Working-class writing; it’s time to change the stories. My first novel, The Killing Jar, was lauded as an authentic tale of working-class life. Which is nice and, I think, happened in part because people could feel that I knew the places and people I wrote about. But my protagonist Kerrie-Ann isn’t really working-class, not when you examine it. She has a ‘business’. Okay, so it’s dealing drugs, but there’s no doubt she approaches this in a serious way, and uses the language of an entrepreneur when she talks about her work. She’s bright and hardworking and I reckon she’d win the apprentice, although the other contestants might want to watch their backs. No, my authentic tale of working-class life comes in my second novel, about the LIFFE trading floor in the 1990’s. My trader characters earn a good living in a legal way. They are also solidly working-class, and bring that attitude and culture to this story. When LIFFE was at the height of its powers, it wasn’t the FT that had the biggest influence on our financial markets, it was ‘Sun Money’.
That’s the problem with authenticity; it often isn’t what people think it is. Being working-class is not about being poor, at least, not all the time. It’s more about the way money comes and goes in cycles; families are often either doing okay or hiding behind the sofa from the rent man and living on potatoes. It isn’t about being neglected or abused. Far from it. Unsurprisingly, working-class people love their children too, who often thrive and rarely leave for school looking scruffy. It’s about growing up in a house that is scrubbed clean and may not contain any books but that’s because you know where the library is, and why would you buy something you can borrow for free?
Being working-class is about being the first to go to University and your parents not being able to send you a monthly allowance like some of your new friends get, but being ready to send you their last tenner when you run out of cash. It’s about rolled eyes from your middle-class tutor when you challenge something about a working-class character in someone else’s story before she asks if you’re about to start a pissing contest about who’s more working-class. It’s about the literary agent’s assistant editing your work who thinks it’s okay to say that she doesn’t think your characters ought to be working-class. Later, on your manuscript, she comments that she doesn’t ‘buy’ a character’s total lack of ambition because she doesn’t get it. At all.
Being working-class is about being turned down for piano lessons at school because you don’t own a piano, even though you’ve already taught yourself to play using a Casio keyboard and sneaking into the hall before school to practise on the real thing. It’s about being dismissed as stupid, or not offered jobs because you don’t look, sound or dress right. It’s about choosing economic safety. You do maths, or science, at University. You become a teacher. Or a doctor, or a dentist. If you become a writer, you become a crime writer, because, in writing if nowhere else, crime pays. And, yes, you become middle-class along the way, after a fashion, but you’re never the kind of insider who confidently reaches for the right cutlery. It’s about where you’ve come from because it’s about the opportunities that you didn’t have, or might not get, even now, because you have a regional accent and wear clothes you bought from Asda.
What’s missing from ‘working-class’ life, as curated and edited by the middle-classes, is the cultural richness. There is music, and laughter, Northern Soul, clubbing, Karaoke, and massive, treasured record collections. There is fashion; big, bold and unapologetic. There is family time around the TV that isn’t about watching like zombies but about sharing the experience and is funny and loving and important enough to be the basis of award-winning comedy like The Royle Family. There’s the creativity and humour that produced Notts County’s wheelbarrow song and, if you’ve not heard it, it’s time you did so google it.
It’s about stories. The one where your mum and dad, who lived less than half a mile away from each other in Nottingham, actually met in Ipswich, after she stole his scarf at the football. The one where your mum was hanging out the washing and hears her dad’s voice; he’s been dead months, and she goes inside the house to find the police knocking at the door, looking for him after a car tax summons. The same one where your mamma gave them a shovel and told them to dig him up from Bulwell Cemetery in a way that you could only ever imagine a working-class grandmother doing. There are funny stories and tragic stories and crime stories and love stories and an awful lot of spooky stories where the clock stops or someone wakes up from dreaming and knows, just knows, exactly which bad thing has happened right at that moment. The stories span all genres and should be heard because, otherwise, the world is missing out.
The problem with the kind of misery fiction often lauded as authentic by the literary world is that it presents working-class life as something people need to escape. But I had a better, more nurturing family than almost anyone I’ve ever met. Why would I want to escape that? The authentic working-class narrative doesn’t need to be about abused and poverty-stricken characters, although it might be, the same way it might be about the ballet (Billy Elliot), or literature (Educating Rita). ‘It’s a good life and a good world, all said and done, if you don’t weaken,’ Arthur Seaton tells us, and, honestly, I feel like this is such a perfect motif of working-class existence, and is perhaps why Seaton is a character who persists, who generation after generation of working-class readers find real and vivid and relevant.
Every so often, there’s a headline in the broadsheets bemoaning the lack of working-class writers, and all of us sitting there at our keyboards writing crime look up in horror. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think crime is specifically more relevant to the working-class experience any more than escape is, but that working-class writers are often drawn to a genre that might pay the bills. Although, let’s be honest about the social conditions that lead to crime; I often write about people who come to the conclusion that crime is their best opportunity to do well in life and that’s because, for many, this is an economic reality. Some of my characters in Dead Flowers are criminals but many are not. My protagonist, Sian Love, is a Cambridge educated, ex-police officer with a PhD who, intellectually, could eat most people for breakfast, and often does. She is also utterly working-class in the same way I am; it’s coded into her DNA. She might have travelled far from her roots, in some ways, but they are still her roots, deeply part of her, necessary for life. This is what it means to be working-class. You couldn’t escape it and, mostly, you don’t even want to.
Nicola Monaghan’s new novel, Dead Flowers, will be published by Verve Books on 5th Sept 2019
