Sheffield-born author Ajay Close's new book What Doesn't Kill Us focuses on feminism during years of Peter Sutcliffe's killing

“I was 15 when Peter Sutcliffe killed his first victim and I was 21 when he was caught, about a mile from my home then,” says Ajay. “During that period, I did go away to university but obviously I was coming back. The other thing is, my family were in Iraq, so the house in Sheffield was empty. So when I was there, I was on my own. I couldn't drive, didn't have access to a car.

“What I remember is that the fear took time to build. I mean, we were aware of it right from the beginning, but I would say, definitely, by the time I graduated and come back to Sheffield, everybody across the north of England was really frightened.

“I wasn't going to let a man I'd never met, even if he was a psychopath, put me under house arrest. I wanted to go out in the evenings and meet friends or go to the cinema, the theatre or a pub. But that meant going there alone. I was living on the dole for quite a lot of that period, so I didn't have money to pay for taxis and things. So I would walk out alone in the evening, come back alone late at night. And by that time, any man you met - it wasn't even when you were on the streets, sometimes when you were on the bus or the train, you were looking around - because they knew nothing about him, every man was potentially this killer of women.

“The police by then were arresting women who were carrying knives to defend themselves. So what I used to do is take a frozen chicken. I never ate it but I used to take it out the freezer compartment, put it in a carrier bag, and I reckoned if I swung it hard enough and aimed it well enough, that would give me a precious few seconds to run away.”

In the years after Sutcliffe’s arrest, Ajay went into journalism, covering huge stories such as the Miners’ Strike, but says the period of his murders remains the most vivid of her time in Yorkshire because “it really did feel like you were going to be his next target”.

Sutcliffe, originally from Bingley, West Yorkshire, was convicted of murdering 13 women and seven attempted murders, and was locked up from 1981 until his death in November 2020, aged 74.

Ajay wanted to write a novel about all this just after Sutcliffe’s arrest and has finally done so more than forty years on – though it is less about him and more about the women who fought back against widespread violence and misogyny.

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What Doesn’t Kill Us takes place as the 1980s nears, when the fictional PC Liz Seeley joins the squad investigating the murders. She is contending with a violent boyfriend at home and chauvinists at work, and is drawn to a feminist collective led by the militant Rowena.

Although the characters are made up, the novel takes inspiration from the women’s liberation movement in Leeds which organised the first Reclaim the Night marches in 1977.

Ajay says: “I absolutely didn't want anybody who was connected with any of the victims of Peter Sutcliffe opening my book and thinking, ‘That character is my mother’. I absolutely didn't want that. So all those sorts of details are completely different. It's not a roman à clef.”

She adds: “I'm not remotely interested in him. He was a pathetic, inadequate, bizarre individual. But what does interest me about that time is, it's like he was a stick that stirred up all this sediment - he didn't create the sediment, it was already there.”

While it was statistically very unlikely, she says, that out of millions of women in the north of England, Sutcliffe would attack her, the culture of the time made that violence feel “so very imminent”.

She says: “The thing is, he was extreme and abnormal, yes, but the feelings he evoked were not so unfamiliar. Young women my age were familiar with men who seemed to hate women or despise them, or be very, very angry about women. And so because he set off those echoes, it felt much more real to us and much more dangerous to us than, objectively, you can say now, it was.”

The book’s release is a chance to reflect on what has changed in the years since - or what hasn’t.

Back then, however, “the sort of things Andrew Tate is saying now could be said in a pub among a group of men, and it's not that all those men would have agreed, but maybe they wouldn't have spoken up and said, ‘Oh, don't be ridiculous’,” says Ajay, who now lives in Perth, Scotland. “It was a very gruff, brutal sort of masculinity.”

For research, Ajay spoke to police who worked on the Sutcliffe case and Leeds feminists from the time, including Coun Al Garthwaite, one of the original Reclaim the Night organisers who is now Lord Mayor of Leeds.

She also explored the Feminist Archive North resources based at the University of Leeds, as well as taking inspiration from an arson campaign against pornography outlets in the city all those decades ago.

“Feminists have a very dour, very boring, oppressive reputation now,” says Ajay. "These women had fun – they really had fun. Ok, they didn’t wear make-up, they weren’t following fashion, they weren’t keen on high heels. Well, boo-hoo, really. They smoked all sorts of things, they drank, they were cheeky.”

Ajay will be in conversation with Diana Muir, who was a junior reporter on the Yorkshire Evening Post in 1978, on Wednesday, March 13 from 6.30pm to 7.30pm at Leeds Central Library. What Doesn’t Kill Us, published by Saraband, is out now.