My father came from a mining family. His father had been a skilled miner, who was then promoted to mine supervisor, or Deputy, and then to Overman, which is, as it were, the highest supervisory level before you get to managers who needed a professional mining qualification. My father's brothers went into mining, and some of his sisters married miners. My father, himself, worked all his life as a clerk at a colliery in the next village – spent 50 years in the same office as a wages clerk, and then a cost clerk. And my mother came from a rather different kind of family. She was one of four sisters: two of her sisters married mineworkers, so we were, in part, a mining family. And the community that I grew up in this little village the majority of men in that village would work in the mine by the village, or in neighbouring mines…

There was a pathway, a bridle path, and then another footpath close to our house, that miners would walk from the village to the mine and back again. So you saw them coming back, blackfaced, and so on – it's the kind of thing that I suppose a young child asked questions about. Then, of course, my father would talk about what was happening at the pit, and my uncles would always be talking about mines. So you just grew up with the idea that that's what work meant – working down the mine or at least in the colliery in some role or other…

Very very low rate of women working. They were housewives. Very busy, because an enormous amount of washing and cleaning to do. No, women in that village worked until they married, typically. Some even didn't work before they were married.