Life

Radio review: Harrowing story of living in poverty and fear

Nuala McCann

Nuala McCann

Nuala McCann is an Irish News columnist and writes a weekly radio review.

Nuala McCann
Nuala McCann Nuala McCann

Lowborn Book of the Week Radio 4

Kerry Hudson’s memoir – a book of the week – is worth the listening.

Yes, it’s so harrowing at times that it sounds unreal. You need to remind yourself that this is true, not a series of stories.

How many lives Kerry Hudson lived from childhood – she was born to a very young single mother who went from “crisis to crisis” according to the social workers’ reports.

Hudson does not pull her punches – at the opening she sets her childhood out - a series of different primary schools, time in care and later, abortion and rape.

She was the one that got away – who made her way through the chaos of her childhood and found a new life.

But she is forever caught between two worlds – even as a successful writer, married, sitting at a desk with an award from the British Council that allows her to write – she sounds torn.

She felt compelled to go back and to look the monster in the face.

She writes in a clear sighted way.

She gives us her life growing up in Aberdeen, how she came from a family of fishwives who chased the “silver darlings” down the coast.

She wanted, she said, to slit open the fish, spill out the guts of what had been.

Her memories are snapshots - watching a film with her mum – The House That Dripped Blood – or being warned not to put her hand down the back of a sofa for fear of used needles.

When she was born, her granny said she was like “a wee pound of Kerrygold”. The name was shortened Kerry.

She remembers foster care – a woman who morphed into “Bisto mum”.

The first “boyfriend” her mum had who swung a set of nunchucks and terrified them both until her mother burst out of the flat in the night, shouting “He’s going to kill us”.

It was, she writes, a childhood where fear “pumped every beat of her heart”.

Her words shine a light on what it really means to live in poverty today. You may not want to hear it, but you won’t be able to switch off.