Nicola Wilding is a documentary film producer, whose family was originally rural working class. Aged 60, her mother, Sandra, prompted by the hacking to death of the soldier Lee Rigby, unexpectedly joined the English Defence League (EDL) and went on marches headed by Tommy Robinson. During a series of disappointing liaisons with men, including two marriages, she had brought up four children, lived in two different countries, moved often within the UK, got into debt, worked in several low-paid jobs, including one at an Omagh army camp pub, and, despite early heart trouble, ended up as a dedicated employee in care homes throughout Covid. She told her daughter she’d got tired of ‘the bloody lefty media’ which only told one side of a story.
In These Wild English, Wilding sets out to examine her mother’s life: ‘Home for my grandparents was a place called the Eden Valley, in the old county of Westmorland.’ Grandad was a labourer for a tenant farmer named ‘Slackie’, who rented land off ‘a wealthy big-house family’. Nana was a Catholic, whose father had come from Northern Ireland to work in the Whitehaven mines. After a stint in domestic service, Nana had married young, and in 12 years raised seven children in a tiny labourer’s cottage, then at Ash Hill farmhouse, where Grandad still looked after the livestock and crops. Sandra, the second-born, spent much of her childhood and teenage years caring for her younger siblings, since Nana would often disappear, eventually leaving them all for good.
