older women - an article

I am not sure this is part of the memoir, but it gives a bit more detail of work with the older women's project.

When I was 59 I decided to change career from being a journalist to becoming a community worker and I found a job in Camden working with older people. Part of my job was to give support to the Camden Pensioners Action Group where I soon noticed that although at least 80% of the members were women, guess who held all the positions of power in the group? Yes, men. So, with the support of my team and central office, I set about getting funding from the GLC to set up an older women's project, which is now, 11 years later, still flourishing and called AGLOW, the Association of Greater London Older Women. We are still only funded to work in London. In Britain as a whole there are 7 million women aged over 60, 7 million citizens who have been rendered iinvisible and whose voices have been silenced by the ageism and sexism in our society. The contribution made by older women to the economy through their unpaid work in the home, as childminders within the extended family, as volunteers staffing charities, as the carers and good neighbours, goes unrecognised. Our society devalues age, it devalues women once they are past child-bearing, child-rearing days. This combination of ageism and sexism means that little heed is paid to older women, low priority is given to their needs and too little research is done into the specific issues that affect their lives. Is it any wonder then that they also suffer low self-esteem and have low expectations when they have been so marginalised? Especially when you learn that only 17% of women retire on a full basic state pension, 80% of all lone women over 60 live in poverty, 60% over 65 have a long-standing illness or disability and around 700,000 people over 65 suffer from dementia, the vase majority of them being women. The women now aged 70 are of a generation that suffered from the negative social attitudes towards the education of women. Many of them left school at 14 and they feel the lack of education has rendered them powerless. The empowerment of disadvantaged older women is one of the main aims of AGLOW. In the workshops that we organise, older women share their experiences, explore their personal and collective needs and determine action to take to fulfill them. We try to increase their confidence. Last year we convened an older women's conference on Community Care and around 80 women shared their experiences as users. One of their main conclusions was that there is a need for more information. Whilst information is available it does not seem to reach the eople who need it most, and information is the key to proper choice. The complexity of the assessment process for Community Car worries them too and especially the questions about their finances. Older people have bad memories of means testing. But most complaints were about the charges for services now. They are finding some of the services they need are too expensive. Chiropody and eye tests are examples. Because of this, certain eye problems, like glaucoma, are not being picked up. They are also concerned about those with mental health problems. Older women are rarely given access to "talking treatments", psychotherapy groups and counselling. They find themselves fobbed off with tranquilisers and anti-depressants. Through AGLOW we have set up some self-help support groups for older women suffering depression. But the awful reality is that more older women are becoming drinkers and are sleeping rough in the streets.
Everyone wanted more information on the complaints procedure and it was stressed that some older people worry about complaining, so they need advocates. A complaint we often hear is that people from black and ethnic minority communities are still not getting culturally appropriate forms of support in many areas, and lesbians are discriminated against in residential homes. The high cost of nursing homes is also a real worry and the fear that they will have to sell their homes and have nothing to leave for their family. [It is ironic that Zelda herself had to sell her home to pay for care and that nearly all the money she had went to the pockets of shareholders in a private care provider!]
User involvement in decision making is always a point of issue. Whilst attempts have been made, user involvement remains more in the wish than in the reality. The users should be involved in the monitoring of services. On housing, the important points raised were the long waits for transfer, the need for more emergency housing for sufferers of violence, because the incidence of elser abuse is very high. There is also the need to carefully monitor conditions in residential homes. And for women to be able to stay in their own homes, they need help with repairs, decoration, odd jobs, window cleaning and gardening. Transport availability and the continuation of the free travel pass are also very important issues for older women.
After that conference, AGLOW arranged a meeting of around 40 of the women to meet women MPs in a committee room of the House of Commons to discuss their concerns. We have also spoken separately to Clare Short. Now that Tessa Jowell has taken over from Clare Short we are arranging another meeting with her at the House in December to lobby for legislation against age discrimination. [Clare Short and Tessa Jowell were both ministers in the 1997 labour government - RIP!] This is blatant in the NHS with operations, screenings and treatment being denied to older women. The ongoing work that AGLOW does is to run courses on assetiveness, self-defence, computer courses and How to produce a newsetter. But we're not all work and no play - we also have had drama sessions, drumming classes, belly-dancing, keep fit and reminiscence workshops. We want women to be able to live life to the full, to fulfill their otential. Towards this aim, AGLOW also works with the Older Women's Education Group. We organise 3 or 4 study days in a year and the most recent one was on relationships. We have also taken ourselves into Europe for campaigning through the Older Women's Network, Europe, which was set up last summer. Through that we sent a representative to Beijing for the International Women's Meeting.

[I think Zelda was about 73 when she wrote this. Being 64 myself now, it is interesting to see if anything has changed for older women. I think many things have, but there is still the looming problem of care in later life, and whether the services will be there and be affordable - especially as in the UK our government is determined to turn back the clock of the national health service to 1945!]

Working among older people

Below, Zelda speaking at older people's forum, and above, at Grey Power workshops drumming and Indian dancing.


After leaving East End News life took anothe twist, pushing me ino a new area of work. Somebody somewhere must love me, as they say, because yet again I landed on my feet in a very interesting job and with some very fine colleagues. In November 1981 I became one of the four-woman team of Camden Task Force, a voluntary sector organisation working with older people. My team mates were nicky Jane and Susan and when I was first introduced to Nicky she showed me the double headed axe hanging from her silver neck chain and asked if I knew its significance. Not wishing to show ignorance I just nodded. however, it didn't take me long to realise that she was a lesbian. The four of us became good friends and we often would go out together to try out a new restaurant for dinner. The table talk spanned feminism, homophobia and party politics, interspersed with friendly gossop about other Task Force staff in other local boroughs. We met up with them regularly at staff meetings and union meetings. They were a lively bunch.
I worked in Area 1 and 2 of Camden which took me from Kings Cross to Swiss Cottage and most of the time I walked to my visits to housebound pensioners or to groups and luncheon clubs. We had an office care and a bike but I couldn't drive and I found London traffic terrifying when I ventured on the bike.
Our tasks involved making sure the older people in our patch had the information and the services esential for their independent living. We encouraged them to join social and camaigning groups, organised health courses, tarted up yoga classes and set up reminiscence groups. We also encouraged young people from the local schools to befriend an elderly person who was housebound, and facilitated discussions in the schools on ageism. At one school I was talking to 11 year olds about the stereotypes of older people and mentioned that many young people thought that old people were no longer secually active. Straightaway a boy's arm shot up, I nodded toward him and he said, "Please Miss, my grandma's never had sex!"
What first attracted me to the job at Task Force was their emphasis on self-help groups and collective ways of working in teams. I was not disappointed either in the work or in my team. I found our weekly team meetings both helpful and interesting. There were always new ideas to discuss. I had a lot to learn and especially about the gerentological philsophy underpinning the work we did. New ideas were permeating the voluntary sector and affecting the ways of working. Language was changing, too. No longer was patronising behaviour or language to be tolerated and we were challenging the too prevalent dismissal by some doctors of the treatable complaints of older women with the phrase "it's your age". They fobbed them off with sleeping tablets. Still today there are those who have no time to treat older people as human beings, and others, too, who want to fit them into a mould they can work with more easily. As one woman complained: "I dread being forced to sing music hall songs and wear a paper hat while I drink my tea." Changes don't come quickly or easily and still too often they are treated like children.
We worked with Pensioners' Action Groups and in Camden the Pensioners' Liaison Committee was set up to meet regularly with an officer fro the Social Services Department, and a councillor on the Social Services Committee, to tell them what the pensioners said they needed. Their persistence influenced the Council to give much-needed special services to some of the frail elderly people. The Liaison Committee was the forerunner of today's Local Forum.
Inevitably changes began to affect the Task Force itself. A new director decided it needed a new image and therefore a change of name. Thus it became Pensioners Link and I was asked to set it up as a membership organisation with a quarterly magazine called Link Up. Then I was given fund-raising responsibilities to enable us to expand our work. I true "Pensioners Link" fashion, representatives of each team worked on applications to the GLC for new projects, such as the two successful ones, the Health issues of Black and other inority ethnic communities and an Older Women's project. The one worker on this latter project was Pam, who launched it with a weekend festival for older women. With hard work and showing great initiative she made it into a successful project. I was on the Working Group right from the start, and later, when Pam moved on, I becae the worker and have been associated with the project ever since. It is now autonomous and renamed AGLOW - the Association of greater London older women -[Zelda herself coined this title], of which I am the Chairperson.

Comment from Sue - Zelda was writing this in the early 1990s, but I am pleased to say, that long after she ceased her own involvement, the project still thrives and many women from the project attended Zelda's funeral and still remember her fondly.

North London Older Women's Group

In the ate 70s the London Conference of the Women's Liberation Movement decided to hold a workshop for older women. Intrigued, I decided to attend. The first surprise was to find women in their early thirties there. Hardly old, I thought, so I asked them why they were attending. Their first answer was that they felt they had very different problems from younger feminists because they were already in steady relationships and had children. "The younger feminists don't want to talk about babies," they said. Their other concern was about the menopause - it was the end of life, they thought. An interesting discussion ensued.
Inspired by that workshop, a few of us who were over 50 decided to continue meeting to discuss our attitudes to ageing. We met regularly for a few months but over the summer holidays the group disbanded. As I had found it a mind-expanding and enjoyable experience, I decided to advertise in Spare Rib for older women to contact me if they wished to meet with other women their own age for discussion. Ten of us eventually settled down together to explore our feelings about ageing and to discuss feminist issues.
We talked of personal problems;exchanged experiences of loves and life;raged at sexism;laughed at men's conceits;supported the abortion campaign; and demonstrated at Greenham. Being working women, many of the problems we brought to the group were work oriented: the lack of promotion; the sexism and ageism we encountered; the someties problematic relationships with our colleagues because of our age; and the difficulties of getting a job at our age. And as most of us were mothers, the fraught relationships with our children were sometimes a subject of discussion, but as one of the group who did not have children herself complained, we tried to respect her feelings.
I sometimes felt we were bending over backwards to accommodate all the wishes of the members, to make us all feel comfortable within the group. I later found out that one woman felt intimidated by some of us; some felt the discussions lacked structure and depth;others felt there was too much structure; one felt like an observer - and they were the ones that stayed with us! Others felt the group had seen them through a difficult period of their lives and they could now move on - so they did. Some of us would have liked the group to be more study-oriented.
A highlight in our early days together was when we were invited in 1983 to produce a half hour film for the Open Space programme on BBC2 television. We called it "Invisible Women" and it was inspired by an article written by Flo Keyworth, a journalist on the Morning Star. We explored the virtual invisibility of older women in the media; why they were the butt of male comedians' humour; why they are portrayed as feeble and dimwitted; and why, if they have relationships with younger men, they are mocked, when older men are applauded for their affairs with young women. The Times review amused us. It said, "This passionate little film may have echoed at times with rather silly overstatements but only male bigots could deny the truth of its main contentions". The Daily Express commended us for "hanging on to our good humour as we discussed with frankness and insight the problem of ageing in a man's world." [Zelda doesn't mention that she commissioned me to write and perform the songs featured in this programme - just had to get that in!]
After that success I did a number of other TV programmes. One I particularly enjoyed doing was on the "representation of women in advertisements for washing powder over the past 20 years", which was filmed in a launderette in Bloomsbury. Another one I did was on education and, more recently, a film was made of my visit to Philadelphia to meet Maggie Kuhn and the Gray Panthers.
It is with some pride that I tell you that the Older Women's Group kept together for over 12 years.

feminism - zelda style!

Zelda and friends at Greenham Common

I had always thought of myself as a feminist and equal to any man. I was out there with the boys, beating them at their own game. Not for me those Party women's groups making things for the Bazaars throughout the year. I went out to work, an independent woman, and I prided myself on taking the decisions in the family. At work, too, I was nicknamed "Queen Bee". Only later did I question that view of myself and become uncomfortably aware that I carried more than half the world on my shoulders. What a fool for not recognising my oppression. Then came the Women's Liberation Movement and my awakening, my recognition of my weaknesses as well as my strengths, that enabled me to look honestly at myself and my position in society. It was a painful process. Consciousness-raising groups gave real meaning to the slogan "the personal is the political". We learned that what we had thought was our problem alone was in fact shared by many other women. Through the sharing of experiences we uncovered and discussed the impact of male power or patriarchy. It became a two-way process of women putting their personal feelings into a political perspective and of Party political women getting more in touch with their personal feelings. And for me it meant having to acknowledge my own mistaken attitudes and practices. I also had to look more closely at the Party and recognise its mistaken attitudes and practices. Feminism was difficult for women of my age to embrace because it invalidated so much we had valued in our lives before.
[Note from Sue: I feel sad that any woman felt their values invalidated by feminism. I know what Zelda means, but in my view, if the movement made her feel that way, there was as much wrong with the values of the movement as with her own.]
Within the Party, discussion had centred around the belief that all would be well for women once we gained socialism. "We should be fighting shoulder to shoulder with our male comrades to defeat capitalism", they claimed, "there's no need to organise in separate groups". We should subsume our struggle for liberation from our oppressioon within the greater struggle to free the working class from their oppression, it was said, ignoring the fact that so many liberation struggles have exposed this argument as false. Women would be urged to support the freedom struggle and encouraged to play a full part in the frontline battle alongside the men and seemingly fully equal to the men. "Look at us," the men in command would say to the world, "we have given the women equal status" and then when the battle was over, the sacrifices made, the women would be pushed back into the home, into servicing the male head of the family, into a second-class citizenship yet again.
The slogan for me was "Women's right to Choose". It should apply not only to the question of abortion, but to every sphere of life. I want control over my own body, my own mind and my own life, and for that I need the fullest information to enable me to make the right choices about my life. [I feel desperately sad reading this, given the complete lack of control Zelda had over her body, mind and life in her last few years!] I want equality of opportunity. I want co-operation, not competition.
Those early days of the women's movement were filled with exciting discussions. I felt I was living on the edge of new discoveries all the time. i was caught up in all the passionate arguments on sexuality and the ectivity around the demands for abortion on demand and free 24 hour nurseries. I was reading Betty Friedan's "The Feminist Mystique", Shulamith Firestone's "Dialectics of Sex", Germaine Greer, Kate Millett and Dale Spender on man-made language. Women's books became very important to me. I read them voraciously. Alice Walker and Maya Angelou broadened my vision; Susie Orbach's "Fat is a feminist issue" gave another dimension to the struggle, as did Barbara McDonald's "Look me in the eye", about lesbians' invisibility even within the women's movement. I was searching, searching, searching all the time, looking into myself and sharing the experiences of other women through the groups. But it wasn't all discussions - theory and practice were joined. Women's Centres and women's safe houses were opened, empowerment projects sprang up, anti-discrimination legislation, easier divorce and abortion were all fought for, and educational changes were wrought. To this day I am still re-examining the world in the light of both feminism and Freud.
I meet so many older women nowadays having relationship problems with their daughters. It is worrying too that each generation of women seems to make the same mistakes as their mothers did and have to re-examine their views on relationships, marriage and child-bearing. Dale Spender was so right when she said "women's ideas about the relationship of women and men are either co-opted or lost by men and have to be recreated every fifty years or so".
Arguably the feminist revolution is the only successful revolution in the 20th century. But now women are arguing amongst themselves as to whether feminism is dead. We may not have achieved all we hoped, but it is recognised that feminist ideas have radically changed society in many ways. Feminism is not dead, it may be just lying dormant for a while in the minds of millions of women. I like Rebecca West's answer in 1913 when she was asked what feminism means: " I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is;I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentimens that differentiate me from a doormat."

East End News

I wanted the job at the East End News so desperately that I was very nervous all the way to the interview. The offices were in a rather grand looking but decrepit old house behind the Bethnal Green Museum, and next to the Centre for Communty Studies which had produced "Family and Kinship in the East End". I waited anxiously for the big black door to open. When it did, there tood a man I immediately recognised as Charlie Goodman, a veteran of the Cable Street battle to stop the Moseley fascists from marching through the East end in the thirties. his welcome was warm and my nervousness vanished as we sat happily swapping news of mutual political acquaintances. He was just teling me of the work he did as a local volunteer giving support to the paper, when Mike Jemson, the Secretary of East End News Co-operative, came to escort me to the interview room.
With his thick black moustache, full beard and wild shock of hair, Mike looked fierce. It was not until we were seated round the table with the other panel members that I noticed his eyes were smiley and encouraging. I began to feel more comfortable and long before the interview ended I sensed the job was mine.
The East End News was run as a cosumers' and workers' co-operative, independent of any political control, and it aimed to provide a focus for the progressive forces in the East End. As such it gained the backing of the TUC and a number of trade unions gave financial help. Progressives throughout Britain welcomed the initiative. They bought shares and gave generous donations. They were keen to support an "alternative" newspaper, one that would not have anti-working class, sexist and racist bias of other papers. The paper had grown out of the previous effort locally to keep the "East Ender" which had been taken over by the company that ran the East End Advertiser, which promptly shut it down.
I started work there in january 1981 as the administrator, and the first issue of the paper was launched in March. Right up to the eve of the launch there had been a team of top=notch journalists and local activists working on the first issue. It was vital to get it right. They had worked into the night for weeks, discussing, planning, arguing the finer points and preparing layouts. There was an air of excitement that kept the adrenalin flowing. Throughout this period none worked harder than Aidan White and Mike Jempson. They made a good team. Aidan had the greater experience as a journalist whilst Mike, newer to the profession, had a deeper knowledge of and long involvement in local community action. Together they put the first issue to bed and it was presumed that Aidan would then become editor. What a shock we had when he said he couldn't give so much time to the East End News in the future because of his job at the Guardian. So Mike was thrown in at the deep end and became editor.
In that first issue we proudly printed our policy: to provide a local news service excluding discriminatory material; to campaign for better services and living standards in the area; an to provide a right to reply to those unfairly treated by the paper. It was these policies that had gained the support of many local organisations from the start. My first task was to set up the financial and administrative systems ad then, far more enjoyable, to organise and co-ordinate the work of the volunteers as well as corresond with the members and donors. We set up training sessions and the volunteers worked in every sphere of the paper's production and distribution. The few paid workers took only £75 a week from the coffers at first but later their salary was raised to £100. Every worker and volunteer did whatever job was needed at any time, and after I set up the required organisational systems I was asked to change my job and become the features editor.
The atmosphere in the office was highly charged. We all felt we wre i at the start of something great. The paid worker were few but the volunteers were many and the newsroom was always crowded with people. You would find yourself tripping over volunteers like Vicky and Viv, sitting on the floor looking over their notes and giggling over their experiences. Both of them were exerienced journalists, having worked on reputable newspapers in Johannesburg, their home town. Fiercely anti-apartheid and undestanding of the need for real press freedom after their experiences in South Africa, Vicky and Viv were eager to put their talent to good use at the East End News.
Everything was done on a shoestring. We had little furniture and far too few typewriters. They were snapped up eagerly whenever anyone left them ungurded for a moment. There was never enough to go round and being very old models they clattered noisily. I fet at home in that atmosphere as I was used to the chaos of left-wing offices. In fact I thrived on it.
Some of Fleet Street's finest journalists gave us their support. they mucked in with the subbing, the reporting and feature writing, and even taught their craft to local people who were eager to play their part in making the East End News a success. Beulah, who had previously been a local nurse, started to write a health column for us. Her ambition was to become a journalist and she worked hard to achieve that goal, studying at the North London Polytechnic. Her husband Pat, a local teacher, was very supportive of her, and they both played a role in the development of the paper. We were all delighted when she obtained her degree and went on to do a PhD at the London School of Economics. She then went on to play a significant role on the NUJ's Black Members Committee. Many other local people throughout the East End wrote on wild life, local history and on tenants' issues. The newsroom was always buzzing with conversation and Mike's patience was often sorely tried, but he buzzed with the best of us. The area we covered in our columns was large, ranging fro hackney, through Tower hamlets to Stratford and beyond Just as a would-be taxi driver goes on the "knowledge", so I walked to every corner of our constituency, getting to know the community groups and local characters. There were many new community organisations springing up, but so were fascist groups. Our columns were filled with reports of racist attacks on housing estates where police turned a blind eye. We tried always to give good coverage to the many issues raised by black community groups.
There was also a flourishing cultural life in the area, with the Half Moon Theatre, the Theatre Royal Stratford and all the alternative comedians and theatre groups performing in the local pubs and clubs. There were poetry societies, film and photography workshops, pub music of every kind and the Rio Cinema, as well as Urban Farms and nature walks. a rich life to savour. We publicised it all and involved many local people in reviewing events.
Spirits were high at the paper. Everyone was committed, but commitment was not enough. As our financial difficulties increased, splits and factions became obvious at the Co-op shareholders meetings. When you consider that East End News was launched with only £26,000 capital, you will understand the enormous task we had taken on.
[At this point, the aforementioned Pat, who had been asked by Zelda to read these memoirs, goes into quite a lengthy diatribe about what went wrong at EEN, how it lost its organiic connection to its readership and their everyday concerns by being too politically correct, not supporting things like wedding announcements and beauty queen competitions, and being generally too censorious. No doubt this points to one of the splits and factions that Zelda talks about]
We had to fight every inch of the way for readers and advertising. There was fierce competition from other long-stading traditional local papers. They were shored up by huge financial resources, whilst the East End News suffered chronic cash flow problems. That was partly due to our advertisers not paying their bills within the month as agreed. We considered every possiblity including becoing a free sheet, but finally we had to shed staff and with a very heavy heart I left the paper in November. The paper continued to be published for a short time, run entirely by volunteers, before it finally folded. It could never be thought of as a failure, despite its short life. [Another note from Pat utterly disagreeing with this statement].
Through the paper's columns, funds were raised to buy a good second-hand taxi for the Tower Hamlets Out and About group of people with disabilities, and when we handed it over there was great rejoicing and straightwaway two of the group's members were able to spend an enjoyable vening at a concert transported by their very own taxi from door to door.
We produced two local history calendars, a book of cartoons by local artists, and helped promote cultural and sporting events. The paper even formed its own football team.
We who worked on the paper gained greatly from the experience and some of the people we trained went on to become respected professionals. It is good to see George Alagiah, once a young East End News volunteer reporter studying journalism, is now a TV correspondent reporting from all the hotspots of the world. Another of our volunteers was Val McCalla, who is proprietor of The Voice newspaper. [Well known Black newspaper in the 1980s].
Yes, the East End News made an impact and even today people speak of it with admiration. They remember it as a brave experiment.

War on Want

A couple of months before I left the Morning Star I moved to Caledonian Road and started to scour newspaper ads for a job. The first to catch my attention was for a publicity/fund-raiser vacancy at War on Want, the development agency, and the address was Caledonian Road. Fate was playing its hand again. I went for the interview feeling very positive, but one of the panel members was very anti-communist and very aggressive in his questioning. I left the interview room feeling quite certain I wouldn't get the job, and was really surprised when I received the phone-call confirming my appointment.
The director mary Dines put me to work straightaway on her pet project in Eritrea. She asked me to produce a leaflet publicising the effects of the Ethiopian bombing of their villates. she gave me photos of small children with their limbs torn off by the bombs and my task was to appeal for money for hospital equipment. I used one of her more harrowing photos and pulled at the readers' heartstrings in the text. When I showed it to the staff, expecting praise, I was roundly abused for exploiting the victims and putting over a Charity image. I tried to ward off their proper anger by saying I had been briefed by the Director, upon which the staff rep went in to berate her, and I was instructed to change the leaflet. A salutary lesson.
During my first year at the agency we organised a tour of Britain for representatives of the Aboriginal peoples of Queensland, Australia, who were trying to win support for their campaign on land rights. When they arrived in this country the cold hit them badly and they had no winter clothing, so they had to borrow my husband's long-johns.
When later a new director was appointed, he aimed to get money out of Europe to expand our work in Central America, Bangladesh, Southern Africa and the Horn, as well as starting up a UK programme. I was uneasy about his plans. I believed that small is beautiful and I feared that the agency would get too big too quickly.
He gave me the job of setting up the UK programme. We were concerned about the growing poverty and unemployment in Britain. Thus we promoted and supported projects such as workers' co-operatives; Unemployed Workers' Centres; and the Centre for Alternative Iindustrial and Technologica Systems, which aimed to produce socially useful goods. Recognising that women remained among the most disadvantaged in our society, we also supported women's employment projects and training schemes, and Back Women's Co-operatives.
The expansion of our work meant the arrival of new staff and the office politics began to change. They opposed the equal pay policy for all workers which we had been trying to achieve, and they were against servicing themselves as we had previously done. Hierarchical structures were set up and I was no longer happy in the office.
Despite our differences, Terry, the new director, invited me to go to Somalia with him to see if War on Want could work there. I hoped to give support to women's craft co-operatives. En route to Mogadishu we had to stop overnight in Rome and there I met an Italian man who was also going to Somalia. He gave me his card and invited us to visit his banana plantation ot too far out of Mogadishu. When Somalia was under Italian "protection" he had owned the plantation, he told me, but now it had been taken over by the government. However, recognising his expertise, they had asked him to oversee its management. As Terry and I had a heavy schedule I doubted whether I would be able to visit, but when we arrived in Mogadishu w found there was an official two day holiday so Terry suggested we might as well take advantage of my friend's offer of hospitality. I phoned him and he happily came to pick us up in his car. When we reached the plantation we saw little groups of women and children standing at the entrance to their small thatched huts all smiling at us. The land around their huts was parched and dusty, but when we rreached the Italian's bungalow, it was set in gardens full of brightly coloured flowers and shrubs and his verandah was lined with well-watered potted plants. An outhouse was used as the kitchen and his cook/housekeeper lived there with her children. H called her to bring food and she came in with her head bowed and eyes down as she was a Muslim. She seemed frightened and he told us that her previous boss had raped her.
The plantation looked very neglected but was still productive - four sections growing bananas and a patch filled with coconut trees in which lived a colony of monkeys. As we walked through their territory they pelted us with stones and nuts.
When we did start work, Terry went up north to visit the refugee camps and i went to meet women being trained in different crafts and to visit a small co-operative that had already been set up. The training centre was in an old Montessori school where they were being taught to cook by different methods fro traditional through to a modern cooker. An American woman was teaching them tye-dying and others were showing them how to use sewing machines and knitting machines. In another workshop they were making traditional baskets and in another they were making children's clothes. Just outside the school the co-o ran a small shop where their crafts were sold at very high prices.
I became very friendly with my interpreter, Fatima, from the Women's Ministry. She was a Muslim and very proud of the fact that she had been educated, which was unusual for women. Her mother, a widow, was very worried that her daughter was still unmarried. It had been her uncles - "enlightened men" she called them, who had insisted she take the educational opportunities offered her under the supposedly marxist regime of President Barre. She also discussed with me the issue of female circumcision which she had undergone and which was still common practice in Somalia even though the government did not approve.
I was unhappy about a lot of things I saw in Somalia, particularly the bribery and corruption. Ships full of much-needed grain were left waiting outside the harbour for days until the palms of several harbour officials were well greased. Food meant for free distribution was being sold in the market. And it was disheartening to see tractors and other vitally necessary machinery left rusting in the fields for lack of spare parts. So we decided against getting involved in supporting projects in Somalia. We would never be able to be certain that our money and goods would reach the intended destination and we did not have the resources or personnel to be able to check it.

holidays in the eastern bloc

Bulgaria
"Drop everything" we were told. "You're off to Bulgaria on Saturday". The Black Sea resorts were then just opening up to western tourists and they were not yet attracting the numbers needed to fill the planes. That was why Jerry and I found ourselves, along with a few other full-time Communist Party workers, being whisked off to Sunny Beach. The only duty we had to fulfill was to meet with the local Communist Party officials on Thursday before we left for home. We had to tell them of any criticisms we had, in order to help them cater better for future holiday makers.
Each of us had specific criticisms but there was one that we all shared - the small pile of 2 inch square, rough, grey toilet paper that was sparingly placed in the cubicle beside a warning not to flush them down the lavatory but to put them in an already overflowing small bin. There was used toilet paper scattered all over the floor. As you can imagine, it was not a pretty sight and nor were the toilets the most fragrant of places.
When I said I was going to comment on this, my companions said it wouldn't go down well and that I should remember the generous hospitality they had offered us. Thursday came and I braced myself for the moment of truth. When the Bulgarian comrades asked for our comments mine was the oly voice heard. i sweetened the pill by firstly telling them of all the things that Jerry and I had really enjoyed, but then told them that they must clean up their act on the toilet front and that the 2 inch squares of toilet paper were too small for western bums.
There was a long silence and my heart pounded. Then the Bulgarian chairman rose from his chair, fixed me with his eyes, and stabbing the air with his index finger, slowy said, "Ah, yes, comrade, but you must admit that there are no sharks in our waters".
What a conversation stopper! For ever after jerry and I used it to stop bores in full flood. It's most effective.

A Day on Bear Mountain
It was thought that after five years of full-time work for the Communist Party you would need your revolutionary batteries recharged. So the Soviet Union and the other so-called "Eastern democracies" offered such comrades throughout the world a month's hospitality. For two weeks we had to go to a sanitorium for health checks and treatments and after that we were given a choice of cities to tour.
Jerry and I, with eight other British comrades were sent to a sanitorium in Yalta where we joined others from America, Finland, France, Germany and Italy. Each day we had early morning exercises before breakfast and then various courses of treatment were booked for you according to what ailed you. There were: hydrotherapy, physiotherapy, massage, salt baths, mud baths, saunas and steam baths and for those of us who were fit there were tennis and badminton courts, rowing, climbing and aerobics to choose from.
One day jerry and I decided to volunteer to clamber up Bear Mountain with the German comrades. We soon wished we hadn't. The Germans were all there wearing their lederhosen and all the gear, whereas we didn't even have proper boots, only plimsolls. We had such a job keeping up with them. They literally leat up steep, thickly wooded slopes like mountain goats. As we staggered the last few yards to the top, the leader of the group blew her whistle and ordered the men to the right and the women to the left. I didn't realise why at first, until I saw the women crouching down behind trees with their skirts up. We joined in the mass toileting and then all of us raced down the other side until we reached the sea. How wonderful it was to plunge straight in after that long, hot climb.
From Yalta we went overnight by train to St Petersburg - (Leningrad in those days). In each sleeping compartment there were four bunks and at the end of the corridor sat a woman in charge of a steaming samovar of tea. I had ust one problem. I had been allocated a bunk in a compartment with three Soviet generals, each resplendent with sword and gun, but all very polite. I kept my clothes on and they just took off their swords.
On arriving early next morning we were met by a band playing and people waving flowers. How very nice, I thought, only to discover the welcome was not for us but for a young newly-wed couple on the train.
St. Petersburg is one of the most beautiful cities I have seen, ith its well-proportioned buildings coloured apple-blossom green, yellow ochre and a pink that glowed in the sunlight. Canals criss-cross the city and every bridge is a work of art in itself. The splendid St. Isaacs Cathedral, towering over the city with its large dome, its enormous malachite pillars and superb marbles, stood across the street from our hotel. In Tarist days the hotel had been used by visiting royalty and it had a chaise longue in the bathroom.
After our organised trip to the Hermitage and Peter's Palace with its trick fountains, Jerry and I left the others and visited the "anti-religion" museum. It showed big bibles with guns inserted into the ages; bullets from many different countries but each inscribed with "For God, King and Country"; relics of Rasputin and other monks who influenced the Tsars. We loved walking along the banks of the Neva at night, where the young lovers met, and as tradition dictated, the man would present a single rose to his loved one..
The street scenes were endlessly entertaining: the group of people stood reading the wall newspapers and discussing the news animatedly, then tut-tuttig as they turned to read the poster warning of the dangers of drinking vodka, while drunkards lay in a stupour in the gutter behind them; and the crows that gathered to remonstrate with a husband beating his wife in the street, while a policeman stood nonchalantly by on the corner, not interfering.
I also carry a vivid memory of the cook at the Party Hotel coming out of the kitchen to talk to me because I ate so little. She thought it was because I did not like her cooking and was close to tears. Jerry put her mind at rest by saying that her cooking was just like his mother's. Thank goodness, she took that as a compliment.

East German Mountain Retreat
We were in a chalet high up on a wooded mountainside and our companions were comrades from many different countries, but this story is of three who came from Argentina. One was a famous poet, Don Juan; another a full-time Party worker, Albert; and the other a peasant, Luis, who had never ever been out of his own small village before.
In the chalet our bedrooms were sited around a small hall, in which there was a small billiard table. Each evening before dinner all the men were to be found playing very seriously - except for Luis who had never played and was carefully watching each move they made. They asked him to play and tried hard to encourage him, but Luis would always shake his head. However, there came a day when I was woken by a click, click, click sound outside my bedroom door at about 4 o'clock in the morning. I tried to ignore it, to get back to sleep but the continual click, click was very annoying. Eventually I got out of bed and opened the door just an inch. Luis was there practising the game of billiards. That evening before dinner he proudly joined the other men in their game.
Another day the three Argentinians joined Jerry and I for a long walk down the far side of the mountain to a famous hostelry in a small village. Jerry had a map and a pocket compass, as none of us had ever been there before. We were all chattering away, occasionally stopping to examine an interesting plant. We even caught a glimpse of a wild boar. Then, as we stopped to study a particularly interesting fungus, I suddenly realised that Luis was not with us. I called out his name - no response. I went back a little way to see if we'd left him behind - no sign of him I became anxious. I knew he could speak neither German nor English and he had no map with him. The others laughed at my concern. "Luis is a peasant" they said. He could find his way without a map or compass - he could work out the direction by the heightand position of the sun. he would find a path and and know by how well trod it was that it led to the village. "You'll see" they said, "He'll be there long before us".
And they were right. As we turned into the village, there was Luis grinning at us over the top of a steine of beer on a table outside the hostelry.

Star Turn

Daily Worker, which at the end of the 1960s became the more blandly named Morning Star, where Zelda had two stints, both working in the People's Press Fighting Fund.


When I first joined the staff of the Daily Worker, Johnny Campbell was the editor. It was just after the Hungarian uprising of 1956 and many journalists had left the paper. But not only was the paper depleted of staff, it also lost much of its support. I was in the Fund department and we had our work cut out to raise the money needed to sustain the paper. Too many of the wealthiest and most generous supporters had stopped their donations. Without advertising that supported other newspapers, it was vitally necessary to win the financial support of the labour movement and the readers, and we literally rought for every penny. As far as I was aware there was no Soviet gold at that time, though rumours were rife. But being a member of staff did not mean you were privy to any special knowledge.
We were a happy band in the Fund department, unlike the newsroom, where the atmosphere was heavy with anger, criticism, reproach. Elsie Gollan [wife of John Gollan who succeeded harry Pollitt as general secretary of the Communist Party] and Monica Millner worked with me and we enjoyed each other's company and were often to be heard singing our favourite songs while working. I was well known for my rendering of "I'm only a bird in a gilded cage".
Barbara Niven was then head of the department and had a small office of her own decorated with her own paintings. She was a "Grande dame", a statuesque figure, a talented artist and writer, admired and respected by all. Johnny Campbell never found his way into our office. There was a divide between the journalists and administrative staff. The canteen was the only place in which we mixed with each other. At lunchtime a select group of us gathered round David Ainley to do the Times Crossword. He was the champion. We merely contributed a word or two. David was the secretary of the People's Press Printing Society, the co-operative that owned the paper. Johnny Campbell stomped into the canteen for his lunch too. His awkward gait was due to the frostbite he suffered during the first world war. A sad-looking figure, he usually sat alone with the Times spread out before him, not inviting anyone to speak to him. I don't think I ever said more than Good morning to him, but I was told he had a sense of humour.
By the time I returned to work in the fund department after nearly six year at the labour Monthly, the editor was George Matthews. George, the "gentleman farmer" of the party and lover of opera, was a very different editor from Johnny. He was far more relaxed and friendly than his predecessor. But the paper was in crisis again Its name was being changed to the Morning Star and it was to have a different format. Many of the readers did not take kindly to either change and it was at such a time that I took over from the much -loved Barbara. I was sure the readers would consider me a young upstart. Despite the boost of sales figures of the Morning Star by a large order of copies from the Soviet Union, it still had to rely heavily on the support of its home readers. Their letters to me, often personal and revealing, were a constant inspiration. I felt that each writer of the hundreds of letters I received nearly every day was a personal friend. Indeed, some of them did become so, and my office was like a Mecca to readers and visitors from abroad, and I had to be a good listener. For the good of the paper I had to show no partiality - or so I thought at the time. With so many different strands of thought surfacing in the Party, my task was seen as keeping the Morning Star readers united around the paper.
Every factio and each individual variation of the Party line was represented in the letters that fell on my desk, and each writer presumed I hald the same view as they did. I was the public face of the paper, not a real person with my own views. In fact I was deeply concerned at the lack of democracy within the Party and the paper and along with many another member of staff was trying to get my voice heard. But that was in the confines of staff meetings.
Part of my job was travelling round Britaiin to meet the readers and whip up further support from other orgaisations. I also had to storm the male bastions of the trade union movement to get funds. i remember one lunchtime appointment I had with an East Midlands miners' leader in a local Working Men's Club where they were meeting. When I arrived that Sunday morning i was a little early and their meeting was still in full swing. I could see through the window the serried ranks of men listening to their leader's words of wisdom as I waited outside the door. Then, the meeting over, they all rushed past m to the bar to get the drinks. I sat down in a corner talking about the need for money for the paper to the accompaniment of the Club's lunchtime entertainment - a stripper! She was difficult to compete with for their attention.
Through a reorganisation of the staff that had to be made, I was given an extra task, the formidable task of organising the Festivall Hall Rally. It was a family event that used t attract around 2,500 people and they were entertained by touring artists from the Communist countries. The performers would stay on for a couple of days before continuing with their tour and we organised culltural outings for them - only to find they had skived off to go shopping in Marks & Spencers and Mothercare at marble Arch.
The first time I made the suggestion to the Festival Committee that we shoud have entertainment more in keeing with the timmes and the new readership we had won, I was laughed out of court. But gradually the committee was won round for a compromise. I was given my head each alternate year, so long as I had visiting East European artists in between. I booked Roger McGough and "The Scaffold". They recited poetry and sang Lily the Pink, their hit song which was well received by the audience. Another time I booked 7:84 Theatre company and they shocked our readers with their swearing. I felt I had struck a blow for freedom of thought. It was after this that the Party began to change the nature of their events too, and organised the Ally Pally rallies, thanks to Dave Cook. They were very popular.
Another venture I was rather proud of was my encouragement of new artists by giving our readers the opportunity both to see and to buy their work. I organised an exhibition of the Naive Painters of the East End at the National Theatre, and I also persuaded some of the artists to sell signed limited editios of their prints and posters through my office, publicised in the paper. We took a small commission on each sale for the Fund. Dan Jones' print of "Blair Peach" [killed by police in London at an anti-racist demonstration] was particularly popular.
As the financial situation of the paper worsened, we were forced to examine the possibilities of moving out of London. Bobby Campbell and I were allies on the committee charged with the responsibility of safeguarding the paper's future. However, before we could fulfill our task, Party Headquarters sent in Reuben Falber to wield the big stick. His word was law. We did not know then that he was accepting "Moscow Gold" despite the continual denials in our columns.
When we set up a Women's group at the paper, it created a furore. But with women like Flo Keyworth, Mikki Doyle and Bea Campbell all behind the idea, our women's group survived all criticism and disfavour.
Later, when Tony Chater became editor the staff meetings began to liven up as the "gloves came off". The discussions on democracy flared into fighting words. There were also Union battles to be fought and I was Mother of the NUJ chapel [National Union of Journalists equivalent to trace union shop steward], so I had many a brush with him I found him to be anti-feminist, not democratic in his working practices and arrogant to boot.
The controversies within the confines of the Star building spilled over into the public arena when the election of the Management Committee took place. When I was first at the paper and attended such meetings, there would be only around 20 or so of the Fund faithfuls there. By the time I resigned the numbers had risen to 150-200 and there had to be an overflow meeting outside the hall. The "hard-liners" would whip up their supporters and, getting wind of that, those advocating change also whipped up what support they could muster. They never mustered quite enough to wi the day As a public face of the paper, I was expected to exhort the readers to support the paper - a job i found increasingly difficult to do as my ideas changed and I found myself at odds with the policies of the paper. I had been uncomfortable in my job for too long and i could no longer live such a lie. i knew I had to leave.
I left and joined a collective of journalists on the newly formed East End News. [Here she worked with Mike Jempson, George Aligayah and other well known journalists]. Whilst at the East End News, one of the Star's journalists, John Flowers, came and asked me to join him, Bea Campbell and Simon Partridge to campaign to open up the Management Committee of the paper to more non-Party members. I agreed and the four of us stood for election to the Committee on the one ticket. That was anathema to the "hard-liners" because they wanted to keep strict control of the paper - no factions, thank you and no "undisciplined" non-Party members. So, from being a celebrity that every reader wanted to know, I suddenly became a pariah that everyone shunned. Many who had professed to be my bosom pals would not even look at me, let alone say hello. To them I was a traitor.

Raji Palme Dutt and Salme

Greetings card to Rajani Palme Dutt from all the staff at labour Monthly, including Zelda Curtis


Whilst Raji Palme Dutt was hated by Harry Pollitt, then general secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and an arch political rival, he was greatly revered by many rank and file comrades. During the war comrades serving in India set up groups to discuss his Notes of the Month and these Labour Monthly Readers' Groups influenced great numbers of soldiers who later swelled the ranks of the Communist Party on their return to Britain. They speak, even today, of labour monthly having been their lifeline to sanity in a mad, mad world.
Even his political adversaries recognised in Raji not only a giant intellect but a man committed devotedly to a cause; a man whose influence affected events throughout the world. Nehru, Kenyatta, Nkrumah, all sought discussion of their problems with him and history will record the roles these men played and the part Dutt had in the events they shaped.
Dutt's father, an Indian, had been a country doctor here, doing his rounds in a pony and trap. He often took the young Raji along with him and it was witnessing the poverty of his father's patients that turned Raji into a socialist, he told me. Seeing the squalor of their lives, the dreadful housing and cramped conditions in which they lived, and the tuberculosis that ravaged their lives, he pledged himself to fight for a better society. The irony was that he also suffered from TB.
Raji often spoke to me about Salme, his wife, and it was to me he entrusted the task of publishing her poems after her death. A beautiful woman, a poet and a political activist all her life, Salme was fluent in French, German, Russian, Swedish, Estonian and Finnish. She had been a brilliant scholar. Born in Estonia in 1888, she took part in the Russian Revolution of 1907. During her University years she was banished to Siberia for her underground activities, and it was that ordeal that caused her health to suffer. She was never really fit throughout the rest of her life.
In 1919 she asked Lenin to assign her a task in whichever country the battle was toughest. "Lenin looked at me with his usual quizzical smile" she told her friends" and replied that in that case I should go to England as that was the toughest place for communism. So I did."
She came to England in 1920 and while working here with Willie Gallacher she was introduced to the young Raji. He was much younger than she was, but within two years they were married. In a poem she wrote in 1936 she said her longing was "to swim where the waves are wildest, And moor a red flag on the whirl."
When I met her in 1965 her health was failing fast and she was in bed most of the time, looked after lovingly by Raji. The day she died I was phoned early in the morning by Raji's secretary at the Party Headquarters. I rushed round to his flat to be with him As he opened the door I saw his sadness. i held his hand for a moment and kissed his cheek. Then my eyes fell on the breakfast tray on the small hall table. A silver teapot and cream jug stood beside a delicate bone china cup and saucer resting on a plate. Two slices of toast stood in a rack alongside a small ot o honey and a tall, slender deep red rose stood in a silver, single-stem vase. Propped up against it was a birthday card. "It was her birthday" he sighed as tears welled up in his eyes.
This was the man the press called "Arch villain", the "intellectual doyen of the international communist movement". Here he was, lover of Salme, crying at his loss, clinging to me in his grief.

Daily Worker and labour Monthly

Angela
The phone rang. It was Angela Tuckett, acting editor of "Labour Monthly", asking if she could meet up with me for a chat. Her reputation was awesome. i could not imagine what she wanted from me - I was intrigued.
"Eccentric" was the usual description of Angela. She was renowned for her playig of the concertina. She and her squeeze box were present on every CND march, on every peace demonstration and at every trades union conference. Stories were told of her amorous dalliances and of her wild youth, but all agreed that her political record was more than admirable. In the thirties she had organised welcoming committees to provide foor and accommodation for the unemployed workers on their march up to London. She had also helped to buld up Unity Theatre in Bristol with her sister Joan. But perhaps Angela was most famous for playing hockey - or not playing it I should say. She had been chosen to play in England's Olympic hockey team but refused to compete at the nazi Olympics in Berlin 1936, leading her team in walking off the field. When we met and she informed me that it was being suggested I should work on Labour Monthly as her editorial assistant, I was too excited by the thought to ask all the questions that later flooded into my mind. Nor did I concern myself immediately with the effect it might have on th Daily Worker, where I was working at the time. I just presumed that Palme Dutt, chair of the British Communist Party as well as Editor of Labour Monthly, had cleared such a move with both the Party and the paper.
I went into the office of David Ainley, the paper's administrative head, to discuss leaving. He sat stonily silent as i told him my news, and then, without even loking up, he said "Never forget that even a cleaner at the Daily Worker does a more important job for the party than any luminary at Labour Monthly." But the party did agree that i should make the move.
MEET THE BOARD
Angela was a great story teller and as we drove each month to the printers she had me as a captive audience. She regaled me with stories of dancing through the streets and colleges of Oxford naked beneath her fur coat. She had seemingly always mixed pleasure with business. She taught me all the tricks of the trade: how to sub the articles, how to lay out the magazine, how to deal with the printers, and it was she who instructed me in how to get my man when we wanted an interview with a trade union leader at conference. "Stand outside the gents lavatory" she told me. "That's the one place they have to go to. They'll promise you anything in their desperatio to get inside quickly." Many an embarrassing hour I stood outside those doors.
On my first day at Labour Monthly Angela warned me that Raji Palme Dutt, the Editor, would never let anyone beyond the front door of his flat. His privacy was sacrosanct, and he defended it against all comers. "Don't think he'll let you in when you go to collect the manuscript of his "Notes of the month", she warned. "He may not even open the door. Sometimes he pushes the pages through the letter box to you." And that was true at first.
Even at the Board meetings he hardly ever glanced in my direction. None of them paid me much attention at first. But what a lot I learned by just sitting there listening to them - Palme Dutt, Robin Page Arnot, Andrew Rothstein, Ivor Montagu, Steve Boddington, Will Paynter and other trade union leaders.It was like a living history lesson listening to them reminiscing about past political events. They made the General strike come alive for me, telling how they brought out the bulletin and distributed it. I heard stories of their meetings with such legendary figures as Lenin, Stali and Dimitrov. They would swap tales of how they smuggled things in and out when they were serving their terms of imprisonment for one political reason or another. They told, too, of strolls in the gardens of Sidney and Beatrice Webb's house with George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells. Ivor Montagu would tell us hi adventures organising ping-pog matches around the world and then would switch easily from that into an account of film-making with Eisenstein.
Such stories were the preamble before we started on the business of the day. They were like the curtain raisers for the main event. Raji would give a resume of the current political scene to help us decide on the themes of the articles for the magazine that month.
Gradually I won Raji's confidence and the door of his flat was opened to me. He even invited me into the inner sanctum, his book-lined study, and I began to know him not just as a leading comrade but also as a vulnerable human being. Wherever he went on his many journeys abroad he sent me a postcard, but his spindly writing was so bad I could hardly make out the messages.
Once he invited me out to dinner and a trip to the theatre to see Shaw's "Mrs. Warren's Profession". Over dinner he told me stories of his courtship of Salme, his wife. Salme's family had a country estate in Finland, carved out of the woods around. He told me of tea on the lawns in sunny weather, of bears wandering in fro the woods, attracted by the smell of honey on the tea table, and how they would sway from side to side just as if they were dancing to some tune they could hear.
Raji came to share Christmas lunch with my family and enjoyed a game of scrabble with us. Then for his 70th birthday I organised a huge party with an iced cake, candles and all. But soon after the Party asked me to return to the Daily Worker as its Fund organiser, replacing Barbara Niven, just as it was changing its name to The Morning Star. On this occasion, contrary to my eperience when i first left the Daily Worker for the Labour Monthly, the move was made amicably.
Around that time Raji's health began to deteriorate rapidly. He often went off to a sanitorium just outside Moscow to recuperate. These trips were paid for out of the royalties that accrued through the sales of his books in the USSR, and he always brought me back a little present, assuring me that the royalties had to be used up.
Even though I disagreed with him on many things, I was very fond of him, and it seemed he was of me. When he died he left me a bequest of £50 in his will. That was great wealth to me in those days.
My work at Labour Monthly involved commissioning, chasing up and editing articles. I also had to do all the publicity, publih special booklets, solicit advertising and gain support for the journal from the trade union movement.
I became a familiar figure at trade union conferences, wheedling donations out of the harrassed members. many of the leading members of the movement took me under their protective wings. Mick McGahey of the Scottish miners used to invite me to join his table at the Mayor's reception at the TUC, where drinks flowed freely, though by no means free. Their drinks kitty was often larger than my whole week's salary.
Bert Ramelson, industrial organiser of the Communist Party introduced me to all the leading trade unionists and to foreign delegates attending the conferences. The Russians were always clustered around Bert, who spoke their language, and they would keep his glass topped up with vodka which they could handle better than poor Bert. Once, at Blackpool, Gordon McLennan came over to me and suggested I get Bert away from the Russians and back to his hotel in a taxi, before he said or did anything he would regret the next day.
Bert was a large man and I found it rather difficult holding him up unti the cab came. It felt a little like being in a Laurel and Hardy film - every time I propped him up he would gradually slide down again. What impressed me, however, was that when eventually I did get him back to his hotel, he remembered to phone home to assure his wife all was well.
Another of my duties was to organise gatherings of the great and wealthy, ostensibly to celebrate the journal's anniversaires, but actually to raise funds. People frm every branch of cultural and political life came to pay homage to Palme Dutt and the journal from james Aldridge, novelist, to Malcolm Muggeridge, broadcaster; Allan Bush, coposer, to Lee Chadwick, artist; MPs and trade unions, doctors and lawyers, as well a the loyal readers from every walk of life.
What I am most proud of in my time at Labour Monthly is persuading Raji to open the pages of the journal to uncensored debate on the arts. I gathered together an editorial group for the new section to be called "The Arts Today". They came from television, film, sculpture, painting, music and poetry and they selected Stuart Douglas as editor. The section, begun in 1967, was to be readable, factual and analytical and it attempted to dig deeper into the relationships between the artist, their subject matter, their achievement, and their contribution to society. Raji was very anxious about it for fear that an anti-Party te might creep into the pages, yet he agreed to write in his Notes of the Month that whilst all in the editorial group were not marxists, "no attempt wil be made to impose formulas from without or limit the judgement of theme and treatment by those contributing ...Nowhere more than in the field of the creative arts is broad co-operation and wide freedom of epression essential. The Muses can ever be constrained; they need to follow their inspiration, if they are to give of their best."
Despite lots of arguments and minor skirmishes, I kept Raji at bay, and had a very interesting time in discussion with all the artists. But then I left the Journal in November of that year. The irony was that the Party wanted me to take over Barbara niven's job at the "Morning star". I was back to square one I giggled to myself at the thought of David Ainley having to welcoe me back to the paper after what he said when I left.

Life in the Party

left
typical column in Daily Worker by Zelda Curtis, appealing for money for the communist daily paper
Right - Zelda and young Zelda Brown in Barcelona - the connections with the Brown family went back to Zelda's earliest days in the communist party


This covers a long period from 1945 to 1982 and she does not describe things necessarily chronologically, (most likely not accurately either!) but it gives an overall impression

It was no accident that I joined the Communist Party, nor as it a sudden conversion on the road to Damascus. Being born a Jew had much to do with it My hatred of the home-spun fascists of the 30s and the German nazis goose-stepping across Europe, incarcerating Jew in concentration camps, were the spurs to action. The books that my dad urged me to read gave me a good grounding and Frank Coles put the jigsaw pieces ito place for me. But it was meeting like-mined people at Unity Theatre that gave me the final impetus to join. I was a fuse ready to be lit but it was no done lightly. I was committed. It gave purpose to my life. But what was so important to me was that I was accepted. I was no longer an outsider. belonged.
When I came out of the WAAF and returned home to Finchley, I met Ruth. Her address had been given to me by the communist party as she was the local branch secretary. She welcomed me with a cup of tea and a home-baked cake, the first of many we were to share over the years as our friendship grew. Ruth was slight of figure and just 5 feet tall, but her reputation as a convenor in the GPO factory was formidable. She was the scourge of the management.
Our husbands, Bob and Jerry, were still in the forces at that time but early in 1946 they were both demobbed. They, too, became good friends. In fact, they were so alike that Ruth dubbed them the two headed troll. Out party life spilled over into our social life. We'd all go out together to sell the Daily Worker on the council estates nearby, or sometimes in the pubs, competing with the Salvation Army and their "War Cry". We'd end up in the Five Bells discussing books we'd read, gossiping about people we knew and worrying about world affairs, whilst downing a few gin and tonics and beers. At that time we were concentrating our efforts on Homes for the homeless, pressurising the council to build more flats.

It was Bob who saw to our political education in the branch. He guided us through the works of Lenin, particularly "What is to be done?" and I remember the heated arguments we had around the work of Ludwig Feuerbach.

In later years I sold the Daily Worker outside the gates of Simms Factory at 7.15am dragging my chidren with me, only to be greeted with cries of "Why don't you go and cook your old man's breakfast?" What they didn't know was that my old man was already at work in the factory.

I was active in my union and in the Peace Movement, firstly working in the united nations association an then in CND locally. Most of the committee members of CND in Finchley were either Quakers or from Pax and the others were all Labour party members. We all got on very well - not just tolerating each other, but liking each other. When I stood as a communist candidate in the local election they were all rooting for me even they they wouldn't vote for me. I suffered the humiliation of a derisory vote of 34 the first time I stood, but gradually I built it up to a reasonable figure.
We lived in Margaret Thatcher's constituency and many's the time I bearded her in the surgery of the constituency Conservative Party headquarters. But it wasn't all hard grind in the communist party. There was a flourishing social life. The Sunday night Scottish Dancing club saw Bob and Ruth and Jerry and I reeling with the best of them, and the musical evenings were a showcase for comrades' talents. Tony played the soons, Gladys the mouth organ and Angela the concertina and there was Norman on the accordion and Louis on the violin. Jerry's claim to fame was his spirited rendering of "Albert in the Lion's Den" and "The very fat man who waters the workers' beer!" Singing and socialism remain almost synonymous in my mind. Rambling is another activity I always associate with the Party. We'd tramp across the Chiltern Hills singing "Joe Hill" and end up playing a makeshift game of cricket. What a motley crew we were. The Party embraced such a variety of people from such different backgrounds: working class and aristocrats;comrades from Guyana and Cyprus, South Africa and Mauritius, but we all shared a vision of a socialist future. Each of us came to the Party for very different reasons and we had different levels of commitment, but we did enjoy a comradeship hard to find elsewhere. As branch Secretary I kept open house for the comrades and a constant stream of them tramped to my kitchen, talking, talking, talking, as I scrubbed the floor. Our house was close by a London transport bus garage and when a 10 week bus strike took place we offered our front room to the pickets. They used is as a rest room and for committee meetings. We supplied the tea and sandwiches.
Jerry was very innvolved in Union work and whilst a shop steward in Handley Page's aircraft factory he took part in a number of small strikes. It was the attitudes of the Borough Committee of the Communist Party to one of those strikes that led Jerry to leave the party - a case of Party members on the outside of a factory trying to impose a line on the comrades within the factory. "What do those bloody intellectuals know about factory conditions?" was Jerry's complaint. It aways amazed me how quickly within the Party, when anything went wrong, the ones they blamed were the intellectuals.
Though he left the party, Jerry remaied very friendly with many of the comrades and our house remained a focal point for party activities. So when did things start to go wrong for me? When the 20th Congress of the Soviet communist party took place and its revelations about the Stalin era came to light I was deeply shocked but it did not make me feel i had to leave the Party as so many others did, including Bob. I had not joined the party out of admiration for the Soviet union. It was capitalism in Britain I wanted to fight against. I as convinced that the British Communist Party was different. We could not make such dreadful errors as they had in the Soviet Union. Our circumstances were so different and I believed at that time that we were more democratic. I thought differently later.
Then came the next shock, when the Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest to put down the 1956 Hungarian uprising. I heard about comades being strung up on lamp-posts. I read that CIA agents and dissidents were streaming into Hungary from Vienna and comrades convinced me that the Soviet tanks were necessary to defend socialism. Although I opened my mind to the truth later I still did tend to believe the CIA was under every bed. That was when Ruth left the Party, but our friendship remained a firm as ever.
The Soviet action in Czechoslovakia really shook me, and I talked it over with my daughter Sue, herself now in the party, and later to become a national executive committee member, as well as talking through it with friends. Although it was 14 years before I finally left the communist party, the long, painful journey out of it began in this period. I began to realise that our own comrades were not infallible; that our British party was undemocratic; that so called democratic centralism created the possibility of dictatorship; that many of its policies were wrong for the times and its so-called leading role in the working class movement -(actually gross interference in the trades unions) - was taking them up blind alleys.
I was one of the people arguing for changes in the Party structures in the 1970s, and against things such as the undemocratic "recommended list" for elections to the executive committee. I argued that new strategies were needed both to attract the youth of the 70s and also to effect the changes in society that we wished to see.
The manipulation of the party's national congress debates always worried me. it was not that they were censored - dissidents were allowed to speak and put over their policies and views both in party literature before congress and on the platform at congress itself - but ranks would close and the big guns would be brought out to shoot them down.
Over the years I suffered doubts about the policies of the socialist countries, but after vainly trying to raise them and get issues debated, I kept my feelings bottled up. When the Soviet Union developed the atomic bomb, we in the British Party were calling for nuclear disarmament. On visits to the Soviet Union and other socialist countries I noted the perks that were due to Party members, and I also noted they paid only lip service to the emancipation of women, and that the attitude of the British party that "all will be well for women once socialism is achieved" was wholly wrong. The doubts loomed larger and larger and the burgeoning womens movement of that time made me question myself and many of my actions. it changed my whole attitude to political parties, lifestyles and work patterns. This was all leading me to leaving the party.
I could no longer stay in, but what a wrench it was to leave. What an inner turmoil I suffered. The party had shaped my whole life for so long and I could not envisage a future without it.
Hugh McDiarmid, the Scottish poet, once wrote that "a man in a red shirt can neither hide nor retreat". I had never tried to hide, I had been proud of my red shirt, and as for retreat, I did not think of it like that. I thought of it more as a step back to take a long hard look at myself and the world But whatever criticisms I may have had, I do know that most of the Party work I undertook was of value, and after i resigned from the party I was gratified still to be asked to write about my new views and work for party journals and to take part in workshops at conferences. One in particular stands out in my memory. I was asked to speak on "The Left and the erotic" at the "Moving Left Show" which took place on a Sunday morning in October 1982. I was one of a pane of speakers including Elizabeth Wilson and Ian McEwan and i was very nervous. My hope was that few would turn up at that early hour. In fact there were about 400 filling the large hall of Queen Mary College and the event was hugely successful. I started by saying I didn't know why I was there talking about sex at 10am in the morning when I could be in bed having it. I pointed out the Puritan ethic within the left and their double standards. The interest shown in that aspect of personal politics decided Lawrence and Wishart to ask me to contribute a chapter to a book on the issue.

[Throughout much of this period Zelda worked at the Daily Worker, Labour Monthly and then again heading up the Fund-raising department at the Daily Worker/Morning Star. Much more detail about that in the next couple of sections.]

Best friends - Bob, Ruth,Zelda and Gerry

Strangely there are no photos of Bob and Ruth, but I include this bit of writing because it is so moving and revealing and because I remember "Aunty" Ruth so fondly too.

Returning to civvy street gave me no problems. I uickly picked up the threads, caught up with old friends and contacted the East Finchley Communist Party branch. That's when I met Ruth Brown. Not only did we share a surname, as my maiden name had been Brown, but we discovered that we had both been at Hornsey high School. To cap that, I discovered that her husband Bob shared the same birthday as my husband Jerry, as well as his punning sense of humour. then when her second daughter was born on my birthday and Ruth named her Zelda Brown after me, i was quite certain ours was a friendship made in heaven. We were destined to be best friends I thought and so we were until death did us part.
When we first met in September 1945, Ruth already had one daughter, Naomi. Our husbands were still in the forces: Bob in the army in Holland and Jerry in the navy on the China Seas, but by February 1946 both were demobbed. Bob had worked in the accounts department of the BBC before the war and his job awaited him on his return to Britain. Until she had Naomi Ruth had worked for the GPO and been very active in the trades union. Slight of figure and only 5 feet 1 tall, it seemed odd to think of her frightening the life out of the bosses, but her reputation as a shop steward and negtiator was formidable. Bob was 5 feet 11, thin and bespectacled, and had read everything lenin had ever written. Orphaned as a young child, he had been brought up by a working class couple and had an unhappy and deprived childhood. That had made him determined to improve himself. He was what the Party called a worker-intellectual.
Jerry admired him greatly and they both enjoyed each other's company. We marvelled at how alike they were and Ruth called them the "two-headed troll". Neither Bob nor Jerry could express affection easily, but they loved strongly.
Ruth and i becae pregnant around the same time, although my Sue was born in November 1947 and young Zelda waited until my birthday on December 26th to arrive. There is often a strong bond between women who have their babies at the same time, and ours was particularly strong. We went to the clinic together and helped each other through the worrying baby illnesses. We understood each other's feelings of imprisonment in four walls when the children were small, so together we pushed our prams to Cherry Tree Woods most afternoons, where we discussed the books we had read, gossiped about the people we knew and worried about world affairs. And gradually we opened up to each other about our past and how we felt about our present lives. Husbands, naturally, figured large in our conversations.
We performed our Party duties together, too. The Daily Worker had to be sold, the Party literature distributed and leaflets pushed through letterboxes. Sometimes all four of us would go out together or Bob and Jerry might arrange to meet us at a pub when we had finished our Daily Worker sales rounds. At that time we were concentrating our efforts on homes for the homeless, pressurising our council to build more flats for the workers. We carried out a survey of the whole of Finchley, showing on a crudely drawn map every bomb site and empty plot of land on which they could build and then we presented it to councillors.
Our party meetings were interesting and enjoyable, sometims discussing current ppolitical issues and sometimes critically evaluating marxist literature. Arthur and ken, the two RAF lads i had met at Woolwich Poly, were back home in Finchley and had joined our branch, and they brought along their friend henry, who had been in Malta throughout the war. He became like a member of the family for both Ruth and myself, and he remained my friend until his death.
At Christmas 1947 I started what became a tradition. I opened my home to all comers on the Saturday before Christmas for a party. Jerry got a barrel of beer from our local and we had lots of spirits and we made a bowl of punch to warm us up. We played games like Murder and Charades, and there was always someone to start the singing. The other tradition that started at that time was spending Boxing Day at the Browns for a joint celebration of mine and young Zelda's birthdays.
Like all comrades Ruth and I worked hard to amke a success of the local Daily Worker bazaar to raise money for the newspaper. The Finchley labour movement turned out en masse for these events. The Labour party worthies came and locals poured in. Jerry dressed up as Father Christmas and was a wow with the kids.

We moved out of Finchley when Sue was 18 months old. Not long after that Bob and Ruth moved to Enfield Lock, to a little council house that backed on to a brook. Beyond that were fields across which one could walk to Epping in one direction and to Waltham Abbey in the other. The River Lea and the canal criss-crossed the fields and anglers fished from their banks.
We would go over there on a Sunday afternoon and have a long walk with them and their dog Rex. They were very proud of the dog and boasted that even though he had only one testicle he was definitely cock of the walk around Enfield. Ruth and I would walk in front chatting away, with the kids trailig behind. She would show the children the different wild flowers and other delights on which Ruth was such an expert. behind us would follow Bob and Jerry, earnestly talking about their jobs and such like manly pursuits, and the dog would bound to and fro between us, now and again giving his attention to the odd horse or cow that stood in the fields. Before it got dark we would return to Ruth's for high tea. It was aways the same: ham, cheese and salad with lots of bread and butter, pickles an home made sponge cakes.
In front of Ruth's house was an industrial estate on which there was a GPO factory. When her third daughter Ursula was old enough to go to school Ruth went there to work and once agai became a shop steward and later a convenor. She stayed there until her retirement and loved every minute of it. bob stayed at the BBC too, becoming head of his department. When he retired he took up archaeology and spent a lot of tie on digs. He enjoyed the painstaking work and the convivial company. It was whilst scrambling around on a dig that he collappsed and died - and we couldn't think of a better way for him to go!
After Bob's death Ruth was always invited to come with Jerry and me on holiday each year. He was fond of her as I was and we had some good laughs on our travels together. After jerry died Ruth and I continued to explore the continent together and on one trip to Spain young Zelda joined us. After that holiday Zelda and I became very good friends.
The next Christmas Zelda phoned me to say that Ruth had been feeling poorly all week and wouldn't be able to coe to my party. When I phoned the next week t see how she was i realised something was very much amiss Zelda, who was a nurse, had moved in with Ruth in order to look after her because she feared it was liver cancer. i had to face the fact that i was going to lose Ruth after 42 years of deep and loving friendship.
When I first visited her after the news, I found her looking drawn and thinner, but cheerful She was very positive, telling me how she traced the pain with her fingers travelling around her stomach, willing the pain to vanish. She laughed about getting to know her body so intimately after all these years and how she instructed it to be rid of that turbulent intruder. She told me about her neighbour's troubles and compalined with annoyance that the Enfield Preservation Society to which she belonged was losing its battle with a loval pub that wanted to build an extension on the open common land around it. And she read aloud to me the assages she had enjoyed in the book I had given her for Christmas. There was no talk of death, only of continuing hopes and of holdays we might share in the future.
The next time i saw her she was visibly failing and was sick several times, but she remained cheerful She told me she had dreamt of me the night before. We had always told each others our dreams and nightmares. "All the family were gathered together" she said, "and then you came and said you wanted to show me something. You took my hand and led me to the door. When you opened it I saw a beautiful scene. There were grassy hills, a blue sky, a clear river and a purple hero flying acorss the sky". I was speechless, choked with emotion, because she was telling me she knew she was dying and I had been the one she had dreamt about. I was the one she told she was dying.
The next Saturday that I visited her she started talking of the past, of her grandmother who had looked after her when her mother died. We talked of our two headed troll and what we had put up with from those two men. Then just before I left she confessed she wanted a good send off with plenty of flowers. She remembered how the whole neighbourhood had lined the streets for the funeral of the local good hearted prostitute. Grateful clients and neighbours she had helped sent flowers an it was a right royal send off, she said.
After that visit the decline was fast. The following Saturday Sue came with me and Ruth was obviously pleased to see her. They chatted for a short while but Ruth was obviously very tired.
Then I discovered that Ruth had given her favourite painting of flowers to a friend, so I phoned Joan and asked her to paint some more for Ruth. Poor Joan, she found it hard, because she kept remembering how the card she had ainted for her own grandmother had arrived just the next post after she died. The feelings of sorrow from that time made it difficult for her to start the painting, but she did it - a lovely composition o spring flowers, primulas and freesias.
I have to admit that all the way to Ruth I kept wondering whether she woudl be gone before I could give it to her. But when I arrived she lay, tiny and frail in a pretty flower-covered nightie, hardly able to speak, her eyes closing every now and again as she floated off into sleep.
I gave her the painting. "Oh, it's lovely" she muttered. "Tell Joan I love it" and she went off to sleep with a smile on her lips. Every now and then she would wake and say something. "You're having some nice dreams," I said. "Will you tell me about them?" She opened her eyes wide and replied quietly "Remember the house with the little animals? They were such tiny animals. You shouldn't eat them, should you? No, you shouldn't eat little animals".
Those were the last words I heard her say.

birth stories and bringing up children

During the war maternity wings of London hospitals were evacuated to country areas. For Sue's birth in 1947 I had registered with the City of Lodon hospital, but even though the war had been over for two years I was sent out to Hertfordshire to Brocket hall. Lord Brocket had been exiled to Isle of Man because of his pro-German leanings and his home had housed many leading Nazis and had been commandeered for the hospital.
Worried that they might not get us to the delivery room on time all the way from London, the authoritied put us up in a hostel for the week before the baby was due. It was a small village close to Brocket Hall. All the women hated it there and we were desparately trying to bring our labour on early. Nearby the hostel there was a very steep hill leading up to a wood, and we decided on the Saturday night to sneak out of the hostel and run up the hill in an effort to speed up our babies' entry into the world.
What a sight - six hugely pregnant women in the dead of night running up a steep hill. But an even stranger sight was us all flying down again screaming and coverin our heads with our arms because we had heard bats squeaking.
On the Sunday afternoon I went into the early stages of labour and was transferred to Brocket hall. The house was still a fine buuilding and had all the original wallpaper in the main room, our ward. The wallpaper had huge malignant looking peacocks strutting across lawns, and each of them fixed you with an evil eye. I had horribly lurid dreams. Whether it was the bad dream or the bats squeakig I do not know, but Sue was born with lots of dark hair stood straight up on end.
When Joan was born we lived in a bungalow near the Welsh Harp, Wembley. To us it seemed sacious after the cramped conditios we previously lived in. So I decided to have the baby at home. The midwife had long talks with jerry about the preparations for the event and he appeared to be calm and quite certain he could cope with the boiling water bit.On the Friday I had prepared, as always, our weekly chicken soup and barley in my one large cooking pot and the rest of the meal was almost ready when I went into labour. I had hardly got the words out of my mouth when, to my horror, Jerry rushed into the kitchen, picked up the steaming pot of soup, rushed into the garden and threw the whole lot over the forsythia bush so that he could fill the pot with boiling water. I nearly cried as I saw our supper scattered over the garden, but ended up laughing hysterically as Jerry started scrubbing everything in sight. He had forgotten to phone the midwife.
When she came and examined me the verdict was "That won't arrive until morning. I'll see you then." Poor Jerry was horrified but tried hard to hide his fears. He put Sue to bed and then came and lay down besdie me to comfort me. It was not the calmest night of our lives but we lasted out until 8am when the midwife arrived. By 9.20 am Joan was born, the very same time of the morning that Sue had been born.
Jerry brought Sue in to see her little sister. She took one look and rushed out of the room screaming. Soon after I heard a tap on my bedroom window. It was my mother. She had a cold and wouldn't come in for fear of infecting us. I lifted Joan up for her to see and off she went to the shop. I looked out of the window and there on my front lawn were a group of crocuses, blue and white oes, the first of the year. A lovely greeting for my new baby.
When Sue was born current thinking on child care was Bowlby oriented. The media and everyone around me insisted that a child needed its mother's total attention for the first five years of its life. There was no substitute for a mother's love in bringing up a baby. That was the line of the Communist Party too at that time.
The hospital where Sue was born trained mothers into firstly 3 hourly and then 4 hourly breast-feeding. One didn't feed the baby in between even if she was screaming with hunger.
Nor did you give her comforting cuddles. Everything as done by the book. There was a prescribed time for everything, especially potty-training, and you were a failure if your child's developpment didn't conform to the Bowlby standards. What a worry it all was. But luckily Sue did develop just as the book predicted. My mother had famously informed me that I was lucky to have a mother who had had children! Bt despite this, I had no real guidance or help and certainly no real knowledge of how to raise a child. Woman's Hour and the women's magazines were my instructors. They made it quite clear that you shouldn't worry your bread-winning husband with your child problems, or you would lose him to another woman. I always had the children tucked up in bed before Jerry came home from work, and his supper was always ready for him. I was such a good wife - no magazine could fault me.
Sue was a Mabel lucy Atwell baby, pretty, chubby and with curly hair. She was a laughing girl. Complete strangers would come over to me to comment on how sweet she was. From the start she liked books and would sit happily in her cot pretending to read them.
By the time Joan was born Dr Spock's books on baby care were fashionable. What a relief! He gave mothers permission to respond to the child's needs and not to be a slave to prescribed times for this and that. He gave you norms but set no absolutes for children's develoopment. So one didn't ever need to feel a failure. He helped us to relax and enjoy our babies more.
Joan was a very active baby. She seemed in a hurry to grow up. Not only was he walking when she was only 11 months old, but she also climbed up the rails outside our local post office, which sent me rushing to her rescue. From an early age she was drawing and painting bright pictures. I have no idea why, but trains were her favourite subject and there were always people waving. One summer evening Joan went missing and just as i was getting frantic, she turned up pushing her doll's pram, wearing a pair of my high heeled shoes, with a policeman in tow. He had found her purposefully pushing her pram about a mile away from our hoe. Her repy when he asked her where she was going was that she was following the moon. Sue was more practical in her adventures. One day when she was playing shops I joined in saying "I'd like a pound of steak please". The next time I looked up from my chores I rrealised she was nowhere in the house. he had taken my ration book and purse from my bag and walked to our local butcher across a couple of roads. On her insistence that mummy wanted a pound of steak the butcher had given it to her and taken the money and ration stamps proffered - putting the rest on the slate. I had to rush it back to him and explain, as I couldn't afford steak!
The girls were always good friends. With three and a half years between them, Joan looked up to Sue and followed her into mischief. They were very different in character,, which meant that i was able to love each of them equally for their differences as well as their similarities. No favourites.
As they grew up it always worried me that I had saddled them with a dreadful burden. Not only did they have to contend wth being Jewish, but they had a factory worker for a father and a communist party member for a mother. Not the best of backgrounds for young grammar school girls. They came on every political march and every demo with me. They helped me canvass during elections and they were active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. We all nursed our blisters together after the Aldermaston marches.
Sue played guitar and sang all the peace songs at socials and our house was always filled with youngsters Then came the teenage parties. One time we came home to find that there had been a fight. Blood was smeared on the walls and trailed down the stair carpet. The phone was pulled from the wall and the front garden was full of broken bottles. One boy had been knifed and Sue had managed to get him to hospital. The police arrived soon after we got home and began asking pertinent questios. Apparently a gang of rough youths had tried to gatecrash the party and when refused entry they started the fight. We discovered that some of our belongings had been stolen, including Jerry's open razors. That event started a long-running row between jerry and i about how much freedom the girls should have. He couldn't cope with his feelings when Sue and joan started to be sexually active and have lots of boyfriends. Those late teenage years were very problematic and played havoc with our already strained marriage.
He became very angry towards Sue and I could never understand why. I knew he loved her, yet he would say the most hurtful things and swear at her in language I had never heard him use before. How she coped with it I will never know. I could not stand it and for a while I left him. But that was even worse because not a day went by without him threatening either to kill himself or to kill me. He would phone me first thing in the morning before I went to work and cry. He put pressure on my mother to make me go back to him and she took his side; and he put pressure on Joan, which was the last straw, so I returned after a lot of discussions as to how we could best live together