Working-class academic and writer Lisa McKenzie on co-writing Sixteen, a new play and love letter to Ashfield's working-class women

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________

I have co- written a play Sixteen it’s currently being rehearsed and will be shown in September 2025 – I really didn’t see that coming. In truth it wouldn’t have happened without Jayne Williams and New Perspectives, it wasn’t on my bucket list or an ambition. 

I’m not really a theatre person. The opportunity came along after meeting Jayne Williams when I was asked to do a talk about class inequality. Jayne and I had a lot in common, we were both from the same town and both our Dads were Nottinghamshire striking miners. Jayne is a Playwright and Participation Director at New Perspectives. She told me she had wanted to write a play about the miners’ strike and especially in relation to women and children. Initially I was sceptical, I didn’t know anything about theatre and nothing about playwriting. So, I continued the conversation with caution and we kept talking, learning a lot about each other. Jayne’s Dad wasn’t just on strike in ‘84 but also worked with my Dad at Silverhill Pit in Sutton-in-Ashfield. I think my memories of that time helped Jayne to revisit her own home. Mining communities are not easy to live in. 

During the strike my Mum had collected memorabilia, newspapers, letters and photos, beer mats with addresses on, and thank you notes. I found photos of Jayne’s Mum and Dad in the Strike Centre in Sutton-in-Ashfield, stood alongside my own family. We must have been in the same room over 40 years ago, a small child and an angry teenager that would one day write something for our community. My Mum founded Ashfield Women Against Pit Closures, the women’s group did all of the fundraising and at Christmas made sure every striking miners’ child in Ashfield had a present from Santa. There were a list of children’s names and what they wanted for Christmas. I found Jayne’s name on that list aged 6. I felt a real sadness seeing those children’s names and ages in 1984 because, 40 years later, I know this was not the first year those families had struggled and it wasn’t the last. At this point, Jayne and I both knew that the story of working-class families in Ashfield deserved to be told. I know how to tell a good story, I come from a long line of working-class storytellers, we can hold a room and we can hold a pub, but I didn’t know whether I could write a story for others to tell.  

 
When I was seven years old, growing up in Sutton-in-Ashfield on the Carsic Estate, I was given a second-hand book on wild flowers, I loved it. The book was small and smelled old. The artwork inside was beautifully illustrated in that very delicate way artists painted during the beginning of the last century. I cherished it and I wrote on the inside my ambition ‘When I grow up, I want to be a writer’. Of course, when I was 7 years old, I didn’t know what a writer was, or even what a writer did. I lived on a council estate in a small coal mining town, but I knew that I loved stories, and I loved reading books. However, the books that I read didn’t really represent me or anyone I knew, they were fantasy about children going off to boarding schools or having long summer holidays near lakes. I read the C.S Lewis Narnia books and the children’s lives in those books: how they spoke and their relationships to each other outside of the wardrobe was as fantastical as they were through the wardrobe. At this very young age I already knew that the stories I had to tell and the stories I knew were not the stories that would be written in books. The stories that connected me to where I lived and to who I belonged, were told in the living room by my Mum, aunties and neighbours. I was born at the end of the 1960s so the generation before me told stories of ration cards, blackberry picking, big families, and hard times. And there were also photos in an album with yellowed Sellotape of young women linking arms in Blackpool just after the war, or my uncles and aunties as children in Skegness and Weddings; frothy dresses and 1960s hair. It was the only time working-class people had their pictures took, on holiday or at a wedding. These were my stories, and the stories of my family were more exciting, more colourful and laugh out loud funny. They were told in exaggerated form and performed by a cast of women every Saturday afternoon. 

I didn’t become a writer, I became a factory worker and worked in the same factory as my Mum and my aunties and cousins, where the stories and the performing continued. I worked at the Pretty Polly making tights when I left school in 1984. The strike was called and my family were all in, my Mum devoted herself in setting up Ashfield Women Against Pit Closures. My Mum and me, throughout that year, wrote letters asking for support from other trade unions and from local businesses. They were written by hand and on the floor in the living room, leaning on the Freemans Catalogue. 1984 was a tough year for the working class all over the country. We were already in deindustrialisation, jobs were being lost and dole queues rising. 

My life moved on after the strike, fear and hopelessness moved into the mining communities, we all knew the pits were closing and what that would mean for all of us. I left Sutton-in-Ashfield in 1988 with a baby and we headed off to the St Ann’s estate in Nottingham. My experiences of working class motherhood and then the death of my Mum in 1999 forced me to revisit my past. After my Mum's death and out of sheer misery and depression I found myself on an Access Course and then at the University of Nottingham. Almost 10 years later I left with a PhD in Sociology and I wrote a book, Getting By, about working class life on the St Ann’s estate. I became a writer.  

However, writing a play is a different type of writing and especially the storytelling we wanted to give back to our people. We have agonised over every word and we have laughed a lot, this is the benefit of working with working-class women - you laugh a lot.  Our aim has been to stay truthful and honest to our industrial working class heritage and to our people. We wanted to tell a story like only the working class can, stood up and performing out of sheer spite. We wanted pathos and we wanted that laugh-out-loud funny because when you are laughing you are not crying. The story we have told is stripped bare to the language and the rhythm of our culture. It chimes with factories and the coal mines of our personal histories. The cadence and accent is that of the working-class women that have left us but we can still hear them. We have written our own love letter to our hometown.