Sally Bayley’s The Green Lady is a beguiling, experimental mixture of biography, fiction and family history. In her excellent memoir Girl with Dove (2018), she wrote about her neglected childhood in the coastal Sussex town of Littlehampton. Here she returns to the same locality, but considers her forebears, embroidering episodes from her own rackety childhood into the lives of her ancestors and local people. The title refers to a hostel on the corner of the lane where Bayley grew up. Its owner, Mary Neal, opened it up to factory girls from London. This is the central image of the book, encapsulating themes of wealth and poverty, town and country, the limitations placed on women throughout the 20th century, and how they worked and cared for each other, or didn’t. The Green Lady is a force of compassion, but a complicated one.
Bayley’s mother can’t afford to buy any presents one Christmas, so she knits an entire town for her daughter
I grew up in Sussex in the 1980s and 1990s, and my world almost overlapped with Bayley’s.
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