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Kiddar's Luck
He was indeed the nearest anybody ever got to Charlie Chaplin in print…the sentences skid and dance and hop on one leg or take a custard pie right on the chin or duck and weave and leave you gasping behind. But he is more for the wry smile than the belly laugh…' This was how Sid Chaplin described Jack Common, author of two of the finest working-class novels of the 20th century, and 'the finest prose writer to come from the North-East of England'. Kiddar's Luck, his first novel, was a commercial flop when it first appeared. It has since been called a 'neglected masterpiece', remarkable for its 'linguistic mastery and insights into the lives of working people, free of illusions and false heroi' (Richard Kelly in The Independent). Jack Common was born in 1903 in Heaton, Newcastle, and grew up in the terraced streets backing onto the railway yards where his father worked. The boy Willie Kiddar in Common's account of a Newcastle childhood is a thinly veiled self-portrait, and Kiddar's Luck tells the story of his first 14 years, from conception on a Sunday afternoon to leaving school during the First World War. At 25 he moved to London, and worked as assistant editor on The Adelphi during the 30s, when George Orwell was his friend and literary mentor, later praising his essay collection The Freedom of the Streets (1938) as 'the authentic voice of the ordinary working man, the man who might infuse a new decency into the control of affairs if only he could get there, but who never seems to get much further than the trenches, the sweatshop and the jail'. V.S. Pritchett called it the most influential book of his life. Kiddar's Luck was first published in 1951 (and its sequel, The Ampersand, in 1954). After the commercial failure of his two novels, Jack Common lived in poverty for much of the rest of his life, and died in 1968.
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First published January 1, 1953
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
February 10, 2026
“The journey can be so long, but the man making it is made by it so to speak”
His eloquence, his passion, his happy, funny memories, and remembrance make this special book. It is written as a memoir, but it is a memoir of a place and other time.
I came up upon the frost rhymed roofs of a working class suburb in Newcastle upon Tyne, and in the back bedroom of an upstairs flat and a street parallel with the railway line on which a halted engine whistled to left through the junction. I chose my future parents. By the time the end you took it right away and rolled into the blue of the junction arcs, and another kid all started an event one out of no novelty in that quarter and momentous only to me.
She was a fool of course her mother her mother said so you would think the old lady was great shakes herself to hear her. And she was in her way. Not that she had any money ever, but she made a poverty respectable. She rained there like another Queen Victoria walked and settle against the threat of commonness and Firm in her knowledge they’ve ever poverty got the better of respectability she’d see her family sinking to the 19th century male Olstrom of casual lab drinking pouring wife beating in jail. My father respected her, but could never come under her command. He won but was doomed. The old lady in the Old Testament in you. They were right.
True she was very much in love with her husband. She would sit up far into the night, waiting for his return a pleasant enough parcel of pretty wife for any man to find at the end of the day work. But he didn’t like it. He was shamed shamed in his manhood that he was kept like a slave away from her, and could only slick back in the late hours when Work had done with him and left him too tired and irritable to toss the nice nothings of love towards his waiting fancy.
The sadness of the lost child then the baby came not me a golden little girl put a picture with a smiling temperament that kept a warm content about her so that she lay cosy in her comfort, never crying, and no trouble at all. She died.
On his birth father heard me heard the clock thought that sounds like a boy and that clocks fast. Leaving my father free to go into the sick room and put that clock right. At least he’d start me running to time.
Reading about the kiddars: “ there you are, I thought, and came home that night through the fish and chip scented air of a hot August twilight my head for the feudal, splendid, and the conviction that I was ancestrally correct to ask for a better turn up of the dice that normally came to one of my condition”
“What I needed, of course was a kick from outside. Presently that kick came.”
The scene in the outhouse is hilarious
“ our amiable family habit of reading in the water closet. It was harmless in every respect, except that it held up the traffic. The system worked all right, and provided all parties had a reasonable amount of time on hand. The awkward customer who hadn’t was my father. Because he had to be at work often in a matter of minutes he held that the line should be kept clear for the express so to speak.
I love how it ends too on the cusp of adulthood. What will happen to him next?
His eloquence, his passion, his happy, funny memories, and remembrance make this special book. It is written as a memoir, but it is a memoir of a place and other time.
I came up upon the frost rhymed roofs of a working class suburb in Newcastle upon Tyne, and in the back bedroom of an upstairs flat and a street parallel with the railway line on which a halted engine whistled to left through the junction. I chose my future parents. By the time the end you took it right away and rolled into the blue of the junction arcs, and another kid all started an event one out of no novelty in that quarter and momentous only to me.
She was a fool of course her mother her mother said so you would think the old lady was great shakes herself to hear her. And she was in her way. Not that she had any money ever, but she made a poverty respectable. She rained there like another Queen Victoria walked and settle against the threat of commonness and Firm in her knowledge they’ve ever poverty got the better of respectability she’d see her family sinking to the 19th century male Olstrom of casual lab drinking pouring wife beating in jail. My father respected her, but could never come under her command. He won but was doomed. The old lady in the Old Testament in you. They were right.
True she was very much in love with her husband. She would sit up far into the night, waiting for his return a pleasant enough parcel of pretty wife for any man to find at the end of the day work. But he didn’t like it. He was shamed shamed in his manhood that he was kept like a slave away from her, and could only slick back in the late hours when Work had done with him and left him too tired and irritable to toss the nice nothings of love towards his waiting fancy.
The sadness of the lost child then the baby came not me a golden little girl put a picture with a smiling temperament that kept a warm content about her so that she lay cosy in her comfort, never crying, and no trouble at all. She died.
On his birth father heard me heard the clock thought that sounds like a boy and that clocks fast. Leaving my father free to go into the sick room and put that clock right. At least he’d start me running to time.
Reading about the kiddars: “ there you are, I thought, and came home that night through the fish and chip scented air of a hot August twilight my head for the feudal, splendid, and the conviction that I was ancestrally correct to ask for a better turn up of the dice that normally came to one of my condition”
“What I needed, of course was a kick from outside. Presently that kick came.”
The scene in the outhouse is hilarious
“ our amiable family habit of reading in the water closet. It was harmless in every respect, except that it held up the traffic. The system worked all right, and provided all parties had a reasonable amount of time on hand. The awkward customer who hadn’t was my father. Because he had to be at work often in a matter of minutes he held that the line should be kept clear for the express so to speak.
I love how it ends too on the cusp of adulthood. What will happen to him next?
March 18, 2017
very difficult in vocabulary
September 7, 2017
Kiddar's Luck finds its charm, authenticity, and unflinching realism of 1910's working class England through its young narrator whose anecdotes provide rich color to a bleak and grey background.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews