Poverty, alcoholism, mental health issues and a child growing up in the 1970s

Learning to Think is Tracy King’s memoir of growing up on a council estate in Birmingham in the 1970s. Her family are poor but united until her father dies in what seems like a senseless killing. Her mother develops mental health problems and also becomes very involved with a local evangelical church who don’t seem to help matters. The author becomes a school refuser and neither she nor her sister is helped much by Social Services. It’s not a particularly unusual situation in that many children, sadly, grow up in poverty, without a father and with scant assistance from the authorities. What is different in this family is that the author is able to lift herself out of the situation and to begin to examine it using critical thinking – she acknowledges that many others are not able to do this.

The trauma that seems to cause the problems for the family is her father’s murder. For years the author and her family had an understanding of what happened which saw her father as a totally innocent victim who was attacked by local youths. In later life she investigates for herself the truth of the matter and comes to terms with her father’s alcoholism which caused him to be aggressive to others. She also explores the lives of those involved in the crime, trying to understand the systemic issues which led to this violent action. When she looks again at the facts of her father’s killing she realises that everything is not as she and her family have thought.

The author looks at how poorer people and the vulnerable are let down by our society but also at the factors which lead to these situations in the first place and which inhibit individuals finding their way out of the situation into which they were born. None of what she says will come as a surprise to anyone who has seriously thought about British society and its problems but it is always good to see things outlined in this way and to use a personal example to make the issues real for the reader.

This is an interesting memoir and one of a number I have read about family fractures and poverty. Each family and each story, however, are different, even if the underlying issues are familiar.