Pip was born in the coal-miner’s cottage where his family of eight lived, in a village near Durham. Pip was destined to join his father down the pit, but the closure of his village’s mine in the 1980s saw him at the back of the dole queue like the rest.
A lot has been written about the red wall in recent years, but Pip Fallow has lived it. This is his account of some of the most important issues affecting Britain today; from levelling-up and the north–south divide, to social mobility and class, and the devastating social upheaval caused by decades of deindustrialization and government neglect, showing how the broken promises of the past impact his village and the politics of today.
This is the memoir of a man who left school illiterate, but has now written a book. The story of a lost generation who were prepared for a life that had disappeared by the time they were ready for it; of communities with once strong social ties that have now disintegrated, and a way of living that simply no longer exists in Britain today.
This is Pip’s story of being ‘dragged up proppa’, living by his wits, working and travelling the world before finally settling a few miles from where he grew up.
Pip grew up on a council estate deep in the coal fields of County Durham. Spewed out of the newly implemented comprehensive education system and destined for a life of cutting coal, he found no coal to cut. He moved around for work and lived on his wits for a decade before landing back in a broken North East, now literate and ready to write. He is a bricklayer, published author and calls himself ‘a former young socialist’. He was shortlisted for the Sid Chaplin Award for working-class writing and has dabbled in acting, with a brief role in a Ken Loach film.
