Dear Tom

Tom Courtenay was born in Hull in 1937 and brought up near the fish dock where his father worked. They were poor but his parents were determined that Tom would have the opportunities that they hadn't had. To their delight he passed the eleven-plus, went to grammar school and from there was accepted to read English at University College London. He didn't really want to go to university, he wanted to be an actor, so he chose UCL because someone told him it was in the same street as RADA, and if he was in proximity, who knew what might happen.Tom and his mother Annie were very close and from the time he left Hull, she wrote to him every week. During Tom's third year at university, his mother's letters became more searching and more intimate in response to his unhappiness and Tom kept every one. Tom has selected the best of them to go in this book and interwoven with them a portrait of what was going on in his life at the time, in the heady days of the early Sixties when successful young working-class actors were coming to the fore for the first time. Annie's letters are astonishing - wise, funny, with a natural instinct for words, but also deeply painful. She knows she's worthy of a better, more creative life, but she hasn't been given the chance. Unlike Tom. As Alan Plater says, 'What society hadn't given her was the vocabulary. She had the pictures in her head but she hadn't been given a proper paintbox.'Annie died of cancer at the age of forty-seven, the week before The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner opened. She knew her beloved son Tom was well on his way, and now, with this book, he has at last been able to give her a chance of well-earned immortality.Partly a memoir of a working-class way of life that has gone for ever, partly a powerfully moving record of the relationship between a mother and a son, partly a portrait of the artist as a young actor, Dear Tom is sure to excite admiration and delight in equal measure.