"They don't know they're born"

If Maggie was made from iron then I am made from steel. But not just any old steel - the best steel in the world - Teesside Steel. Full of the milk of human kindness she was not and before she could even dream of moving into number 10 she saw to it that us kids weren't either, snatching our daily third of a pint of full cream milk for all over sevens and making the tinkling of the ice cream van that bit less appealing. What discerning Grangetown kid would want a cheap, air filled, emulsifier-rich Mr Whippy rather than a traditional Italian Lanny's? I still can't eat that "ice cream" to this day and I bet she and her ilk never did either. Oddly enough, I was in Attlee Road Primary School back then and it had been under the quiet, unassuming & much under-estimated Clement Attlee that the 1946 Free Milk Act was passed, granting one third of a pint to all children under the age of 18. Tories cared little for children in the 1970s. Back then, it was all about the cuts to meet election pledges on tax. Oh, hang on a minute...

Now, the steel works might look ugly to you, but to me it's a thing of wonder and I'd love to go into great detail about the heritage of my industrial home town but that's for another day - suffice to say we're not called smoggies for nowt.  The majority of the men in my town either worked in the steel industry or in the shipbuilding industry. The more educated ones worked in the chemical industry. They didn't come home dirty and coughing up black sputum, crawling around on the floor with portable oxygen tanks strapped to their backs in their 40s then eventually die an agonising death from pneumoconiosis. Black lung it's affectionately known as to the layman. No, they died from the crippling asbestos disease mesothelioma instead. What they did have in common though was deafness from exposure to constant and excessive industrial noise without hearing protection (the more thoughtful wives gave them plugs of cotton wool to put in but all this did was trap in bacteria and give them terrible ear infections. Hand hygiene wasn't a thing back then). Oh, and the inability to fasten their own shirts with their Raynaud's disease from using vibratory hand-held tools for hours and hours on end (the more thoughtful wives bought them lots of pairs of knitted gloves to wear one over the other until their fingers were fat, stiff, splayed sausages but that didn't help either). These conditions would dominate my legal career for 15 years but this too is a story for another day. 

My Grandad worked in the local steel industry. The exact same building in this photo in fact. He came home every day black from the soot in the coke ovens at Dorman Long in Grangetown. How I hated it whenever he asked me to fetch his pipe from his pocket in his filthy, greasy work jacket hung on the back of the kitchen door, not because I knew I'd get coal dust, fluff and bits of baccy under my fingernails but because there was often a slaughtered hare strung up by its back legs right next to it too, blood dripping on the floor from the gaping wound across its throat. And then there were the days with my Grandad holding out closed fists. It was a real Morton's fork situation because he could only be holding one of two equally disgusting things: a hare eyeball still attached to the optic nerve or a New Berry fruit jelly with the disgusting liquid centre and the crunchy sugar coating. Both were equally likely. I had to pick one and if it was the jelly I had to eat it, even though they made me retch as much as I would if I tried to eat an eyeball. Grandad loved those jellies but not as much as hare or rabbit pie, which was very popular in our family and considered a bit of a delicacy. It's hardly surprising then that I've always had an aversion to eating animals.

Now, watching the Nutty Professor one day as a child of about 6 my Mother set my tea before me (dinner to those in the south). My sisters had bacon on their plates and I didn't. Great, she'd remembered I don't - or won't - eat meat. There was something new, and round, and brown on my plate though but I didn't question it because it didn't look like what everyone else was eating so I figured my Mother had respected my lifestyle choices. After I'd eaten my meal, my Mother asked if I enjoyed it. This wasn't something everyday working class parents asked their kids - mealtimes were a Hobson's choice, you either liked it or you lumped it - so you can probably appreciate just how suspicious I was.

- Yes I did like it, what was it?

- Black pudding.

- What's that?

- Weeeeell, it's pork sausage, dried pig's blood and suet.

Just because it wasn't a slice of bacon, or a lamb chop or a sirloin steak (as if) didn't exactly make it suitable vegetarian fodder did it? She worked in an abattoir for goodness sake - came home covered in and smelling of pig blood every. single. day. Everybody but me saw the funny side. Is there any wonder I can hardly walk by a butcher's shop without balking, especially if I can smell meat cooking in there? The sight of blood, however, has never bothered me.

And nor was I ever one for eating sweets either so I was just as likely to chew on an eyeball as I was a candy (as my Grandad called it). I could make a selection box or an Easter egg last for months - long, long after my sisters had eaten theirs. What I hadn't realised at that time was that they stole pieces every day in the meantime and carefully molded the gold foil back over the gap so I couldn't tell and replaced all of my Cadbury's flakes with chomps or texan bars. I have never been able to tolerate anything sticky on my teeth so they knew I'd never ever eat those chewy chocolates in a month of Sundays so I'd end up giving them to my sisters anyway. It was a win win for them. The flakes, however, could just melt in my mouth without touching my teeth so one day - eventually - I would have eaten those flakes. They might have turned white by then but still, I'd have eaten them. Not that I was ever bothered about the chocolate - it was the sheer deviousness of it all.

What I actually loved to eat was coal dust and coking coal. We just called it coke. I remember taking a chunk of coke from the coal shed, grinding it beneath the heel of my shoe then scraping it up into a paper bag. That was my version of a ten pence mix-up. I kept it in the pantry behind the currants. I knew my sisters would never look there because there was only me who like currants - they thought they looked too much like dead flies. I don't know what I thought they'd do with the coke dust - it's not as if they'd eat it themselves. They'd probably have just poured it out and what a tragedy that would have been. I'd eat coke dust much the same as anybody else would eat kayli - that coloured sugar not to be confused with sherbert. Lick my finger, stick it in the bag, poke it around to get maximum coverage and then pop it into my mouth. It had exactly the same texture as kayli but was far, far better for your teeth, unless you'd rather have rotten teeth than black teeth that is. Well put it this way, I've never ever had a tooth extracted and heck, whitening teeth with charcoal is quite de rigeur these days. I was clearly a child before my time... I also had a penchant for chalk and emery boards. Unsurprisingly, unlike everyone else, I didn't mind sand in my sandwiches at the beach either. I still don't.

These are the kind of things a seventies child had to contend with: pre-children's rights, pre-wussy liberalism, pre-scales of emotional well-being. So you're forgiven for assuming that I'm made from steel because I'm a product of the heavily industrial environment I grew up in. I probably am to some extent because you can take the girl out of Grangetown but you can't take Grangetown out of the girl but no, I'm made from steel because I grew up with resilience, tenacity and determination. All the qualities we want our children to have today. I overcame all of that and still turned into a strong, hard-working, independent woman. Here, our early years mantra is turned on its head: the end product is far more important than the process. Granted, it could never be described as best practice and certainly wouldn't get the stamp of approval from Tanya Byron but my experiences in my formative years seem to have caused me no lasting harm -although I'm sure my sisters would beg to differ.