Nicola Wilding knew the letter was from her brother, Billy, as soon as she saw the line of tape on the envelope flap. His mail had to pass inspection: he was three months into a prison sentence for attempted carjacking with an imitation gun. “Have you spoken to Mum lately?” he wrote. “She’s turned into a fascist, lols.”
It was 2013 and their mother – a 59-year-old care worker, who for most of her life had voted Labour – had just attended her first march with the English Defence League. Wilding read her brother’s news while at the kitchen table in her flat in Glasgow. “Was I worried?” she says. “I was bemused. I thought: ‘Oh, Mum’s just being daft. She’s having an adventure. She’ll get over it.’” But instead, “the anger stayed”, more marches followed – and Wilding started to wonder what personal and political forces had led her family to this place.
A family memoir of three generations
Thirteen years on, her family memoir, These Wild English, tells the story of three generations, from her grandparents’ farm in Cumbria to the scrapyards, banger race tracks and care homes of Kent. It is shot through with her family’s “bootstrap fatalism” – “this sort of hopefulness in the absence of hope” – and fizzes with all the family love, joy and “crazy energy” of a souped-up Darling Buds of May. But there is violence too, less cash and a lot more alcohol.
Wilding, 52, is a television producer who has worked on documentaries covering social issues from adoption to the housing crisis, as well as shows including Dragons’ Den and Bargain Holiday Secrets. But she has never turned her focus on her family, or herself, until now. Ten years on from the Brexit vote, could she, by exploring their stories – “lives that are neither deserving nor undeserving but simply unheard” – unravel bigger truths about why so many working-class people feel unseen and unserved by traditional mainstream politics?
Why did her mother join the EDL?
Wilding’s mother, Sandra, had earned a place at grammar school, but she left at 15. By 18, she was pregnant with Wilding and married soon after. She died in 2024, without having read These Wild English, though “she loved the idea of the book”, Wilding says. At times, Wilding sounds like an anxious parent trying to explain or excuse the acts of a wayward teen: her mum had “fallen in with” the EDL; it “might be a phase”; she had always been “feisty” and impulsive. But when her mother changed her Facebook profile banner to a photo of Lee Rigby, the soldier murdered by Islamist extremists in 2013, and words such as “patriot”, “infidel” and “no surrender” flooded her posts, Wilding tried to speak to her.
“I did say: ‘I’m not sure this is the best use of your time, Mum. Are you sure this is right?’ And: ‘Do you look at everything you’re posting? Do you think some of it’s racist?’” There is a lot of equivocating, and you can almost hear Wilding squirm, more than 10 years later, as she tries to broach the big questions. “I sort of held my counsel and showed my disapproval, but I wasn’t absolutely condemning her because she’s Mum,” she says.
The personal and political context
“I’m far right if you say I am,” her mother replied when Wilding eventually asked her. So what does Wilding think? “No, she’s never … I mean, I can’t, and I don’t, and I can’t, and I won’t see my mum as racist,” she says. “Misguided, possibly.” For 40 years, her mother “was a brilliant care worker for people from all creeds and colours, all walks of life. She cared for people without fear or favour.” In later years, she specialised in caring for people with Korsakoff syndrome, a chronic memory disorder.
Her mother’s third husband, whom Wilding steadfastly calls “the soldier”, was a corporal in the British army. Sandra and Wilding’s three siblings had followed him from Kent to Cyprus, Colchester and County Tyrone in Northern Ireland. The murder of Rigby felt personal. “For the last 10 years, she had been living in barracks … This idea that you could be hated and murdered in your own country, it really triggered her.” She went on her first march a few weeks later.
Broader societal forces
“We live in a multicultural society,” Wilding says. “If a lot of people are reacting with fear, we have to acknowledge that, not dismiss it, or flatten it down to prejudice, bigotry and racism. Because if we want to get along in this multicultural society, we have to put in the work and make sure we’re bringing everybody. I don’t think we know how to do that yet.”
Wilding’s three siblings joined their mother on a hard-right demo in Dover – her twin sisters took the day off work; one brought her boyfriend. At the time of Sandra’s death, Nigel Farage was one of seven people she followed on Instagram. She thought him “a splendid chap”, Wilding says. “She liked Trump, too” and if she were alive, would “probably vote Reform. I think most of my aunts and uncles would vote Reform.”
Wilding reflects on the loss of institutions that once supported the working class. “We think about the 1950s, 60s and 70s and all these great institutions: the NHS and hundreds of thousands of council houses built for the working class by the working class – and all that’s been stripped away,” she says. “Now we have a globalised economy. The working class have been uncoupled from a national story … on what it means to belong. So we have to work out what that story is and include the working class.”
Family dynamics and Wilding’s own escape
Wilding’s family council house in Cumbria was identical to neighbouring houses – and very different. Where others had tidy lawns and trim hedges, Wilding’s front garden contained a broken immersion heater. Financial irresponsibility abounds: money for the pub, none for the mortgage. Violence is also present: Auntie Christine dragged down the stairs by her hair; Uncle David threatening to cut Wilding open with scissors if she won’t polish his shoes (he later went to prison for glassing someone).
When her mother and stepfather decided to buy their council house in the 80s, Wilding was 12 – “old enough to feel I disagreed with some of the things Mum did. I could see the trajectory and the chances were, it wouldn’t get paid off. So I was scared and worried.” In fact, the house afforded Wilding an escape. When her mother and siblings moved to Cyprus with “the soldier”, she was able to refuse to go. She was 17, halfway through her A-levels. “I had the place to myself and I loved it. Really loved it,” she says. “It’s terrible to say.” Her mother “cried for days. She wanted to take me with her. She was absolutely gutted.”
Wilding doesn’t have children – she had looked after her younger siblings so much in childhood that “for a long time, I didn’t want to go there. I felt by the time I was 20, I’d done that.” She is an aunt “to five or six nephews, maybe more” – an interesting imprecision from the family chronicler.
Grief and understanding
As Wilding finished writing, her mother was diagnosed with cancer, and the book is not only a journalistic search for understanding, but a daughterly one, carried forward through the lens of grief. In her loss, Wilding started drawing again, immersive, intricate black-and-white line drawings – “for therapy, because it calms me down”. She frequently slips into the present tense while speaking about her mother. “Maybe on the face of it, it looks like we’re not close, but that’s because we know each other too well,” she says. In adulthood, they were polite. “We knew each other’s vulnerabilities and weaknesses. We circled each other carefully, because we knew exactly who the other person was.”
So what would her mother think were Wilding’s weaknesses? “Mum saw me as very, very sensitive, full of a brittle pride and a worrier,” she says. “She was brilliant at being supportive and never judged me. I just hope I’ve done her justice, for the complexity that is my mum.”
