ABSTRACT
BB: So it must, I mean the kind of racial mix that you grew up with must be very different from here?
Helen: Totally, absolutely, completely different, yeah. Where I live, I actually went to a school which was 20 miles away from where I lived. Which is another thing I don’t want my children to have. I want them to go to a school that’s round the corner and to be able to see their friends after school. For me that just wasn’t an option. I used to catch three buses to get to school, every morning. I used to leave home at 20 past 7 to get to school at quarter to 9, from the age of 11. It’s just too much, I wouldn’t want my children . . ., and all my friends lived miles away, so as I said it was just staying over, it was a bigger deal than just going for tea, I missed out on that completely. And in the summer, a lot of the time I was just on my own. My brother and sister are a lot older than me, so in a way I was an only child. And the racial mix was completely . . . my parents I would say had become middle class, but say for example, both my grandfathers were miners. One was a lead miner and one was a coal miner and very much working class. They decided that they didn’t want their own children from fairly enormous families to become miners. And so they moved from, down to the valley, if you like and the whole family clubbed together and bought a farm.
