Ann

 Ann was an ambitious woman. Living with undiagnosed bipolar disorder meant that she had great energy and creativity. Unfortunately, it also meant she was plagued by periods of suicidal depression. Growing up in East London Ann was at first raised in a multi generation home and then in a council flat with her mum. Her first home was in Dagenham, where she grew up with her mum, her grandmother, grandfather and her aunts. Born immediately after the Second World War she was subject to rationing and had a particular dislike to the rationing of chocolate as a child, especially having to defer her ration of chocolate to her aunt. Her mother and grandfather were Salvationists. The Salvation Army started up in East London in Victorian times, and her grandfather was a Victorian. Salvationists practised a Christian religion. Based on practical help. They offered soup and blankets, secondhand clothes and taught abstinence from alcohol. Gin was mothers, ruin and alcohol studs between a poor man and an honest days work. This upbringing shaped, Ann was also a woman and began work before any kind of equal pay, and certainly long before any kind of equal perception of men and women. Raised in a household with so many generations of women and then, as a teenager, raised home alone by her mum and perception of men and the role they play was negligible. Men were unnecessary and unimportant. Ann was particularly resentful when her father joined her home with her mum. As father was a janitor at the nearby car factory. They were working class and the bottom of the pile. Ann was resentful of this. Ann’s father was also resentful of his status in life. He very much could have aspired to more. poverty negates opportunity, and he did not have access to an education, and therefore could not realise his full potential. In this sense Ann’s father, and her future husband, shared a similar frustration. Neither were known for their empathy with others.

Ann’s ambitions were borne, partly out of her undiagnosed mental health condition and partly borne out of her frustration, anger, resentment, sense of injustice, and a sense of having a right to more which was denied her by both her sex and her class. Being raised by Salvationists was also a frustration as she was denied so many of the decadences post-war that other people of her generation enjoyed. The result was the van was marinating and determined to have for herself a better life than she was born into.

David and Ann were both barely out of their teens when they met at the young liberals Association. They were 20 when they married. This arrangement allowed both of them to leave.