High Peak writer Nicola Briggs reflects on childhood, class, and silence in debut memoir

Drawing on her own childhood diaries alongside those kept by her father, the book offers a layered account of growing up in Britain in the 1970s.

Born in Huddersfield, Briggs was sent away to boarding school at eleven. At the time, she recalls, the experience felt exciting rather than unsettling. “There were lots of preparations, where I was the centre of attention,” she has said. Only later did she recognise what that early separation meant. “I don’t remember home much during the boarding school years,” she reflects. “Home life was more of a blur during that period.”

What stands out most sharply in retrospect is what was never discussed. “Our time at boarding school was never discussed,” Briggs says. Nor were relationships, expectations, or emotional struggles. Silence, she suggests, was simply how many families functioned at the time.

The memoir grew out of diaries Briggs kept as a child, which she later read alongside those written by her father. His writing confirmed much of what she remembered. “His own words describe him better than anyone else could,” she says. In the book, Briggs does not shy away from recording his attitudes. “I knew my father didn’t like immigrants,” she reflects, noting that such views were reinforced by the newspapers and social norms of the period.

Her own diaries tell a different story. Later entries are difficult to revisit. “It makes me feel angry in places,” she admits. “Like I was under attack from so many sides, with nobody to support me emotionally. I had every right to feel upset.”

Class runs as a theme through the book. As a child, Briggs absorbed assumptions without questioning them. “I just thought what they thought,” she says of her parents’ views. Only much later did she begin to understand how deeply those beliefs had shaped her.

Briggs is careful not to frame the past as a moral lesson. “I haven’t done it to improve people or educate them,” she says. “I’ve just done it to record something that will otherwise get lost through the generations.” She describes the book as “part of a mosaic”, a small but honest piece of social history.

After nearly forty years working as a solicitor, Briggs found the space to write only later in life. “There is a bit more space in my head for thinking and creating,” she says. “My life is settled for the first time.” Now living in the High Peak, she sees the book as a way of facing the past clearly rather than nostalgically. “It’s easy to have rose tinted memories,” she reflects, “but honesty has to come from remembering that it wasn’t all good.”

Peacock on the Moon, Briggs’s debut memoir, will be published on 31 March 2026.