Overview

What if the job that changed your life arrived as a small newspaper advert? In February 2000, eighteen-year-old Emma Astra left the working-class streets of Leicester - the only place she had ever known - to take a seasonal job at a Youth Hostels Association hostel in Canterbury. She had little money, no qualifications beyond average GCSEs, and no clear idea what came next. She expected a temporary job. She got an education in everything else. Working long shifts in a large Victorian hostel and living in a shared staff house around the corner, Emma found herself at the centre of a constantly shifting world of international travellers, backpackers, and school groups from around the world. Days were spent cleaning dormitories, serving breakfasts, and helping guests find their way through England. Evenings brought shared meals, nights out in Canterbury's pubs and clubs, and conversations with people from cultures she had never encountered before. Gradually, something shifted. Learning to drive, exploring London and the Kent coastline, and navigating an entirely new city on her own opened up possibilities that had once felt completely out of reach. Looking back twenty-five years later, Emma reflects on how those twenty-one months quietly shaped everything that followed - a career in social work, a return to education as a mature student, and eventually a PhD at the University of Leicester. This is not a misery memoir. Emma's early life was not easy - family pressures, unstable employment, and personal struggles are all here, told honestly and without flinching. But this book doesn't ask for sympathy, and it doesn't dwell. It shows what happened when one good employer, one good opportunity, and one good decision changed the course of everything. The Youth Hostels Association emerges in these pages as something rarely celebrated: a genuinely good employer, offering a young working-class woman real skills, real responsibility, and real independence at a time when it mattered most. At a moment when young people's employment conditions are a live and urgent national conversation, that story feels more relevant than ever. Drawing on themes of class, youth mobility, and the value of practical work experience, My... Canterbury Tales asks bigger questions: What does opportunity actually look like for young people from working-class backgrounds? What do we lose when affordable live-in work schemes disappear? And what can lived experience teach us that formal education sometimes cannot? Written as Canterbury finds itself in the international headlines during this year 2026- the first woman leader of the Church of England receiving her ceremony in Canterbury Cathedral, and for the sobering events that have drawn national attention to its streets during the meningitis outbreak- My... Canterbury Tales is a timely reminder of what makes the city so enduringly significant: as a place of history, community, and possibility, and a book with something specific and personal to say about the opportunities that shape young lives. Richly illustrated with personal photographs from the period, this is a short, focused memoir about the working-class instinct to improvise, adapt, and overcome - and where that instinct can take you. A small advert. A coach ride. A city she had never seen. Sometimes that is all it takes. Dr Emma Astra is a Lived Experience Expert in Leicester. After leaving school at sixteen, she returned to education as a mature student and eventually completed a PhD at the University of Leicester. Her writing draws on lived experience to explore class, social mobility, and what ordinary life can teach us that formal education sometimes cannot. My... Canterbury Tales is the first volume in a planned memoir series examining different periods of her life within a wider social context. www.linktr.ee/emmaastra

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