Who is Alice Nunn?

Alice Nunn is the name of my great-grandmother.

I knew nothing of my great-grandmother while growing up. Neither did my mother. When my grandmother was nearing the end of her life she made some remark about my aunt’s hands, something like, “You’ve got lovely hands like my mother.” My aunt said, “How do you know? I thought your mother died in childbirth.” Then it all came out. My great-grandmother was divorced by her husband for adultery, an unspeakable act in the 1890s and even apparently something to be ashamed of in the 1960s, or it was for my grandmother who made her daughters promise not to tell their husbands.

So what happened to the lost Alice Nunn? Rumour had it that she had gone to South Africa after the divorce. I rather liked that supposition, because even though in the 1970s South Africa was a leper among nations, it would have been warmer than Hackney. I just assumed she was lost forever. A. Nunn became Anon. I wrote her back into existence.

Then in 2007 as a birthday present for my mother’s 90th birthday, my cousin went searching for her among all the burgeoning new genealogy websites. He traced her. A few short years after her divorce she was buried in a pauper’s grave in Abney Park Cemetery in Stoke Newington.

I was quite upset about this and decided to go and find her for myself. It was a bit like the television programme, So Who Do You Think You Are. Among the tangled creepers and fallen headstones I stood with my map provided by the Abney Park Trust in what I thought was the right spot and a photo taken by a friend shows me looking quite pleased with myself, despite the fact it was freezing cold and trying to rain. But just then a gardener, one of the volunteers, came up with his wheelbarrow and said, “Are you the person who wrote to us about finding the grave of Alice Nunn?”

This is where, if it was that television show, the camera would have honed in on my face and the gathering horror. Because he then told me the place I was standing was where she was buried originally in a mass grave but about 10 or 15 years later, after another epidemic, all of the bodies in that area were dug up and moved “over by that boundary,” he said pointing. The boundary was a wall giving onto a council housing estate. It was more dreary than I can describe, than I could ever have imagined.

We went back out past the creepy dilapidated chapel in the centre of the cemetery which looked like something straight out of a Gothic novel. But it was quite apposite, this structure standing grimly there in the rain, a ruin guarding the last resting place of the destitute and the abandoned. So that is Alice Nunn. She didn’t go to South Africa and live a warm prosperous existence. She died about 27. Having had a rubbish life, she then died a rubbish death and her bones were pulled and tugged at and left in unquiet piles.

The nasty, brutish and short life of the poor.

I have never seen anything positive about being poor, I have never had any desire to suffer for my art and live in a garret. It would be nice to make a living writing, but I have only ever managed that for one year when I got an Arts Council grant, and the rest of the time I have had a normal job working for the government. Nothing wrong with working for the government, it keeps one in pinot, but it does make it difficult to use your own name if you want to write about sex and death, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. So on the off chance, the extremely slim possibility, that the recipients of my official correspondence may have read my books, I have always written fiction using the anonymity of my great-grandmother’s name. Now I know more about her, I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t have minded.