My mother had operation after operation. Father had been out of work a long time when I was coming. There was no unemployment benefit or maternity or child welfare schemes. Mother kept going by dressmaking. She couldn't afford proper attendance at my birth and was badly handled. The result was a life of agonizing suffering. But she had the most marvellous recuperative power and would not be an invalid. Once the awful pain was still, she was up and around.

I remember my father speaking bitterly of the life of undernourished idle men, wanting to work, but who were caught up in the realities of the over specialized, under organised cotton trade of pre-war days and of the days when he trampled from one mill to another trying to get a job.

The boys were filling in time, bored stiff under they reached 14 years and could leave. I was an undersized girl. They all towered above me. My only hope was to interest them sufficiently to keep them reasonably quiet. One day the Headmaster came in and demanded to know why the boys were not sitting upright with their arms folded. "They are sitting that way because I am interesting them" I replied. To which the Headmaster responded by caning almost everyone. We had a grand row, and I was sent home to be reprimanded by an Inspector. But my temper had not calmed. The surging hate of all the silly punishment I had endured in my school days prevented any awe of the Inspector. I whirled all this out at the unfortunate man, who listened quietly and advised: "Don't do any more teaching when you have finished your two years here. Take my advice. Go and be a missionary in China."

It was all very elementary but Blatchford made socialists in those days by the sheer simplicity of his argument. Here was the answer to the chaotic rebellion of my school years. My mother's illness fitted into this protest against the treatment of the sick who could not pay, the inefficiency of commercialism, the waste, the extravagance, and the poverty.

It was a memorable meeting. I got a seat in the front row of the gallery. It seemed noisy to me, whose sole experience of meetings was of religious services. Rows of men filled the platform. But my eyes were riveted on a small slim woman her hair simply coiled into her neck, Katherine Glasier. She was speaking on 'Socialism as a Religion'. To stand on a platform of the Free Trade Hall, to be able to sway a great crowd, to be able to make people work to make life better, to remove slums and underfeeding and misery just because one came and spoke to them about it - that seemed the highest destiny any women could ever hope for.

For a day's propaganda cycling, we were furnished with sandwiches, a primus stove, stacks of leaflets and The Clarion. We held open-air meetings to catch people as they came out of church or chapel. We scrawled slogans in chalk and we sang England Arise outside pubs and on village greens.

Helen Wilkinson was a first rate organizer who in addition to the necessary virtues of good organizing and eloquent speaking, possessed deep convictions and enthusiasm. To her delightfully warm personality and great charm she added courage in facing hostile audience and wit to deter hecklers.

Helen Wilkinson, the member for Middlesbrough East has hair of a stunning hue. And this shone like an aureole above the light Botticelli green of her dress. It was a complete breakaway from the sober black and white which earlier lady members adopted. And why not. Is not the Labour Party the party for colour and vivacity.

Women have worked hard; starved in prison; given of their time and lives that we might sit in the House of Commons and take part in the legislating of this country.

Around Easter, 1937, I paid a visit to Spain to see the lads of the British Battalion of the International Brigade. Going up the hillside towards the trenches with Fred Copeman, we could occasionally hear the dull boom of a trench mortar, but more often the eerie whistle of a rifle bullet overhead. Always I felt inclined to get my head down in my shoulders. "I don't like that sound," I said by way of an apology.

"It's all right, Willie, as long as you can hear them,"

I was told. "It's the ones you can't hear that do the damage."

We got into the trenches and I passed along chatting to the boys in the line. From the British we passed into the Spanish trenches and gave the lads there the peoples' front salute. Then, after visiting the American section, we came back to our own lads. All of them came outside and formed a semicircle, and there, with as my background the graves of the boys who had fallen, I made a short speech. It was good to speak under such circumstances, but it was the hardest task I have ever undertaken. When I finished we sang the Internationale with a spirit that all the murderous savagery of fascism can never kill.

The following morning I went into the breakfast room of the Hotel in Madrid to see Herbert Gline, an American working in the Madrid radio station, about a broadcast to America from the Lincoln Battalion. When I got in who should be sitting there but Ellen Wilkinson, Eleanor Rathbone and the Duchess of Atholl. We had a very friendly chat, and I was fortunate in getting their company part of the way home. But whether in Madrid while the shells were falling or in face of the many difficulties that were inseparable from travelling in a country racked with invasion and war, those three women gave an example of courage and endurance that was beyond all praise.

We withdrew to Mondijar, a small village to the east of Madrid. Comfortable quarters in a beautiful countryside soon improved morale. New recruits brought our figure back to the six hundred mark. Field training and manoeuvring took up all our time. During this period Major Attlee, the leader of the British Labour Party, with Ellen Wilkinson and Noel Baker, came out to Spain. Ellen was a great favourite with the lads. Her fiery enthusiasm and kind interest in the smallest things made her the central figure of this group.

At about nine o'clock at night, as darkness was falling, the square at Mondijal was lined by the members of the British 16th and 50th, and the American Washington and Lincoln battalions - some twelve to fifteen hundred men. Those in the rear were holding lighted torches. Clem Attlee and Ellen spoke from a cart, in simple, kind language, of the things that the British Labour Party were trying to do. The response was terriffic. Carried away by the enthusiasm of the speeches, I asked Clem whether he would allow the battalion to be called after him, and he immediately agreed, declaring himself more than honoured. He was to meet considerable opposition on his return to England from the Tory Government over this incident.

Attlee has two fatal handicaps, honesty and modesty, but he is a subtle strategist, understands people and plays with his team. Herbert Morrison is an able administrator and a bit of a brute - the rudest man I know - he will invite you to his table and then read a detective novel but he is giving London almost exclusively gifts needed by the nation.

I mentioned to Attlee that a number of plotters had been given jobs. He laughed, perfectly well aware of what had been going on. It is not bad tactics to make one's enemies one's servants.

Ellen Wilkinson to dine with me. This has been on the cards for some time, but always put off. She is still a most devoted worshipper of Herbert Morrison, and puts me second. What she would like would be Morrison to lead the Party and me to be his deputy. She would like us two to go into the War Cabinet, putting out Attlee and Cripps. The difficulty about all such plans is that the right moment never arrives to put them into execution! She says that Morrison, having been deeply absorbed with his job until recently, is now feeling that he has got it into running order, and is taking much more interest in wider questions, including post-war problems and the future of the Labour Party. Bevin, she says - though I think she puts him third in order of merit among Labour leaders - is quite grotesque in his garrulity.

Had Helen Wilkinson lived longer, there is little doubt that the children of England and Wales would have had reason to bless her name. She would have made mistakes; she would have provoked bitter antagonism; but she would have seen to it in fact, as well as promise, no child would be denied the opportunity that was his due.