When Kerry Hudson was seven and living in the Scottish town of Airdrie, her mother took her and her baby sister to a neighbour’s flat, where the adults all got drunk. The three of them then returned home, and began playfully throwing broken biscuits at each other – a laugh at first, until her mother suddenly snapped.
“She told me I was a selfish little cow, that I was a nasty little bitch,” Hudson writes. Her mother then dragged her to another nearby flat, and told the family who lived there that they were to take care of her eldest daughter until social services came and took her away. Hudson remembers the response of the children she then had to spend the night with: “The kids asked me, full of the horror of the idea of a child simply given away, ‘What will happen?’ And I replied, ‘I don’t know, she doesn’t want me.’”
As it turned out, her mother came to get her the next day, full of hungover remorse. But the experience was of a piece with the chaotic, volatile nature of Hudson’s childhood: essentially a fitful trek around Scotland and England, defined by her mother’s turbulent personal life and mental instability, and a sense that there was rarely anyone around to make her life more bearable – either from the relevant authorities, or any friends and family. Hudson, now a successful novelist, is still deeply affected by formative years when she went to nine primary and five secondary schools. “I find myself unable to reconcile my ‘now’ with my past,” she says. “I can best describe this vertiginous feeling as belonging nowhere and to no one, neither ‘back there’ nor truly ‘here’.”
Lowborn – which began as a column on the now-defunct website the Pool – is split between Hudson’s memories of her upbringing and her more recent experiences of returning to the places through which she passed. Its distinguishing features echo her two social realist novels, Tony Hogan Bought Me an Ice Cream Float Before He Stole My Ma and Thirst: bracing prose and an eye for symbolic detail. When her American father found out he was to become a dad, we learn that “he fell to his knees and cried, ‘What am I going to do?’”, whereupon her mother left him. His on-off replacement was a man called Richie, who had a habit of splitting up with Hudson’s mum and moving from town to town, but still managing to eventually drag the family behind him. He was partial to “cheating when he played cards, even when it was with his six-year-old stepdaughter”.
Hudson’s instinct for small things replete with significance rarely lets her down. In the B&B (“essentially it was a homeless shelter”) the family were billeted in North Shields, near Newcastle, “there were communal showers for 20p a go, so we had two a week until we figured out we could sneak in and shower quickly after someone else had paid”. She recalls arriving at a new home in Great Yarmouth and being told not to put her hands down the back of the sofa because “there’s dirty needles down there”. And at regular intervals, she realises in retrospect that her life took this or that turn on the basis of snap decisions or crude chance. A founding event is rooted in a single mind-boggling sentence written by a social worker: “Although much concern was expressed regarding the care of Kerry by her mother, there was little presented in the way of concrete evidence.” On this basis, she was returned to her mum after a spell in foster care, and the family’s awful wanderings resumed.
If the book has a flaw, it is not in the telling of the story, but some aspects of the way Hudson and her experiences are framed. In the introduction, she lists questions she wrote Lowborn to answer, which include: “What did it mean to be working class any more?” The online promotional blurb includes a prominent quote from the food writer Jack Monroe, claiming that reading Lowborn will allow the reader to “really understand the complexities of being born working class in Britain”. But Hudson’s story is about a life lived at the edges and extremes, and trying to universalise it perhaps runs the risk of playing into a host of modern prejudices. The 21st-century discourse about class and inequality has a tendency to equate “working class” with “poor” and move at speed into assumptions about chaos and degeneracy.
In a righteous endpiece, she points out that “we live in the world’s sixth-richest economy but one-fifth of us live in poverty”, and that a decade of austerity is part of the explanation. Lowborn is in part an indictment of a country that claims to still have a functioning welfare state, though help is now even harder to come by than it was when she was growing up. Most of all, it is a moving portrait of the survival and eventual flourishing of a remarkable spirit. This might sound sentimental, were it not for something evident on nearly every page: such terrible experiences, even if they are left behind, always leave scars.