wWhen Sandra Forsyth started marching in support of the English Defense League, her daughter Nicola Wilding hoped it was a phase. Sandra, who grew up in Cumbria and lives in Dover, was about to turn 60 and was struggling with a lot of stress. Not only was her son sentenced to two years in prison for armed robbery, but she was working in a home for adults with complex needs. She liked the work, but it could be tough – especially when customers threw furniture at her or ripped sinks off the walls.
Then, in May 2013, Lee Rigby, a drummer with the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, died after being stabbed to death by two Islamic militants. Wilding says that Sandra did not know Rigby, yet his death brought her suppressed anger to the surface. She started watching videos on Facebook of a man named Tommy Robinson, who wanted to know why the country’s brave soldiers were being killed. By September 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 thought-provoking memoir of Sandra, who endured poverty, upheaval, and abusive peers, as well as two rounds of surgery due to heart disease, until her death in 2024. “How did my mother, this proud tough woman who raised four children single-handedly, end up marching with far-right extremists chanting ‘No more refugees’?” Wilding asks. “And my brother – a kind, intelligent, funny man who loved his children – how did he end up in prison? … Was it us? Did we do this to ourselves? Or was it something else – something bigger than us?”
“We” is important in this story. Wilding, the eldest of the Forsyth children and one of the few in her family to find stability through education and career, is a TV documentary producer specializing in poverty and rural working-class communities, though here she is no impartial observer. She also has an eye on the bigger picture, looking at how wider events and social and economic decisions taking place in Westminster can affect the lives of vulnerable individuals and communities. For the Forsyth family, these included the winter of discontent in the 1970s and 80s, mass unemployment and Thatcher’s Right to Buy scheme; the foot-and-mouth outbreak and financial crisis in the 2000s; and the Tory austerity programme, the Brexit referendum and the resurgence of the far right in the 2010s.
Wilding is not the first author to examine the alienation of the British working classes and the ways they are exploited, oppressed 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-promoted, post-Brexit discourse, the white working classes are often presented as aggressors waging a brutal war on immigrant communities, used by self-interested politicians to deliberately stoke division. Wilding has little time for such one-dimensional portrayals, despite his apparent dismay at his mother’s flirtation with the far right.
Instead, writing in thoughtful and elegantly understated prose, she digs into the roots of Sandra’s resentment, telling a story that spans three generations, starting with her early life on her father’s farm in Eden Valley, Cumbria in the 1960s, where she was tasked with looking after her siblings during recurring periods when her own mother was a runner. Tired of the drudgery of parenting and rural life, Nana Forsyth would leave the family for several weeks before returning home with an olive branch in hand in the form of sweets for the children and cigarettes for her husband.
At the age of 18, Sandra became pregnant and attempted to live with the child’s father, moving to a cottage up the road from the farm. But within a few years, he was gone and Sandra was a penniless single mother. And thus began a transformative pattern that would continue throughout her life: a new man, a new house, an explosion followed by deep debt and a search for a fresh start.
In the book’s acknowledgements, Wilding credited James Rebanks, a former neighbor from Cumbria, author and farmer, for “seeing this book before I saw it”. It seems that Wilding needed some convincing to focus his documentary’s gaze on his own flesh and blood, although, happily, he did. Full of grit and compassion, This Wild English blends the personal and political to show how families are shaped by circumstances and inherited trauma, and can be attacked by forces beyond their control. At its center is Sandra, a hero for the ages, who is opinionated, charismatic, fiery, caring and – wisely or not – always ready for a fight.
