Kerry Hudson - Tony Hogan Bought Me An Ice Cream Float Before He Stole My Ma

The first words Janie Ryan hears as she enters the world are her mother Irene’s cries of ‘come on out, you shitting, cunting, little fucking fucker’. She is then presented to her family, who ‘came & held their faces so close to mine I could smell whether they'd had booze or food for breakfast. It was mostly booze'. From these Roddy Doyle-esque beginnings, Kerry Hudson’s extravagantly-titled debut develops into a bittersweet and idiosyncratic coming-of-age novel.

You could say that Janie is a child of the Eighties – certainly, she is someone for whom there may as well be no such thing as society. Though her family is often reliant on state benefits, they are largely overlooked by the institutions which are supposed to provide them with support, and Janie’s attendance at school is sporadic at best. Her upbringing is a tour of the worst-hit areas of Thatcher’s Britain, from North Shields at the fag-end of the Miners’ Strike to the run-down seaside town of Greater Yarmouth. Even in these areas, she is still marked out by her poverty – in North Shields, she is forced to hide in a hedge after other children 'followed me after school to see if I really did live in a homeless shelter like Kevin Hayes said'.  Janie and her mother are a unit, ‘us against the world’, but self-reliance is a necessity rather than a virtue. This self-reliance often means forming alliances with dubious characters, most damagingly of all with the titular mother-stealer, Tony Hogan.

We first hear Tony’s name mentioned by Irene as a threat to some would-be muggers: ‘have ya heard of Tony Hogan? Ask yer brothers, or yer da’s, or yer fuckin’ dealer’. As well as a menacing aura, Tony has money, and he wins Janie over with bribes the first time they meet (later, she will compare him to her sister’s dead-beat father Doug by saying ‘At least Tony Hogan bought me an ice cream float before he stole my ma’), but though he can help the family with cash, he proves to be a destructive presence. By the time he has finished, they have been forced to flee their home, and life becomes increasingly harder as they move from B&B to B&B across England and Scotland.

Like a northern soap opera, Janie’s world is full of strong women stretched to breaking point by feckless men, like Uncle Frankie, who buys her mother a bottle of vodka and a miniskirt to mark her bringing her baby home for the first time, and Doug, whose sporadic appearances in her life are marked by extravagant promises and bitter disappointments: ‘the cheek of him, promising the world and giving us fuckin’ Airdrie’. Two men stand out from the rest, in Janie's perception at least – her Da, an American, who loved poetry (‘aye, and drinking’), and Tony, who initially appears to a protector for the young family, before revealing himself to be something altogether darker. Both of these characters appear to have the qualities needed to become successful in Thatcher’s Britain, but this ruthlessness extends to their personal relationships, and Janie’s upbringing is scarred by the absence of one, and presence of the other.

The rare occasions when Janie and Irene feel settled are during periods when they are surrounded by female company; first in a refuge in Aberdeen, after Irene has been thrown out by her mother, and later when they travel to London and stay for a few brief, happy days with Janie’s Da’s ex-girlfriend, before Irene decides to strike out on her own again.

Janie’s narrative is poignant throughout – she sharply observes the effects of poverty, domestic violence and post-natal depression on her mother (‘my memory of ma in those weeks is of her under the heavy duvet, though it was August and scorching. The duvet fell over her limp body like drifted sand’). The effects on her are no less severe. As a young child she sees her mother being abused, and her family’s drug use, leaving her with ‘so many jagged secrets, pushed into a little body for safe keeping until they threatened their way out’. Janie is forced to grow up quickly – it is often unclear how old she is, as she takes responsibility for keeping her mother’s spirits up, and looking after ‘Tiny’, her little sister.

Jenny Fagan’s recent debut The Panopticon explores a similar situation, focussing on Anais, a teenage girl with a troubled background, who dreams of escape. Anais’s hopes are frustrated by harassment from the police and health services, but Janie never attracts their attention by lashing out. One other character from recent Scottish fiction might make for a more accurate, if less obvious, comparison.

Like Renton in Trainspotting, Janie’s horizons are wider than her peers’. Her father is American, which adds some exotic glamour to her rootless upbringing, while her mother set an early example by heading to London at the age of 16. Most teenagers in Greater Yarmouth sought to escape the drudgery of school and work through drink, drugs and casual sex, and Janie joins in with this (‘Reggie had a tape player, so we'd all pile into his room, hand over our pocket money to get booze, listen to Coolio & get off with each other'), but she has an extra outlet: the library. Although her school attendance had been sporadic at best during her childhood, Janie had spent days in libraries with her mother, waiting to be allowed back into their lodgings, and the self-directed learning she did here allows her to dream of better things: ‘Except for ma, those librarians were the only ones who knew how much hope was snagged in those books’. This echoes, in a more down to earth manner, Renton’s courtroom discourse on Kierkegaard, whilst defending himself on a shoplifting charge ('I'm interested in his concepts of subjectivity and truth, and particularly his ideas concerning change,; the notion that genuine choice is made out of doubt and incertainty, and without recourse to the experience of advice of others'). Both characters yearn for escape, to leave their pasts behind them and strike out for fresh territory.

Overall, Terry Hogan… is a well-structured and memorable debut, which manages to tread the path between deprivation and hopefulness without becoming saccharine or rose-tinted. The cultural references are keenly observed, and Janie’s accounts of her adolescence spent in dingy rock clubs will be familiar for many twenty-somethings. It can be strange to read first-person accounts of being born and the early years, but Janie develops a strong narrative voice which I’m sure Ms Hudson will be keen to return to in the future.