Class And Writing

Street Cat Blues is my debut novel and it was a long time coming. I guess it could be categorised as cosy crime but with a definite noir bite.

I am the child of what I sometimes think of as a mixed marriage. By this I don’t mean mixed in terms of ethnic or religious origin but mixed in terms of class. My father was originally from a fairly middle-class background, a grammar school boy whose parents owned their own house.

My mother had ten siblings and came from the kind of family that always seemed to drop between the cracks and probably didn’t even register on the social scale. She loved reading but was the sort of child that librarians made wash their hands before she was allowed to touch a book. For reasons that even now I don’t fully understand, they drifted away from my father’s family and moved to west London which was where I was born. From there we migrated to just outside north London to a notorious post-war council estate which was where I spent my teenage years mostly avoiding school and watching daytime television.

‘The estate’, as it was called, was generally despised, mostly I guess by those that had never set foot on it. Aspirations were low, especially for girls, and there was a definite feeling of being on the wrong side of the tracks. Literally in this case, as a railway tunnel divided the council estate from a private housing estate, the latter being an altogether different world and one in which the likes of me and my friends were not welcome. Fortunately, when I was young I wasn’t conscious of much of this although I remember being surprised when my sister, a talented tennis player, wasn’t accepted for membership of a tennis club in the nearby town. The only thing that would have remedied the situation was a change of address.

After a few false starts I studied Law part-time and then went on to teach in colleges of further education. This was probably a natural habitat for me as many of my students were adults who, for one reason or another, didn’t succeed at school and were hungry for a second chance. I think that it was no coincidence that many of them were women.

I loved teaching but I had known from a very early age that I wanted to write and my genre was always going to be crime. I had stumbled across Agatha Christie at the age of twelve and fallen in love. On all those days that I was bunking off school, I devoured her books. Fortunately nobody told me that such novels, what with all their country houses and servants called Gladys who sniffed all the time, were not accessible to kids like me. Really, what I should have been doing was reading books laced with gritty social realism that I could identify with. What a barrel of laughs that would have been.

I told very few people that I was writing, on the basis that if they didn’t know what I was doing then they wouldn’t know that I had failed. And I did fail. Quite hard and for quite a long time. I had a few near misses when agents or publishers would show an interest but then, instead of pushing hard until the door opened, I crumpled back down again.

In spite of by now wearing an (admittedly thin) veneer of middle-class confidence, the council estate kid was never very far away. I guess that I was more or less at the point of giving up when I decided to have a final shot last Christmas and submitted Street Cat Blues to a small independent publisher. An email came back the next day and, frankly, I dreaded opening it. I’d hoped that I could have at least a few days dreaming. Well, I did say it was Christmas. They offered me a contract.

Although I wrote other things, Street Cat Blues was the book I kept returning to. The main protagonists are a cat, Aubrey, and a mixed-race teenage boy, Carlos, who is living illegally in Britain with his mother. The worlds of the two cross when Aubrey is adopted by Jeremy who also teaches at the school Carlos attends, Sir Frank Wainwright’s. Although there is a cast of cats, it’s not some dopey talking cat book. The novel is set firmly in the human world where the virtue signallers are not necessarily virtuous and even the most monstrous characters are not without some redeeming feature. Although I didn’t realise it at the time, I guess I was creating a many-layered world which is both strange and familiar and one which I had probably unwittingly inhabited most of my life.

As a society we disapprove of discrimination and rightly so. We have laws in place to deal with it. But class is possibly the one thing that we don’t really talk about, although it sometimes seems to me that it pervades everything that we do and everything that we are. It both traps and releases but, as I now realise, probably only if you let it. If you are reading this and you have ambitions to be a writer then remember this: you don’t have to qualify. Just keep going. The biggest secret of all is that there is no secret.

—I was born in London and spent my teenage years in Hertfordshire where I spent large amounts of time reading novels, watching daytime television and avoiding the kind of school where girls did needlework and boys did woodwork. Failing to gain any qualifications in science whatsoever, the dream of being a forensic scientist collided with reality when a careers teacher suggested that I might like to work in a shop. I don’t think she meant Harrods. Later studying Law, I decided to teach rather than go into practice and spent many years teaching mainly Criminal Law to young people and adults.

Twitter Alisonoleary81

About STREETCAT BLUES

A quiet life for Aubrey?

After spending several months banged up in Sunny Banks rescue centre, Aubrey, a large tabby cat, has finally found his forever home with Molly and Jeremy Goodman, and life is looking good.

However, all that changes when a serial killer begins to target elderly victims in the neighbourhood.

Aubrey wasn’t particularly upset by the death of some of the previous victims, including Miss Jenkins whom Aubrey recalls as a vinegar-lipped bitch of an old woman who enjoyed throwing stones at cats, but Mr Telling was different.

Mr Telling was a mate…

 

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing