Tom Crewe: What scares me most in life is probably the Tory party and death, in that order

My earliest memory is of my brother being born — I was given a red bus so I didn’t feel jealous

Sat, 28 Jan, 2023 - 02:00

Mary Cate Smith

I grew up in the northeast of England. My mum’s from a big Catholic family; she had five siblings, so we had a lot of big boozy family parties. We were always in each other’s pockets.

My mum and dad were readers but they weren’t massively bookish. My brother also ended up writing a novel so I don’t know what that means. We can’t quite work out where it comes from.

My dad was very good at reading with me and certainly encouraged me to read but it always seemed weirdly impulsive with me. I was writing stories for my own enjoyment from about the age of five. I always wanted to be an author. I didn’t really even know where I got the word from.

I think my earliest memory is of my brother being born. I remember being given a red bus so I didn’t feel too jealous.

I just can’t really account for this lifelong love of reading and writing. I’ve got a children’s exercise book from when I was six saying ‘when I grow up, I want to be an author’. That stayed with me my whole life.

It’s actually taken me quite a long time considering I’m 33 now but I have always wanted to do that.

This is going to sound quite awful but I always believed I would do it, that that dream would come true somehow even when it didn’t seem particularly obvious how it would happen.

I used to write all sorts of things; make up stories about the teddy bears in my room or men walking out of the house and getting into a train crash or stories about children doing things.

If no one’s reading it, it’s like living in some kind of personal opera and you’re the only person who can hear it. That becomes almost stressful by the end because you’re just desperate for it to feel real to someone else. I really remember that feeling of just wanting to get it out of my head and into someone else’s.

The best life hack is when you see friends, you should always arrange the dates when you’re next going to see each other before you leave the restaurant or the bar because you’ve both established when you’re free so it’s in your diary and you’re not faffing around for ages.

My greatest quality is that I’m disciplined. I’m good at forcing myself to work and that’s something you really need to do if you’re going to write a novel. Particularly if you’ve got a full time job, you really have to force yourself to give up things, wake up early and all the rest of it.

The person I turn to most? It would probably have to be my partner who unfortunately for him gets all my worries and my anxiety. He reads everything I write first and so he’s always being put through his paces all the time.

I’ve got a bit of an obsession with death. I would like to leave behind some good books. Other than that, it’s very boring but I would like to be remembered as a good guy who was entertaining.

When I was 14, my dog Tess, a cocker spaniel, got run over. I still can’t forget letting her out of the house and failing to call her back in and somehow her getting out onto the road. The sad thing is she came back to the door and I opened it but she decided she didn’t want to come in and she went back out into the darkness. I’ve thought about that for years.

It often makes me feel sad that a lot of great poets and writers assume the permanency of the seasons. It’s [climate change] actually a real loss and a disconnection from the past and our ancestors. We are in the process of losing that sense of continuity in our great literature by losing those standards. For centuries, writers have relied on a shared sense of what the seasons means and what nature looks like and how the world around it appears.

I have a permanent coffee cup which I carry around with me. I never take any cups or plastic bits from coffee cups. I’m also trying to get better at taking the train to different destinations around Europe.

I’m quite good at making speeches. I did enter some public speaking competitions at school. I’d get picked to do readings in church or assembly so I got quite confident and it served me in good stead. I’ve made a few good best man speeches at weddings.

I am constantly surprised by the badness of politics, by the awfulness of the Conservative party and the fact that the Tory party has got away with governing so badly, at least since Thatcher, and the fact they’ve been rewarded for it, when, in fact, all they’ve done is run down the country and fuck it up in various ways.

What scares me most in life is probably the Tory party and death, in that order. I’m very scared of the randomness of how close we all are at any time to death, of a random disaster.

The happier I am, a moment like this, when the reviews are great, I start wondering if I am going to get hit by a bus.

I used to really like acting and I got a lot of pleasure out of being in the theatre and I still think maybe there’s nothing like the experience of being in a play. The collective atmosphere of being in a production, the camaraderie backstage, the excitement building to the performance, and the exhilaration afterwards. I sometimes think maybe if I’d taken it a bit more seriously, I could have been an actor.