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WHen Sandra Forsyth started marching in support of the English Defense League, her daughter Nicola Wilding hoped it was a part. Cumbria-born Sandra, who lives in Dover, was in her early 60s and had a lot of anxiety. Not only was her son sentenced to two years in prison for armed robbery, but he was working in a home for adults with special needs. He loved the job, but it could be exhausting – especially when customers threw chairs at him or tore down walls.
Then, in May 2013, the death of Lee Rigby, a drummer with the Second Battalion of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers was killed by two Islamist terrorists using machetes. Sandra didn’t know Rigby, Wilding notes, but his death brought her anger to the surface. He started watching videos on Facebook with a man named Tommy Robinson, who wanted to know why the country’s brave soldiers were being killed. By September of that year, they were protesting in the streets of London.
Inspired by her mother’s late death, This Wild English is the heartfelt and heartwarming story of Sandra who, until her death in 2024, endured poverty, turmoil and abusive friends, and a heart attack that led to two surgeries. “How did it happen that my mother, this proud mother who raised four children on her own, went along with right-wing terrorists chanting ‘No more refugees’?” Wilding asks. “And how did my brother – a kind, intelligent, loving man – how did he end up in prison? … Was it us? Did we do it to ourselves? Or was it something bigger than us?”
The “we” in this article is important. Wilding, the eldest of Forsyth’s children and one of the few in her family to find stability through education and work, is a TV documentary producer who works on poverty and rural areas, although she is not currently seen as a fan. They also have an eye on the big picture, seeing how the wider social and economic decisions taken in Westminster can affect the lives of vulnerable people and communities. For the Forsyth family, this has included a winter of discontent, mass unemployment and Thatcher’s right-to-buy plan in the 1970s and 80s; the rise of foot and mouth and the financial crisis of the 2000s; and the Tory austerity program, the Brexit referendum and the long-term recovery in the 2010s.
Wilding is not the first writer to examine the alienation of the British working class and how they are exploited, despised and misunderstood: Kerry Hudson’s. LowbornJoel Budd Young people and Rebecca Smith Rural all have given their own opinion. In our post-Brexit social media narrative, white working class groups are often treated as anti-immigrant terrorists, driven by self-serving politics that are deliberately divisive. Wilding has little time to show such one-sidedness, although he is deeply disturbed by his mother’s influence on the right.
Instead, writing in a clear and carefree voice, he explores Sandra’s dissatisfaction, telling a story that spans three generations, starting in the 1960s on her father’s farm in Eden Valley, Cumbria, where she was tasked with caring for her siblings while her mother ran errands. Frustrated by the exhaustion of parenting and rural life, Nana Forsyth leaves the family for several weeks before returning home clutching an olive branch as candy for the children and cigarettes for her husband.
At the age of 18, Sandra became pregnant and tried to live with the child’s father, moving to a small house from the farm. But after a few years, he left and Sandra was a penniless mother. And so he began a life-long journey: a new husband, a new home, a mortgage followed by deep debt and a quest to start over.
In the acknowledgment of the book, Wilding praises the writer and the farmer James Rebankswho used to be a neighbor in Cumbria, because “I saw this book before I was”. It seems that Wilding took some convincing to change his appearance on his flesh and blood, however, happily he did. Full of compassion and empathy, this Wild English combines the personal and the political to show how families are shaped by experience and the traumas of birth, and can be battered by forces beyond their control. At the heart of it is Sandra, a character for many years who is mischievous, charismatic, cruel, caring and – intelligently or not – always fighting.
