Nicola Wilding's debut memoir spans three generations of her working-class family, from Cumbria to Northern Ireland

“In 2013 my little brother was in prison for armed robbery. My mum was marching the streets with the English Defence League, belting out, ‘I’m England till I die’. At the time I was in an edit suite, making a documentary about the housing crisis, and thinking to myself: How did we get here? As a family, as a class, as a country?”

This is how TV producer and writer Nicola Wilding describes the catalyst circumstances for her memoir, These Wild English: A Family, a Class, a Country on Fire. A microcosmic story of working-class alienation, it is a heart-rending debut about how the post-war trajectory of our nation affected some of society’s most exposed and vulnerable. But it is also a story full of feistiness, tenderness and love, in which Wilding vividly tells her own family story with all its pains and glories. 

Spanning three generations, from her grandparents’ life of labour on a farm in Cumbria’s Eden Valley, to her mother’s peripatetic, debt-ridden existence in Kent, Cyprus and Northern Ireland, and Wilding’s own often chaotic childhood, it contains all those “White Working Class” tick-box clichés: riotous drunken behaviour, absconding spouses, serial single parenthood, unemployment, debt, benefit fraud, domestic violence, imprisonment.

“How easy it would be,” Wilding writes, “to stick a label on my own family and make them fit a ready-made story. But would it be the truth?” The great achievement of These Wild English is to compel us to jettison all labels and clichés, and show us the truth of just how hard it could be to hold a family together in the rapidly-changing Britain of the 1970s and ’80s, which moved fast and broke things, crushing aspirations in the process. From there, it is not hard to see how we arrived in these present times of fracture and division.

Brexit happened and there was a bit of soul-searching and a notion that we really must listen to the working class. But I’m not sure that anyone really listened. And 10 years later here we are

When we speak via video call, Wilding, now in her early 50s, tells me that she “always wanted to write and tell stories”. After art college and an English degree at Sussex University, she embarked on a career in television and while working at the Discovery Channel honed a desire to make factual TV with a focus on social issues. Twenty-five years later, she is now an edit producer based between Glasgow and her native Cumbria, with a CV encompassing programmes made with the likes of Hannah Fry, the late Michael Mosley and centenarian national treasure Sir David Attenborough; and subjects including adoption and self-harm.

Despite her long experience of programme-making and scriptwriting, Wilding was unsure whether she would be able to write a memoir, doubts she describes as a “typical working-class thing”: “Had I been left to my own devices, I wouldn’t have done it because I didn’t know I had something to say.” Re-connecting with writer James Rebanks, a former neighbour from her childhood, she says, helped her get started. “James and I grew up together and he knew my family. He said to me: ‘There’s a book about working-class lives crying out to be written here.’”

These Wild English took Wilding seven years, and draws upon numerous conversations with her mother, siblings, aunts and uncles. Strongly influenced by her love for Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight (coincidentally also one of my own favourite memoirs), she began writing it in the present tense, but following editorial feedback switched to the past tense to allow her to contextualise events in the lives of her family.

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