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The initial meetings were exceptionally dull. Gradually the Labour Party had been taken over by the left wing and they were not very welcoming to new faces. So I also found going to meetings quite oppressive. People were not very welcoming to new members....'here's who we are and this is how we participate'... It was not like that; they were very clichish.

I think it must have been about 1983, the time I moved to this house in fact that all this was happening because I was no longer a member of that branch over at Norfolk Terrace way - Regency branch it might have been - and became a member of this ward and it was here that I met the far left at early meetings and felt very frozen out. And it was very shortly after I joined that it became suspended- I had just joined the party and there was no party to go to!...

Those people who were more ingrained and embedded in the Party continued to meet, there were support groups but I wasn't aware of those and so I just backed out of politics until the party came back. Then I made a point of rejoining the minute it did come back, getting actively involved, because I thought that it was people like me that would put it back in the middle of the road and not too far to the left. Now of course I'm far to the left and haven't moved an inch but that's another story....