Hudson does not sensationalise her past. She describes her early childhood with a dispassionate detachment that makes it believable, that engages empathy. You feel that, but for the accident of birth, the child taken into care, the wee girl flinging nunchucks near her mother’s face, the person packing up all her possessions and moving, time and again, across the country to start a new life: that girl could have been you.

You didn’t even get a few years’ good start’). Once she’s back with her mother, the pair move up and down Britain in a series of desperate situations: damp council flats, unsuitable B&Bs. Her mother moves to escape domestic abuse, or a bad situation, or to catch up with Kerry’s step-dad.

The book alternates between the story of Hudson’s childhood and her present-day journey to rediscover the deprived places where she lived.ĭescriptions of Hudson’s early childhood are evocative of the 80s: spiked hair, double denim, space hoppers, Dallas, Wogan and 20p to spend at the ice cream van. But this is no sepia-tinted nostalgia. Events were so traumatic that as an adult Kerry wakes at night ‘screaming obscenities at phantom shapes, inky terror running through ’. As a toddler, she is put into care (of this time her Auntie Susan later says: ‘You were a tiny child. She recounts the shame of being that kid – the poorest in school – who cowers from constant bullying in clothes that are too small she recalls the time when she was ‘crying, filthy, starving’ and taken into care. In her memoir, Lowborn, Kerry Hudson shares her experience of growing up amidst the chaos and uncertainty of homelessness.

Kerry Hudson’s precise, intricate and intelligently written memoir, Lowborn, revisits the brutal realities of poverty and the deprived places of Hudson’s own childhood.

Lowborn book