. **RB:** How did *The Horse* happen? What was the start of all that, it seems that a lot of life went into it. **WV:** It started when I was working on *Don’t Skip Out on Me*. This old friend of mine and I drive around in the desert, a lot. We’ve done it over the years for 35 years. I asked him to drive around with me while I took pictures and hung out where that novel took place – I grew up camping in that area. One day we were driving maybe 30 miles from the nearest road, and we came across a wild horse that was blind, in the middle of a big salt flat. So literally, man, literally 20 miles from a tree;10 miles from a tree, maybe. No water on the soil, on its own. And it just stopped me in my tracks. I’ve never seen anything sadder for me, because horses aren’t meant to be alone. They hate being alone. And they’re flight animals. So he’s scared and he can't see and he’s got no friends. And, and we just stopped, and you can see he was blind because both his eyes, \[the\] sockets were small, and there was stuff hanging out in one, like in the book. We camped near the horse, and then the next day, we went back into town. They have a Bureau of Land Management that looks after wild horses in that area. And so the guy goes, “Oh, man, I’ll come out for it.” And then after that, we were driving, we kept driving farther into the desert; it’s really beautiful out there. And we couldn’t stop talking about it. And I mean, I know what man does to each other is horrific. I mean, you just open the newspaper every day, you can see it. But there was something so sad about seeing the end of a guy’s life, a horse’s life, the saddest ending imaginable to that poor horse, which would be, “I’m alone, I can’t see and I can’t even…” At this time I’d been touring too much, and my life wasn’t going out good. I was boozing too much, so… The romantic in me wanted to write about, you know, the life of a journeyman working-class musician. So that’s how it all kind of began. And then I spent years tinkering on it. Years rebuilding that story and telling it in a few different ways. Oh, yeah, it takes me a long time. I have to edit a lot and rework the books a lot. **RB:** Some of your darker, more callous characters – the villains if you like – are struggling with demons, aren’t they? I’m thinking about some of the people in *The Night Always Comes*. Or the boss in *Lean on Pete*. Do you ever feel any tension between representing a community and writing about the individuals in that community? You write about working-class communities and you stick up for working-class people, but then some of your bad guys are working class too. Is that something you ever think about? **WV:** Well… *The Night Always Comes* is a pretty political novel in a way, you know. With that I was really interested in the idea of it all kind of starting with the housing and homelessness explosions. Where I live in Portland, Oregon, housing prices went up like, you know, something like 200% in less than ten, In 15 years, but in wages only doubled. You know, and so you’re like, holy shit, how is a working-class person ever gonna buy a house that was built for working-class people? All these little houses were built for the workers, but now workers can’t afford them. And that would drive me crazy. And then you have quotes by, you know, like President Trump, when he was talking about a business deal but he says in business, it’s – the point is don’t, you can’t be too greedy. Greed is good. It’s good to have more, it's good to have four houses, even though you only live in one. And it really made me mad. **RB:** What is the worst job you’ve ever had? **WV:** I mean… like funny worst jobs?… I guess the worst job I had – and for me it was good job, really – was when I worked at a union trucking company for a while. You just unloaded trucks. No one talked to you. I’d worked in Reno at the same trucking company, and the depot was small, and that was really fun, with cool guys. But \[at the other depot\] I was just a number, and that was rough. I worked in a warehouse for a while where I didn’t talk to anybody all day. And I just labelled boxes, because they had a different barcode system. And I just would do that all day, day after day and no one talked to you and you know, my girlfriend and I weren’t getting along, I had no money. I was trying to be in a band. I was hungover every day. And then you’re by yourself under fluorescent lights, you know, in a warehouse the size of a football field. Yeah, that’s probably the worst before. Yeah, I’ve had a lot of those kinds of bad jobs. I’ve quit a few of them. That’s the bleakest though. I’ve done different jobs. I’ve been a janitor. I worked in trucking companies for years. I was a shipping receiving clerk for a couple years. And a house painter. I was always too shy to work in bars. But then my being in a band cured me of being so shy. **RB:** When you were in the warehouse, what job did you dream of? **WV:** Electrician. I had an opportunity once to be an electrician. And that’s where I wanted to go, man. Because that, in the US that’s the king of the trades. Like you have a really good union, good pension. It’s hard work, but it’s more thinking work. That was always the dream. But yeah, I did always want to be in a band. But I was never that good. --- [Tip the Bee](https://thebeemagazine.com/#/portal/support) All donations go towards supporting the Bee’s mission to nurture, publish promote and pay for the best new working-class writing. ### The Working Class Library Episode 2: Giving Up the Ghost by Hilary Mantel URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/the-working-class-library-episode-2-giving-up-the-ghost-by-hilary-mantel/ Last updated: 2026-06-11T19:00:39.000Z [Listen to "Working Class Library - Giving up the Ghost - Hilary Mantel" on Spreaker.](https://www.spreaker.com/episode/working-class-library-giving-up-the-ghost-hilary-mantel--65218089?ref=thebeemagazine.com) The Working Class Library is the Bee’s podcast. Each month, a writer joins Richard Benson, editor of the Bee, and Claire Malcolm, CEO of [New Writing North](https://newwritingnorth.com/?ref=thebeemagazine.com), to discuss a book and decide whether it deserves a place on the shelves of our imaginary library of great books by and about ordinary people. In our second episode, novelist [Louise Doughty](https://www.louisedoughty.com/?ref=thebeemagazine.com) drops in to consider Hilary Mantel’s 2003 memoir [Giving Up the Ghost](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/may/10/featuresreviews.guardianreview18?ref=thebeemagazine.com). Readers who came to Hilary Mantel after her double-Booker-winning success with Wolf Hall made her a star of the literary world may not be aware that she grew up in a working-class home in a Derbyshire mill town. She, however, said many times that that background had a decisive influence on her as a person and a writer, and in Giving Up the Ghost she shows how. In the end, her status as a working-class woman almost leads to her death. Her memoir prompts the question, how much things changed – or not? Thoughts? Comments? Thoughts apprehended from a spiritual plane? Please share them with us on our social media channels. ### Books Mentioned - Louise Doughty – [A Bird in Winter](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780571322190?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [Platform Seven](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780571321964?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [Apple Tree Yard](https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/apple-tree-yard-from-the-writer-of-bbc-smash-hit-drama-crossfire-louise-doughty/4191691?ean=9780571278640&ref=thebeemagazine.com), [Whatever You Love](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780571313440?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [Fires in the Dark](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781471137587?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [Stone Cradle](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781471137570?ref=thebeemagazine.com) - Hilary Mantel – [Every Day is Mother’s Day](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781841153391?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [Beyond Black](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780008609979?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [Vacant Possession](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781841153407?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [Wolf Hall](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780008381691?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [Bring Up the Bodies](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780008749576?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [Eight Months on Ghazzah Street](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780007172917?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [A Place of Greater Safety](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780007250554?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [The Mirror and the Light](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780008739553?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [Fludd](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780007172894?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [A Memoir of My Former Self: A Life in Writing](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781399813884?ref=thebeemagazine.com) [An Introduction to Giving Up the Ghost by Hilary MantelHer working-class background was overlooked, but the double-Booker winner said it determined how she saw the world.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/icon/favicon-9e0c372b-6cad-4470-a5bf-e0406b951355.png)The BeeGeorgia Poplett![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/thumbnail/mantel-c4f1d8b2-385e-405c-a167-eb92f539292a.jpg)](https://thebeemagazine.com/an-introduction-to-giving-up-the-ghost-by-hilary-mantel/) [Tip the Bee](https://thebeemagazine.com/#/portal/support) All donations go towards supporting the Bee’s mission to nurture, publish promote and pay for the best new working-class writing. ### An Introduction to Giving Up the Ghost by Hilary Mantel URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/an-introduction-to-giving-up-the-ghost-by-hilary-mantel/ Last updated: 2026-06-11T18:59:49.000Z [The Working Class Library Episode 2: Giving Up the Ghost by Hilary Mantel TKsExcerpt here![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/icon/favicon-17.ico)The BeeRichard Benson![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/thumbnail/giving-up-the-ghost.jpg)](https://thebeemagazine.com/the-working-class-library-episode-2-giving-up-the-ghost-by-hilary-mantel/) ### Hilary Mantel’s childhood: on the side of the hard sums [“We were northern, working-class and Catholic, and to me, Englishness was Protestant and southern, and owned by people with more money.”](https://www.repubblica.it/robinson/2021/09/03/news/interview%5Fhilary%5Fmantel%5Fireland%5Fmoving%5Fjk%5Frowling%5Fcancel%5Fculture%5Fboris%5Fjohnson%5Fwomen%5Fengland%5Fracism%5Frepubblica%5Fitalian%5Fnewsp-316078121/?ref=thebeemagazine.com) Hilary Mantel was born Hilary Mary Thompson on 6 July 1952 and raised in the mill village of Hadfield, Derbyshire. She was the oldest of three children. Her father was a clerk and her mother a school secretary. The family was Roman Catholic, though Mantel would later describe herself as lapsed from the age of 12\. Her great-grandparents were millworkers in County Waterford in Ireland before they moved to Derbyshire. Mantel experienced recurring bouts of ill health in childhood and was nicknamed “Little Miss Neverwell” by one of many doctors who would fail to diagnose or treat her properly. When she was seven, her mother’s lover, engineer Jack Mantel, moved in with the family; Mantel’s father slept in another bedroom for four years until the family moved to Cheshire without him. Mantel did not see her father again and took her stepfather’s surname. In an [interview](https://theartsdesk.com/books-theatre-tv/first-thing-i-do-when-i-wake-write-hilary-mantel-1952-2022?ref=thebeemagazine.com) the day after winning her first Booker prize, for *Wolf Hall* in 2009, Mantel recalled her school experience “in a classroom \[with\] two different blackboards, one with hard sums and one with easy sums. And all the children with holes in their jerseys were on the side with the easy sums. They had been written off already \[…\] I was on the side of the hard sums.” In 1970, aged 18, Mantel began studying law at the London School of Economics but after her first year transferred to Sheffield University, where she met fellow student Gerald McEwen. They married at the end of their second year, divorced in 1981, before remarrying in 1982\. Mantel would [later define](https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/alumni/news/hilary-mantel-interview-brendan-stone?ref=thebeemagazine.com) her reasons for studying law as influenced by a desire for “a good career \[…\] we had an inspiring teacher for criminal law, Professor Wood, who had a dry sense of humour and who was kind to me. I didn’t know, when I chose law, that my health problems would escalate and that I wouldn’t be able to have a career of that kind. The university looked after me when my health broke down.” While at Sheffield, Mantel identified as a socialist and was a member of the Young Communist League. ### Her first books, and worsening health After graduating in 1973, Mantel worked as a social worker and then as a shop assistant for Kendals department store in Manchester, during which time she began work on her first novel. (Completed in 1979, the book was rejected by agents and publishers and eventually published as *A Place of Greater Safety* in 1992.) In her twenties, Mantel’s health worsened, and she was wrongly diagnosed with a psychiatric illness. The antipsychotic medication she was prescribed only produced an experience of psychosis, destroying Mantel’s trust in medical professionals for a significant period of time. Before four difficult years spent in Saudi Arabia (which would inspire her third novel, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street), Mantel lived with her husband in Botswana, where he worked as a geologist, from 1977-1982\. In 1979, her discovery of endometriosis in a medical textbook led to her having a hysterectomy at the age of 27\. Mantel directly traced her illness to her reliance on writing as the only form of livelihood which her physical abilities allowed. Nonetheless, she later [said](https://theartsdesk.com/books-theatre-tv/first-thing-i-do-when-i-wake-write-hilary-mantel-1952-2022?ref=thebeemagazine.com), “it didn’t do me any good, diagnosing myself. It didn’t speed things up. It just made doctors think I was arrogant.” In 1985, Mantel’s first novel, *Every Day is Mother’s Day*, was published by Chatto & Windus to moderate critical acclaim. It was followed by a sequel, *Vacant Possession*, in 1986 (Chatto & Windus) and further novels *Eight Months on Ghazzah Street* (Viking, 1988); *Fludd* (Viking, 1989); *A Place of Greater Safety* (Viking, 1992); *A Change of Climate* (Viking, 1994); *An Experiment in Love* (Viking, 1995); *The Giant, O’Brien* (Fourth Estate, 1998); and *Beyond Black* (Fourth Estate, 2005). In 2003, Fourth Estate published a memoir, *Giving Up the Ghost*, and *Learning to Talk*, a collection of short stories. Mantel’s change of publisher came amid the tumultuous publishing landscape of the 1980s and 1990s, in which Penguin rose through multiple rapid acquisitions to become a titan of the market; the company acquired Chatto & Windus and made it an imprint in 1987\. Mantel’s list then moved to Penguin’s Viking imprint, where it remained until 1998, when she signed with Fourth Estate, an independent publisher acquired by HarperCollins in 2000\. Her backlist was reissued and rejacketed by Fourth Estate in 2010 in the wake of her Booker win, as is standard practice within the publishing industry. The staggering success of *Wolf Hall* (Fourth Estate, 2009) brought Mantel attention beyond the confines of so-called midlist fiction. Wolf Hall and its sequel, *Bringing Up the Bodies* (Fourth Estate, 2012), each won the Booker prize in their year of publication. (Mantel was only the fourth author and first woman to win the Booker more than once.) In 2020, the final title in the “Wolf Hall trilogy”, *The Mirror and the Light*, was longlisted for the Booker. In addition to the novels, Mantel was a prolific short-story writer – the 2014 collection *The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher* includes [the story](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/19/hilary-mantel-short-story-assassination-margaret-thatcher?ref=thebeemagazine.com) of the same year from which the book takes its title – critic and essayist, delivering the [2017 BBC Reith Lectures](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08vkm52/episodes/player?ref=thebeemagazine.com) on the role of history in culture. As of March 2025, her published works include: 12 novels; two short story collections; a memoir; a collection of her articles from, and correspondence with, the London Review of Books, *Mantel Pieces* (Fourth Estate, 2020); and *A Memoir of My Former Self* (John Murray, 2023) an posthumous anthology of autobiographical writings. Following complications arising after a stroke, Hilary Mantel died aged 70, on 22 September, 2022 – the day before her 50th wedding anniversary, and four days before a long-awaited move from her home in Devon to Ireland. ### (Not) Giving Up the Ghost *Giving Up the Ghost* was Mantel’s ninth book and first memoir, published into the tailwind of such commercial literary memoirs as Jung Chang’s *Wild Swans* (1991), Mary Karr’s *The Liars’ Club* (1995), Gore Vidal’s *Palimpsest* (1995), Martin Amis’s *Experience* (2000), and *A Life’s Work* by Rachel Cusk (2001). In a [preface](https://foxedquarterly.com/hilary-mantel-a-flickering-on-the-staircase/?ref=thebeemagazine.com) to a 2017 Slightly Foxed edition of the book, the biographer Maggie Fergusson wrote that “as \[Mantel\] reveals in a rapid-fire interview at the end of my battered paperback, \[*Giving Up The Ghost*\] was originally intended as a purely private exercise, like her diaries, only to be read by others after her death. What made her change her mind she doesn’t say.” Christopher Potter, author and managing director of the publishing house Europa Editions UK, was a publisher at Fourth Estate who played a key role in persuading Mantel to move there from Penguin. According to Potter, she had been commissioned to write a novel, but was struggling with writer’s block. Potter suggested that she produce a book of short stories to buy her extra time to write the novel. Mantel duly produced a sheaf of stories, which struck Potter as significantly autobiographical; this was confirmed by Mantel, who indicated that she had resisted publishing them before as she did not want her mother to read them. (However, she did agree to publish a selection in the [LRB](https://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/hilary-mantel?ref=thebeemagazine.com), a publication that her mother did not read.) Potter suggested she write an introduction to harness the stories together. This ended up being 35,000 words and became the bedrock for two of her books: *Giving Up the Ghost* and the *Learning to Talk* short story collection. He then again suggested she write a memoir, since her mother’s health was ailing, and she agreed. Mantel was apparently very keen on the idea of publishing in different genres while she worked her way through her writer’s block – these two interim titles proved instrumental in dissipating the block, causing her to begin work in earnest on what would later become *Beyond Black*. Potter agreed that Mantel was unusually tuned into the needs of the market and recognised her writing as her economic livelihood as well as her art. I asked whether he ever received pushback acquiring new titles from Mantel during the years in which she only sold modestly; he reflected that before Fourth Estate was acquired by HarperCollins, he held a significant amount of editorial sway in acquisitions meetings despite the fact that Mantel’s books “never sold” or were shortlisted for prizes. This situation changed after the company was sold (although Mantel fortunately sold well enough to justify future advances by then). He said that it was “a great mystery” to him as to why Mantel didn’t break out sooner than she did. He had tipped *The Giant, O’Brien* as her “big break”, but it was not longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction that year (1998) because, according to Potter, Fourth Estate submitted another book, *Larry’s Party* by Carol Shields, the eventual winner. Potter did not give figures, but did mention that what Fourth Estate paid for Mantel’s novels did not necessarily reflect her success in the market at that time. Potter added that Mantel didn’t speak much to him about her class identity, as their conversations usually circled around the mystery of life, dark forces, evil and science. (Oh, to be a fly on those walls!) He added that they did not come from similar backgrounds, which may have been a reason why she did not discuss hers with him. In Mantel’s own [words](https://theartsdesk.com/books-theatre-tv/first-thing-i-do-when-i-wake-write-hilary-mantel-1952-2022?ref=thebeemagazine.com), spoken the morning after winning the Booker for the first time, “You know it is going to change your career. It may not change your writing, but your career is a different thing.” In the same interview, Mantel noted that “writing \[*Giving Up the Ghost*\] was a freeing process in some ways. Although I’ve still got a lot of problems with my health, things have improved. And I think the memoir was saying, ‘Well, that was my past.’ And hanging on to the hope that things would be better. You see, I think what a book like \[*Wolf Hall*\] needs is a huge amount of energy, and physical and mental energy feed off one another. And I don’t think I could have done it when I was really ill. The writing of *Beyond Black*, my last novel, took me a long time. I had a gruelling few years and it held the book back. And then we began to climb up the other side, and I thought that I probably did have the energy to tackle it. It’s all about your internal economy, in a way. How much can you afford to spend?” *Giving Up the Ghost* was reviewed in [The Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/may/10/featuresreviews.guardianreview18?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [The New York Times](https://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/05/books/unsuited-to-everything.html?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [Publishers Weekly](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780805074727?ref=thebeemagazine.com) and [Kirkus Reviews](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/hilary-mantel/giving-up-the-ghost/?ref=thebeemagazine.com), and excerpted in the [London Review of Books](https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v25/n01/hilary-mantel/giving-up-the-ghost?ref=thebeemagazine.com). This clutch is notable for its appeal to a middle-class-and-above readership, despite Mantell’s working-class roots, which were largely glossed over by reviewers. In an [interview](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/may/04/biography.features?ref=thebeemagazine.com) with The Guardian in May 2003, *Giving Up the Ghost* was explicitly positioned as a health memoir, in which Mantel is said to offer “the account of a life haunted by illness and medical incompetence, written in words that never fail her.” (The interviewer finds another interplay between health and Mantel’s life, noting that the author is then living in “a former lunatic asylum \[…\] now a carpeted oasis she shares with her husband, Gerald.”) Strikingly, there are traces of pathologised ambition in the text which may resonate with the class tensions at play. After she began experiencing the symptoms of endometriosis aged 19, Mantel “was sent to a psychiatrist who diagnosed overambition.” Certainly there are gendered power relations at work here, too, but as Mantel herself said, “I was seethingly ambitious, I don’t make any secret of that. I needed to be somebody. The only way I could think of was by writing. Because all you need is paper and pencil and you can do it horizontal. \[…\] It was the cheapest source of power. Words are free.” In [diary excerpts](https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n21/hilary-mantel/diary?ref=thebeemagazine.com) published in the London Review of Books in November 2010, issued a month later as a UK-only ebook, *Ink in the Blood: A Hospital Diary*, Mantel writes scathingly on Virginia Woolf’s complaints about the “poverty of the language” used to describe illness: “What of the whole vocabulary of singing aches, of spasms, of strictures and cramps; the gouging pain, the drilling pain, the pricking and pinching, the throbbing, burning, stinging, smarting, flaying? All good words. All old words. No one’s pain is so special that the devil’s dictionary of anguish has not anticipated it. \[…\] No doubt language fails in that shuttered room called melancholia, where the floor is plush and the windowless walls are draped in black velvet \[…\] But then, mental suffering is so genteel; at least, until the dribbling sets in. Virginia only has decorous illnesses. She has faints and palpitations, fevers and headaches \[…\] Virginia never oozes. Her secretions are ladylike: tears, not bile. She may as well not have had bowels, for all the evidence of them in her book.” ### Anything with a white cover and sad face: the rise and fall of “misery memoirs” For Mantel, both language and the body appear to exist materially under the conditions of social class. Although these clues to Mantel’s socioeconomic backstory appear as essential stitches within the fabric of *Giving Up the Ghost* – “Persiflage is my nom de guerre. (Don’t use foreign expressions; it’s elitist \[…\] And as for transparency – window panes undressed are a sign of poverty, aren’t they?” – her class background was largely redacted in the publication and marketing of *Giving Up the Ghost*. Indeed, I noticed a general pattern that external comments on Mantel’s working-class identity were framed in terms of a necessary hardship to produce the genius of her work. This sense was pervasive in both publisher copy and in reviews. Perhaps the most famous (or infamous, as the case may be) memoir of this period was *Angela’s Ashes* (1996) by Frank McCourt, which enjoyed resounding critical acclaim and commercial success and significantly boosted the popularity of “misery lit” – and in particular “misery memoirs” – into the book charts. However, controversy surrounding accusations of inauthenticity were repeated with later works, such as James Frey’s now-discredited *A Million Little Pieces* (2003). A series of such scandals helped slow the rate of production of books of this type until it dropped off almost entirely in the latter half of 2008 (interestingly, coinciding with the global financial crash, perhaps creating a literary landscape in which the misery memoir resonated too powerfully for many readers). In December 2008, HarperCollins publisher Carole Tonkinson [told The Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/dec/01/constance-briscoe-misery-memoirs?ref=thebeemagazine.com) that there had been “a lot of over-publishing and publishing of stories that weren’t as good or well-written, and there have been a lot of problems legally with some of them \[…\] We are cutting back a bit.” *Giving Up the Ghost*’s place in this sub-genre is signified by the [hardback’s cover design and jacket](https://editions.covecollective.org/content/giving-ghost?ref=thebeemagazine.com). The back copy includes endorsements (all female, interestingly) from noted memoirists Rachel Cusk and Margaret Forster, along with the novelists Helen Dunmore, Clare Boylan and Carol Shields. In another quote on the front cover, Cusk likens the novel to Lorna Sage’s Bad Blood (2000), a memoir of working-class adolescence in Wales; Kathryn Hughes, in her introduction to a tenth anniversary edition of Bad Blood, roundly rejects the idea that the book is a misery memoir. Mantel’s memoir has had a range of cover designs and jackets. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/03/51SgyXHesUL._SL1152_.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/03/51TVRF19ZHL._AC_UF1000-1000_QL80_.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/03/71hEw0b7DxL._AC_UF1000-1000_QL80_.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/03/81H1IX4U3OL.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/03/y648.jpg) It is interesting that other than the reappearance of a teal colourway across several designs, the covers are not bound together by a certain set of images in the way that one might expect. In publishing today, there is a tendency to retain original cover designs with alternate colourways; the afterlives of Mantel’s memoir are a striking departure from this. Likewise, as the book moves beyond the late 90s/early 2000s memoir boom, the cover quotes shift from almost exclusively other memoirists in vogue, to more critical platforms such as The Guardian, with taglines emphasising Mantel’s Booker wins. We might say that the marketing strategy moves beyond memoir with a capital M and into Mantel with a capital M – but what was lost in the process? Was there an erosion of Mantel’s working-class origins and identity in the rush to claim or qualify her as a product of an increasingly middle-class Britain under Blair’s government? These covers acquire a particular significance in proximity to contemporaneous memoirs, especially those overtly coded as middle- or working-class. Though it is not a hard and fast rule across the board (Martin Amis’s Experience sported a similar cover), books marketed as misery memoirs predominantly had covers with titles in cursive fonts and black-and-white photographs of children, signalling formative experiences of abuse and/or hardship, frequently involving poverty. There may also be a point to be made here about Amis’s publishers costuming him in the guise of the working-class misery memoir to appeal to the same demographic, despite his privileged upbringing. The packaging of books in this way is seen more recently in the trend of the “shopping trolley” memoir – see for example Dr Jessica Taylor’s *Underclass* (2024) and Cash Carraway’s *Skint Estate* (2019). However, interestingly, this schema has also been adapted for political nonfiction – Paul Embery’s *Despised* (2020), Darren McGarvey’s *Poverty Safari* (2017), and Danny Dorling’s *Shattered Nation* (2023). A contrasting, emerging cover trend in the last decade has been the use of bright colourways layered on top of vintage personal photos, again with common usage of teal. From white covers with sad faces we seem to have moved towards blue-and-red covers with happy faces – but I would argue that this does not occlude troubling “misery lit” narratives beneath the surface. The most cursory of Google searches produces an array of red-and-teal colourway covers belonging to the “medical nonfiction” genre, an immensely popular genre today. Are there disturbing suggestions at play here to do with “pathologising” being working class? This comes with a suggestion that the working-class memoir is only worth reading once the author has got better/bettered themselves. This may be far too speculative – but the unexpected cover design dialogue between these two genres seems significant. ### “Most of us spend our lives in adaptation”: Mantel on stage and screen Though *Giving Up the Ghost*, *A Hospital Diary* and *Ink in the Blood: A Memoir of My Former Self* have not been adapted into another medium, her historical novels have been phenomenally successful in this regard. In her [final Reith Lecture](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08x9947?ref=thebeemagazine.com), Mantel spoke at length about the snags and troublespots of adaptation: “Fiction, if well written, doesn’t betray history, but opens up its essential nature to inspection. When fiction is turned into theatre, or into a film or TV, the same applies: there is no necessary treason \[…\] Indeed, the work of adaptation is happening every day; without it, we couldn’t understand the past at all. An event occurs once: everything else is reiteration, a performance \[…\] Most of us spend our lives in adaptation, aware we have a secret self, and aware that it won’t do. We send out a persona to represent us, to deal for us in public; there are two of us, one home and one away, one original and one adapted.” Mantel herself adapted *The Giant, O’Brien* into a BBC Radio 3 play broadcast in December 2002\. The Oscar-winning screenwriter Peter Straughn adapted the first two novels in the Wolf Hall trilogy for a six-part TV [miniseries](https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/m002473m/wolf-hall?ref=thebeemagazine.com), Wolf Hall, starring Mark Rylance, Damien Lewis, and Claire Foy, first shown on BBC Two in 2015\. The third book, The Mirror and the Light, was made into a six-episode series of its own, also written by Straughan for the BBC, broadcast in 2024\. Similarly, the Royal Shakespeare Company staged Wolf Hall Parts One & Two in 2013, adapted by Mike Poulton, and The Mirror and Light premiered in 2021, adapted by Mantel and Ben Miles (who played Thomas Cromwell in all three theatrical productions). Surveying her work in all its variety and diversity of form prompts the question: did any common threads in her writing bring the success she sought? After her first Booker win, Mantel [was asked](https://theartsdesk.com/books-theatre-tv/first-thing-i-do-when-i-wake-write-hilary-mantel-1952-2022?ref=thebeemagazine.com) whether she identified with the opening scene in *Wolf Hall*, in which Cromwell, as a child, is viciously beaten by his father. The interviewer wondered whether that particular scene revealed “any hint of being nicknamed ‘Neverwell’”. Mantel replied: “This has not happened to me. But I know about oppression. I know about oppression within the family \[…\] And when you notice something like that in childhood, \[the memories of oppression\] drive through your life. You’ve always got an eye out for underdogs.” --- *Georgia Poplett is a researcher who worked with The Bee and New Writing North as part of a placement supported by the* [*Northern Bridge Consortium*](https://northernbridge.ac.uk/?ref=thebeemagazine.com)*, a Doctoral Training Partnership funded by* [*the Arts and Humanities Research Council*](https://ahrc.ukri.org/?ref=thebeemagazine.com)*.* [Tip the Bee](https://thebeemagazine.com/#/portal/support) All donations go towards supporting the Bee’s mission to nurture, publish promote and pay for the best new working-class writing. ### Publishing’s Class Problem URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/publishings-class-problem/ Last updated: 2025-06-16T19:12:13.000Z In 2019, I used a chapter in Kit de Waal’s Common People: An Anthology of Working Class Writers to demonstrate the class crisis in the publishing industry. The launch of the Bee is a chance to reflect on what might have changed in the last five years. Since 2019, we’ve seen a huge range of research sounding the alarm about diversity in publishing generally, with specific research focused on social class. Sadly, little seems to have changed in the data on workforce demographics. This depressing story of continuity in the class crisis is despite high-profile discussions and interventions grappling with class in publishing. This essay offers an overview of how class gets measured in official statistics, what the limits of that measurement might be, and how this applies to publishing. It then looks at how middle-class dominance of key occupations in publishing has been consistent since 2014, and highlights research that has identified the reasons for this dominance. Finally it flags the question of what publishing loses when working-class origin people are missing from the industry. ### What is class? Class, to paraphrase Raymond Williams, is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language. On the one hand, class is quite a technical term, based on the jobs people do. On the other, it forms a crucial part of the sense of identity many people in Britain hold as part of their everyday lives, as well as their cultural expressions. This short discussion will try to introduce the “technical” and the “identity” ways of thinking about class. It is important to understand both ways of thinking about class *together*. When taken together, identities and technical measurements help us to show *how* occupations such as publishing are highly socially exclusive, and begin to explain *why* this is the case. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/02/anvil.png) The technical use of class is about understanding how economy and society are organised. Another way of thinking about how economy and society are organised is to ask how they are *structured.* This is where technical understandings of class come in. The most widespread and best known of these is the National Statistics Socio-economic Classification (NS-SEC). ### Measuring class The NS-SEC clusters occupations together into eight groups, from 1 (higher managerial and professional, which includes doctors, CEOs and lawyers) to 7 (routine occupations such as bar staff, care workers and cleaners), with 8 covering those who have never worked and the long-term unemployed. The NS-SEC groups are based on the way that jobs in each group have similar characteristics. For example, for the professional and managerial jobs, this is the terms of the employment contracts, the pay, the amount of autonomy or control employees have in their workplace, and the careers they are part of. The NS-SEC gives a clear definition of class, which is based on employment and occupation. It allows us to map jobs onto categories of middle and working class that are the terms people use in everyday discussions of class. As well as giving a clear definition of class, the NS-SEC means we can be clear about class-based forms of inequality. We can see, through this technical approach to class, how workers in different occupations have differing characteristics. ### Origins, destinations and identity So far, this discussion probably seems very dry, particularly for a subject as emotive as class. Moreover, it is especially dry if class is a crucial part of social inequality, another importantly emotive subject. So, we need to think about the other way people understand class, which is as part of their identity. Social surveys often show a big gap between the numbers of people who would be classified as working class, because their occupation is in the NS-SEC categories 6-7, and those who describe themselves as working class. Part of this self-description is about describing the feeling of being ordinary, just like everybody else. It is also a self-description that tells us about people’s class *origins*. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/02/shopping-cart.png) People’s class origins, in technical terms, are about what their parent or parents’ occupation was when they were growing up. This tells us a great deal about their class origin when we’re thinking about the big picture of who is from which occupational, NS-SEC, starting point. In turn, we know there is a relationship between parental profession and other social resources, such as family wealth or attendance at particular schools and universities. There are also other social patterns associated with occupation and parental occupation, such as forms of cultural participation and consumption. As with class, occupational understandings of social origin only take us so far in understanding people’s lived experiences and their own sense of identity. Counting the numbers of people with parents who are doctors, compared to the number with parents who are cleaners, can tell us about the patterns of class in society. This type of information, along with understanding the differences or similarities between people’s origins and their occupational destinations, has been the central concern for research on social mobility. At the same time, and much as with class, social mobility has a broader meaning in public and politicians’ languages, which asks whether society is fair? What are the chances of people making it into prestigious jobs? Or is success solely based on what your parents did for a living, where you went to school or university, and who your contacts are? It is useful to remember that the answers to these questions are not solely about class either. Class *intersects* with other big social categories, such as gender or ethnicity. Disability and sexuality are also important, as is immigration. Intersectional understandings are most crucial when we ask if specific groups are under- or over- represented in the workforce. This may then help to explain why specific voices and stories are absent from page, stage and screen. Class origins are a particularly difficult subject for researchers because many people’s self-descriptions are subtly different from how their parental occupational *origins* might be classified. This is made even more complicated by how people self-describe their class identity in the context of their jobs, their occupational *destinations*. ### The class crisis in publishing In publishing the core sets of occupations are classified as being professional and managerial jobs. This means they are middle-class occupations, middle-class *destinations* for the people working in them. This classification is irrespective of individuals’ social origins and the sometimes low pay and bad working conditions they may encounter in publishing. The fact that publishing is counted as a middle-class occupation might go some way toward explaining why we hear so many horror stories of people feeling excluded; of people feeling like they don’t quite fit with organisational or occupational cultures; and why the statistics on the class origins of people working in publishing are so alarming. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/2025/02/library-1.png) Publishing has a serious class problem. It is one of the most socially exclusive of all creative industries. In 2014, which was the first year class-origin data was available from the Office for National Statistics’ Labour Force Survey, almost half (47%) of all authors, writers and translators in the British workforce were from the most privileged social starting points (NS-SEC 1), contrasted to only 10% of those with parents from working-class origins (NS-SEC 6-8). For publishing as a whole, including occupations such as editors and journalists, the figures are still highly skewed towards those from middle-class starting points: 43% as opposed to 12%. Since then, the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre (PEC) has published several reports looking at class in the creative workforce. In 2021, this work included a specific case study on publishing, and the most recent data on key occupations in publishing was published in 2024\. The 2024 data shows a similar picture of middle-class origin dominance of publishing. Although there are year-on-year variations, since 2019 there has consistently been more than 60% proportions of middle-class origin people in publishing occupations. In the same period, working-class origin proportions have never been above 20%. PEC’s 2021 report, Social mobility in the Creative Economy: Rebuilding and levelling up?,identified several reasons for these ongoing class inequalities. These start early in life, with access to the arts and cultural subjects and extracurricular activities clearly differentiated by social class. Access to university, for an industry where almost everyone has a degree, is a further barrier, given the close relationship between class and educational outcomes. When people do try to enter publishing they encounter no- and low-pay positions, with internships in London a particular barrier for those without wealth and connections. In turn, as recent research on social mobility in publishing has shown, promotions and career success are shaped by class backgrounds. Even where those from working class origins get *in*, this is no guarantee of getting *on.* Who gets *on* in publishing shapes the power over and control of the industry. Who makes the crucial decisions, such as commissioning; who gets given support and resources for marketing; and, crucially, what sort of control and creative freedom is offered are all shaped by these workforce demographics. Class is not unique in this respect. Race and ethnicity, disability and gender are all important aspects of inequality in publishing. This is still the case even where the overall gender balance of the industry has more women, and where publishing makes an effort around better ethnic and racial diversity. One of the things that comes from the statistics is the question of who is missing from these numbers? This is not just about percentages or ratios, as important as they may be for policy or organisational change. It is about the narrowness of the workforce that may have little or no lived experience outside of the white, middle-class origin male. It is about the impact of that on who is permitted to speak, who is allowed to take risks, and who is only offered a clichéd or inaccurate “gap in the market”. Finally, it is about the lived realities that are overlooked, assumed to be unimportant by commissioners, and never given a chance. --- [Tip the Bee](https://thebeemagazine.com/#/portal/support) All donations go towards supporting the Bee’s mission to nurture, publish promote and pay for the best new working-class writing. ### Confessions of Nothing URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/confessions-of-nothing/ Last updated: 2025-06-16T19:12:31.000Z So we’re in my mum’s car. It’s olive green, with the kind of buff finish that makes it seem like it’s sparkling – not sure the make, hatchback though. I don’t have many memories of her driving. Actually just a few over this period and then no more, because she stopped not even a year after. Don’t know why. So we’re in my mum’s car and she’s driving and I’m in the driver’s seat. I’m about seven. Lara George’s new album’s just come out; my favourite song, “I’ll Write a Song About” is blasting in the car from the CD player. I nod and sing along. That day I was escorting you on your errand, Mum, which you would quickly run without me. I was searching the car as I always did when I was in a space I wasn’t used to: checking every crevice, opening shields and compartments that she probably didn’t know existed. In the glove compartment was a small bag filled with makeup. I pulled out something thin and cylindrical and held it up to the driver. “What’s this?” I asked. She took her eyes off the road for a second, too much time for a new driver. “That’s mascara.” I unscrewed the lid and SLOWLY pulled it out. It was a long tube of thin, black wand and then a fuzzy, sharp-looking brush at the end. This was confusing, not as clear use-wise as the lipstick and blush. “What’s it for?” I asked. “For your eyebrow. I mean eyelash.” I unscrewed the cap. “Don’t use it,” you said. I paused. “Why?” “It’s for adults.” That made it even more interesting. There was nothing separating me from grownups. I had already mastered crossing the road, and saved my idiot cousin from choking. Most importantly, I had upgraded from the teaspoon toddlers used to eat rice to the metal tablespoon used by Mum and Dad and the other adults. If this black brush was for adults, it was as well for me. But you didn’t need to repeat yourself for me to listen, and I screwed it back and put the makeup bag by the cupholder. You pulled up to the destination, with a location and appearance I can’t remember, put on the handbrake and got out. The heat was ushered in as soon as you turned off the engine and AC and opened the door – like it had been waiting, like it had been ready to swarm in all along and was waiting for you to leave. The air felt heavy, and a sort of anxiety clamped at my throat. I always had this idea that a car was a whole other space of residence and personhood, so this was the equivalent of being home alone, with no real adults, with the emptiness of the back seat as an eery reminder of possible danger. I tried to take my mind off the whole thing, circling back to the concept of extending my eyelashes. Using my pointed forefinger, I approached my eye horizontally, placing the flesh wand underneath my lashes, then letting the skin run through my lashes. I supposed that was how one used such a thing, glad I’d used my finger a nail scratched against my eyeball. I used a bad word I wasn’t meant to know, clutching my eye for a bit, making sure it didn’t bleed before trying again. This time, I softened the blow of my finger by wetting it, spitting all over the knuckles to lubricate it. I repeated the movement again, brushing my eye, watching my eyelashes clump up and grow thicker in the little car mirror. It was working! I celebrated inwardly as I continued the manoeuvre, smiling. The card made a clicking sound from the outside and I saw your figure at the driver’s seat. I watched as you got back into the car, excited to tell you my revelation. You took one look at me before responding. “You used mascara?” you immediately said. I was taken aback, hurt by what I should have read as a compliment on the effectiveness of my creative innovation. I scrambled to defend myself, hating the feeling of being misunderstood. “No, I didn’t,” I whined. “Tell the truth,” you muttered, tiredly. “I didn’t!” I asserted, my eyes welling up with tears. There was no real consequence to saying yes other than your disappointment. But I wouldn’t take an accusation for something I didn’t do. The brush over my invention, over the discovery I’d made with spit and flesh, left me almost too worked up to give further explanation. I licked my finger and brought it up to my eye in demonstration. “Look, Mum. I used my finger, look.” But you’d already put the car in ignition and reversed into the main road, driving on. I knew you weren’t angry, just willing to drop the whole thing and move on. The CD picked up automatically from my favourite song on the album, the jazzy notes falling on deaf ears as I sat in a bowl of feelings I couldn’t process. All I knew was I couldn’t blame anyone for how I was feeling other than myself and my desire for exploration, my wet finger feeling estranged from my body the whole day. I sat briskly for the rest of the journey, waiting for an apology I never asked for, which never came. I brought this scene up again years after, when the memory popped into my head. You didn’t remember it, but you asked the same question before I reached the end of my story. “So did you wear the mascara?” you asked again. I felt the rage from my seven-year-old body repossess me, this time tempered by a composure unusual for a teenager. “No,” I simply responded, offended that you thought this was some sort of decade-late confession. “I didn’t. That’s the whole point.” I tried to explain again, and you tried to understand, but I could see it wasn’t really landing. What was the point of this random memory that I’d brought up? The 244 made a sharp right into Ovatltine road, and the green of the petrol station behind your head served as a glaring reminder that this was no longer 2008 Lagos, Nigeria, and I was no longer seven years old. But, again, my mouth kept moving in explanation, which was met with well-meaning half-nods from you. This memory popped up again this week, but I won’t tell it to you a third time. I’m scared of what doing so would do to me; what anger or sterile indifference would overtake my body from 16 years ago. I can’t get to the bottom of what it was that irked me about the situation in the first place, which upon reflection was so aggressively nothing. Was I taking offence at the inference that my revolutionary technique couldn’t have achieved the same results as the common mascara manufacturers? Was it the fact you asked twice that day, questioning my character like I ever had a need to lie to you? Was it the fact that the first thing you said had undermined the discovery I’d made, about makeup, about my face and about myself and how my brain worked and its creative solutions? I was never able to convey that part of myself to you in a way we both understood, and that was difficult, I think. I didn’t use mascara on myself until I was 14, but that wasn’t because of you. The black and brushy wand proved much harder to use than my finger and spit, and after a few near-blinding attempts, I gave up. I used my own natural mascara all throughout Year Seven to Nine, in the toilet stalls of my all-girls school, at breaktime and lunchtime or before the end of the day, when I taught all my friends the technique before we went on the 401 bus home, eager to impress boys we didn’t even like. I wish I could’ve brought you along on that journey. The cramped bus was different to the calm stillness of your car: no favourite song playing, no cool compartments to look through or errands to run, but I still would’ve been there. And I would’ve shown you my wet-finger mascara prototype, my original Iron Man figures, and the ideas I had about the different ways we could store bread. I would’ve let you in on the random thoughts of a seven-year-old that are quite nonsensical and eye-poking. You could’ve wet your finger in solidarity and opened the journals of your seven-year-old self to resurrect your own crazy ideas. Or, and this would be most preferable, you could have trusted me enough to believe me as the bus led us down the road into the future of an adolescent girl we could’ve spent together. --- [Tip the Bee](https://thebeemagazine.com/#/portal/support) All donations go towards supporting the Bee’s mission to nurture, publish promote and pay for the best new working-class writing. ### The Working Class Library Episode 1: New Grub Street by George Gissing URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/the-working-class-library-episode-1-new-grub-street-by-george-gissing/ Last updated: 2025-06-17T15:50:40.000Z [Listen to "New Grub Street by George Gissing" on Spreaker.](https://www.spreaker.com/episode/new-grub-street-by-george-gissing--64715003?ref=thebeemagazine.com) The Working Class Library is the Bee’s podcast. Each month Richard Benson, editor of the Bee, and Claire Malcolm, CEO of [New Writing North](https://newwritingnorth.com/?ref=thebeemagazine.com), invite a writer to discuss a book and decide whether it deserves a place on the shelves of the Working Class Library – our imaginary library of great books by and about ordinary people. For our first episode, Richard and Claire are joined by [Simon James](https://www.durham.ac.uk/staff/s-j-james/?ref=thebeemagazine.com), Professor of English Literature at Durham University, and George Gissing expert, to consider Gissing’s 1891 novel [New Grub Street](https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/new-grub-street-george-gissing/17862?ean=9781847499219&ref=thebeemagazine.com). Gissing wrote New Grub Street to skewer the new literary crowd and their readers as books and magazines were exploding in popularity following the arrival of mass education in Britain. What can it teach us about book publishing, the British class system and working-class writers today? If you have any thoughts or comments on the show, please come and chat to us on our social media channels. ### Books Mentioned - John Carey – [The Intellectuals and the Masses](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780571169269?ref=thebeemagazine.com) - Charles Dickens – [Oliver Twist](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781785996252?ref=thebeemagazine.com) - EM Forster – [Howards End](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780141182131?ref=thebeemagazine.com) - George Gissing – [Charles Dickens: A Critical Study](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781845882372?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [New Grub Street](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781847499219?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [The Nether World](https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/George-Gissing/The-Nether-World/441447?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [The Odd Women](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781513281506?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [Workers in the Dawn](https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/George-Gissing/Workers-in-the-Dawn/7485250?ref=thebeemagazine.com) - Christine Huguet & Simon J James – [George Gissing and the Woman Question](https://www.routledge.com/George-Gissing-and-the-Woman-Question-Convention-and-Dissent/Huguet-James/p/book/9780367882242?srsltid=AfmBOop2jj3Pl1HWfHX896kosWqyT1L5EHnTYK0T4SK4H0G1HYgajXW-&ref=thebeemagazine.com) - Simon J James – [Unsettled Accounts: Money and Narrative in the Novels of George Gissing](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781843311089?ref=thebeemagazine.com) - George Orwell – [Keep the Aspidistra Flying](https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/George-Orwell/Keep-the-Aspidistra-Flying/15446930?ref=thebeemagazine.com) - Jonathan Rose – [The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes](https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/Rose-Jonathan-Rose/The-Intellectual-Life-of-the-British-Working-Classes/17621892?ref=thebeemagazine.com) - Douglas Stuart – [Shuggie Bain](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781529019292?ref=thebeemagazine.com) - Flora Thompson – [Lark Rise to Candleford](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9780141183312?ref=thebeemagazine.com) - Raymond Williams – [Culture and Society](https://www.hive.co.uk/Search/Keyword?keyword=Culture%20and%20Society&productType=0&ref=thebeemagazine.com) ### Other Links - [Tit-Bits Magazine](https://www.joyceproject.com/notes/040019titbits.htm?ref=thebeemagazine.com) - [A Room of My Own: What Writers Need to Work Today](https://rsliterature.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/RSL-A-Room-of-My-Own-Report-19-June-2019.pdf?ref=thebeemagazine.com) - [Authors’ Earnings in the UK](https://pec.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Authors-Earnings-in-the-UK-Creative-PEC-Policy-Brief-August-2023-Designed-v2.pdf?ref=thebeemagazine.com) For each episode of the Working Class Library podcast, we commission a contemporary working-class writer to write about some of the issues raised by the book we’ve been discussing. For New Grub Street, [Damian Kerlin](https://substack.com/@damiankerlin?ref=thebeemagazine.com) asks why publishers are making it more and more difficult for writers to be paid money owed to them. [An Introduction to New Grub StreetHow the troubled George Gissing inspired Orwell, and foretold the influence of Amazon, BookTok and poverty porn.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/icon/favicon-1.png)The BeeGeorgia Poplett![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/thumbnail/GissingHeader-1-1024x660-1.jpg)](https://thebeemagazine.com/an-introduction-to-new-grub-street/) --- [Tip the Bee](https://thebeemagazine.com/#/portal/support) All donations go towards supporting the Bee’s mission to nurture, publish promote and pay for the best new working-class writing. ### An Introduction to New Grub Street URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/an-introduction-to-new-grub-street/ Last updated: 2025-06-16T19:56:47.000Z [The Working Class Library Episode 1: New Grub Street by George GissingGissing expert Simon James joins us to consider how New Grub Street became so topical again, and to ask if it deserves a place in our fantasy library.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/icon/favicon.png)The BeeRichard Benson![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/thumbnail/new-grub-street-1.png)](https://thebeemagazine.com/the-working-class-library-episode-1-new-grub-street-by-george-gissing/) ### George Gissing’s youth: triumphs and tragedies George Gissing was born in Wakefield, Yorkshire in 1857, the first of five children. His father came from a family of Suffolk shoemakers and ran a chemist’s shop until his death in 1870, when George was 13\. George’s father had encouraged George’s studies, and George felt the loss keenly. Nevertheless, at 16 he won a scholarship to [Owens College](https://www.manchester.ac.uk/about/history-heritage/history/victoria/?ref=thebeemagazine.com) (later the University of Manchester), where his academic performance was initially outstanding, with his aptitude for English and Latin particularly noted. In Manchester, Gissing met Marianne Helen “Nell” Harrison, who is reported by some sources to have engaged in sex work. Owens College expelled Gissing when it was discovered that he had stolen from other students to support Nell financially. After a month’s hard labour in [Belle Vue Prison](https://manchesterhistory.net/manchester/gone/bvprison.html?ref=thebeemagazine.com) in 1876, he emigrated to Boston and then Chicago, serialising his short fiction in periodicals, including the Chicago Tribune. On his return to England, Gissing married Nell and moved to London, working as a private tutor (the experience possibly providing inspiration for his New Grub Street character Harold Biffen). During this period, he self-published his first novel, [Workers in the Dawn](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781906469139?ref=thebeemagazine.com). In 1884, his and Nell’s marriage broke down, which some Gissing scholars have attributed to Nell’s alcoholism. Nell died in a Lambeth slum four years later. Gissing identified her body, but he did not attend her funeral. ### Writing: a slow ascent That same year, 1888, Gissing embarked on a tour of Italy, where he nurtured his love of classical literature. (In a now-discredited turn of events, Gissing was posthumously suspected of Jack the Ripper’s crimes in a 1975 out-of-print [book](https://archive.org/details/jackripperdefini0000whit) by Richard Whittington-Egan, called [Jack the Ripper: The Definitive Casebook.](https://archive.org/details/jackripperdefini0000whit) The Italy trip proved to be an alibi, overlapping with the dates of the London murders.) Returning to London in 1891, Gissing met and married Edith Underwood, daughter of a Camden Town shopkeeper. Their first son, Walter, was born in 1891\. The family moved to Exeter and Brixton before settling in rural Epsom in 1894, where the couple’s second son, Alfred, was born in 1896\. There, Gissing socialised with the literati of the day, including writer [HG Wells](http://hgwellssociety.com/?ref=thebeemagazine.com), and the renowned economist and reformist [Clara Collet](http://www.clara-collet.co.uk/?ref=thebeemagazine.com). This second marriage was strained: Gissing accused Edith of violent rages and, in 1896, sent Walter to live with his unmarried sisters in Wakefield without Edith’s knowledge. The couple finally separated in 1897\. Edith died in 1917 aged 46, in an asylum where she had been confined since 1902\. It is not clear whether Gissing arranged for her confinement, or who otherwise funded her institutionalisation. In addition to his tendency to sell off his copyright quickly, often at a loss, Gissing’s failure to negotiate timely payment schedules with his publishers – and his publishers’ failures to offer responsible royalties – forced him to produce one or more novels a year in order to live off his writing. However, he began to live more comfortably off his earnings towards the end of his life. His literary star ascended, and he wrote prefaces for five of Charles Dickens’s novels between 1900 and1901\. But his health worsened and, in 1898, he departed for Europe’s warmer climate, entering into a bigamous marriage with Frenchwoman and translator of New Grub Street, [Gabrielle Marie Edith Fleury](https://archive.org/details/lettersofgeorgeg0000giss%5Fw6g3/page/n5/mode/2up). On 28 December 1903, in [Saint Jean de Luz](https://victorianweb.org/authors/gissing/grave.html?ref=thebeemagazine.com), Gissing died of myocarditis. ### Publishing: ‘A trade of the damned’[\[1\]](#fn1) New Grub Street was the ninth of Gissing’s 23 novels. His first – the [three-decker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-volume%5Fnovel?ref=thebeemagazine.com) [Workers in the Dawn](https://victorianweb.org/authors/gissing/proposal.html?ref=thebeemagazine.com) – was rejected by multiple publishers and ultimately self-published using the proceeds of a small family inheritance, but proved a commercial failure. Over the course of his five subsequent works, Gissing developed his take on the popular Victorian condition-of-England [form of fiction](https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780199799558/obo-9780199799558-0011.xml?ref=thebeemagazine.com): a politically engaged genre reflecting on contemporaneous labour relations, the class divide, and industrial themes. Gissing’s version was characterised by the presentation of morally upright protagonists struggling in dismal economic circumstances, often contrasted with working-class characters to draw out class differences. His second foray into this genre – [The Unclassed](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9783752354959?ref=thebeemagazine.com), published by Chapman and Hall in 1882 – was another commercial failure. Of these first novels, Gissing sold his copyright outright for between £100 and £150 (around £15,000 to £23,000 today). This in an era in which the difference in the average annual income of the gentry and the working class was less than £300 per year.[\[2\]](#fn2) These, then, were the material conditions in which [New Grub Street](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781847499219?ref=thebeemagazine.com) would be written. Gissing’s upfront payment from his publisher was £150, but off the back of its success Gissing was able to negotiate a £200 advance for his next novel, [Born in Exile](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781714376261?ref=thebeemagazine.com) (1892). Towards the late 1890s he was making upwards of £350 per book. Gissing first began work on *New Grub Street* in October 1890, and delivered the finished manuscript to publishers [Smith, Elder & Co](https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/art-artists/organisation/smith-elder-and-company-london?ref=thebeemagazine.com) the following December. By April 1891, the novel was in print. It would become his most famous book, popularised in part by the later devotion of [George Orwell](https://newcriterion.com/article/remembering-george-gissing/?ref=thebeemagazine.com). Rare bookseller [James Cummins](https://www.jamescumminsbookseller.com/?ref=thebeemagazine.com) reports that *New Grub Street’s* first print run comprised 500 to 750 copies. Exact figures are difficult to ascertain, but it is suggested that 390 of these were sold to lending libraries. Reviews of rare booksellers’ prices suggest that [New Grub Street](https://www.abebooks.co.uk/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=30918383056&searchurl=an=george+gissing&attrs=fe&ds=30&fe=on&rollup=on&sortby=17&tn=new+grub+street&cm%5Fsp=snippet-%5F-srp0-%5F-title17&ref=thebeemagazine.com)’s first print run actually involved closer to 500 copies, with a further 250 being printed for the second print run later in 1891. ### New Grub Street, commercial fiction, and the rise of the lending library ### In the early modern period under Queen Elizabeth I, all printing was banned outside of London, Oxford, Cambridge and York. After the lapse of the [1662 Licensing Act in 1695](https://earlybookmarket.com/printing-geography.html?ref=thebeemagazine.com), the printing trade was stringently monitored for sedition by the Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers, under the purview of the Bishop of London and the Archbishop of Canterbury.[\[3\]](#fn3) Printing presses and their publishers were therefore largely circumscribed within the national centre of commerce – the City of London – around which communities of jobbing writers sprang up in the late 19th century.[\[4\]](#fn4) The title New Grub Street is an extended play on Grub Street, a London alley first described by Samuel Johnson and used as a metonym for commercial publishing, as Wall Street is used today for the stock market.[\[5\]](#fn5) The name Grub Street originated from a refuse ditch that reportedly ran alongside the street, but soon came to signify what was produced from the pen of the so-called “needy scribbler”.[\[6\]](#fn6) The real Grub Street is now known as Milton Street. It is beside the [Barbican Estate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbican%5FEstate?ref=thebeemagazine.com) in North London, an area in which some publishers still maintain offices. The original Grub Street’s proximity to the British Library is also important – as seen in New Grub Street, the library became an important hub for writers in the 19th century. Grub Street writers usually resided in the garrets of buildings, which were cheap to rent owing to their cramped, sloped ceilings; damp and cold conditions under uninsulated roofs; and inaccessibility.[\[7\]](#fn7) Similar conditions are found in New Grub Street, of course. It was not easy for late Victorian writers to make money, and the economic pressure on them was intensified by the three-decker format. In Gissing’s period, novels were conventionally published in three volumes before being more cheaply reissued. Lending libraries like that of the well-known [Charles Mudie](https://www.lindahall.org/about/news/scientist-of-the-day/charles-mudie/?ref=thebeemagazine.com) insisted on a 12-month interval between editions, similar to the standard [period](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/25/book-clinic-why-do-publishers-still-issue-hardbacks?ref=thebeemagazine.com) of a year between hardback/ebook and paperback editions in publishing today. On their own, these three-volume first editions retailed at 33s/6d – equivalent to £114.68 today – but they were sold to the lending libraries at half price. Mudie commonly bought at least 100 copies. The purchasing power of him and the other lending libraries could make or break a late Victorian writer’s career, forcing them to choose between enduring a slower production pace but making a guaranteed sale and accessing a much larger circulation of readers, or selling their copyright back to their publishers at a probable loss. ### Gissing v ‘the triple-headed monster’ For example, Gissing saw reprint rights on [New Grub Street](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781847499219?ref=thebeemagazine.com) of a halfpenny per copy up to 25,000 copies, rising to three-quarters of a penny thereafter. For reference, the average annual working wage in England in the mid-1880s is quoted as being £42/12s, or £6,860 today.[\[8\]](#fn8) Lending libraries like Mudie’s generally charged their subscribers one guinea annually (£69.50 today). They enjoyed an effective stranglehold on the market of working-class and lower middle-class readers.[\[9\]](#fn9) Gissing’s feelings towards the three-decker format are perhaps embodied in Edwin Reardon’s hatred of “the triple-headed monster”: while three-volume novels paid more and were associated with more “literary” prestige, they demanded more time and energy to write than a single-volume novel. Indeed, Reardon estimates that one three-decker work generated the same income as four single volumes.[\[10\]](#fn10) Mudie and other circulating libraries favoured formulaic writing and stock plots as the century progressed, reducing the margins for more experimental novels until the [Net Book Agreement of 1900](https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780191863592.001.0001/acref-9780191863592-e-159?ref=thebeemagazine.com), which dictated set prices for novels within the literary marketplace. Gissing’s first two rejections from Smith, Elder & Co cite their fear that neither book appealed to the Mudie reader, hence their commercial nonviability – recalling Jasper Milvain’s opening assertion that the “successful man of letters … thinks first and foremost of the markets”. Strikingly, New Grub Street’s first-edition [title page](https://www.jonkers.co.uk/rare-book/5171/new-grub-street/george-gissing?ref=thebeemagazine.com) copy emphasises Gissing’s credentials as a prolific writer of the three-decker as their marketing strategy. ### Slum fiction and the origins of the mass market Although the reading public was more evenly weighted between the upper, middle and lower classes in the aftermath of the [1870 Education Act](https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/livinglearning/school/overview/1870educationact/?ref=thebeemagazine.com), which made provision for children’s schooling between the ages of five and twelve, there is a question of time and labour here. As the middle classes gained additional leisure, the industrialisation of 19th-century life absorbed the working classes into increased labour. So when we think about who exactly was reading what became known as [“slum fiction”,](https://victorianweb.org/genre/slumfiction/intro.html?ref=thebeemagazine.com)evidence suggests that it was fewer working- than middle- and upper-class readers, who may have approached these works as titillating portraits of poverty. In an era of widespread wholesale slum clearance, did slum fiction play into certain sensationalised ideas about working-class life as received by the middle-class reading public, or did its popularity derive from its more *accurate* depiction of working-class life, which appealed to a newly-literate working-class public? To help answer this question, we might look to the readership and circulation numbers of the literary periodicals in which Gissing’s work was reviewed. (Of note, too, is that, despite this expanded literacy, taxes on paper, newspapers, and advertising meant reading largely remained the preserve of the wealthy, as [Frederick Nesta](https://www.scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/libraries/article-abstract/5/2/289/227022/Gissing-Grub-Street-and-the-Transformation-of?ref=thebeemagazine.com) has explored.)[\[11\]](#fn11) Nesta estimates that, by the 1890s, “there was potentially an English-reading audience of 120 million” across the UK, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and India, as compared to only “50,000 only 65 years before”. This meant there was a market in which writers could try to sell the serial and translation rights for their work. However, as indicated earlier, Gissing appears to have followed the “gentlemanly” letter of an antiquated publishing age, engaging directly with Smith, Elder, and selling them his copyright outright. [George Smith](https://www.oxforddnb.com/display/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-36138?ref=thebeemagazine.com) (the Smith of publishers Smith, Elder) had Gissing to dinner at his home several times, often reminiscing about editing [Charlotte Brontë](https://www.annebronte.org/2022/07/10/brontesinlondon/?ref=thebeemagazine.com) in what Gissing apparently considered to be an insufficiently reverent tone. This is how publishing was done in the early 19th century, and it contrasts strongly with Milvain’s rather more commercial late-19th-century approach seen in New Grub Street. On the whole, it appears to have benefited publishers more than their authors. What makes New Grub Street so prescient now is Gissing’s laying bare of the intersections of literary taste with the way writing is sold and distributed. Since the mid 1990s, we have been living through the greatest shift in mass reading habits and book production since the 1880s, many of those changes are not dissimilar to those in this great realist novel. Amazon, controlling around half of all new-book sales in 2019, according to the *Wall Street Journal*, can be seen as a modern Mudie’s, although it also a publisher, with multiple book imprints, some of which like Audible dominate their sectors. In “Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon”, the literary scholar Mark McGurl argues that Kindle Direct Publishing is the “most dramatic intervention into literary history”, on the grounds that it allows writers to circumvent traditional gatekeepers and publish their own work. “The rise of Amazon,” he says, “is the most significant novelty in recent literary history, representing an attempt to reforge contemporary literary life as an adjunct to online retail.” Add to this the impact of social media, from BookTok to literary subreddits, and you have another dispiriting turmoil for literary writers like the one that so depresses Reardon. ### Women, snobbery and the market The feminisation of the Victorian literary mass market during this period is also an important context, especially given the success of Gissing’s later novel [The Odd Women](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781961884243?ref=thebeemagazine.com) (1893).[\[12\]](#fn12) Middle-class women made up a majority of the Victorian reading public, with “popular” novels (especially those of a Gothic persuasion, like [Ann Radcliffe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann%5FRadcliffe?ref=thebeemagazine.com)’s) attaining major commercial status. At the same time, the 1870 Education Act had swelled popular readership so that, culturally speaking, writers in the late Victorian era shifted away from the Romantic idea of the “lone genius” towards the model lower-brow working professional. In this new era, writing had shifted from the elite preserve of the genteel to be classed alongside the [clerical work](https://www.victorianvoices.net/topics/work/clerical.shtml?ref=thebeemagazine.com) so despised by New Grub Street’s Amy Reardon. Moreover, as Stephen Whiting [shows](https://academic.oup.com/jvc/article/27/4/686/6656062?ref=thebeemagazine.com), the intellectually inferior books now being produced for the mass market were not “envisaged as morally and culturally enriching \[but\] intellectually harmful”. Strikingly, as expanded literacy rates coincided with rising concerns around contagion and public health, classical literature was seen to epitomise moral and physical improvement in direct contrast to the popular penny dreadfuls and similar. This was in part the case behind Matthew Arnold’s influential arguments in [Culture & Anarchy](https://www.britannica.com/topic/Culture-and-Anarchy?ref=thebeemagazine.com) (1869). Such literary snobbery was hardly new. Indeed, Daniel Defoe’s 1722 masterpiece [Moll Flanders](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781788882057?ref=thebeemagazine.com) tried (unsuccessfully) to evade the [Stationers’ Company](https://www.stationers.org/?ref=thebeemagazine.com)’s censorship by occluding its less seemly (ie socially realistic!) qualities under the façade of “[spiritual autobiography](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiritual%5Fautobiography?ref=thebeemagazine.com)”. Within this Church of England-sanctioned genre, a certain fall from grace was permissible in order to facilitate the necessary narrative arc of Christian redemption. However, in Victorian London, the genre of “hack” writing being produced out of Grub Street was remarkable for the fact that working-class readers were now able to purchase and read about the lives of working-class characters, in books often written by writers who were themselves from the working classes. It also crested a *fin de siècle* wave of changes in 19th-century life that would go on to be made particularly visible by the first world war. ### Victorian ‘ecologies of paper’ In part, though, the failure of Gissing’s early novels may be traced to not only a crowded market of new writers, but what [Richard Menke](https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/victorianstudies.61.1.03?ref=thebeemagazine.com) calls a crowded “ecology of paper”.[\[13\]](#fn13) In 1887, a boom in Spanish esparto grass crops and wood fibre caused a ripple effect through the British paper production and publishing industries, with more books commissioned, bought and printed than ever before. On top of increased literacy rates, this meant that, for the first time in history, the working classes comprised a significant portion of the reading public, opening up changing literary tastes – and, especially, an appetite for novels that accessed everyday experiences beyond those of the upper- and middle-classes. This unique set of circumstances helped to make Victorian London a publishing metropolis that seriously challenged Oxford and Cambridge, whose businesses were founded on their knowledge economies, Clive Hill argues.[\[14\]](#fn14) Disparaging critical attitudes towards such “middlebrow” publishing, to which Gissing’s New Grub Street belonged, were born in part from the “complicated and deeply contested process \[of\] democratisation of social and political life in 19th-century Britain”. ### Reviews and popular/critical reception On 2 May 1891, the [Saturday Review](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturday%5FReview%5F%28London%5Fnewspaper%29?ref=thebeemagazine.com) featured an unsigned review of New Grub Street that took issue with Gissing’s portrait of literary London: “The entire population does not consist of worthy ‘realistic’ novelists, underpaid and overworked on one side, and of meanly selfish and treacherous, but successful, hacks on the other”.[\[15\]](#fn15) However, less than a week later, another reviewer in the same publication praised Gissing’s “instinct with life” and “picture, cruelly precise in every detail, of this commercial age”. (We might be reminded here of Milvain’s side hustle ghostwriting reviews.) Other reviews in [the Whitehall Review,](https://www.victorianresearch.org/atcl/show%5Fperiodical.php?jid=108&ref=thebeemagazine.com) [the Athenæum](https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/serial?id=athenaeum&ref=thebeemagazine.com), and [the Author](https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/serial?id=theauthoruk&ref=thebeemagazine.com) throughout the 1890s all lauded the novel’s expert realism, indicating Gissing’s position at the head of this emergent style of writing. Over the course of his career, Gissing’s novels were reviewed in such periodicals as the [Illustrated London News](https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/serial?id=illuslondonnews&ref=thebeemagazine.com), the [Spectator](https://www.spectator.co.uk/?ref=thebeemagazine.com) and more. Taking the Illustrated London News as representative to give an indication of Gissing’s readership: at its peak in the late 19th century, the magazine enjoyed a circulation of around 300,000, overwhelmingly made up of the middle classes.[\[16\]](#fn16) Can we consider these reviews to be engaging with class issues in a meaningful way, then, or are the reviewers again writing from a middle-class perspective in considering the “realism” of Gissing’s fiction? ### Gissing and realism We might think of earlier realist novels like \[George Eliot\]([https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cambridge-companion-to-george-eliot/introduction-george-eliot-and-the-art-of-realism/A2B3A79E33C8712CE74AE7C4F6249947#:\~:text=Eliot's](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cambridge-companion-to-george-eliot/introduction-george-eliot-and-the-art-of-realism/A2B3A79E33C8712CE74AE7C4F6249947?ref=thebeemagazine.com#:~:text=Eliot's) realism extends from the,aspect of her realist project.)’s [The Mill on the Floss](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/mar/27/eliot-mill-floss-biography-tulliver?ref=thebeemagazine.com) (1860) as a precedent for Gissing’s work, but the class structures that are made explicit in New Grub Street should not be glossed over. While Eliot was also concerned with the inequities of Victorian society, Maggie Tulliver is a squarely middle-class construction, as are the pastoral environs of St Ogg’s. Likewise, Eliot’s work has a relationship with [Wordsworth’s aesthetic philosophy](http://www.concentric-literature.url.tw/issues/Flows/10.pdf?ref=thebeemagazine.com) in the figuring of rural working-class communities and characters as part of an integrated whole, corresponding to paternalistic attitudes around lack of accessible education and intellectual “purity”. As [Raymond Williams](https://raymondwilliams.co.uk/about-raymond-williams/?ref=thebeemagazine.com) demonstrates in [Culture and Society: 1780-1950](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781784870812?ref=thebeemagazine.com) (1965), Eliot and other writers like her sought to deny the importance of the power of social class in people’s identities. What did Gissing himself make of this endeavour? In an 1895 letter to [Thomas Hardy](https://www.hardysociety.org/?ref=thebeemagazine.com), he wrote, “As for work, I am writing a lot of scrappy things, to be called ‘Human Odds & Ends,’ for the Sketch \[a British illustrated weekly journal\] – blotched impressions of miserable, squalid lives. They are not worth much, but such work must needs be done, & \[his editor, Clement\] Shorter tells me that this kind of thing extends one’s public.”[\[17\]](#fn17) In an earlier letter to his publishers, on 8 February 1887, Gissing had expressed his disappointment at their £50 offer for his latest title, [Thyrza](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781406544879?ref=thebeemagazine.com), and suggested that the book might benefit from being published with a list of his previous titles: “My signed work has got for itself a certain recognition, which should certainly increase the market value of what I now write.” The sum of £50 in 1887 is equivalent to about £8,200 today – in line with current mid-tier fiction title advances, which are usually in the £5,000 to £10,000 range – indicating how little 137 years has moved the needle in terms of author advance payments.[\[18\]](#fn18) In a European context, Gissing’s work tapped into a genre of social realism that was already popular across France and Italy. In Italy, particularly, the literary genre of [*verismo*](https://www.britannica.com/art/verismo-Italian-literature?ref=thebeemagazine.com) had first been described by [Luigi Capuana](https://www.mhra.org.uk/pdf/td-13-2.pdf?ref=thebeemagazine.com) in 1872\. Gissing met his third wife Gabrielle Fleury after she wrote to him requesting to translate his work into French, indicating an appetite for social realism on the continent. (We might even wonder to what extent Gissing came into contact with this genre during his 1888 Italy trip, although it is difficult to get a sense of this from his letters from the time.) However, in rigidly sticking to the antiquated system of publishing favoured by Smith, Elder – in which Gissing dealt directly with his editor, who bought his entire copyright for a fixed rate – it appears that Gissing himself benefited little from the social realism moment in Europe beyond its minor ripple effect on the British market. Perhaps the instinct of Harold Biffen, New Grub Street’s realist writer character, was right: he may indeed have been better off had he tried to publish his novel The Grocer into Europe’s rather more fertile social realist literary market, instead of London’s. ### The afterlives of New Grub Street There have been few adaptations of New Grub Street. In [1972](https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/schedules/service%5Fbbc%5Fradio%5Ffourfm/1972-08-27?ref=thebeemagazine.com), [2002](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yng%5FiVhA9ZU&ref=thebeemagazine.com), and [2016](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07q2r4v?ref=thebeemagazine.com), the novel was adapted as separate radio plays, all for BBC Radio 4\. There are reports of an iPad videogame series developed by Elizabeth Chang and Nathan Boyer, [Adventures of a Hack](https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/62782775.pdf?ref=thebeemagazine.com), based loosely on the infrastructure of the novel. And in 2005, Christopher Douglas created the comedy radio series [Ed Reardon’s Week](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006r5ck?ref=thebeemagazine.com), which transposed the novel’s themes and certain characters to a contemporary setting. More recently, in January 2024, Gissing himself was the subject of [a Spectator character study](https://thespectator.com/book-and-art/george-gissing-born-exile/?ref=thebeemagazine.com) by DJ Taylor. It’s interesting to ask, as we do in the podcast: what is it about New Grub Street that makes it so importable to a radio form, as opposed to TV or film? The obvious conclusion would be the lack of a happy ending – or rather its long and very unhappy one. After Gissing’s death, HG Wells hailed him as “the master and leader of the English realistic school”, to whom later realist writers ought to feel indebted. Gissing’s work also had a profound influence on George Orwell who, in a 1948 [essay](https://orwell.ru/library/reviews/gissing/english/e%5Fgis?ref=thebeemagazine.com) on Gissing, wrote that “England has produced very few better novelists”. In the essay, Orwell used Gissing to exemplify his construction of “the novel” more broadly, as “a story which attempts to describe credible human beings, and – without necessarily using the technique of naturalism – to show them acting on everyday motives and not merely undergoing strings of improbable adventures. A true novel, sticking to this definition, will also contain at least two characters, probably more, who are described from the inside and on the same level of probability – which, in effect, rules out the novels written in the first person.” Likewise, Orwell’s analysis of the formal qualities of Gissing’s style (“certainly there is not much of what is usually called beauty, not much lyricism, in the situations and characters that he chooses to imagine, and still less in the texture of his writing”) make visible a throughline with his earlier 1946 essay, Politics and the English Language. Interestingly, Orwell also notes that he has “never been able to get hold of” any of Gissing’s works beyond New Grub Street\_,\_ [Demos](https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15568/9781906469177?ref=thebeemagazine.com) and The Odd Women\_,\_ gesturing towards the strangely patchy availability of Gissing’s *oeuvre* in the 20th century. The increase in the availability of his works, together with his growing profile in literary studies, suggests that in the 21st century, contemporary readers are finding new relevance in Gissing’s work. #### Notes for researchers Gissing’s copyright appears to have lapsed and he appears not to have a designated estate, though there is a [Gissing Trust](https://www.wakefieldhistoricalsociety.org.uk/links/the-gissing-trust/?ref=thebeemagazine.com) dedicated to the upkeep of his childhood home. His archives include [one collection housed by the University of Manchester](https://www.library.manchester.ac.uk/rylands/special-collections/a-to-z/detail/?mms%5Fid=992983876710601631&ref=thebeemagazine.com) (comprising 180 printed items and 384 archive items, ie manuscript material, including an extract from his boyhood diary, and candid letters to his sister, Ellen), and two other collections currently maintained in the US: the [Yale George Gissing collection](https://archives.yale.edu/repositories/11/resources/661?ref=thebeemagazine.com) (comprising ten boxes and one portfolio of letters, manuscripts, publisher agreements, school certificates and photographs), and the [New York Public Library George Gissing collection of papers](https://archives.nypl.org/brg/19211?ref=thebeemagazine.com) (comprising 1,108 items in both French and English, described as manuscripts, correspondence, diaries from 1879-1913, a commonplace book, financial and legal documents, pictorial material, and flora). #### Further reading In addition to the footnotes, the below articles may of particular interest: Circulating Libraries in the Victorian Era by Troy J Bassett (Oxford Research Encyclopedias, 2017) Bassett breaks down the structural and commercial functions of the Victorian lending libraries, drawing comparisons to modern-day retailers like Amazon George Gissing’s Ambivalent Realism by Aaron Matz (Nineteenth-Century Literature, vol 59, no 2, 2004) Here, Matz pulls out key reviews and responses to the Victorian realist literary movement to inform understanding of the critical reception of Gissing’s work The Reception of George Gissing in China by Ying Ying (English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, vol 58, no 2, 2015) Ying considers the reception of Gissing’s work in a Chinese context, with an emphasis on culturally specific labour relations, and maps the evolution of “Gissing studies” in the 20th century. Also places a particular emphasis on the train in New Grub Street as a meaningful juxtaposition of “aesthetic value with thematic significance” for Chinese scholars A History of British Publishing by John Feather (Routledge, 2006) A comprehensive and accessible history of publishing in the UK, designed as a primer for students on creative industry placements and courses. Tours through the development of the industry from its early modern origins to the 21st century, and locates the British publishing industry within the context of competing disciplines like education, politics and technology --- 1. George Gissing\_, London and the Life of Literature in Late Victorian England: The Diary of George Gissing, Novelist\_, ed. [Pierre Coustillas](https://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=dp%5Fbyline%5Fsr%5Fbook%5F2?ie=UTF8&field-author=Pierre+Coustillas&text=Pierre+Coustillas&sort=relevancerank&search-alias=books-uk&ref=thebeemagazine.com) (Harvester Press, 1978). [↩︎](#fnref1) 2. Gerald Hull, “George Gissing, New Grub Street and the Writer’s Inner World: Relevance and Disaster” (essay, University of Wales, Bangor, 2018). Accessed 10 June, 2024, [https://www.brlsi.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/George-Gissing-essay-Feb-2018.pdf](https://www.brlsi.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/George-Gissing-essay-Feb-2018.pdf?ref=thebeemagazine.com). [↩︎](#fnref2) 3. D Duhaime, “The Statute of Anne and the Geography of English Printing” in *Copyright and the Early English Book Market: An Algorithmic Study.* Accessed 18 June, 2024, [https://earlybookmarket.com/printing-geography.html#:\~:text=After](https://earlybookmarket.com/printing-geography.html?ref=thebeemagazine.com#:~:text=After) the 1662 Licensing Act,at a fairly steady rate. [↩︎](#fnref3) 4. “Industries: Printing” in *A History of the County of Middlesex: Volume 2, General; Ashford, East Bedfont With Hatton, Feltham, Hampton With Hampton Wick, Hanworth, Laleham, Littleton* (1911). Accessed 19 June, 2024, [https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/middx/vol2/pp197-200](https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/middx/vol2/pp197-200?ref=thebeemagazine.com). [↩︎](#fnref4) 5. Bob Clarke, *From Grub Street to Fleet Street: An Illustrated History of English Newspapers to 1899* (Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 2004). [↩︎](#fnref5) 6. “Grub Street, N.” Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford University Press, 2023). [↩︎](#fnref6) 7. Ian Rock, “How to Repair Your Victorian Roof” in *Real Homes* (2019). Accessed 26 June, 2024, [https://www.realhomes.com/advice/how-to-repair-your-victorian-roof](https://www.realhomes.com/advice/how-to-repair-your-victorian-roof?ref=thebeemagazine.com). [↩︎](#fnref7) 8. Arthur L Bowley, *Wages in the United Kingdom in the Nineteenth Century: Notes for the Use of Students of Social and Economic Questions* (CJ Clay & Sons, 1900). [↩︎](#fnref8) 9. Guinevere L Griest. *Mudie’s Circulating Library and the Victorian Novel* (Indiana University Press, 1970). [↩︎](#fnref9) 10. George Gissing, *New Grub Street* (Smith, Elder & Co, 1891). Accessed 3 June, 2024, [https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1709/pg1709-images.html](https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1709/pg1709-images.html?ref=thebeemagazine.com) [↩︎](#fnref10) 11. Frederick Nesta, *George Gissing, Grub Street, and The Transformation of British Publishing* (Edward Everett Root, 2020). [↩︎](#fnref11) 12. Stephen Whiting, “Pox, Prose, and Prostitution: Masculine Anxiety, the Myth of the Male Author, and the Late-Victorian ‘Exchange Economy’ in George Gissing’s *New Grub Street,*” *Journal of Victorian Culture* 27, no. 4 (2022). [↩︎](#fnref12) 13. Richard Menke, “*New Grub Street*’s Ecologies of Paper,” *Victorian Studies* 61, no.1 (2018). [↩︎](#fnref13) 14. Clive E Hill, “Gissing’s *New Grub Street* and The Origins of Middlebrow Publishing,” *Literary London: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Representation of London* 9, no. 1 (2011). [↩︎](#fnref14) 15. Aaron Matz, “George Gissing’s Ambivalent Realism,” *Nineteenth-Century Literature* 59, no. 2 (2004) pp212-248\. [↩︎](#fnref15) 16. *The Illustrated London News Historical Archive, 1842-2003.* Accessed 27 June 2024, [https://www.gale.com/c/illustrated-london-news-historical-archive](https://www.gale.com/c/illustrated-london-news-historical-archive?ref=thebeemagazine.com). [↩︎](#fnref16) 17. Pierre Coustillas, “Some Unpublished Letters from Gissing to Hardy,” *English Literature in Translation, 1880-1920* 9, no. 4 (1966). [↩︎](#fnref17) 18. Andrew Franklin, “The profits from publishing: a publisher’s perspective,” *The Bookseller* (2 March, 2018). Accessed 1 July, 2024, [https://www.thebookseller.com/comment/the-profits-from-publishing-a-publishers-perspective](https://www.thebookseller.com/comment/the-profits-from-publishing-a-publishers-perspective?ref=thebeemagazine.com). [↩︎](#fnref18) --- *Georgia Poplett is a researcher who worked with The Bee and New Writing North as part of a placement supported by the* [*Northern Bridge Consortium*](https://northernbridge.ac.uk/?ref=thebeemagazine.com)*, a Doctoral Training Partnership funded by* [*the Arts and Humanities Research Council*](https://ahrc.ukri.org/?ref=thebeemagazine.com)*.* [Tip the Bee](https://thebeemagazine.com/#/portal/support) All donations go towards supporting the Bee’s mission to nurture, publish promote and pay for the best new working-class writing. ### Plastic Venus URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/plastic-venus/ Last updated: 2025-06-16T19:13:35.000Z A shell, like a pool float from the leisure centre. She was really there. Naked and quivering, floating on a piece of plastic. A baby. The old man ran into the water. Half-formed prayer frothing up to his lips with the dregs of last night’s lager. Inches away, the old man slipped on a clump of kelp. Pain shot through his old joints. Crawling towards her, he felt glass shatter under his hands. A broken beer bottle sliced through his palm. The cold water turned red. Salt burned his eyes. She was being pulled farther out. With his fingertips, he groped at the plastic. It was a shell, like a pool float from the leisure centre. The edges were soft, chewed by the winds. With a jerk, he tipped the baby into his arms. She filled him with a new strength. Enough to return to the shore, his body on fire. On land, She opened her eyes. This was no ordinary infant. Her skin was gold. Her hair carried the scent of orange blossom. With a coo, She stretched out Her limbs. Weighing him down, till he was on his knees again. Proof, he thought. They would never doubt him again. Tying his sodden jacket around her, he carried Her back to town. This old dock worker, his lungs full of asbestos, bursting with delight. So blinded, he did not see the asters and gorse blooming as She passed. Birkenhead welcomed Her with slack jaws and dropped handbags. This woman, taller than the tallest lad, with tresses of hair that burned like the sun. Without thinking, they followed her. A silent parade, circling closer to a building with columns and a pediment. Made of granite and sandstone. Easy to mistake for a temple. The town hall. Inside the council chamber, men in cheap suits sweated over piles of paper. Pens twisting in agony, trying to solve equations that should never have existed. At their head was the mayor, whispering prayers under his breath. They could not divide the ever-smaller worm to feed the town. They needed salvation. Truly, anything. Then he heard the stampeding of feet. The thumping of fists against chests. The doors to the chambers swung open. It was Her. Ducking under the doorframe, the townsfolk appeared around her. And together, they began to dance. Their bodies were rusty. But with each clicking joint, a strange feeling filled them. It was happiness. From Her, in exchange for their bodies. The men in suits tore up their spreadsheets and files. Throwing handfuls of paper that bloomed into rose petals as they fell. They did not quite know why, but they all loved Her. She received their adoration with open arms. As She bowed, the old man’s jacket fell from her body. In Her nudity, they could not tell Her age. Puberty had come, but was it years or only months ago? The eyes of the young were shielded with the corners of shirts and scarves. Many of the teenage boys, and some girls, ogled. Lust oozing from every pore. Then, Her face became lightning. Brutality rippled across Her. The old man acted quickly, tearing a quilted tapestry off the wall. As the squares of red and blue fabric were draped over Her, Her smile returned and She lay down, to sleep. Filled with fear, the townsfolk whispered into the night. What was She? A miracle or a curse? Since the yards had closed, had they not all prayed for change. An object of transformation. The old man, his clothes still damp, looked at Her sleeping. He had saved Her. He, too, loved Her. But he knew that the ones who answer prayers are beyond comprehension. Literal tyrants. Easily confused, by vague confused wishes. We should take her to the city over the river, he said. To sell her. But these words unlocked memories in the townsfolk of his previous claims. Swans with the face of women. Ghost ships. And wasn’t he also the scab? Who had crossed the picket on the first day of the strike. So they chased him out of the town hall, with his tall tales and poisoned words. Running, he cursed them. But even in his heart, he couldn’t curse Her. Galvanised, the rest of the town worked in shifts to worship Her. Each hour, a new family replaced the last, bringing with them the little they could offer. A beaded cushion, a mug commemorating Princess Di, strings of plastic pearls. In the morning, the town was different. The columns of the hall were covered in flowering vines and scented herbs. In the square, rows of plants appeared. Laden with aubergines, tomatoes, and pomegranates that were so ripe they would spontaneously burst, releasing gushes of sweet juice. The gnarled trees that lined the yard were now heavy with lemons, oranges, and fat olives. The jobless young men were enraptured. Without teaching, they started harvesting the crop. Making brine for the olives from the sea. Salting lemons. Their muscles ached with purpose. To worship Her. To lie in Her temple. To become Her beautiful boys, with chests glistening with olive oil and heads crowned with garlands of fig leaves and myrtle. Her harvest was abundant and, though not rich, they were no longer hungry. And with this came a new happiness. In time, the townsfolk forgot the old man. He spent his days on the street corner, eating rotten olives and sour oranges. Bitterness took root inside him. For it is easy, when spurned, for love to turn to hate. A desire to destroy. He started to leak poison into every passerby. For weeks, the old man polluted the town from his street corner. His words settling in the hearts of the townsfolk, like heavy, hard stones. Why did they still have to work? Why did their bones still ache? One by one, they gathered outside Her temple. Too hesitant to knock. Of what they might find beyond. Then the doors swung open. From the darkness, She emerged. Barefoot and beautiful. Terrifying in her perfection. The townsfolk threw at Her their wishes and hopes. A discord of desires. Her voice cut through them all, ringing out like a cathedral bell. *Silentium.* A dead language, but one they found themselves guessing. So the townsfolk threw themselves onto the pavement. Behind Her, the beautiful boys appeared. Olive-oil chests glistening under the weight of hessian sacks. From each leaked a trail of seeds. Wheat and corn. Sesame and pumpkin. The sky grew overcast, a cloud of feathers descending on the town square. Pigeons from the city over the river, ratty and hungry. Gorging on the seeds, the birds grew fat and juicy. The townsfolk were confused. They were no longer hungry for food. They wanted more. Her feet were moving, another dance. More furious before, cracking the concrete and shaking the buildings. Spinning around, the pigeons joined her. A swarm of grey. The townsfolk cowered. Although if one had looked up, they would have seen Her magic. The pigeons drained over colour. The greyness running through Her, leaking out into a shimmering puddle around Her feet. A quivering mirror to the sky above. The sound of dancing stopped. But when the townsfolk looked up, She was gone. In Her place were doves, as white as marzipan, and a disc of shimmering metal. The owner of the pawnshop who went to the metal first. He brought out his hammer and struck it gently. Then he rubbed it on a touchstone and, from his grin, they rejoiced. It was silver. Soon the fruit was left to wither on the vine. Instead, the townsfolk made nets from wicker chairs and tights. They would catch the pigeons, and She would transform the birds. Giving the people silver, and the skies doves. With each gift, though, Her face grew more fierce. They did not care, spinning Her silver into fat stacks of cash. Placated, the townsfolk grew complacent. Unaware of the vultures circling ever closer. \* Life was hard in the city over the river. The queues outside the job centre coiled like intestines. The summer’s riots still smouldered in the heart of the city. These strangers had no time for the rumours blowing over about the town. Murmurs of a place where fruit grew on the roadside. Where the potholes were filled with lakes of solid silver. Then one day, a car crossed the river. A Merc, with windows tinted darker than the night. A little lad clambered out, enveloped by bodyguards. The mayor’s son, they recognised him from the papers. Diving into the Argos in St Johns, the strangers watched him tear open the catalogue. Picking gifts at random. One Amstrad record player, two Matchbox racing kits, three Gola sports bags. Waiting for his boxes, they watched him play with the chain under his shirt. Silver, as thick as a noose. So, with claws outstretched, the strangers followed the lad back. Emerging from the shadows of the tunnel, the strangers found a town transformed. El Dorado on the Wirral, where ladies wandered around in furs and the men were shirtless, wearing garlands of leaves. Fruit they’d never seen before fell from trees, smashing into sweet rubies on the pavement. Not a soul would speak to the strangers. Declining their cheap rollies with smiles glistening with silver. Kicking stones, the strangers found the old man. Lonely and still on his corner, he perceived their attention as love. He told them the miracle. He told them about Her. The next morning, the strangers rammed their van into Her temple. Brandishing knives and guns, a surprising calm settled in them. A feeling projected from another. They slaughtered the beautiful boys. Reaching the inner sanctum, scented with orange blossom, they saw Her for the first time. But rather than cower, they instead reached out with hungry hands. With a clearer wish. In their hands, She burst into pearls. Delicate and small, shattering under the fleeing strangers. An irritation sticking into the soles of their boots. As soon as She disappeared, the town filled with death. The plants began to wither, coiling into dark tendrils and dry stumps. Then the silver crumbled into dust. The doves plummeted to earth, cracking themselves open on the cement. Out of their husks crawled rats, wet and hungry. The decay drove the men into despair, and they locked themselves inside their homes. It was left to the wives to roam the streets, spearing rats to roast over fires made of dead olive trees. Unlike the men, though, they cried together in pain. Not just for Her, but for the decades before. For their boys returning from the yard with maimed limbs and tarred souls. For the strikes. For the pain that passed through the generations, in the spirals of their genes. They moved through the town like a funeral procession, stopping at the yard. “Come back,” they said. “Give us meaning again.” The water licked their slippers and pumps. Then came Her voice. *Sacrificum* “We offer ourselves.” There was no response. “Anything, really,” the wives begged. *Alieni* “The strangers.” The sea rose to swallow the wives. They emerged from it transformed. Faces hardened into beaks. Crystals of salt grew from their arms, forming feathers as sharp as glass. Monstrous creatures, halfway between woman and swan. Flying towards the city over the river. Beaks open, to hunt. They did not return until the storm. One so great that fish fell from the skies. Smashing through windows and roofs, suffocating in the air. The townsfolk sheltered in Her temple. The few that remained. Husbands with long beards and eyes unused to the light, and children so afraid of being bitten by rats that they would only be carried. The old man refused to come inside. Tying himself down with a yard of rope, he feared what they had made Her. Through the broken doors of the temple, the men and children saw Her again. High in the sky, riding on a swan-wife. They ran towards Her, tears streaming in the wind. In the yard, the swan-wives folded around Her. Wings outstretched like waves of shattered glass. She stretched out Her hands. With bloodstained fingers She petted the long necks of the swan-wives. The women cried out in agony, their feathers rippling. From their beaks, they hacked up chunks of flesh. Gnawed-off fingers. Chewed-up bones. It was the strangers, flayed like the carcasses in the butcher’s windows. The men and children fell to their knees. Through trembling fingers they watched as the sea grew red. The same colour as Her eyes. \* She was different. Silent. Smeared in blood. Guarded by the swan-wives. With little left in the town, the men tried to offer their bodies. Dancing with weak limbs. Singing with broken voices. At the men’s performances, only the swan-wives stirred. They let out an unholy sound, between laughter and agony, before flying into town. Using their beaks to break up the rotting pier and empty houses. Bringing the wood to Her. The men followed suit, collecting driftwood from the beach. Ripping up their floorboards, giving Her their foundations. This time, they were not blessed with fruit or silver. Instead, the air in the town grew salty. Centipedes and earwigs infested beds and carpets. Limpets grew underneath toilet seats and in the dark corners of bathrooms. The men were too starved to contemplate whether these were gifts or not. She was busy, burning their offerings in the furnace of the yard. Day and night it blazed, churning out iron boxes. Caskets, too small for any adult. Whispers began to fill the town. Mutters around the park. Arched eyebrows over the tops of pub urinals. A request floated on the breeze. *Infantes, infantes, infantes.* So poisoned, it could only be from one source. The old man. “Is it you we hear?” the men said to him. Still tied to the lamppost, he only smiled. “The request we hear every day.” One of the men kicked him. His head tipped up, revealing a lipless grin. His flesh gnawed away by rats. “Then it is Her,” they said. “Who demands our children.” The mayor went first, offering up his little lad. He fell asleep in Her arms, before the swan-wives sealed him into a casket. The box bought the town a strange sense of finality. So, to the devouring mother they offered more. Bundles and prams. No longer hoping for anything but an ending. With each casket, a shape began to form in the yard. It was a ship, made of the slumbering bodies of their children. Hollow-cheeked, they brought the final child to Her. An infant. Passed through the kelp and broken beer bottles, the rotting flesh of the strangers, along the long necks of the swan-wives. The baby was silent, swaddled in dirty cotton. In Her arms, she awoke. Cooing like a dove, she was placed on the deck of the ship. There was silence, then an immense sound. Like the sudden laughter of schoolchildren. The ship was moving out of the yard. Blowing on a breeze scented with orange blossom. Clipping the horizon, where it became something small and plastic. The townsfolk found themselves filled with a song. A single request. No longer the jumble of half-formed wishes and desires. “*Terminare*,” they chanted. Finally, She understood. As Her face grew soft, the sea flooded in. Warmer than ever before. Filling their longs. Washing away the skeletons. Only the baby was left, floating on a plastic shell. Towards another mistaken wish. Another vague prayer. Another town to drown. --- [Tip the Bee](https://thebeemagazine.com/#/portal/support) All donations go towards supporting the Bee’s mission to nurture, publish promote and pay for the best new working-class writing. ### Hickling Hands URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/hickling-hands/ Last updated: 2025-06-16T19:13:54.000Z There was the occasional creak as the hot water found its unfamiliar way through the radiator. The dining room had finally begun to warm up. My mother, though, was still sat in her grey winter coat (with multicoloured zippers), and I in my long black coat (with furry insides). “Look at mine,” Grandad said, from his flattened, red velveteen chair, hands held out in front of him. We were gathered with a cup of tea. His, of course, was balanced on his jogging-bottomed leg, while below Charlie circled, threatening the mug’s stability. My mother’s gloves were on the table next to her own mug as she gently scratched away at her ring finger. If I’m honest, it was hard to distinguish Grandad’s hands from how they usually looked. They were big and red. But then they were all year round. Even in summer, in place of those chilblain sores would be his unhealed and untended-to cuts from his garden. Grandad’s hands were much bigger than mine or my mother’s. They were the cumulation of years and years of chilblains. He was the oldest I could point to and go, YOU! You gave me these hands! You gave me these Hickling hands. \-=- I used to think of them as my own, private torture. Agonising quietly, at primary school I would sit on them for hours, rubbing my swollen hands against the coarse cushion covering of the seat, numbing the pain away. Sometimes I’d even bite on them, a strange but soothing massage. Teachers would look at my hands in horror and gasp. First, they would see the overwhelming red colour of my fingers. Then they would see the purple patch stretching like a bruise over my knuckle, and they might wonder whether it was the bone itself that had swollen. To somehow remedy the irremediable, I was given permission to wear gloves in class. They became a source of pride and individuality, those black and grey fingerless gloves. Under my cardigan, I thought they gave me the edge of a plucky young heroine like Tracy Beaker or Wednesday Addams. Though I always had to take them off because, somehow, they made the chilblains worse. So gloves or not, mine, my mother’s and my Grandad’s hands would be burning bright red till spring. \-=- Grandad would pick me up every Monday from school. My parents both worked late and, as an only child, there were no older siblings to look after me. By the brick wall at the back of the playground, he was a tall, proud but solitary figure, apart from everyone else. I could easily pick him out over the sea of fussing parents, waiting there with a quiet confidence. As the bright colours of the classroom gave way to black tarmac on the way home, I knew what was coming. Following the usual script he would look down with a knowing twinkle in his eye. When I followed his gaze I would find with delight, but not surprise, the orange and purple Double Decker wrapper poking out of a pocket in his dark grey fleece. “Can I have it now?” “Oh go on then. Don’t tell your mum,” he would say, feigning a whisper. I remember thinking that I should’ve felt embarrassed that other kids might see me holding his hand, but I never did. They were big, rough and warm. They were safe. As we walked quietly, I fiddled with the remains of the chocolate bar. "Are you alright?” I would say. "Yes love, because I'm with my Mi Mi," would be his reply. Grandad was a quiet man. He didn’t tell what I imagined were stories typical to other grandparents. There was much he didn’t share, like his time as a steelworker or as a union man at Northern Dairies – where he frequently won Milkman of the Year. Most, if not all, that I knew about Grandad (and indeed about my late Grandmother) had come from my mother. But even then, she wasn’t sure if she knew everything she could. Once she told me how, as a child walking through Rotherham Market with Grandad, they had passed an unfamiliar man who he had quickly greeted and then continued walking past. “Who’s that?” my mother had asked. “That’s your cousin.” “Who?” “Oh, y’know!” he said, expanding no further for my shocked mother than, “works at the butchers.” But at the same time, as she would also attest to, I already felt I knew, if not understood everything about Grandad just through his presence. Once home, Grandad would settle into the plush cream seat by the radiator. I would take the hardbacked red seat by the window and around five he would make me dinner along the lines of beans, or spaghetti hoops, or maybe even crisp potato waffles in the oven. He would stay till either of my parents came back. Then, after a quick survey of the garden to give his approval, he would drive back up the Parkway to Rotherham. After I started secondary school, even though I was old enough to be alone, he still came sometimes. My life was changing, but he was the same. Never stopping long, but then he never did, just long enough for a tea, a walk up the garden, and for his calm to fill the house. One day in year seven, I watched as hot steam rose from my microwaved spaghetti hoops and toast. My eyes wandered away from whatever John Wayne flick was on TV (they were all the same to me) and out of the window. I took a forkful of dinner, lifting it up to my mouth, when out the corner of my eye I saw them. I realised instantly they were in the same school uniform as me and, yes, I did know them. It was too late to duck away. They had already seen me. *It’s Mie! Mie. It’s Mie.* I froze, not knowing if I should try to move away, but certain I would never sit in the window again. The sound of their shouting pierced through the window, followed by laughter as they walked away. I tried to breathe. “Was that your friends?” Grandad asked. He was sat upright, hands relaxed but firmly placed on the arm rests. I smiled at him, making a supplicating noise of neither agreement nor disagreement. My spaghetti hoops hung off my favourite fork. \-=- “Did he tell you what he said to the nurse?” “No, what?” I said. “She asked him to sit down and she told him, ‘We’re going to have to take some bloods now.’ And he only went and said, ‘Why've you run out?’” “What’re you like!” I called to Grandad, who was laughing to himself in the other room. But in a quieter voice I asked my mother, “Is he, *you know*, alright though?” “Well, love,” my mother said. “Well, you know.” Grandad had the sharpest wit and sarcasm, and I’d try reflect it back at him. Sometimes I’d think, ‘Was that too far?’ but then I’d look at him, eyes closed and laughing. “They just kept telling me they’d have to get some out soon or else I’d be full of holes. They can never get it first time. And I said I can’t help it with my circulation and diabetes and that. ‘You’ve got to keep calm,’ they said. And I thought, ‘I am bloody calm!’” Grandad said, after joining us in the kitchen. “Look at my arms.” His multiple purple bruises matched his hands. My mother put yet another prescription away in the kitchen cupboard and said, “Well he’s had everything done: cholesterol, blood pressure and his bloods. He’s had it all.” “Ooh lucky you,” I said, raising my eyebrows at him as he nodded and raised his back. My mother did odd jobs for him round the house, cleaning and sorting out. Often Grandad and I would sit in the dining room, both looking out into garden, lost in thought. My solitude saw his solitude. My quiet was his quiet. My mother had let slip about how hard the first few years of secondary school had been for me. But he’d never brought it up. I felt like he trusted me to deal with it and, even though he wouldn’t say anything, he helped nevertheless. “Are you hungry, love?” “I’m always hungry, Grandad.” “Have some of those pears then,” he said. “Oh, there’s apples in that fruit bowl.” He thought a moment, “Oh, I know”. Disappearing away, from out of the kitchen came all sorts of ceramic noises. I waited, flicking through his TV magazine and reading the horoscopes and film listings. When he came back, he had two plates in hand. Each had a tall towering stack of thick cream crackers. Between the five crackers, in total, were thick square slices of Edam cheese, layer upon layer. He said nothing as he passed it to me, like it was normal. \-=- When I started university I didn’t see Grandad much apart from on screen. We talked mostly on video call. I taught him how to use a tablet, and his afternoons filled with Dragon’s Den clips and Peter Kay. It was nice for him to connect to the things he loved, and for the people who loved him too. I could be in between deadlines, cooking panicked bolognese or Pot Noodles, and I’d see a green circle next to his profile showing he was online. I would prop my phone up against my kettle and let it ring. “Mi Mi! Ayyy!” he would almost shout, his big reading glasses on and his hands in the peace sign we always did as a greeting. The calls didn’t last long. We wouldn’t talk about much other than what we both had in for dinner and what we’d been up to in the day. “Not much,” he would say. “Me neither,” I would say. But those calls got me through first and second year. Then when I came home for Christmas, we reverted to normal again. Grandad demonstrated, as we sat there, how he could only bend his fingers to a certain point. His index, no more than a gentle curve. Once the middle of my finger had swollen so much that I could only bend it into a hook. I remember showing it him proudly, though it couldn’t match his. “Well you’ve still done the garden with them though, haven’t you?” my mother said to him. I agreed with her, shaking my head jokingly, “Yeah, you!” Not that I could criticise. When I was younger, my mother always warned: "Don’t come waking me up at night saying your chilblains hurt if you’re not going dry your hands properly." But I was (and still probably am) always both too young and too impatient. With her own hands dried thoroughly, my mother passed me the hand towel. I began a half-hearted performance of drying before chasing after her out of the bathroom. Predictably, later that night, she was sat in the living room, lit by the light of the TV and the orange glow of the lamp in the far corner. I came downstairs, tears in my eyes, my hands held out. She looked at them and, despite the warning, took them in her own hurting hands that knew a history of skin splitting to the bone, electric blankets and soreness, and held mine. The notes my mother and I compared about our hands were the same we three – myself, my mother and Grandad – would share. “Anyway how’s your studying?” “It’s alright,” I said. “I’m just really busy.” Charlie chose this moment to rise from his bed and scuttle, claws scratching on the laminate floor as he ran out through the kitchen. “Bloody in and out. In and out,” Grandad said, getting up. “He’s got the bloody ball out now.” But he was up like a shot. When we went outside, though, Charlie quickly gave up on playing catch and lounged around under the bench, just happy we had joined him. Grandad started the garden then, lifting heavy plant pots with ease. It was no challenge, really, for a man once accustomed to pouring out giant vats of liquid metal. In his pale blue fleece, grey joggers and those blue trainers that had seen better days, he picked ripe tomatoes. He washed and gave us them in a plastic bag, before sitting with a tea in the white plastic chair. When his tea eventually got cold or he got sick of it, he’d pour it out onto the bricks. It would run between them in little channels, pooling up in milky blobs. Charlie would then sweep in, licking it up. “We like a cup of tea, don’t we, Charlie?” he said, stroking Charlie’s black fur. The golden watch on his wrist glinted in the sun as the nearby church’s bells called the hour. “You hungry, Dad? Fancy owt for lunch?” said my mother, poking her head round the back door. “I’m alright,” he said. “Oh but I’ll have some cake, though." He got as big a slice as could be cut, before sneaking more. You’d never see it leave his hands as he always ate so fast. He couldn’t have tasted it, so I didn’t understand what he could have gotten out of it, other than the performance. To make me smile. “We’ll need to get going now, Dad,” my mother said, damp tea towel still in hand from the lunch plates. “Right, tek off then,” he said, getting up from his easy chair. “I’ll have to take my lad out.” Pulling away, my mother wound her window down and we waved to him. I kept my eyes on him till the we turned the corner when he would be out of sight. He’d stopped waving and just stood, hands in his jogging bottom pockets, lingering for a moment longer. Driving home, we passed the imposing church at the top of the hill. There was the pub and their massive plastic Santa, laid down all year and heaved up at Christmas; the bakeries, the auto shops, and the scrapyard. As we reached the Parkway – the strip of motorway that spans Rotherham to Sheffield – I looked out at the horses hiding behind the trees, the pylons and the wind turbines. I could picture Grandad on his walk. From the top of the hilly field he would look down to the factories where he used to work, dog treats, loose change and, if he could remember it, his phone jangling in his fleece pocket. \-=- As part of my degree, in what should have been third year, I went on a year abroad to Japan. That winter ended up being my worst for chilblains. No heating in my room meant they swelled up larger and more painfully than ever before. They were no longer even red. They were purple and ripping apart. I scolded myself for letting them get so bad and hoped they could be cured with menthol cream. I wondered if he had chilblains that year. My mother did. I’d seen her throbbing hands on video call. They were the hands that lifted him up, dosed out medications, and poured out his pop. They were the hands that cared. Mine hurt from the heat radiating from my phone as I called to see him. I could see my fingers through my tears, held up in a peace sign, as Grandad weakly rested his own in a similar shape on his forehead. Hands, red. There we were, for just a bit longer. Three generations of Raynaud’s together. Everything had happened so quickly, successive illnesses in successive days. Then one especially cold night he was gone. I couldn’t fly back to the UK for the funeral so there was no closure, no family gathering, no Grandad: just me. Since then, the weather still turns and the chilblains still form and worsen. The heating at work or university still cooks them till they’re bright red raw. And we still gnaw away at them, trying to urge that pain away. \-=- I realised something, when I was home again in September. I boarded the train for a study week off. We passed through Doncaster and I sat unaware. Then gliding by, almost as in a dream, outside the window was the retail park: Primark, where Grandad bought his joggers; the Morrisons where he’d push the trolley round in his speckled black fleece; and the WH Smiths I’d long to go to before a visit to his house. It was the first time I’d seen it since I’d left for Japan. And from the train rather than the road, at first, I didn’t recognise it. But as soon as I did, I turned to look. There, too, was the old church with its dark bricks, on the hill. Though I couldn’t see his street, as I told my mother later, I started crying. “Ah, I know love,” she said. “I know.” She took my hand in hers, holding it in her lap as we sat on the sofa. “Your Grandad would’ve said, ‘Did you wave to me from the train?’” “He always said that!” “I bet the other passengers will have been thinking, ‘God someone doesn’t want to go home, is it that bad?’” We both laughed. “That person’s seen Rotherham and wept!” I joked, squeezing her hand. I looked down at our hands. Hand in hand, thumb by thumb. Even without the redness, the chilblains, swelling and bursting open, our hands looked the same. From the grooves on the knuckle, to the shape of the nail, even the length of the fingers. They looked the same. So I took a picture. Each year, my Hickling hands look more like hers, more like his, more like mine. --- [Tip the Bee](https://thebeemagazine.com/#/portal/support) All donations go towards supporting the Bee’s mission to nurture, publish promote and pay for the best new working-class writing. ### Procurement Process Blues URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/procurement-process-blues/ Last updated: 2026-06-18T14:01:46.000Z In a world where stories are currency, it’s ironic how elusive fair pay can be for those creating them. For working-class writers navigating the labyrinth of publishing, securing payment can be as challenging as the pitch itself. Despite recent moves toward inclusivity, financial barriers persist, silencing essential voices and threatening to turn an industry built on diversity of thought into one that only champions those who can afford the entry fee. As a working-class writer myself, I’ve felt the weight of this reality. Early in my career, I vividly remember the thrill of receiving my first commission from Europe’s leading LGBTQ+ magazine – a dream come true. But that excitement quickly soured as I grappled with the publisher’s opaque payment system. Months passed before I saw a penny, and there is nothing worse than chasing a late invoice when you were already seriously underpaid. In this case, less than £150\. The experience left me questioning not my talent, but whether the industry valued my contribution enough to pay me fairly and promptly. ### Breaking the silence on money In Britain, money talk is often treated as taboo, a cultural legacy of politeness that working-class writers can ill afford. For me, the silence around payment isn’t just awkward: it’s detrimental. Freelance writers often navigate vague procurement systems, unclear rates, and contracts that are anything but straightforward. Take Alex \[not his real name\], a Manchester-based writer, as an example. After years of freelancing, he’s all too familiar with the hurdles. “You think landing a commission is the hard part,” he said. “But the real challenge begins when you’re registering with procurement systems, filling out forms, and chasing overdue invoices. It’s exhausting and often feels intentionally difficult to discourage us from following up.” I’ve experienced this too. I’ve spent hours wading through procurement processes, uploading identification documents, and sending countless emails just to receive payment for work I’d completed weeks prior. Once, I considered not chasing a £50 fee because the administrative effort outweighed the amount. But for many of us, even small payments can mean the difference between paying rent or skipping meals. For working-class writers, the publishing industries’ financial systems can feel like an obstacle course. The procurement process, which requires freelancers to jump through hoops – filling out complex forms, submitting ID verification, and navigating outdated systems – often causes significant delays in payment. Why should I, a singular person, fill out the same process as that of a huge organisation? This bureaucratic maze wastes time and energy that could be better spent on creative work, leaving many writers financially stressed. Adding to the challenge is the lack of clarity around payment rates and processes. Many publishers don’t offer standardised rates or transparent guidance on how fees are determined, leaving writers to guess at what constitutes fair pay. This lack of transparency not only breeds confusion, but also discourages writers from negotiating better terms, especially when they fear being seen as difficult. With little financial security, working-class writers are often left in a precarious position, struggling to make a living while their work is undervalued. ### The systemic problem While publishers trumpet their diversity initiatives, financial systems within the industry often work against the very voices they claim to champion. Professor Katy Shaw’s 2020 report [Common People](https://www.northumbria.ac.uk/about-us/news-events/news/common-people/?ref=thebeemagazine.com) highlighted how publishing needs to “wake up to the world beyond the M25,” noting how financial barriers disproportionately impact underrepresented writers. In my opinion, here’s the issue: publishing’s polite culture loves to celebrate successful sales, but balks at candid conversations about money. Editors and agents may view financial discussions as crass, leaving writers to navigate a system that values social privilege over material realities. For many working-class writers, this can lead to self-doubt and reluctance to negotiate fees, fearing they’ll be perceived as “difficult”. The industry’s gig economy model is meant to be agile and dynamic, yet its outdated systems create bottlenecks that are anything but. What’s needed is recognition that fair payment isn’t a luxury – it’s the foundation of an equitable publishing ecosystem. So, where’s my £50? ### Survival isn’t enough In the publishing and media industries, there’s a pervasive, often unconscious, power dynamic at play – one that disproportionately affects working-class writers. People from disadvantaged backgrounds are often seen as “outsiders” by those with more social privilege, which can subtly manifest in their interactions with powerful gatekeepers like editors, agents, and even accounts departments. What’s striking is that, while the system recognises the intimidation felt by underrepresented voices, it fails to see how the power imbalance works in their favour. The lack of financial transparency and clear payment systems is a prime example: gatekeepers may view these issues through the lens of social privilege, assuming that writers, particularly from working-class backgrounds, don’t have the power or the platform to demand better pay or fairer terms. This dynamic is also rooted in how society often views working-class people and their ability to advocate for themselves. In many cases, working-class writers may experience self-doubt when dealing with figures of authority, whether they’re editors or agents. This reluctance to assert their worth often carries over into financial negotiations. For some, there’s a deep-seated cultural expectation to defer to those in positions of power, meaning they’re less likely to challenge unfair terms or ask for higher pay. This hesitation to “speak up” isn’t just a personal failing; it’s a reflection of the wider societal bias that working-class people should “know their place”. As a result, they’re often left scrambling to navigate a system that doesn’t make room for their voices – or their value. Moreover, this tension is exacerbated by the gig economy’s promise of flexibility and speed, which contrasts sharply with the reality of long delays in payment and convoluted processes. Freelancers are meant to operate in a fluid, fast-moving space, yet the industry's approach to payment and contracts often drags on for months, putting workers in a vulnerable position. For me, this mismatch between expectation and reality is demoralising. It creates a barrier where, despite my talent and hard work, I’m held back by a system that values me less than my more affluent peers. Until the industry begins to recognise these nuances and make real changes to empower all writers – regardless of their background – this power imbalance will continue to stifle diversity and creativity in publishing. Publishing has the power to shape society’s understanding of itself. By enabling more voices, especially those from working-class backgrounds, to share their stories, the industry not only broadens its appeal but strengthens its connection with readers. Transparent, accessible payment systems are essential to fostering a thriving, representative community of creators. As Alex puts it, “Publishing loves to talk about the importance of fresh perspectives. But until we talk about the money needed to support them, it’s just talk.” --- [Tip the Bee](https://thebeemagazine.com/#/portal/support) All donations go towards supporting the Bee’s mission to nurture, publish promote and pay for the best new working-class writing. [The Working Class Library Episode 1: New Grub Street by George GissingGissing wrote New Grub Street to skewer the new literary crowd as books boomed with the arrival of mass education in Britain. What does it teach us about book publishing, the British class system and working class writers today?![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/icon/favicon-15.ico)The BeeRichard Benson![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fc/56/fc56b9ab-b4c1-4291-8dc6-e491452ed510/content/images/thumbnail/grub-street-1.jpg)](https://thebeemagazine.com/the-working-class-library-episode-1-new-grub-street-by-george-gissing/) Listen to the Working Class Library podcast episode on George Gissing’s New Grub Street ### A Class of Our Own URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/a-class-of-our-own/ Last updated: 2025-06-16T19:14:54.000Z If you ask teachers in British primary schools about kids, social class, and reading and writing, they will tell you that children from affluent backgrounds are more likely to arrive at school having been encouraged to read, but once pupils have been exposed to reading, writing and storytelling, their background makes no difference to their enthusiasm or ability. In fact, a 2024 survey by the National Literacy Trust found a higher percentage of children from poorer homes enjoyed poetry than those from better-off families. And yet the most recent figures show that 47% of published authors have middle-class backgrounds, and just 10% working-class. Those figures are from 2014, by the way, and trends strongly suggest that the difference will now be even greater; for publishing as a whole, the middle-class-background figure is now over 60%. Across the creative industries, younger adults from working-class backgrounds are four times less likely to find work than their middle-class peers. In case you were wondering, the percentage of people categorised as working-class is between about 35 and 50, depending on what measure you use. Clearly, for a lot of children who come from working-class homes and enjoy writing, things happen between the ages of, say, 11 and 30 to put them off or prevent them pursuing it as a career option. Research shows those things are mostly lack of access to higher education, cultural differences, and money – it being more or less impossible to live in London, where publishing is heavily based, on the sort of money books pay, without another private income of some sort. This isn’t very good for our culture or society, is it? If you’re working-class and fancy a career as a professional author, it is bloody terrible. It seems likely that there could be an uncatered-to market. A survey for New Writing North’s *A Writing Chance* project found 63% of working-class readers were concerned about representation, and would read more novels if they had more working-class characters in them. (Although, it is worth noting, those characters need to be authentic and convincing.) But it isn’t just about money. Book publishing has a huge influence on whose voices and experiences and ideas get heard and taken seriously in our society. They affect the public and help to decide what becomes history. If you exclude the voices, experiences and ideas of half the people in the country, you shouldn’t really be surprised if it starts to seem that we don’t respect or understand each other as well as we used to. \* This was the sort of thinking that led Michael Sheen to work with New Writing North, Faber, the *Daily Mirror*, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Audible UK, Northumbria University, and the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation to found *A Writing Chance*, a programme for working-class writers in 2021\. That programme has already helped several new writers to publication, including Tom Newlands, whose *Only Here, Only Now* was one of the big literary hits of 2024\. And it is from that programme that *the Bee* has grown. *The Bee* is an online and printed-form literary magazine for working-class writing by established and emergent writers. We have a podcast, *The Working Class Library*, in which writers discuss classic working-class literature, and an ambitious outreach programme to encourage new writing by working people. That programme will include an online platform with courses, where writers can gather, hone their work and support one another. *The Bee* is produced by New Writing North and supported by Faber. Of course, working-class means a multitude of things depending on who you are and who you ask. We respect both the official Government NS-SEC measures, explained in Dave O’Brien’s essay on class and publishing, but also believe that other factors including education, social connections, identity and family history are important. However you define class, it is also clear that your background can still affect your life chances and career prospects. True, some commentators (though never working-class ones) argue that the idea of social class has become irrelevant; if that were true, there would be less talk of nepo babies, chavs, gammons, Red and Blue Walls, adolescence, Keir Starmer’s dad and Angela Rayner’s accent, and approximately 60 per cent less material for British stand-up comics. Class has been hard to measure since UK General Register Office statisticians began trying in the early 1900s, and puzzled over, for example, why vicars were poor but had the same tastes and habits as rich people. It has been declared outdated since at least the 1950s, when critics argued you couldn’t be working-class and own a washing machine. We can all see that at this point in time, we’re transitioning from industrial-era concepts of class to post-industrial ones, and we can see equally that around the world, writers – Annie Ernaux, Didier Eribon and Édouard Louis in France, Sunjeev Sahota, Jenni Fagan and Andrew O’Hagan in the UK, Xuetao and Fan Yusu in China – have begun to reformulate those concepts. In his 1958 classic *Culture and Society*, Raymond Williams argued that working-class culture was characterised by collective endeavour and achievement, whereas bourgeois culture was focused on the individual. I believe that to an extent, the same remains true today; so much of popular culture in particular has been created instinctively and communally by working-class communities. Football crowds, club culture, hip hop, street art and fashion subcultures were created with some friendly competition, but also huge mutual enjoyment. We would like to bring that spirit to *the Bee*; that’s why, as we worked on the project, we were inspired by the club- and sub-cultural documentary photography of the great working-class photographer Elaine Constantine, and why one of her images sits atop this piece. We believe that by publishing serious fiction, non-fiction and poetry by people of working-class origin, with a sense of shared enquiry and mutual endeavour, we’ll encourage better representation, and a grown-up debate about how class works in the 21st century. We’ll also simply celebrate that mix of joy and wonder that comes from a reader or a writer of any age. And any class. Richard Benson, Editor --- [Tip the Bee](https://thebeemagazine.com/#/portal/support) All donations go towards supporting the Bee’s mission to nurture, publish promote and pay for the best new working-class writing. ### On the Joys of Secretly Reading at Work URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/on-the-joys-of-secretly-reading-at-work/ Last updated: 2025-06-16T19:15:09.000Z For me, there is no reading more enjoyable than reading done secretly at work. I find the secrecy and risk of being caught, plus the jarring nature of the place you find yourself in, somehow makes your imagination keener, and makes you more sensitive to what you’re reading. I read, for example, 1984 while working in a grain store in the East Midlands, where I grew up and still live. I had to help lorries back up to the grain pit, sweep out the lorries if need be and, while I was waiting for loads to arrive, I was supposed to sweep up. Of course no one checked, and anyway as soon as a lorry had tipped up, it was as dusty as ever. I found a corner where I could see the pit area but no one noticed me, and spent at least half my time with Winston and Julia, having outsmarted my own Big Brother with ease. Since then I’ve read in warehouses (James Ellroy), on farms (Murakami) and while waiting as a driver, although that’s quite acceptable. I know I’m not alone in this pleasure, because I’ve read that the young Sue Townsend was sacked from a clothes shop for reading Oscar Wilde in the changing rooms, and Mark Hodkinson writes about getting away with it in No One Round Here Reads Tolstoy. Sadly, in my current job (on an arable farm) I spend quite a lot of time filling in forms in an office now, so it’s more difficult as there are fewer situations where you get left to wait on your own. However, others do manage it – if you look at the [Reading At Work thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/6g31hg/reading%5Fwhile%5Fat%5Fwork/?ref=thebeemagazine.com) on Reddit’s r/books, you’ll find lots of stories of people managing to read novels on screen while pretending to work. Fair play to the bloke who’s read Brothers K, The Three Musketeers, Frankenstein, Meditations and Dracula by pasting Project Gutenberg files into Word docs. I know some would say this is time-theft, but I get my work done, and as I don’t smoke I don’t have fag breaks. And in any case, it makes me a more intelligent person, which I’m sure my employer appreciates. Secret Reader --- [Tip the Bee](https://thebeemagazine.com/#/portal/support) All donations go towards supporting the Bee’s mission to nurture, publish promote and pay for the best new working-class writing. ### Class & the Health Lottery URL: https://thebeemagazine.com/class-and-the-health-lottery/ Last updated: 2025-06-16T19:15:26.000Z In the UK, one profound question occupies the national consciousness more than any other: why can’t all the fat, lazy, poor people be as healthy and successful as rightwing political commentators? This essay is my earnest attempt to answer that question. The link between social deprivation and poor health is well established. In the Middle Ages, kings generally outlived peasants – not because they jogged daily or counted calories, but because *privilege trumps personal responsibility*. While peasants broke their backs in the fields, subsisting on stale bread and turnip stew, kings feasted (gout be damned), slept in draughty but comparatively luxurious castles, and had physicians on hand – even if medieval medicine was little more than guesswork and leeches. Sure, royal life came with the occasional assassination attempt, but that beats dying from infected blisters or a bad harvest. Peasants, after all, faced famine, filthy living conditions, hard labour, and a healthcare system best described as “hope for the best”. So, before anyone claims good health is purely a matter of individual choices, remember: no amount of positive thinking or “pulling yourself up by your muddy bootstraps” could outpace the benefits of being born with a crown. Several centuries later, still grappling with the puzzling phenomenon that wealthier people seemed to be living longer, more productive lives than the poors, we attempted to get to the bottom of the mystery once and for all. The 1980 Black Report, commissioned by Labour in 1977 to investigate health inequalities, revealed significant disparities in health outcomes across social classes. It stated: “Social class differences in mortality begin at birth. In 1971, neonatal death rates – deaths within the first month of life – were twice as high for the children of fathers in social class V as they were in social class I.” The Thatcher government didn’t appreciate this, as it jarred somewhat with its emerging neoliberal critique of the post-war consensus. Naturally, the Iron Lady’s acolytes suppressed the report’s findings, dismissing Sir Douglas Black’s recommendations to address social inequalities in health through improved child benefits, housing, and labour conditions. Despite clear evidence and repeated warnings, successive governments have ignored the consequences. Today, this neglect manifests in widespread public health crises driven by poverty and inequality, exacerbated by a healthcare system unfit for modern needs. For those insulated from social inequality – living in secure, dual-income households with access to top schools – the dire health picture for the poor is barely visible. This detachment fosters the illusion that social mobility is a result of personal merit rather than structural advantage: another consequence of Thatcher’s ultimate victory. Favourable conditions in education, health and employment are mistaken for individual success rather than systemic privilege. While lifestyle choices matter, they are shaped by the options available. To live in a deprived community is to lack the resources and opportunities of affluent areas. The Covid-19 pandemic exposed these stark inequalities. Those in poverty before the virus were the most vulnerable. Longstanding disparities in health, housing, employment and public trust drove higher infection and mortality rates in poorer areas. Of course, this stark reminder of the true impact of these historic inequalities was relegated in political discourse, where debates about how many unproductive elderly people the virus might kill off, or whether the virus was even dangerous, took centre stage. In a post-Covid world, accessing healthcare feels like navigating an obstacle course – something we’d rather avoid unless absolutely necessary. Today, falling ill doesn’t just mean dealing with pain, distress or anxiety. It also brings a sense of dread at the prospect of engaging with the NHS. Making a GP appointment or visiting A&E has become more arduous and time-consuming than most of us can remember. One disastrous result of this has been the utter abandonment of continuity of care – a sense of familiarity that improves the quality of medical encounters, and an essential principle of world-leading healthcare. Strong word of mouth once reinforced trust in local health services: if you needed help, someone would be there. A functioning healthcare system depends on more than just clinical resources. People must believe their health is worth taking seriously and trust that, if they seek care, it will be available. Sadly, that is no longer the case. In fact, it’s likely that the only reason the system hasn’t collapsed is that so many people choose to avoid it. If everyone who needed a GP appointment booked one tomorrow, the system would grind to a halt. Avoiding GP surgeries has become a legitimate strategy, with patients waiting until after-hours to call NHS 24, where they are at least guaranteed to speak to someone that day – despite that not being its intended purpose. Many now delay or abandon the idea of seeking medical attention for minor aches, pains and discomforts. They feel like a burden, lack the time, or simply can’t face the stress of trying to be heard. Over time, these untreated issues compound into serious health conditions. The early warning signs a GP might use to detect diseases like cancer are missed. On a larger scale, this crisis manifests in grim statistics – rising numbers of younger people living with or dying from cancer. It fosters doubt, scepticism, and even apathy toward our own health. A toxic fatalism takes root: if people with life-threatening conditions are waiting too long for treatment, what chance do the rest of us have? Despite needing more care, poorer patients receive less. Healthcare funding is systematically skewed in favour of wealthier areas, where residents experience fewer and less complex health issues. This is the "inverse care law", first articulated by Julian Tudor Hart in 1971: access to good healthcare is inversely proportional to the need for it – the sicker you are, the less likely you are to receive adequate treatment. This plays out daily in GP surgeries across the country. In affluent areas, doctors have longer consultation times, fewer chronically ill patients, and better-resourced practices. In poorer areas, GPs are overwhelmed and underfunded, forced to make impossible choices with limited resources. On paper, the difference in consultation times may seem minor – just seconds – but in practice, it means the difference between thorough care and rushed decisions. Complex health issues demand time and attention that overstretched doctors simply don’t have – and let’s not get started on the receptionists. In Britain’s poorest communities, poor health isn’t an anomaly – it’s an expectation, woven into daily life. Multimorbidity – once associated with old age – is now common among younger generations in these areas. Chronic conditions like heart disease, respiratory disorders, diabetes, and mobility impairments don’t exist in isolation but in devastating combinations, slashing both lifespan and quality of life. This, of course, has everything to do with poor people making dumb choices, and nothing at all to do with the fact you can now get a McDonald’s delivered directly into your face at any time of the day or night. Contrast this with wealthier areas, where florists, and fruit and veg shops dominate main streets, often flanked by wide-open, well-maintained greenspaces, and you begin to see what deprived communities are being deprived of. Doctors working in deprived communities witness these realities daily. GPs have described to me patients who, faced with the choice between making drastic lifestyle changes or continuing as they are, often opt for the latter – not out of ignorance, but resignation. This isn’t recklessness; it’s a rational response to a system that has failed them repeatedly. Lifestyle choices don’t happen in a vacuum. Stress, food insecurity, air pollution and substandard housing all shape health outcomes in ways that individual willpower alone cannot overcome. The failure of the system isn’t just about funding; it’s about political will. The NHS alone cannot solve health inequalities, because these disparities are rooted in broader social issues. Investment in early intervention and preventative healthcare, particularly in the most deprived areas, remains grossly inadequate. Addressing poverty- related health disparities requires a fundamental shift – viewing healthcare not as a reactive service for the sick, but as part of an integrated social support system designed to promote community wellbeing, harmony and, of course, economic productivity. For Britain’s poor, healthcare isn’t just inadequate – it’s increasingly privatised by stealth. As GP services become harder to access, people turn to pharmacies, where over-the-counter painkillers, sedatives, and cough syrups with addictive potential are readily available. Many self-medicate, leading to rising rates of substance dependency. Painkillers mask undiagnosed conditions until they reach crisis levels. Toothaches become abscesses requiring emergency surgery. Suspicious lumps go unchecked until they are terminal. Mental health struggles, left untreated, spiral into addiction, suicide and preventable deaths. This is not a functioning public health system – it is a lottery rigged against the poor. Britain’s drug crisis is not just about illicit substances – it is a direct consequence of medical failures and policy missteps that have exacerbated addiction among the working class. The over-prescription of opioids in the 1990s and 2000s fuelled an epidemic of dependency, mirroring the crisis in the US. Chronic pain, often the result of physical labour, was treated with powerful opioids without sufficient oversight. When the scale of the problem became undeniable, the NHS responded, beginning in 2019, with sweeping restrictions, cutting patients off without adequate support. At the same time, benzodiazepines – commonly prescribed for anxiety, trauma and sleep disorders – were also heavily restricted. For many struggling with untreated mental health conditions linked to poverty, these medications had become a lifeline. Their abrupt withdrawal forced thousands toward illicit alternatives, including street benzodiazepines and heroin, with often deadly consequences. Lacking a robust national response to the evolving drug crisis, the system fails those most in need. Instead of being treated as patients requiring care, those battling substance dependency are criminalised, abandoned, or pushed into unsafe drug markets. People suffering from addiction in Britain’s most deprived areas are treated as second-class citizens within the NHS. They have little say in their treatment, often placed on methadone maintenance programs with no clear pathway to rehabilitation. Addiction (like most other poverty-related health problems) is still framed as a personal failing rather than a complex medical and social issue. This moralistic stance ignores the systemic factors driving drug dependency: poverty, childhood trauma, inadequate housing, and a lack of mental health support. And that’s before even considering social security. For those in deprived communities, health problems come with an added burden – an overly punitive welfare system that prioritises rooting out fraud over ensuring people receive the support they are legally entitled to. Rather than acting as a safety net, the welfare system has become an obstacle course, where legitimate claims are frequently denied as a cost-cutting strategy – mirroring the tactics of private health insurers in the US. Instead of providing financial assistance to those in need, the system is designed to delay and reject claims, trapping individuals in cycles of stress, debt and worsening health. Government crackdowns on benefit fraud have long been more about political messaging than meaningful reform. Despite fraud making up only a small fraction of overall welfare spending, successive governments have introduced increasingly harsh measures to monitor and penalise claimants. Enhanced powers to scrutinise bank accounts and social media profiles, coupled with severe penalties for minor administrative errors, reflect a “politics before policy” approach. These measures are designed to project a government that is “tough” on welfare – even at the cost of pushing already vulnerable people deeper into hardship. This punitive approach is counterproductive, particularly given the government’s stated aim of getting people back to work. Chronic stress, financial insecurity, and the constant threat of losing vital support create conditions that worsen health and make it even harder for people to re-enter the workforce. For women, the stakes are even higher. Economic dependence can trap them in abusive relationships, while repeated interactions with an unsympathetic welfare bureaucracy retraumatise survivors of violence. Rather than helping individuals regain stability, the system entrenches precarity, making it harder for people to recover and contribute to society. A welfare state that punishes rather than supports is not just cruel – it is economically short-sighted, entrenching poverty and ill health while failing to achieve its own goals. Beyond hospitals and GP surgeries, the environment itself makes people sick. In the poorest communities, urban decay is ever-present. Abandoned buildings, derelict lots, and neglected infrastructure contribute to mental illness and reinforce cycles of despair. When every street you walk down reminds you that no one cares, it’s easy to believe that that includes your doctor, your government, even yourself. Just as buildings must meet basic safety regulations to be classed as habitable – a home must have a bathroom, doors and windows – we must rethink how communities are designed, based on what human beings need to thrive. Right now, the forces shaping our neighbourhoods often run counter to public health, dictated by market forces that aggravate the principle of the inverse care law. That is to say, deprived communities become unhealthier wherever commercial incentives are allowed to run rampant. When supermarkets and property developers are being given more input on how development in a community unfolds while local authorities are in a state of managed decline, is it any wonder that so many people live in food deserts, surrounded by off-licenses masquerading as groceries, with five bookies to every GP, and an illicit drug market that can deliver to your door faster than Dominos? Health inequality in Britain is not a failure of knowledge; it is a failure of political will. Every government has understood the stakes. Every government has chosen to maintain the status quo. Reallocating healthcare resources to favour the most deprived areas would mean taking from wealthier ones – an electoral risk few politicians are willing to take. Internationally, progressive policies have demonstrated the potential for change. Denmark integrates elderly housing with young families, fostering intergenerational support. Norway treats addiction as a public health issue rather than a criminal offence, leading to lower recidivism rates for drug-related crime. Finland prioritises equality and wellbeing in its social policies, correlating directly with better health outcomes. Strategies like universal basic income, free school meals for all children, and subsidised mental health care are widely recognised as effective in reducing inequality. Yet Britain remains trapped in a cycle of short-term policy decisions, cultural division and systemic neglect. Basic issues like cycle-lanes, needle exchanges, and policies that promote work-life balance and gender equality generate days of online debate here, while in most European countries of comparative wealth, these are settled issues. Is it any wonder we are being out-performed on every metric except inequality, where we consistently top the league? As inequality deepens, those in the poorest communities grow increasingly distrustful of institutions, leading to disengagement from healthcare altogether. This accelerates the inverse care law: those most in need become the most distant from care. True healthcare reform requires more than just increased funding. It demands a proactive model, where health is monitored over lifetimes to detect problems before they arise. Community environments must also be redesigned to support wellbeing, integrating what we know about human health into urban planning, housing, and employment policies. A truly effective healthcare system cannot focus solely on treating individuals at the point of need. It must also address the conditions that make people sick in the first place. So how do we move forward? Some argue we require an insurance-based system to meet the level of demand for better services. Others believe we just need to keep pouring money into the NHS and that anything approaching reform is akin to backdoor privatisation. In this polarised and highly ideological debate, we’ll get nowhere fast. In truth, a large part of the solution lies not in the health service but in the wider inequalities outlined earlier. The Health Equals campaign, launched by the Health Foundation in 2024, seeks to tackle these structural inequalities by drawing attention to the broader social and economic forces that shape health. It challenges the notion that healthcare alone determines health outcomes, emphasising how education, housing, income, job security and access to green spaces directly impact wellbeing. At its core, Health Equals calls for systemic change that extends beyond the NHS. It advocates for policies that improve living conditions and remove the structural barriers that lead to poorer health in disadvantaged communities. A coalition of organisations – including Shelter, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Trussell, Barnardo’s, and Citizens Advice – supports the campaign. With expertise in housing, poverty alleviation, food insecurity, and social justice, these groups reinforce the campaign’s core argument: health is shaped by the conditions in which people live and work. This campaign matters because it shifts the conversation from personal responsibility to societal responsibility, and from inequality to fairness. By advocating for fairer policies and greater investment in the social determinants of health, the campaign seeks to prevent illness before it arises – ultimately reducing strain on the NHS and improving life expectancy and quality of life for marginalised groups. It’s a campaign I support because it focuses on measures well within the legislative competence of any government, provided they are willing to show leadership and place policy before politics. Without a paradigm shift, Britain’s poorest will remain condemned to shorter, sicker lives. The burden of ill health falls disproportionately on the working class and economically disadvantaged – not because of personal failure, but because of structural injustices. Until policymakers take responsibility for the structural determinants of health, these inequalities will persist. The question is not whether we can afford to address these injustices, but whether we can afford not to. The longer these disparities go unaddressed, the higher the societal cost – not just in healthcare spending, but in human and economic potential lost to preventable disease and premature death. If growth is the number one priority of government, then a healthy workforce is required to drive it. Perhaps, instead of turning the Department for Work and Pensions into a low-rent FBI, snooping on bank accounts, performing dawn raids on suspected fraudsters, we might deploy resources making sure people get the help they need so they can return to work, healthier, happier and more productive. The suppression of the Black Report 40 years ago may feel like a distant memory to many, but it remains a stark reminder of how long these issues have been ignored. Like a niggling health issue that goes unaddressed, one day the symptoms we’ve tried to ignore or minimise will simply overwhelm us. What should worry all of us is just how adjusted those in most need have become to this dangerously imbalanced health status quo, and how this low expectation lets politicians off the hook. But perhaps the most shocking aspect in the ongoing public health debate, so often centred around notions of individual responsibility rather than systems that demonstrably favour wealthier citizens, is how distant most people remain from the ugly, irrefutable truth: poor health is absolutely a choice – a political one. --- [Tip the Bee](https://thebeemagazine.com/#/portal/support) All donations go towards supporting the Bee’s mission to nurture, publish promote and pay for the best new working-class writing.