This one reads like a novel, and yet you are forced continually to remind yourself of its traumatic reality. Memoirs hold a strange, liminal position between truth and fiction. It develops, growing more assertive and exploratory, as Ashworth herself grows older.
This is not a sociological study the prose is tight and restrained, occasionally wry and genuinely funny. There is a stoic strength to the narrative voice all the way through, and her innocent, clever humour provides welcome reliefĪshworth captures the wonder and naivety of childhood brilliantly. They were a source of comfort in difficult times Ashworth reflects on the influence of an English teacher, who, “radiated a crucial sense of possibility and cast a benign, probably lifesaving, spell on me.” We are invited to connect such a love with the fact we are reading her memoir all these years later: it was reading and writing that “got her out” in a very real sense. Her love of reading, at first Enid Blyton and later Keats, cuts through the violence and the misery. School was an escape from home, and so was fiction. Top left, Clopton Walk and the Crescents in Hulme (1972), Top right, Hulme Walk (1972), Bottom, Charles Barry Crescent in Hulme (1972)īooks, literature and learning are key themes. On the next page, the book begins: “My father drowned when I was five years old.” Stark and brutal as this juxtaposition may be, it provides a neat summary of the book itself. On the inside cover we are told Ashworth was born in Manchester in 1969, and went on to become a junior research fellow at Jesus College, Oxford. Once in a House on Fire reads like a true crime documentary: powerful, compelling and horrifically real. Having been sat idly in my garden, I was soon engrossed, transported to a dark, murky, and uncertain world. “Sad but inspirational” was my mother’s judgement – she was not wrong. Some critics, such as Margaret Foster, have suggested it should be compulsory reading in all inner-city schools. Andrea Ashworth’s 1998 memoir Once in a House on Fire, set in 1970s Manchester, is a moving testament to resilience, intimacy, and community in the face of horrific personal circumstances.
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