Nick Pettigrew discusses his debut recounting his time working as an anti-social behaviour officer

"Proust’s inspiration was eating madeleines. Mine came while I was standing in the stairwell of a tower block, taking photos of human faeces.” Nick Pettigrew is describing the moment he decided to try and make his job the subject of a book. His resulting début, Anti-Social: The Secret Diary of an Anti-Social Behaviour Officer, charts the year which brought Pettigrew’s more than 15-year career to a close; and gives gob-smacking insights into a job which stretched the limits of his “patience, compassion and sanity”. As he documents his encounters with mental illness, drug dealing, addiction, poverty and crime, there is a human story on every page to make you cry with sorrow, cry with laughter or curl your toes in disgust: sometimes all three at once. It all adds up to a potent cocktail of heartbreak, horror and humour.

Acquired by Century in a 14-publisher auction, and to be backed by a major marketing and publicity campaign, Anti-Social has already been described by Kathy Burke as: “This is Going to Hurt but with more dead bodies and an abundance of cat shit.” The comparisons with Adam Kay’s book and with The Secret Barrister are inevitable, so when I speak to Pettigrew in his first ever interview, on the telephone from his home in Croydon, I ask him whether he was conscious of writing in the vein of those two bestsellers. “Those are brilliant books but it was only about 18 months ago that I began thinking there might be a book in my own job. Prior to that, I had always kept work separate from my writing, so it was virgin territory in that sense,” he tells me.

I loved TV comedy as a kid but I always wanted to be the person writing the lines, rather than the person who said them

Pettigrew’s serious intent in this frequently laugh-out-loud book is apparent from the beginning: in the prologue he writes: “By the end, I hope you will have some insight into how the framework that keeps society functioning is now a spun-sugar latticework of making do, doing without and hoping nothing goes tragically wrong.” However, it comes as no surprise that Pettigrew—now in his late forties, but whose ambition to write dates from childhood—has a background in comedy writing, including contributing to the Daily Mash. “I loved TV comedy as a kid but I always wanted to be the person writing the lines, rather than the person who said them.” Even so, he spent much of his twenties, after studying English Literature and Philosophy at university, trying to make it as a stand-up comedian. He had some success; doing open spots at The Comedy Store, and taking two shows to the Edinburgh Fringe, before realising that it wasn’t where his future lay. “I always say I reached the dizzy heights of competence,” he tells me.

Delicate balance

Modesty aside, it’s clear that Pettigrew has a gift for comedy, and for creative similes in particular. Of the gulf in lived experience between most judges and the situations he deals with, he writes: “Trying to make them understand the effect of a neighbour’s anti-social behaviour in already difficult living conditions is like trying to explain life on the International Space Station to a seventh-century dung farmer.” He also manages to raise a laugh from even the most dire true life subject matter, for example in an anecdote about a “dead Nazi paedophile”, although in this instance it is actually Pettigrew’s partner who must take the credit for one of the funniest pay-off lines in the whole book. Most admirable is the fact that Pettigrew’s dark, penetrating humour never descends into cruelty or contempt, and I ask him how he was able to strike such a delicate balance. “When I was working in the job, my default way of dealing with it all was in a blackly comic way. And my natural register is comedy, so these stories were always going to be injected with humour in the telling. The last thing I wanted to produce was a dour, hectoring book that no one would want to read.

But having said that, the way I approached people in my job was to treat them with respect and concern for the things they were going through, so I never wanted to trivialise the job or the people on the page either.”

While stressing that his childhood was loving and supportive, Pettigrew himself grew up in relative poverty on a Liverpool council estate. He includes a little bit about his own negative life experiences in the book, including his erstwhile drug use, and medication for depression. “While not always to the same extent, a lot of the issues I encountered in my job have also affected me to some degree, and this gave me a level of insight and empathy,” he affirms. “On days when I was smartly dressed because I had a court appearance, I’d try to get across to the families I worked with that I wasn’t born in my forties wearing a suit, and that I too had sat in the stairwells of council estates and hung around on street corners.” By the end of the book, however, it’s clear that Pettigrew’s commitment to the job over many, increasingly under-resourced years had ground him down to the point where he could no longer carry on, and he resigned from his position.

You can have a moral view of such people but—and I hope the book gets this across too —I try to live in the real world rather than the one we would like to live in

Even before the advent of Covid-19, Anti-Social was a book on a mission to show the effects of austerity and years of neglect on the most vulnerable in our society. Reading it at the height of the current crisis only amplifies the urgency of this, and Pettigrew recently added an author’s note to his book to reference the current situation. “Sadly, there are already reports that the level of domestic violence has increased dramatically because so many people are trapped in their homes with an abusive partner. And even the noise nuisance that I talk about in the book, which is essentially the bread and butter of ASB work, is bound to have increased as well.” Pettigrew voices a particular concern for people who are Class A drug or alcohol dependent, who may live on the streets, and who routinely rely on sex work, or on crimes such as shoplifting and burglary to survive. “You can have a moral view of such people but—and I hope the book gets this across too —I try to live in the real world rather than the one we would like to live in. And I don’t know what’s going to happen to those people.”

Eternal optimism

Anti-Social is also powerfully topical in showing what the long-term deleterious effects can be on those we task with dealing with society’s most challenging situations, while chronically overworking, underpaying and insufficiently appreciating them. I ask Pettigrew, a self-confessed cynic, albeit one who believes in people’s fundamental goodness, whether he hopes—as we all hope—that something positive may come from this crisis. “You have to be optimistic. It might be naïve, but the focus on the NHS, on care work, on people on low incomes, is front and centre at the moment and I fervently hope that when this virus goes away, that focus doesn’t go away as well.”