The experience of being in the isolation hospital had the effect of almost totally erasing any memories I might have had of my life as a very young child. Everything I have mentioned that I directly remember took place during and after this event. When our first child was born in the late 1970's, we owned our house - a small, two up two down end of terrace that cost us £9,500. We had both entered a professional occupation because universal secondary education was available allowing access to Higher Education, a degree and the possibility of breaking out of the entrapment of class. Our first child thus began life in a family now ensconced in the lower reaches of the middle-class with the firm possibility of cementing this status more firmly as the years passed. Childhood illnesses were dealt with humanely and thoroughly thanks to universal health care paid for through taxation, which distributed the costs reasonably fairly through the redistributive tax system. These transformative social changes were not granted through the beneficence of the powerful, but through the demands and organised activity of working people. If these hard-won advances are now in retreat, it behoves all of us to look carefully at the reasons why rather than taking the simplistic route of simply blaming the previous generation, many of whom organised and acted to defend what the immediate post-war generation had achieved.

Back in the precarious family home, my mother must have known that the only way we could survive as a family was to get work. Until I had reached school age, this was clearly impossible. My brother had started school while we were still living in my grandmother's house, but my sister and I were too young and full-time child-care was not on any political or social agenda in the early 1950's. Mothers stayed at home and reared children, men went to work to support their families and single-parent families didn't exist. Only happy, two-parent families of two to three children were acknowledged as the standard social unit of society.
 As soon as it was feasible, my mother got a job (very unusual at this time for a woman with children) and we entered a new routine. In the morning my mother would sit us in front of the clock on the mantlepiece and showed us the point at which the big hand would allow us to make our way to school. She must have assumed that my eight year old brother would make sure we would all arrive at school in one piece. In reality, as soon as she had left for work, my brother would be off and my sister and myself would be left stoically watching the big hand ( or for myself, becoming almost hypnotised by a tiny golden arrow that whirred round in a small hole in the clock face) until the big hand permitted us to leave. We would then make the fifteen minute walk to school across a large council estate, together. I remember very little of this school, but I do remember that when we left to walk home, the children in the Junior part of the school would still be working, and I would watch them trapped behind the cast iron frames of their heavy twinned desks and feel sure that I would never be able to do that kind of work and felt very fearful of the future.
When we got home from school, a very kind lady who was known to my grandfather on my mother's side, came in to look after us, unpaid, until my mother came home from work. My mother's first job was short lived. She was employed to do the accounts in a local laundry, but being much more a literary than a mathematics person, she soon found the work out of her skill zone - and her employers found likewise - and so they parted. Fortunately, she had been sending articles to the local newspaper for some time, and several had been published. A vacancy as a junior reporter arose which they offered to her, and thus began her career working in the newspaper industry and a way out of the poverty that single-parenthood placed upon us (and continues to do to so many women today) - though this would take many years to occur. For a long time we continued to live on the precipice of civilised existence, at any moment liable to topple over into an abyss of local authority care and familial disintegration. My mother's determination kept us, somehow, safe on the ledge. Of course, as a child, you don't judge your circumstances in relation to the social norm. Your life is as it is and you don't question it. It was only on rare occasions that I was suddenly aware that we were not quite like most other families, usually when someone at school would ask me what my dad did and the momentary incomprehension when I said I didn't have one. One of the most important aspects of now being at school was that we were all entitled to free school meals. A cooked dinner every day in term time was vital to our young development. It's scandalous to be aware that today, children are once again going hungry and losing weight in the school holidays as the divide between the haves and have nots increases in one of the world's richest societies. Why Victorian levels of inequality and poverty are once more with us must be analysed in a more sophisticated way than blaming the baby boomers.

to be continued......