Violence overshadowed my Yorkshire childhood

We might be twins, Catherine Taylor and I. We were both girls growing up in Yorkshire in the same decades – I in the West Riding (where an alley is a ‘ginnel’), her in the south (where it’s a ‘gennel’). We are children of the Yorkshire Ripper years, conditioned to be constantly scared of the murderer, the dark, and our independence. We were both fatherless too young – mine dead, hers departed to another household; and we both had strong mothers keeping the remaining family afloat and forced to take in lodgers – in our case, Polish, German and French, in hers, Japanese and Senegalese. Much of this bookis familiar – but not all of it. There is still room for surprise and stirring.

Its title derives from the Sheffield Outrages known locally as ‘The Stirrings’, a period in the mid-19th century when aggrieved trade unionsts murdered and bombed. Taylor duly writes of violence – of Peter Sutcliffe, the Battle of Orgreave, the Hillsborough disaster and the quiet Cold War terror of the Bomb, although this is usually at a remove and oddly passive.