Once in a House on Fire by Andrea Ashworth Picador 332pp, £14.99 in UK
The memoir is a very "in" genre right now, the most obvious example being Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes. Once in a House on Fire (as the title and the author's name eerily suggest) has many similarities with McCourt's best-seller. The difference is that the time is the Seventies, and the author is a Mancunian woman (with a dash of Italian and Maltese) in her late twenties. The depressing truth is, however, that in spite of the forty years that separate Andrea Ashworth's youth in Manchester from that of Frank McCourt in Limerick, their books are very similar, rendering childhoods marked by deprivation, deracination, alcohol abuse and violence. Over both memoirs hovers the presence of the humiliated and downtrodden mother, to whom both authors are unswervingly devoted, but from whom they must ultimately make a break in order to begin a new life.
Like McCourt, Ashworth experiences an early and unsuccessful move to a different continent when her parents convince themselves that Manchester has nothing to offer and the streets of Vancouver will be paved with gold. She recalls her first trip in an aeroplane: "It was like being shut up in a spaceship with our stepfather, pressing our faces out at the world . . . smiling air hostesses hovered under helmets of hair . . . while he sat strapped into his seat licking their legs with his eyes."
Ashworth's real father died in a freak accident when she was five. Her stepfather is a bullying drunkard, whose attacks on her mother are eventually stopped when Ashworth (aged nine) and her younger sisters form a human barricade by hanging on, terrified, to their mother's skirts when he raises his fist: " `Out of the way, girls,' he told us, but we all three held on to our mother. I felt her ribs sticking out brittle where I had seen them kicked by a boot on the bathroom floor, late at night under fluorescent white light."
They eventually manage to escape, but not until he has squandered the money from the sale of the Manchester house and ruined their chances of having a new life in Vancouver. Back in England, her mother makes valiant efforts to survive with the help of relatives and friends, but soon has a new boyfriend. It is not too long before he is outdoing his predecessor in his brutal attacks on Ashworth's mother, and also the girls: "He thumped me across the side of the head, then picked me up by the hair and hurled me towards the fire, where I crashed into ceramic tiles."
Glimpses of security are found in other people's houses ("I wanted never to leave her kitchen where the fresh laundry dangled, like floppy angels, over our head on the rack"), or when "Dad" whirls in, suddenly full of presents and bonhomie, but only before the next storm erupts.
Most of all, security lies within the pages of books. Her love of reading and her intelligence turns out to be Ashworth's salvation. She struggles through horrific years at school where she has to wear hand-me-downs from charity shops, is taunted for being "a Paki", and has to hide her natural ability in order to maintain her street cred. Even her second stepfather disapproves of her reading "posh" books, such as Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. She hides Yeats poems in her bra so she can read them in the pub where she has a part-time job. Her ticket to a new life is finally in her hand when she wins a scholarship to Oxford.
This is a moving account of how a sensitive girl survives a dark childhood, never losing her capacity for forgiveness. She is able to inject wry humour into her appreciation of the difference between herself and the safe middle-class world of her friend Tamsyn when the two are accompanied to the cinema with a pair of respectable boys from Tamsyn's neighbourhood: "His round moony eyes struck me as stupid although he strained to make them look deep. He looked trapped in his face: stuck with an idea that he was terribly handsome. I kept my mind on the film. It had been thrilling to be packed in the cinema with other people, all sweating and sharing the same fear. It made me feel normal, just like everyone else, for an hour and a half: terror was something you put yourself through for fun, rather than something dangerous and dirty that you swept under the carpet at home."
Ashworth's humour is much quieter than McCourt's, but she is an equally gifted descriptive writer, and just as able to paint a vivid, poignant scene without pushing us into a sink of sentimentality or pathos. Her restraint, descriptive capacity and freshness of expression show that she has a lot of writing talent. One wonders if a memoir is the best place to start, with such ability. Having soaked up every terrified and courageous drop of her past in this detailed portrait of her first two decades, where can she go next? Unlike Frank McCourt, she has not lived long enough to start on volume number two of her own life.
Katie Donovan is a poet, and an Irish Times journalist