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When Sandra Forsyth began marching in support of the English Defence League, her daughter Nicola Wilding hoped it was a phase. The Cumbria-bred, Dover-dwelling Sandra was about to turn 60 and had been dealing with a lot of stress. Not only had her son been sentenced to two years in prison for armed robbery, but she was working at a home for adults with complex needs. She liked the job, but it could be gruelling – especially when clients hurled furniture at her or ripped sinks off walls.
Then, in May 2013, came the death of Lee Rigby, a drummer with the Second Battalion of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers who was murdered by two Islamist terrorists using machetes. Sandra didn’t know Rigby, Wilding notes, but his death nonetheless brought her pent-up rage to the surface. She began watching videos on Facebook by a man named Tommy Robinson, who wanted to know why the country’s brave soldiers were being murdered. By September of that year, she was protesting on the streets of London.
Inspired by the puzzle of her mother’s late-life activism, These Wild English is a heartfelt and evocative memoir of Sandra who, up until her death in 2024, endured poverty, upheaval and abusive partners, as well as a heart condition leading to two rounds of surgery. “How did my mum, this proud tough woman who had brought up four kids pretty much alone, end up marching alongside far-right extremists chanting ‘No more refugees’?” Wilding asks. “And how did my brother – a kind, smart, funny man who loved his kids – how did he end up in prison? … Was it us? Did we do it to ourselves? Or was it something else – something bigger than us?”
The “us” in this story is important. Wilding, the eldest of Forsyth’s children and one of the few in her family to find stability through education and a career, is a TV documentary maker specialising in poverty and rural working-class communities, though here she is no dispassionate observer. She also has an eye on the bigger picture, noting how wider events and the social and economic decisions taken in Westminster can affect the lives of vulnerable individuals and communities. For the Forsyth family, these have included the winter of discontent, mass unemployment and Thatcher’s right-to-buy scheme in the 1970s and 80s; the foot-and-mouth outbreak and the financial crisis in the 2000s; and the Tory austerity programme, Brexit referendum and resurgence of the far right in the 2010s.
Wilding isn’t the first author to examine the alienation of the British working classes and the ways they have been exploited, pilloried and misunderstood: Kerry Hudson’s Lowborn, Joel Budd’s Underdogs and Rebecca Smith’s Rural have all offered their own perspectives. In our social media-fanned, post-Brexit discourse, the white working classes are often cast as aggressors waging vicious war on immigrant communities, having been manipulated by self-interested politicians deliberately stoking division. Wilding has little time for such one-dimensional depictions, despite her clear dismay at her mother’s flirtation with the far right.
Instead, writing in thoughtful and elegantly understated prose, she digs into the roots of Sandra’s dissatisfaction, telling a story that spans three generations, starting out with her early life in the 1960s on her father’s farm in Eden Valley, Cumbria, where she was tasked with looking after her siblings during the recurring periods when her own mother did a runner. Exasperated by the drudgery of parenting and rural living, Nana Forsyth would leave the family for weeks on end before returning home clutching an olive branch in the form of sweets for the kids and cigarettes for her husband.
At 18, Sandra became pregnant and attempted to make a life with the baby’s father, moving to a cottage up the road from the farm. But within a couple of years, he had left and Sandra was a penniless single mother. And so began a peripatetic pattern that would continue throughout her life: a new man, a new home, an implosion followed by deeper debt and the quest for a fresh start.
In the book’s acknowledgments, Wilding credits the writer and farmer James Rebanks, a former neighbour in Cumbria, for “seeing this book before I could”. It seems Wilding took some convincing to turn her documentarian’s gaze on her own flesh and blood, though, happily, she did. Full of grit and compassion, These Wild English blends the personal and political to illustrate the ways families are shaped by circumstance and inherited trauma, and can be buffeted by forces beyond their control. At its heart is Sandra, a protagonist for the ages who is wayward, charismatic, fierce, caring and – wisely or not – always up for a fight.
