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Amanda Craig: ‘I went and talked to the girls who were walking the streets’ |
A grim fairy story of north London folk
The bad are punished in Amanda Craig’s riveting tale of raw life in NW1, writes
Ruth Gorb
HEARTS AND MINDS by Amanda Craig
Littlebrown £17.99
ON a winter’s night, in a desolate piece of heathland, a young woman’s body is heaved into a murky pond. It is an opening to a novel worthy of Dickens. But the pond is on Hampstead Heath, and the terrible events that led to the murder have all happened in today’s Camden.
Amanda Craig has taken the Victorian novel and brought it magnificently into the 21st century. The book is a thriller, a love story, a detective story; it has villains and victims and a huge cast of characters; it is strong on plot and social awareness. Take these 19th-century trappings and apply them to one of the most controversial issues in our society today – immigration – and you have a riveting, disturbing picture of the way we live now.
It’s a hot topic, and one that has fired the imaginations of more than one writer. Amanda Craig says, with only a mild display of pique, that she was writing Hearts and Minds well before the publication of Rose Tremain’s The Road Home or Marina Lewycka’s A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian. “My book was supposed to be published in 2004. What delayed it was getting seriously ill.”
Her doctors, her nurses, the cab drivers, the au pairs who helped with the children when she came home – they were all immigrants, they all affected her life, and her work: it was when she had to interview the eastern European girls who wanted to come as au pairs that she began to learn about the exploitation and degradation that was happening on her doorstep.
She is, she says, a lucky woman. She has recovered from her long illness, she has a good marriage, a happy family, a successful career: originally a journalist, she now reviews children’s books in The Times and is a highly acclaimed novelist – her bestseller, A Vicious Circle, which lifted the lid off the world of journalists and literati, caused a considerable hoo-ha among those who saw it as a roman a clef, an accusation she hotly denies.
She is gentle, hardworking and courageous. She lives with her family in a quiet, gentrified street in Camden Town; big, light rooms lead onto a lush green garden. But round the corner is Agar Grove, where there was – until a clean-up operation – one of the most infamous brothels in London.
“We all know about it in theory, but I decided to actually go out and find out what was happening, like Dickens and George Eliot did. I couldn’t get into the brothels, but I went and talked to the girls who were walking the streets.
She told them she was a journalist, and offered them money; they were only too happy to come off the cold York Way into a warm café and talk to her. They knew girls who had been trafficked, all of them on heroin, all of them very young. “They were all 16 and under – one of them was 14,” she says. “I kept thinking of my 16-year-old daughter – it was my worst nightmare.”
We lead such sheltered lives, she says, and don’t know about these girls kept like battery hens, never allowed out, repeatedly raped and beaten, half-starved – it beggars belief. Why don’t they try to escape? “To what?” asks Craig. “Their lives wouldn’t be much different at home. It was the misery there that they hoped to escape when they came to this country.”
In her novel, the young prostitute Anna is one of five immigrants whose stories cross and part and cross again in the streets of Camden. Not all are victims – although a young South African teacher is victimised by the loutish pupils in a sink school where he works -but all of them reflect the appalling struggle to survive young people face in London: even Katie, an American escaping an unhappy love affair back home, working for a publisher here, can only afford to live in a stinking, run-down couple of rooms in a dubious house in York Way.
Job, seeking asylum from Zimbabwe, lives in a cold room in a tower block, is at the bottom of the heap in the hierarchy of cab-drivers, and still manages to send money home to his wife. He is good, brave and heart-breaking, and it is he who is the hero of the hour in the terrifying denouement of the novel, an attempted suicide bombing.
It has been a monumental task, says Craig, assembling a huge cast made even huger by including characters from some of her previous novels.
It is all familiar, and unfamiliar, and there is an uneasy sense that events were predestined by the novel. There is talk of a credit crunch; Amanda Craig’s husband is an economist and foresaw trouble in 2006 when she was writing the book. A month after she had finished it, three east European girls started hanging around Agar Grove. The fictional attempted suicide bombing happened before the real London Tube bombs. The Craig household was burgled two months after Amanda had written about Polly’s burglary. “Like her, I fought the way I would have fought for a child,” she says. “The whole of my novel was on my lap-top; I wasn’t going to let them have it.”
We don’t expect violence in our protected lives, she says, but there is violence in her book because it exists, here, in London. “I’m passionate about London,” she says. “It is the queen of cities. Yes, it does exploit people, but if you work hard you can make a go of it. And yes, there is a lot of wretchedness around. But there is also resilience and intelligence and gutsiness.”
She could be talking about Dickens. Of her own book, she says it is a fairy story: “The good end up happy, and the bad are punished.” |
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