I am Maggie Jackson.

I was born and brought up in Leeds, as were my parents and grandparents.

My mother was one of 11 children who experienced real poverty in the 1920s to 1940s, living in Wortley and Middleton.

Their stories, their commitment to social justice, their compassion and generosity, influenced my own life and led to my career of over 30 years in Youth and Community work in Leeds.

I am now a writer and Spiritual Director living in North Yorkshire.

My poem ‘Where it came from’ reflects how my own values were formed.

Where it came from.

It didn’t come from reading Gramsci or Karl Marx.

Nor did it come from Labour Party meetings in the local pub,

or from singing ‘The Internationale’ at Socialist Worker Party parties.

It was fuelled I think by watching ‘Cathy Come Home’

and trying to recruit my well-off schoolmates into a Shelter group.

It was fired by seeing Jan Palak set himself alight for the cause of freedom,

and by the fear that my brothers would be killed by Cuban, or American, missiles.

It grew from within our family home which my mother opened up

to a lonely man from somewhere called The Congo,

the only Black person in the factory, who no-one else would talk to;

where we welcomed too a beautiful young prostitute

who needed some unfettered, familial love.

It grew from being parted from my friends who didn’t pass their ‘Eleven Plus’ exam,

and being one of the two kids from the Council estate who went to Grammar school;

from not understanding why I couldn’t study Greek and be Oxford material

as my dad only earned an honest manual living and got washed at the kitchen sink.

It was something to do with an early memory

of sitting on a pile of old rags and woollens in my pram

while my mother walked for miles to some dingy yard and then,

ragless, but with a few shillings to buy some shin-beef, pushed me home.

It came from stories of my mother and her ten siblings living next to an abattoir,

of a cow escaping and running into their house

and her father, on his return from work, (or was it the pub?) wanting to know

why his wife hadn’t killed the cow so they could eat meat for a year.

And stories of her sisters and her mother getting TB and dying from the ‘flu;

of her father, who had been gassed and wounded in the trenches,

giving his children to ‘The Authorities’ and dying in the Work-house.

It came from an inherited sense of outrage that my many pretty aunts

had to wear ‘Boots for Bairns’ and be labelled as the ‘Home’ girls by their teachers.

That my beautiful mother (who would sing me to sleep with arias)

lost an Opera scholarship by lying about her age and getting work in a shop;

That some distant, wealthy relatives, chose my mother (as she was the fairest)

to stay with them for two weeks in the country, then returned her to poverty

with the gift of a doll that she fondly remembered till the day she died.

It came somehow from Sunday-school and Missionary boxes,

from reading ‘The Water Babies’, ‘Little Women’ and ‘Oliver Twist’.

It came from the way neighbours helped each other if someone needed

a coin for the rent, or some chicken soup to cure a child who was sick.

It came from an innate knowledge of right and wrong,

from dignity and self-respect and a belief that hard work would, one day, be rewarded.

It came from always voting ‘Labour’,

and never wasting the right to make your mark in the ballot box.

And then, one day, when I was pulling up my socialist roots once I got a degree,

when I was becoming philosophical instead of political,

when I learned to drink wine, eat pasta, be promiscuous and play Mahjong,

there was news of a strike and pictures on the telly,

scenes of women workers leading the Union rally,

and there was my Mother, carrying the Union banner,

my glorious Mother, holding high the Socialist banner.

Then it was that I remembered- where all of it came from.