Why does JK Rowling hate the middle classes? Harry Potter author says inhabitants of affluent fictional setting based on her hometown are racist and unfriendly

On one side, the cosy Victorian cottage looks out across cow-flecked pastures down to the Severn Estuary. On the other, it oversees a field.
No one’s at home. But someone has been tending to the tidy flowerbeds around the neo-Gothic porch and the garage door seems to have had a fresh lick of paint.
One might expect some sort of recognition that this was the place where Britain’s most successful living author spent her formative years. But there is not so much as a plaque or a sign. Nor does the village of Tutshill boast a pub called the Harry Potter Arms, or even a Hogwarts Close.

 

JK Rowling's first adult novel, The Casual Vacancy, which launched this week, draws on her unhappy youth in the village of Tutshill, Gloucestershire

Certainly, everyone in this pretty corner of Gloucestershire, overlooking both the River Wye and the River Severn, is well aware of the link with the world famous Joanne Rowling.
Many have fond memories of the author as a girl and of her family. To this day, some loyally refuse to discuss her at all. The local school has named the ‘JK Rowling’ library after the head girl of 1982. But you certainly can’t accuse residents of milking the connection. Stratford-upon-Avon it ain’t.
Most people are just proud that the creator of Harry Potter grew up in their midst and went on to enjoy global success, bestowing much of her fortune on charitable causes.
Or at least they were. As of this week, they are not so sure. Because Ms Rowling has just branched out into adult fiction. In doing so, she has drawn on her youth to create a dark, sexually explicit tale of ruthless snobbery and bourgeois hypocrisy set in Pagford, a fictional West Country village with more than a touch of Tutshill about it.
Having issued the usual assurance that none of the characters are real people, Ms Rowling has admitted that the book is ‘very much me vividly remembering what it was like to be a teenager’ and that much of it is inspired by her experiences at the local comprehensive. It was not a happy time. ‘You couldn’t give me anything to make me go back to being a teenager,’ she told the Guardian. ‘Never. No, I hated it.’
Inevitably, the book has invited a response from villagers who are unhappy with the suggestion that the Tutshill area is — or was — anything like this.
Indeed, the general consensus in these parts is that Ms Rowling has traded Hogwarts for hogwash.
‘It sounds nonsense,’ says Mike Rickards, 72, a former drinking chum of Ms Rowling’s father, Peter, whom I meet in the village pub, the aptly named Live And Let Live. ‘I suppose she’s got a bit of a chip on her shoulder. This has always been a happy area.’
The central plot of the book, called The Casual Vacancy, is a battle for the parish council following a councillor’s death.

The evil, middle-class, Right-wing snobs want to seize control and redraw parish boundaries in order to dump the local sink estate on another authority.
They don’t want the ‘tiny classes, the rolltop desks, the aged stone building’ of the local primary ‘swamped by the offspring of scroungers, addicts and mothers whose children had all been fathered by different men’.
‘I know she writes fiction but no one can go around redrawing boundaries,’ laughs Roy Birch, 79, who has been a Tutshill parish councillor since Ms Rowling was a teenager. As he is also a Liberal Democrat district councillor and a former county councillor, he knows a bit about local government — ‘we do playing fields and hedges’.

 

He is tickled by the idea of a coup at the parish council. ‘We often get casual vacancies. We had one the other day after a poor chap became ill and resigned.’ So was there a battle for his seat? ‘You must be joking. We have to go down on bended knee to find people to volunteer. We haven’t had a contest in 20 years.’

 

Tutshill, the small village on the Welsh English border that JK Rowling grew up in and has used as inspiration for her newest book 'The Casual Vacancy'

Across the village, I find the residents pondering two mysteries. What might they have done to upset Ms Rowling? And what, exactly, is going on at the old Rowling place?
For I soon discover a most intriguing possibility. It would appear that, for all her unhappiness here, Tutshill’s most famous export may have bought back her old house, of which more later.
This week’s publication of The Casual Vacancy has been accompanied by an unprecedented publicity circus. Having sold 450 million copies of her Harry Potter books, Ms Rowling has been able to demand whatever she wants ahead of her first foray into adult fiction.
So, those select journalists granted an interview have had to sign hilarious contracts banning them from reporting the most inconsequential details about their encounter.
What emerges from these interviews, however, is a picture of a generous, if brittle, philanthropist with a strong social conscience and a contempt for those who do not share it.
‘I don’t understand why everyone isn’t completely obsessed with morality,’ she told the BBC on Wednesday. ‘They’re not — I know that for a fact. But I am. I think I’m a really moral writer.’

‘We’re a phenomenally snobby society,’ she declared the other day. ‘The middle class is so funny. It’s the class I know best and it’s the class where you find the most pretension.’

In another interview, Ms Rowling explained that The Casual Vacancy is a broadside against the prejudices and hang-ups of the middle class (most of the country, in other words).
‘We’re a phenomenally snobby society,’ she declared the other day. ‘The middle class is so funny. It’s the class I know best and it’s the class where you find the most pretension.’
Having previously complained about invasions of her privacy, it is striking that Ms Rowling has now not only drawn a spotlight on to her own past but, consequently, focused attention on the village where she was raised.
She has, she says, ‘laid my friends bare’. Lucky friends. No wonder the people of Tutshill are bemused.
For Ms Rowling has painted the residents of make-believe Pagford as a bunch of heartless racists with zero compassion for the downtrodden no-hopers on that local housing estate.
‘We’ve had them through the local school for years,’ moans one.
‘The concept of earning a living is completely foreign to them; generations of workers and we’re expected to subsidise them.’ Another seethes with fury when an Asian woman attends a church funeral service in a sari. In short, they are monsters.
The residents of (real) Tutshill seem anything but. After spending a day talking to locals aged from 90 to 15, ranging from the lady of the manor to a youth in a hoodie, I would say this is a community with all the usual problems, and yet a pretty contented one.
‘This is a nice, friendly place which is why we moved here,’ says Julie Williams. She has just picked up her two girls from the village primary school next to St Luke’s Church, where young ‘Jo’ Rowling was once a regular in the congregation.
‘Rotten girl!’ laughs Barbara Francis, pillar of the community and one-time neighbour of the Rowlings. ‘All villages have their ups and downs. But this is a nice village.’
Superficially, Tutshill bears little physical resemblance to Pagford. First, Pagford is a town with a pretty square and cobbles, and sits on the edge of a city called Yarvil. Tutshill is a meandering village, with no formal centre, next to the Forest of Dean.
Yet both are next to rivers and close to the ruins of an ancient abbey. And when you see the topography, the similarities really start to ring true.

 

'The Casual Vacancy' went on sale on Thursday and is JK Rowling's first book aimed at an adult readership

For Tutshill sits at the top of the hill and exudes a certain affluence. Drive a mile down the hill to Rowling’s alma mater, Wyedean Comprehensive (a dead ringer for the book’s ‘Winterdown Comprehensive’), and you enter the adjacent village of Sedbury.
Here there is a different atmosphere — social housing, graffiti, hoodies and angry-looking dogs.
I find a trio of boys from Ms Rowling’s old school hanging around the supermarket sharing a can of cider. What’s life like here? ‘Nothing to do,’ they say with a shrug.
Matthew Hughes, 31 and unemployed, is more forthright: ‘The best thing for a boy round here is to join the Army and leave. But there’s still a good spirit here.’
Do they detect any hostility from Ms Rowling’s old neighbours up the hill? ‘I suppose they’re a bit snooty in Tutshill,’ says Alice Bonner, a 19-year-old mother-of-one, who lives in Sedbury with her ex-Para partner. But she is no great Rowling fan.
‘I hate all that rags-to-riches stuff. Rags to riches my a***. JK Rowling was at school with my mum. Mum had next to nothing and Rowling had quite a bit.’
In no time, the conversation attracts a small crowd and assorted claims — good and bad — about what Ms Rowling was ‘really like’ at school. After 30 years, a lot of it, patently, is rubbish. But I am introduced to Lisa and Kerry Duffield, two sisters who seem to have known her well.
‘She was a good friend to me and that’s why I don’t talk about her,’ says Kerry briskly and walks off. Lisa says that they haven’t seen ‘Jo’ in years. ‘But I’m sure she’d be just the same if we did.’ So was Tutshill full of vicious social snipers back then?

Pre-sales of 'The Casual Vacancy' were the highest of any book this year, but little was known about its content, before it was launched this week

‘They’ve always been a bit snobby up in Tutshill, that’s all.’ Throughout the day, the only two even remotely snobbish remarks I hear are from a young Tutshill woman who politely describes Sedbury as ‘more affordable’, and from a 90-year-old woman who admits that she puts ‘Tutshill’ on her address even though her home is really in Sedbury. It’s not even Hyacinth Bucket, let alone Marie Antoinette.
Back up in Tutshill, I meet an elderly lady who has lived here for 60 years, is rather amused by the media attention but would rather not give her name.
‘I remember Jo’s mother, Anne, very well. She used to help me about the house and she was lovely. Then she got very ill, which was terribly sad. And I remember her girls. I suppose some people might be hurt by this book, but I’m not going to worry about it.’
Anne and Peter Rowling moved to Tutshill in 1974, with their daughters, Joanne and Dianne.
Peter worked as an engineer at the local Rolls-Royce plant and Anne took a job as a lab technician at Wyedean Comprehensive. They bought their cottage from a local farmer, and the girls grew up there. Jo could not wait to flee Tutshill for Exeter University, then London, poverty and single motherhood in Edinburgh and, ultimately, worldwide fame and fortune. Dianne would move to Scotland, too.
Anne died in 1990 after a long battle with multiple sclerosis. To this day, her devoted daughter continues to fund research into the disease.
In 1995, Peter Rowling sold up to television producer Julian Mercer and his family. At the time, they’d never heard of JK Rowling.
Mr Mercer laughs as he recalls how close he came to removing an inscription etched into a window frame: ‘Joanne Rowling slept here circa 1982.’
‘Luckily, she became famous before we got round to redecorating.’
The Mercers sold up last year simply because they wanted somewhere larger in the same area.
The house went on the market for £399,950, but not for long. ‘It was bought for the asking price by an elderly couple. They seemed in quite a hurry,’ he recalls. ‘But I don’t know who they were.’ More than a year later, their identity remains a mystery.
Several locals tell me of a rumour that the new owner may even be Ms Rowling herself. On closer inspection, they may be right.
According to the Land Registry, the house was registered last year to a company called Caernarfon Lettings Ltd. No mortgage was involved, so that mysterious elderly couple must have paid cash.
Caernarfon Lettings turns out to be brand new and has nothing to do with the Welsh town of Caernarfon.
Not only is it based in Ms Rowling’s home city of Edinburgh, it shares offices with her charity, the Volant Charitable Trust, at law firm Turcan Connell. Its one named director is a partner at the firm. Last night, they declined to make any comment on the matter, citing ‘client confidentiality’.
So why might Ms Rowling — or her agent — have bought the place?
It is, presumably, partly about control, just like those neurotic pre-publicity contracts. Perish the thought that someone might move in and rename it Harry’s House or open a Potter Museum or tea shop.
But perhaps it is more than that. Could it be that Ms Rowling has many treasured memories of her mother here and wishes to preserve them in the best way possible?
Given Ms Rowling’s track record of generosity, I dare say her old home might one day end up serving some charitable purpose.
But having read The Casual Vacancy, I think we can be certain of one thing. She will not be relocating to Tutshill.
No one is ever going to find a window ledge round here etched with the words: ‘Joanne Rowling slept here circa 2012.’