Susan Allred MBE (author)

 Sponsored by the Beechbourne  Herald & Courier  

Susan (‘Su’) Victoria Alexandra Allred,  the well-beloved rural novelist and essayist of the countryside, was born, the third and latter-born of four, in 1985, into a Lancashire farming family: one of the old yeoman or franklin class, but balancing, at the time, financially, upon the cusp between the lowest of the lower middle classes and the most superior of the working and tradesmen’s classes. Her father, Dan Allred, is a highly regarded farmer, farming, nowadays, a considerable acreage of Grade I land near Mawdesley; her mother, Liza, n é e Texter, appears the Platonic ideal of the farmer’s wife, but is also herself a highly regarded author. Her memoirs of rural and farming life, originally serialised in the Chorley  Guardian,  were collected and published as  Seasons Spent,  to steady sales, critical praise, and, most importantly, the delight of readers; it has become a cult classic, and was republished in a lavishly illustrated edition in 2009, with a foreword by one of its most distinguished fans, HRH the Prince of Wales. It is perpetually on the verge of being commissioned by the BBC, who always in the end resile from its rural traditionalism.

 Dan and Liza Allred are pillars of their community, props of the village and its church, and cherished local oracles patronised by the well-heeled incomers, who listen with respectful awe to the rural wisdom of ‘Farmer Allred’ and sit at the feet of Mrs Allred at WI meetings and demonstrations of countryside food and crafts. Mr Allred, although not an author like his wife and late daughter, has done FE courses enough ( though he never took a degree)  that he might have  taught  at Cirencester: Su came by her brains honestly.

Her brothers, Tom, married to Jenny and with three children, and George, married to Polly, with two children, farm under their father.

Su Allred died of pancreatic cancer in 2016, leaving a son, Philip, born in 2007.

Life and Education
Su Allred’s early years, like those of her parents’ generation and her grandparents’, were somewhat peripatetic. The Allreds, Texters, Ashursts, and Ramsdales, and their various forebears, had spent three centuries moving further away from ever-spreading Manchester, which continued to capture good agricultural land for its urban sprawl, mine good fields for coal, and gobble up villages and towns insatiably. The interlinked families had, by the time of Su’s birth, moved in the time since the Industrial Revolution from Pendlebury to Atherton, from Atherton to Gathurst, near Wigan; the Allreds then removed from Gathurst to Appley Bridge, where Su was born; and from Appley Bridge, when Su was three years in age, to a substantial farm outside Mawdesley, just North of Bispham Green.

The Allreds and their kin had always sold up well, knowing the value of their holdings when these were suddenly wanted for coal or ribbon-building or industry; but the move to Mawdesley, which enjoyed property values commensurate with its increasing appeal to well-heeled retirees, and the acquisition of a larger farm to have room for her older brothers to follow their father in time, left even so warm and canny a man as Dan Allred temporarily overextended, as Liza (writing as Elizabeth) Allred uncompromisingly details in ''Seasons Spent. ''

Su, also, as the somewhat unexpected child of her parents’ maturer age, was something of a hole in the budget at first, though loved none the less for that; she began, however, to pay for herself in her infancy, in her first appearance in print: Liza’s Chorley Guardian columns in which young Su appeared were far and away her most popular.

It was perhaps unsurprising, then, that Su, from an early age, wished to write. And she possessed the brains as well as the imagination, and yet more the determination, to make a decent fist of it. She did very well indeed at St Peter’s C of E School, and moved on with ease to the conquest of Bishop Rawstorne C of E Language College (now Academy), where she was Head Girl. She then went on to the University of Manchester: which was a shock, on both sides.

At Manchester, where she read English Lit with Creative Writing, she suffered both socially and academically: fellow students and lecturers alike looked down upon her as mousy, and as a mouse with very stay-at-home, country-mouse instincts: the very instincts which made her an author, and the sort of author she became, beloved for her gentle rural novels which were not a million miles from Liza Allred’s own memoirs. Academically, despite her keen intelligence, she just scraped a Third, her work being out of joint with the times, or at least the times and trends at Manchester, with its go-ahead progressive obsessions; and had quite enjoyed rubbing their noses in it with her royalty statements and sales and well-attended signings, in after years. At the time, however, it was maddening; and the situation was exacerbated by her fellow students, who considered her tiresomely old-fashioned and hopelessly quaint.

This was the context in which, having been dragged out on the town by the nearest thing she had to (rather patronising) friends for a birthday pub crawl, she slept with Man City’s aspiring striker, the young Edmond Huskisson. Ginny Birtwell, the most patronising of her acquaintance, had attempted to pull the yet-closeted Edmond, who was well on his way to inebriation at the time; and when he declined her, Ms Birtwell began to cast aspersions upon his virility and suggested his lack of interest in her betrayed him as a closet homosexual. Huskisson retaliated by flirting intensely with Su Allred, herself a bit drunk by that point in the evening, underscoring for Ginny Birtwell that he was not uninterested in women, but was rather disinterested in her. The upshot was that, Ginny having passed out after a further outburst, Edmond Huskisson and Su Allred left together, having first extracted a condom from Ms Birtwell’s bag.

What neither suspected was that, it being Ginny Birtwell’s ambition to entrap someone on the verge of fame and fortune, and thus to become a cosseted and well-funded WAG, she had randomly pin-pricked the condoms she habitually carried, playing a sort of pregnancy roulette.

Within a few months, it was evident that it was Su who had become pregnant, and by – though she told no one, Edmond Huskisson very much included – a Premier Leaguer. It was also at just that time that Edmond was outed, and thereupon injured on the pitch and half-blinded by things thrown from the terraces, ending his sport career.

That Su had clearly been sexually active at least once was looked upon by the Staff and by her fellow students as a rather surprising point in her favour. That she declined to name the father, abort the child, or seek maintenance, however, swiftly cost her any sympathy or approbation thus earnt, these quixotic positions being regarded as rural, backward-minded, and wholly un-progressive.

Su Allred, therefore, left Manchester with a Third in English Literature with Creative Writing; a reputation as the least creative and most backward-looking writer ever to embarrass the Faculty of Humanities; and an infant and officially fatherless son.

Career
Susan Allred returned to the family farm for a time, where the practical Allreds accepted what could not be mended and gave her and young Philip – who rapidly and indelibly became ‘Pip’ – unstinting support and unconditional and accepting affection. So soon as she was able to do so, with Liza caring for Pip during the day, Su did what any writer with a Third in English should do in such circumstances: she sought, and got, a job in journalism. She began at the Chorley Guardian, partly on the strength of her being her mother’s daughter, but soon took a very good offer from the ''Farmers Guardian. She was allowed also to do a certain amount of freelance work for the Wigan Evening Post. ''By the time Pip was four, she had rented a cottage of her own not far from the family farm, towards Wrightington Bar; and as she remained a churchwoman and a regular communicant, there was no real difficulty, despite the shadow over his parentage, in placing Pip at Mawdesley St Peters from Little Acorns Preschool, and then Reception, onward.

<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">Pip stopped at his grandparents’ – indeed, it had been hopeless to try to pry him loose from their loving grasp – three nights a week; and on those nights, and in quiet weekends, and in spare moments, Su Allred wrote, and not for the press. And she was a swift, inexhaustibly inventive, and efficient writer. By the time Pip Allred was in Year Two, she had not only a novel, but a publishing contract. For three years, Su managed, to ever-increasing acclaim (and sales), two or three slim, poetic, and fanatically loved volumes a year; and found that (if often through clenched teeth, and with a fugitive undertone of resentment) her old university and fellow pupils were eager to be associated with her, professing to have been her dearest friends or most valued lecturers.

<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">She was appointed MBE for services to Literature in the 2015 Birthday Honours, before her illness and its severity were generally known.

<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">She had at the very least secured a future for herself, and, which meant much more to her, for Pip. Her ‘Lostley’ novels, set in a farming village beneath the eaves of the Western Pennines and striving to cope gracefully with the shock of the new, were set to run forever, to widening acclaim and readership.

<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">And then she began to feel unwell. Her final finished novel, much delayed, and far different in tone to its predecessors, came out in 2015. Her prior pace of publication had trailed off since 2014; and  A Muffled Peal was not, as previous novels had been, an elegy: it was, rather, a eulogy, for two of her most loved protagonists and for Lostley itself.

<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">Her fans, increasingly alarmed since the year prior, now begged for news, and reassurance. They were given the former. Su Allred and her publisher issued a press release, announcing that she had been diagnosed with a swift and incurable cancer of the pancreas; to which she succumbed in January of 2016, in Manchester, at The Christie.

Publications
<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">Su Allred’s unfinished memoir of her rural childhood is currently being edited for publication by her mother. Her ‘Lostley’ series of novels remain in print, and are more popular now even than when she lived.

Select Bibliography
<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">Harvest Home (2012)

<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">All Glorious Above  (2012)

<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">''Nunc and Mag. ''(2013)

<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">We Plough the Fields and Scatter (2013)

<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">All We Like Sheep (2013)

<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">A Rose Tree Springing (2014)

<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">Plough Monday (2014)

<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">A Muffled Peal (2015)

Critical reception
<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">Although muted since her recent death, there has always been a critical current, little different to the sneers of her university career, which regards Susan Allred’s work as hopelessly vieux jeu, a sort of pallid imitation of Miss Read and Barbara Pym, however technically well-written. Julie Burchill and Hadley Freeman, for once in agreement, have both dismissed the novels by reference to John Major’s infamous ‘long shadows on county grounds, warm beer … “old maids bicycling to holy communion through the morning mist”’ speech of 1993; Michael Moorcock has expressed similar disdain.

<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">Alan Bennett – in a perhaps surprising championing of a Lancashire author by a Yorkshire writer – has notably taken up the cudgels in defence of Su Allred and the ‘Lostley’ novels.

<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">He is not the only celebrated Susan Allred fan – or ‘Lostleyan’: figures as varied as HRH the Prince of Wales, Alan Titchmarsh, Susan Hill, Peter Maughan, AN Wilson, Peter Ackroyd, Stephen Fry, Eric Robson, Paul Johnson, and Nick Cohen are notable Lostleans. So also were, well before her past connexion with Edmond Huskisson was made public, Professor the Baroness Lacy, now Millicent, Duchess of Taunton, and Charles, Duke of Taunton.

<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">Amongst those who have consistently urged the BBC to commission adaptations are Dame Penelope Keith, Sir Patrick Stewart, and David Suchet.

Personal life; death; legacy
<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">As for Dorothy L Sayers, Su Allred’s brush with sex and scandal did not change, but rather deepened, her long-held convictions, religious and moral. As writers will do, she faced – and resolved and accepted – facts, mediated through the writer’s art, and achieved catharsis: with devastating candour and clarity in ''Nunc and Mag. and in All We Like Sheep, ''in which reflections of her own experience and its consequences were incorporated in the narrative arc.

<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">There was certainly no one in her life after Pip’s birth; and the rough charity of Mawdesley enfolded Su and her son: if there was, as undoubtedly there must have been, a certain amount of gossip, and some scandal talked, it was carefully prevented from coming to her or her son’s ears. She and her publishers, moreover, took full advantage of the protections which the law affords the privacy of minor children to keep Pip’s name, and indeed existence, out of the public prints.

<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">As her health worsened and her diagnosis and prognosis passed from concern to a positive death sentence, Su, descending through the Crick, Weston Park, and Jimmy’s to The Christie and merely palliative care, resolved to reveal at the end the secret of Pip’s paternity.

<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">Her only real regret, in her last illness, was that she was placing by her ill-health and imminent death a further burden upon her family, and especially upon her son, who, naturally enough, had become a specially solemn and self-contained boy as he watched his mother fade, and too early mature and too early Stoic; and all her hopes were founded upon leaving him in good hands which should support him, when the first grief had passed, in being a boy again and not a child grown early old.

<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">She had followed, often with amusement and sometimes with stupefaction, the news of Edmond Huskisson’s post-football career, and considered that he deserved to know of his son, and looked likely to handle the consequences rather better than she might once have hoped. Her resolve was further stiffened by her knowledge of Ginny Birtwell’s fate: Ms Birtwell had never snared a sleb or a sport figure, but, continuing her attempts to do so, had also diverted herself from time to time with bits of rough. One of these, discovering her habit of sabotaging protection, had taken violent exception to it; and Ginny had been murdered in 2009, her murderer serving a life tariff. It is certain that Su Allred should in any case have given Pip an official father before she died; but these events made it rather easier for her to do so with some confidence as to the consequences.

<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">Pip Allred was placed, after Su’s death, with his natural father, his Allred grandparents retaining agreed rights to spoil him when they wished; and Edmond Huskisson and Teddy Gates, who were in the process of adopting three other children when the news was broken to them, are now very much Pip’s fathers as well.

<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">His Grace the Duke of Taunton, upon learning of the situation, put the Allreds in touch with his men of business, particularly as Liza Allred is Su’s literary executor; and a Trust has been created for Pip’s benefit.

<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">There is a dignified memorial to Su Allred in S Peter Mawdesley, where she is buried. Her funeral was reported only after it had occurred, so that her family and parish were not overrun by trippers and coachloads of fans.

<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">There are also several organisations online dedicated to her work and to the ‘Lostley’ novels.