This is a story not so much about me, but about my mother and how things have changed about how women got educated, how they fitted into the world and how social mobility could happen and the costs of it.

My mum was born in 1924 - she was the youngest of six daughters, in London, and her father was a roofer. The family history is a bit murky, but what is clear is that he was in the army, in one of the Scottish regiments. How he came to be in one of the Scottish regiments I do not know, because as far as I know there were no connections with Scotland. But he was in one of the Scottish regiments and his regiment fought in the Boer War. After the Boer War, he came back and got married to a lass called Sarah - this is my mother's mother - and I never knew her, never knew either of them.

He got married to her and they had these six daughters. However, what happened was that they had four daughters, at which point they were all quite close in age, within about 10 years from first to last, and at that point the couple separated – I’m not sure why. He went off to Canada, and the deal was that he was going to go to Toronto, where he would meet his wife’s brother who had organised some accommodation and a job for him, and he would stay there, make some money, then come back.

However, the story is that he was on the train and he met this chap who said “Vancouver - best place in the world!” So they got to Toronto and he stayed on the train - he never even said hello to his brother-in-law. He just went to Vancouver and stayed there for some years. It was a booming town at that point, not long founded I don’t think, and it would be a good place for him to be because there was a lot of building, and he maybe learned his trade there. He lodged with a family who were Catholic, and as a result of lodging with them he became a Catholic himself. Whether they told him that he was behaving dreadfully and he ought to go home, I don't know, but he did go home.

Whilst he’d been away, my grandmother had been destitute, working in a jam factory and living in one room with her four daughters, who were looked after by her landlady during the day and must have been in desperate straits. She also had rheumatic heart disease and had been told not to have any more children after her first, and of course she was now on to her fourth. Anyway, he went back and they were reconciled, and two more daughters were born, of whom my mother was the youngest. And Sarah died when my mother was only 12, because the heart disease caught up with her. These days she could have been treated, but in those days there was nothing that could be done, she died of heart failure.

My mother thought a great deal of her father - I don't know why - and she went to a Catholic school and eventually became a Catholic herself when she was in her early teens. And she was a bright lass - they were all quite bright really – and she went to a convent school and was doing very well, and it was the greatest regret of her life that she was forced to leave and go to work before she could get any qualifications. So she never went on with her education, and in some ways I think, somehow or other, I did the things that she couldn't do.

Then the war came along, and although it was dreadful and awful for many, many people, for some people it was the making of them, because it opened up their horizons. She joined up - I think she lied about her age – and she went into the ATS and became a Morse code receiver, and she was very good at it.

When you take down Morse code, because you can see the message evolving in front of your eyes you can guess what's coming. But she was sufficiently good that she was actually very accurate even when she didn't, so she could take code, which doesn't make any sense - you're just writing down what look to you like random letters. So she got drafted into taking down the Enigma. She didn't know what it was and she was never closely involved - all she did was sit down and write down the messages - but she got involved in that at various stations. They were called Station Y, not Station X, and she was doing that.

And that led to a career after the war, and she was working but gave it all up when she got married and I think regretted that too, and took on a traditional wife and mother role. If you ever asked her how old she was, she would always say 27 - that was the age at which she got married and it all came to a stop. She would laugh, like if you ask a woman how old she is and she’ll pick a random age from many years ago, but the age she picked was 27.

My father came from Middlesbrough and was one of four boys, of whom only two survived childhood - two of them died very young. He came from a very old-fashioned family and my mother told him – I’m the eldest of four and I have three brothers - that I would get the same educational opportunities as the boys and that he mustn't try to restrict it.

So I was the first person to go to university on either side, because I come from the generation where we basically had free education, so I went to a grammar school on a county place - it had been a private school, but they started taking people on county places that were paid for. And in those days you could go to university and you would get a grant to support you - you didn't have to go into the horrific amount of debt that young people have to go into today.

So I fell in that window where the state looked after you a bit better than it does now – and here I am!