This is a naive but emotionally profound, funny and heartrending collection of letters from a working-class Yorkshire woman to her son in London, whose talent enabled him to progress beyond class. The letters are presented in the illuminating context of his account of what he was doing in the years he received them. The two kinds of autobiographical fragments make up a moving expression of maternal and filial love that endured the mother's and son's separation by geography, education and social status.
Annie Eliza Courtenay was married to a man who made a subsistence living painting trawlers in Fish Dock, Hull. Tom, their only son, won scholarships to a local grammar school, University College London and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, then achieved immediate, dazzling success as a young star of England's New Wave theatre and cinema of the 1960s.
"Of course my early fame as an actor was due in some measure to my background," Courtenay writes, "but I never beat my chest about being either North Country or working class. There was a time during the Sixties when it was the thing to be working class, and ambitious young men in London would compete to demonstrate their credentials. Nobody's were purer than mine." His background and timing qualified him perfectly to play the anti-authoritarian leads in Billy Liar and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, both big hits.
Although Annie Courtenay's education ended when she left school at the age of 14 to work at weaving nets for fishermen, she felt the yearnings of a creative artist. She believed, he recognised, that "the imaginative part of life, the search for meaning and expression of that meaning, is the most important part of life". As she put it, "it's just a normal function of the human brain to try and make patterns of things". Art can impose order on chaos. Her weekly letters to Tom were her form of artistic expression, and his career was its apotheosis. Without sophisticated scholarly resources, she often felt thwarted as a writer, but her letters gave him support when he needed it most and he gave her important gratification when he called her a poet.
The tender intimacy and down-to-earth pawkiness of these letters are deeply touching, even to us outsiders. Courtenay's commentary is equally touching, especially on the last years of his mother's life. She died of cancer at the age of 47. Now he has paid tribute to her with a posthumous reward, which, he writes, is "something she would have loved, though she wouldn't have thought it possible".
Patrick Skene Catling is an author and critic