I am your mum, pretty much! Well, I was 17 in 1981, shacked up in South London with an abusive dickhead, when I had my first pregnancy. In a rare moment of self preservation, I ditched the bf and had an abortion. I had to wait six weeks to see the second doctor and he was appalling - brought all the medical students in and warned them to lock up their daughters, that my 'type' would be back year after year but out of compassion for the baby he'd sign the form. The nurse squeezed my hand and whispered to me, " Sorry, he's always like this" - hard to believe it happening now!
Anyway, I lived with my single parent mum and siblings and she had just bought a council house (£16k) after over a decade living in a council flat with no inside loo or hot water. It was wonderful (at the time).
By 1982 I had managed to get away to a university, and it was like a dream (first in my family etc). Full grant, benefits in the holidays, rent £11pw. I came out as lesbian and for awhile was the only out lesbian on campus (impossible to imagine now!). I was politically active: miners strike, Greenham etc. I spray painted sex shops and superglued the locks of Barclays.
I remember the country as anxious. There was mass unemployment and a lot of worry about drugs. The Brixton riots - all our shops were boarded up. And nuclear war - my mum kept a 'suicide drawer' of old medicines for us to use when the bomb dropped. I came back to London in 1986 and enjoyed meeting more gay people, before Clause 28 and HIV/AIDS came crashing on our heads. It is impossible to convey how different social attitudes were back then.
Of course, we didn't have PCs or smartphones. I learned touchtyping, I made phone calls from phone boxes, I wrote letters. If I needed to research something I went to the library. If I needed to communicate with colleagues I typed out a memo. If I travelled to somewhere new I took my A-Z.
I didn't get on a plane until the late 1980s. I already had my first flat by then (bought for £53k, sold in recession for £38k). It feels like yesterday, but so much was different. As a child, I remember women always in headscarves, men in caps. I remember grown ups droning on about the war and thinking 'that's ancient history!' but of course the war only ended 19 years before I was born and for grown ups it was recent. I remember the coal man and IRA bombs and the milk snatcher. I remember my mum telling me excitedly about the Equal Pay Act and the Sex Discrimination Act and how life was going to be different for me.
I'll stop there!