Lowborn: Growing Up, Getting Away and Returning to Britain’s Poorest Towns
As seen:
By Kerry Hudson, and and, Kerry Hudson
avg rating
3 reviews
Random House presents the audiobook edition of Lowborn by Kerry Hudson.
What does it really mean to be poor in Britain today? A prizewinning novelist revisits her childhood and some of the country’s most deprived towns
’When every day of your life you have been told you have nothing of value to offer, that you are worth nothing to society, can you ever escape that sense of being ‘lowborn’ no matter how far you’ve come?’
Kerry Hudson is proudly working class but she was never proudly poor. The poverty she grew up in was all-encompassing, grinding and often dehumanising. Always on the move with her single mother, Kerry attended nine primary schools and five secondaries, living in B&Bs and council flats. She scores eight out of ten on the Adverse Childhood Experiences measure of childhood trauma.
Twenty years later, Kerry’s life is unrecognisable. She’s a prizewinning novelist who has travelled the world. She has a secure home, a loving partner and access to art, music, film and books. But she often finds herself looking over her shoulder, caught somehow between two worlds.
Lowborn is Kerry’s exploration of where she came from, revisiting the towns she grew up in to try to discover what being poor really means in Britain today and whether anything has changed. She also journeys into the hardest regions of her own childhood, because sometimes in order to move forwards we first have to look back.
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This is a memoir of a girl growing up in acute poverty who revisits the many locations that she lived in throughout her childhood and views them from a new perspective. The first thing I noticed on opening this book was the map, four pages in. I cannot resist a book with a map and this one was fascinating with some place names in bold typeface (these were the towns that she lived in throughout her childhood) and dotted lines with arrows which I discovered were the routes she and her mother travelled, either to escape from or to join one of her mother's boyfriends. It made for uncomfortable reading and I found myself comparing my own childhood with Kerry's. I grew up in a poor household but there was plenty of love and food, and I felt wanted. All very different to Kerry's experience. I felt angry that no one seemed to take responsibility for her safety and well being. Not her mother, the boyfriends, or the many teachers in all the different schools Kerry attended (apart from those at Hetton-le-Hole who seemed to recognise that something was very wrong. But still nothing was done). Kerry clearly questioned her own ability to be able to love and nurture another human being after her own experiences. It was comforting to hear how she found escape in libraries and books, and I wonder if that was the motivation that spurred her on to escape the kind of life she was leading and to find a better one. I liked how Kerry tackled each location, telling the story of that particular time in her life. She then followed it up with a chapter where she re-visited the place, sometimes finding the actual house or flat, and speaking to locals about the current state of the community.
I recently found Kerry Hudson on Twitter and I am delighted to see that she is on maternity leave, so she must know now that she can love and nurture her own child.
A raw and incredibly honest memoir of a life lived at the edges of society, this is Kerry’s recollection of growing up with a young single mother and a string of unsuitable father figures and influences. Her experiences of a cycle of alcoholism, poverty and domestic abuse perpetuated through generations can be at times a difficult and un-nerving read. Growing up with no stability, no certainty of what tomorrow holds, amidst a constantly changing backdrop of addresses, towns and schools, Kerry tells of how she escaped from poverty and moved on with her life to where she is today.
This is a book that probably resonates with many readers for different reasons. It is a brave piece of writing and one that asks us many questions of our society and how we ensure children and families have the right support in place. It examines poverty and how it throws up a huge wall in the faces of so many and also highlights some of the really important work that (good) teachers and organizations are doing in trying to address this.
I found this book really quite touching. Heartbreaking in parts, rather humorous in others, but well written and gripping from beginning to end. A book I’m glad I picked up.
Kerry Hudson managed to escape the life of poverty in which she grew up; the cycle of deprivation that many never leave. In Lowborn she returns to the towns she lived in with her mother and younger sister to fill in the memory gaps, to understand who she is and try to discover what it’s really like to be poor in Britain today.
I found this memoir moving and honest – Kerry doesn’t shy away from revealing the harrowing treatment she endured from family members, bullying from both children and teachers and her experience of assault and rape. Writing this book allows Kerry to come to terms with her experiences and how they shaped her.
What I found most distressing was the fact that the experiences of the poor in these towns has not changed and in many ways has got worse. I suspect a writer could visit these towns in another twenty years and discover children still living in damp flats with not enough food to eat. The current pandemic has highlighted those inequalities that have always been there so maybe things will change in the future.
I’m not sure Kerry gets to the heart of what it means to be poor today. In the book she chats to people she meets in the towns but to discover answers would require a lot more research.
This book works best as a memoir. I thought the structure of the book recounting her memories of a place followed by the present-day visit was effective. I felt a lot of empathy for Kerry and am glad she managed to find some peace of mind in the writing of it.
