I grew up in a single parent household at a time when the only acceptable reason for not having a husband was that he had died in the war. Unfortunately, my father wasn't dead and the majority of the women on our street used this fact as an excuse to find fault with my mom, Kitty. In their defence, she was quite elegant, beautiful and cultured in ways foreign to the women who slaved in the local steel mills of Sheffield and who spent their lives trying to simply survive, in an environment filled with financial and domestic hardship as well as the ever worsening pollution. I always believed as a child that their distrust and dislike of my mom helped them cope with their stresses of day to day living. My mom was no different from her detractors; her life was their life; she simply failed to acknowledge life's difficulties.

I have never met my father and his absence was less than a pinprick during my formative years. Unless, I was able to use this fact to manipulate those who were less than kind to my mom, in order to get what I wanted. Luckily, my mom also failed to acknowledge my bad behaviour,

My mom, sister Cathy and I lived in one room in my Auntie Wins house, located just a block away from one of the larger steel mills that helped make Sheffield famous for its steel. Our day to day life was filled with noise, grime, soot and obsessive cleaning in order to prevent the outside coming indoors. Some of the women on our street took this a little too far in my opinion and also polished the outside steps that led into their houses. This was a hopeless task that had to be repeated daily but at least it gave the women a legitimate excuse to be outdoors aptly on their knees in the muck, bums in the air while spreading their 'muck.' Being a helpful child, I took every opportunity to engage them in conversation.

When we weren't cleaning our room, mom would come up with ways in which we could learn something new while having a good time. Adventures she called them. One favourite adventure involved taking a bus to a place we had never been before, usually in the country, and getting off when we saw something of interest along the way. We usually packed a lunch and brought along an umbrella in case it rained. Once off the bus we walked aimlessly in any direction we were drawn to and played a 'What do You See' game. We had no map and no way of knowing the direction in which we were walking. It probably would not have helped much if we had a map anyway because both my mom and I were blessed, or cursed, with the belief that the north is always ahead, I still have this problem, and in order to read a map, someone has to point me in the direction facing north and if, for example, I have to go south; I simply turn the map upside down. The adventure began when we acknowledged that we were lost; therefore, it was time to go home. In order to find our way back to where we had got off the bus, we had to remember everything we had seen along the way, in reverse sequence. There were times when these adventures became quite scary.

We had very little money those days, and mom scrimped and saved as much as she could in order to buy birthday and Christmas gifts for me and my sister. I can't remember ever being given a present that wasn't a book. I experienced an epiphany of sorts while watching the movie 'The Jungle Book' at a local theatre the other day. I suddenly realized that it was on Mowgli, the lead character, that my childhood fantasy alter ego, Dina, was based. Dina too had a Black Panther as a companion, and together they helped solve problems in their community. They never got lost. This fantasy was my favourite and remained with me for several years. I now believe that my mom's adventures were the genesis for this particular fantasy. The Jungle Book was given to me on my fifth birthday. Thanks, mom!

My mom was married three times. The first time she married for love, to an officer in the RAF. She met him while working as a nanny in London. He came from an upper middle-class background, and I'm sure that his family was less than ecstatic when told that he was marrying one of the working class, from the North no less. She was pregnant with my sister Cathy when he was shipped off to Aidan, in his capacity as a pathologist, to investigate a significant increase in TB deaths. While there he contracted the disease and came home shortly after Cathy was born. He died when Cathy was about four years old.

My mom and Cathy moved back to Sheffield eventually to be with her family. It was here that she met my father, a local businessman who expressed an interest in marrying her. He eventually convinced her that every child needed a father, and she finally agreed. This marriage did not last. He apparently lost interest in her once she became pregnant with me and moved a girlfriend into the house to live with them. When I was born, he told my mom to leave because he only wanted a son to carry on his name. And so my mom, Cathy and I moved into Auntie Win's front room. The information I have on my dad came from family members and others, and I have come to believe it's true since so many people told me the same thing. The only thing my mom ever told me about my dad was that he was a Hide and Skin Merchant and picked up bones and hides from butcher shops, abattoirs and farms, which he then sold to various other companies to be processed and used in perfumes, lipsticks and such. She said he had her accompany him on his rounds when she was pregnant, and she believed that these experiences contributed to my becoming a vegetarian. In her worldview, good always triumphed.

It was while living with Auntie Win that mom met husband number three. He was a chain smoking lorry driver who lived with his two daughters across the road. In my opinion, he was skinny and unlovely to look at and far beneath what my mom deserved. Unfortunately, she eventually agreed to marry him but only when he threatened suicide if she turned him down. I was about six or seven at the time. This marriage lasted for over twenty years, and throughout all this time we disliked one another.

We moved onto a housing estate when I was about eight. The three bedroom house seemed like a palace to me after living so many years in one room. I developed friendships with neighbourhood kids, got a dog called Rip as a pet and tried to ignore Joe, my stepfather, as much as possible. As I got older this became more difficult since he felt the need to spy on me at every opportunity. He followed me around the estate, cursing my friends and telling me to get off home. He became convinced I was breaking the law somehow and wanted to catch me in the act. My mother, meanwhile, was oblivious. Life was good.

It was around this time that I began to realize that my mom was not like other moms. She rarely got mad at me or anyone, or anything else for that matter. She created a little feeding space for mice in an outdoor toilet area, adjacent to the back door, putting food out for them twice a day so that they wouldn't need to come indoors to eat. The idea that she would do such a 'stupid thing enraged Joe, but she didn't care. She would sit quietly on the back steps and watch the mice come out to nibble on the cheese put out for them. Surprisingly, it seemed to work. While everyone else on the estate had problems with mice, our house was vermin free. I began to think that she could speak to animals. My mom was a spiritualist, and I believed that if you could see and speak to spirits, it was not such a stretch to be able to speak to animals.

Whenever it rained heavily my mom and I would go for a walk armed with popsicle sticks. We used these sticks to pick up worms from the pavement and put them where they wouldn't be stepped on. One day we walked over to a pond just outside the estate. The pond had been fenced off from the pavement to discourage kids from playing in the water, and the pavement was covered in worms, some of which had already been stepped on. We immediately got busy picking up worms with our sticks and putting them over the fence. When we were finished, I asked my mom if worms could swim. She immediately climbed over the fence and asked that I find a bag or container of some sort to put the worms in so that we could relocate them.

As I got older and went to Grammar School I found myself becoming increasingly annoyed by my mom's eccentricities. I became more rebellious and expanded my circle of friends to include the type of kids my stepfather had always accused me of associating with, including some local bikers. My best friend Velia, went to a secondary school and her mom wore make-up at all times, smoked holding her cigarettes elegantly between two fingers, and wore high-heeled shoes and clothes that were form-fitting. Best of all, she happily covered for me whenever I played truant. Velia's mom was really cool.

When I was in my teens we moved to two bedroom bungalow on another housing estate on the outskirts of Sheffield. My mom was really happy with the location since it was on a corner lot and she had a large garden to work in. My stepfather acquired two border collies, and he walked them daily on the adjacent Derbyshire Moors, training them to be working dogs. Looking back, it would seem that he had hopes and dreams of being something other than what he had always been. My mom had a large orange coloured cat called Sandy, who soon became her poetic muse. I would get home from work and find her sitting in her favourite chair, Sandy on her lap, writing poetry while dirty dishes filled the kitchen sink and wet laundry sat in the laundry tub waiting to be rolled dry. When she wasn't writing poetry, she was in her garden growing an eclectic range of flowers and vegetables. She would sit on the grass and talk to the plants while she worked with them.

We had the finest garden on the estate and people would come from all over to admire the garden and talk to my mom. She tried to get me interested in gardening but was unsuccessful. When I was thirteen, and before we moved to this house, I had been stung by a garden centipede and went into anaphylactic shock and almost died. It took years before I felt secure in areas where such creatures lived. The one thing she did convince me of, in terms of flowers, was that they should never be picked. They should be admired on the site in which they grew. She would ask me, "How would you like to have your feet pulled off for no other reason but that you are beautiful."

As I entered my late teens, my mom became a source of embarrassment. One day while at work on the third floor of a building located at a busy intersection in downtown Sheffield, I was looking out a window and saw my mom dodging traffic while crossing busy main streets to reach a raised island in the centre of two adjacent highways. Once she reached the island, she climbed up on top to where some city workers were planting flowers. They stopped working to talk to her and then directed her to where they had already planted flowers. A co-worker watching the scene unfold in front of us asked, "Is that your mom?" My response was, "No." A few minutes later, my mom arrived at my office, happy but dishevelled and a bit grubby from her climbing. She had brought some mail over to me since she had to come downtown anyway and she thought that it might be important. Someone asked her what she was doing on the island, and she told them she had found an injured bee and wanted to put it somewhere safe while it recuperated. They all thought this was really sweet. No bad deed goes unpunished.

Every child, I believe, grows up knowing that their mother’s job is to indoctrinate them into becoming who they want them to be, and the child's job is to rebel against such indoctrination. And I did rebel. At times I even believed that I was winning. However, looking back on my life with my mom, I have come to realize all the things that drove me crazy were actually life lessons. I'm reminded of when I was in Grammar School and was such a nuisance in class that the teachers would make me sit at the back of the room. I didn't mind, I read books that were deemed inappropriate for my age, chatted with other backroom sitters and totally ignored everything the teacher was saying. When it came to taking the mandatory exams, I always passed. How was that possible? It drove my teachers crazy. I now believe that I simply absorbed information through hypnopaedia, by virtue of being in an environment where teaching (life) was taking place.

I have taken the life lessons I learned from my mom and unconsciously incorporated them into my life as an individual and as a mother. My mom taught me that all people are created equal, that all living beings have a purpose and that most people live up to what is expected of them.