Flame-haired Robbie Fitzgerald is on a mission to change his life and his family’s. He’s indeed running along snow-covered streets to get on the stage of a Warrington working men’s club on time and impress a very special member of the audience, Dickie Vaughan. His voice and look manage to cast a spell on Vaughan, but it’s exactly this moment of glory that causes Robbie to arrive home too late to save his Malaysian wife Susheela from being raped by a gang of local skinheads. The tragic event ends up shadowing the life of the whole family: Susheela soon loses her will to live, slowly and relentlessly sinking into a deep depression while Robbie gives up singing for his family’s sake but eventually turns into a robot stuck in a factory job.

As the story moves from the ‘70s into the ‘80s, Robbie’s dreams of giving his children what he didn’t have, education and a better place where to grow up, are shattered by the dark fate that holds his family in a tragic grip. His children seem to be lost in a world of confusion and frustration: Vincent grows up into a tormented young man, with perfect memories of the terrible ordeal his mother went through when he was 5 years old. Bullied by his schoolfellows because of the colour of his skin, he turns into a talented writer but struggles to be accepted by his equals. His sister Ellie starts using drugs from a very young age, her teenage years coinciding with the beginning of the rave scene.

Once Upon a Time in England chronicles the damages hate can cause, while telling a tragic story about how the savagery of racism, bigotry and intolerance crush spirits and destroy lives. The novel also manages to analyse in a painful but unforgettably moving way different issues such as the immigrant experience, mixed marriages, homosexuality, the question of belonging and identity, social class and ambition. Though Robbie dearly loves his wife, he sometimes cringes at her foreign accent, and even disapproves of spices. Speaking Tamil and eating spicy dishes become for Susheela almost forbidden pleasures. Walsh manages to capture quite well Susheela’s condition as she herself is half-Malaysian and, as a child, had no idea her mother could speak Tamil and Mandarin as she had purged her own culture from her blood.   

Helen Walsh’s new book leaves behind the world of Brass, her 2004 debut novel with its controversial heroine Millie, a sort of female version of Charles Bukowski and Hubert Selby Jr.’s anti-heroes, that won her a few attacks by feminists. Brass almost pigeonholed the young author into the pseudo-Irvine Welsh literary genre, but with Once Upon a Time in England, a shocking and grim urban tale, Walsh has grown up proving she can write lyrical passages, while hitting hard in your stomach with her gritty descriptions of the bleak English landscape, of the Fitzgeralds’ life and of the state of mind they are trapped in. 

Towards the end of this urban tale of near-misses and shattered dreams, rage and loss mix together, while the raw power of the novel is transfigured by tragedy providing incredible moments of tenderness described by Walsh in a beautiful prose that leaves a tiny sparkle of hope in the heart of the Fitzgeralds and of the readers.