Once in a House on Fire by Andrea Ashworth is the author’s biographical account of growing up in 1970s Manchester. I enjoy a good biography and I lived near to Manchester in the 1970s, although I am a few years older than the author, and so I picked this up in a charity shop at some point for the princely sum of 50 pence. My edition is a rather faded and worn paperback, but the pages are all still attached, if slightly discoloured at the edges.
The author’s father died when she was five years old. Her mother struggled to cope mentally and financially. Eventually Andrea had a stepfather who abused her both physically and mentally. Her accounts of his behaviour are, naturally, disturbing but what is more difficult to read is the lack of interest by the authorities and her mother’s collapse into depression. When, at last, her stepfather left he was replaced by another violent man. The childhood of the author and her siblings was shaped and coloured by poverty and violence.
Because she was intelligent and did well at school Andrea was able to leave her home situation and make a life for herself elsewhere. Her account of this is interesting but it makes obvious to the reader that there were many other children living in poverty and with abuse who couldn’t leave as she did. There isn’t a lot of analysis of the underlying issues that cause poverty and create environments in which violence thrives, but the narrative makes some of this obvious, although it provides no solutions.
I have read a lot of books about people growing up in poverty and facing abuse and this is a good example of the genre. It isn’t over dramatic and is very moving in places. I would have liked the author to explore further the root causes of systemic poverty but that wasn’t the point of her memoir. It did, however, leave me grieving for those who don’t escape from similar backgrounds and who are broken forever and for those who go on to replicate the same conditions into new generations.
I shall add this book to my small collection of similar memoirs.
Anne Is Reading 