When the relationship foundered, Hudson found herself with and without her mother in temporary accommodation, foster care and every other kind of unsuitable housing.

Hudson was born of a vulnerable mother and an older man, an ex-US army veteran “already in the grip of alcoholism”. This woman’s advice to her granddaughter – to grab the hair in fist fights and “use my nails” – would many years later serve Hudson well in the backstreets of Great Yarmouth. She lived her life in the fish houses of Aberdeen in “brutal conditions and vicious workplace politics”. She begins her story well before her own birth, with her “terrifying” grandmother, who looked “like Elizabeth Taylor with violet eyes”. Hudson has the lived experience of someone who fell through the cracks. It’s compelling, fascinating and well-written, undeniably grim but peppered with humour and tenderness, every chapter a testimony to someone’s goodness or fortitude, to the kindness of strangers. So the chapters are titled “Aberdeen 1991 and Aberdeen 2018”, “Hetton-le-Hole 1989 and Hetton-le-Hole 2018” and so forth, working us around the country and her childhood, her teenage years and family life. I have access to art, music, film, books” – with the “unrecognisable” one she left behind. In Lowborn , she compares her life now – “I eat well and always have somewhere decent to stay, my clothes are cheap but I can afford to replace them, I enjoy the luxury of exercise. What follows is Hudson unpicking those events and the towns in which they happened: Aberdeen, Great Yarmouth, Canterbury, Liverpool, Sunderland – poor towns or, at least, the poor side of each town where every economic boom has failed to penetrate to those most in need. She starts frankly, with the events of her first years, during which she experienced:

It is, as she calls it, “all-encompassing, grinding, brutal and often dehumanising”.

Reading Kerry Hudson’s excellent memoir, Lowborn, I was reminded, as though I could ever forget, that there is nothing glamorous about true poverty.

We, the constant poor, had nowhere to go for the holidays but back to the bedsit, still cold, with 10 fags to last us for the festive season. By Christmas, the fun of that had worn thin and they returned to Surrey and York to be fed and watered and have their allowances topped up. The posh students used to come, a fresh round every October, and flirt with poverty, with having only 20 fags for the week, with the thrill of buying a second-hand leather coat and being too cold indoors to take it off. I grew up in the student area of Birmingham, solidly middle-class bohemian with a whiff of incoming immigration from surrounding poorer areas and over the waters.

Kerry hudson lowborn