To be honest I feel like feminism started inside me, before I saw it anywhere else. Because of having a brother, and because of the way my dad would talk to us. "You’re letting yourself be beaten by a girl - come on you can do better than that". How he would be given a tricycle and toy guns and things and I would be given a scooter and a doll. I felt strongly about the injustices of these things.

I felt bad later when I realised that I'd always thought girls at school were boring. I used to go and sit on the boys’ table at dinnertime because then you could tell jokes and have fun.

We moved when I was nine and I went to a different junior school that was more mixed. There were kids whose parents did all different things, so they didn’t all speak in such broad Sheffield accents, and I wasn’t quite such an odd one out and wasn’t bullied all the time. So things changed there and I made friends with some of the girls, who were a bit more feisty.

But still our world was very different from today. We all had to do the 11+, and after that I went to an all girls grammar school. It was a “direct grant school” - independently run, but the local council had 50% of the places in it. So in each year there 30 girls whose parents paid, and 30 whose places were paid for by the council.

I was shocked when I got there and found that some of these girls were speaking what was almost a different language, saying “barth” and “larf” instead of bath and laugh. There was a range of different accents, it was - interesting. My grandmother spoke a different language too in some ways, she had a much broader Yorkshire accent than my parents. She used thee and thou in moments of intimacy and affection. My grandmother was the person I was closest to in my family: Mum’s mum. But she would tell me off for saying some of the things my dad said: "it’s alright for your dad to speak like that, but little girls do not speak like that."

My grandmother had grown up down the road in a terraced house and had left school at 14 and gone to work in a bread shop, selling buns. But she remembered everything she’d learnt at school and she could still recite Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Dickens. We always had things to talk about, me and granny.