Tracy King (2024) Learning to Think.

Tracy King is the exception to the rule, rule. She’s working class. She got educated. She got a book published by one of the big five (or four) publishers. And, oh yeh, her dad got murdered. I’d read about what happened next in The Observer.

She starts but not at the beginning. Setting the scene: I was born to working-class parents. Mum, Jackie was tiny. She worked part-time as a secretary but really was a full-time mum. Dad worked abroad He was also an alcoholic. This got him into bother working in Saudi. He was sent home after losing his job and they lost their house, but moved into a new-build council estate in Birmingham. This was on the cusp of Thatcherism. High unemployment and no more council housing. Poor, but normal stage.

Jackie was a wonderful mum, but she developed agoraphobia. She couldn’t leave the house without her daughters Tracy or Emily.

The Prologue begins with the dramatic (well, murder is more dramatic, but she gets to that later) of Tracy, her twelve-year-old self, skinny and short, being exorcised by elders from the born-again Christian group the family has joined.

Tracy has been acting up. She’s angry after her dad died suddenly. First they were told it was a terrible accident. An aneurism in his brain. Then the police informed them he’d being karate chopped by a group of feral youths, some of whom Tracy and her sister knew. Emily too was having a hard time. She’d been taken into Care after not being able to attend school for a number of reasons that included being bullied. It would have been impossible to imagine a middle-class child being taken into care. Their life was a mess. Tracy didn’t know how to deal with it. She was very angry and aloof. In born-again Christian parlance, she was possessed.

She knew what to do, how to act. She acted as if she’d been saved.

‘…trauma can make you feel like a freak, and poverty is shameful. But it’s as simple as this: without resources trauma and poverty are a chaotic maze. Because a lot of things happened to me and my family we were not well-equipped emotionally or financially to navigate.’   

Education helped her escape. Most of us recognise that door is being shut on the working-class, but it was left ajar in the late eighties. By the kind of coincidence that made her think that blinking rapidly made the traffic lights change, I had a copy of Carl Sagan’s  The Demon Haunted World on my desk, when she referred to it. With eighty million American’s voting for an evil moron it’s good to have a touchstone for lucidity and light.

When Tracy grew up she was able to look back at the demons that were tried for killing her da. As expected, they looked and acted a lot like her. Working class with a hard upbringing that left them ill-equipped to deal with being accused of murder as young lads. The case was thrown out of court. She too found them not only innocent, but empathetic. She knew where they were coming from. She’d travelled metaphorically and physically from the chaos that poverty brings and that strange belief other folk get what they deserve but only if they’re rich. Worse, kowtowing to the wealthy and letting them decide what is best for us, the working-class, while destroying the environment and creating a stagnant world in which the underclass is hidden like an unwanted child and deceived. Carl Sagan says much the same thing in The Demon Haunted World, but that was then, pre-second-world war. Tracy King knows where her allegiances lie and it’s with us. Her goals are modest. She wants to get us to Learn How to Think. That’s a revolutionary act. Read on.

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