The 1970s alternative mum ☮️
who paved my way into the gut-health space today
Gosh it was embarrassing being me in the 1970s and early 80s.
You see, I had an “alternative” mum ahead of her time.
As in, she’d pick me up from primary school sporting a Laura Ashley flowing floral smock and shoulder bag with a dangling leather fringe. If it was a colder day, she’d be wearing a native American striped woollen poncho too.
She always stood out from the mum school gate crowd with her naturally cork-screw hair waterfalling down her shoulders, dyed henna red.
I wrote last week in my new-science-of-the-borage-leaf post about how she would send me to school with alternative snacks eg a tangerine, and often I remember, a sesame seed cluster when everyone else was eating crisps and Cadbury’s.
The other mums wore Marks and Spencer “normal” clothes - eg A-line skirts, nylon blouses and belted rain macs of the day.
Often they’d also have a shifon head scarf over a couple of hair rollers to keep off the rain. Most chain smoked.
The fact my mum was different, meant the other children often chanted, “"your mum’s a witch” at me.
And it was the reason finally given by the class bully when she announced she was going to beat me up after school.
About 30 children waited in eager anticipation outside for the fight to begin - to see the newbie 7-year old get the deserved kicking for being different.
It didn’t last long - a few scratches, scuffs, and bruises each side - till a nun came and broke us up and the crowd dispersed.
But if I hadn’t twigged before that day that my family was a bit different, I definitely did then, and spent the next 10 years wishing we weren’t.
When you’re a kid, you don’t have a choice about your lifestyle.
You just have to live it.
So it meant eating Cranks brown crumbly bread, vegetarian quiches, brown rice, nut loaves, and home-made yogurt - at that time, the alternative diet, My mum adopted it because it wasn’t processed and she believed in real food.
As a kid, I didn’t like much of it, so remember just being hungry. A lot.
Then there was what I looked like.
Do you know Clothkits? My heart is sinking writing this. A catalogue from a small company then-based in the “alternative” town of Lewes in Sussex.
For several years, the cardboardy-pinafore dress kits came in an envelope, my mum cut them out and ran them up on her sewing machine, and I had no choice in the matter but to wear them.
Thankfully, the only place people saw me outside school uniform was me playing the recorder while my mum played the guitar at folk mass.
By the early eighties, she wasn’t ordering Clothkits any more.
And I think this is when the weekend Greenham Common women’s demos started.
Freezing cold, pouring with rain, knee-deep in mud against a barbed wire fence, chanting peace songs with thousands of poncho and anorak-clad women surrounded by police.
🎵“All we are saying, is give peace a chance!!!”🎵
Returning back onto the bus from a toilet stop at a service station, my mum’s friend Monica, (sporting a page boy hair cut I recall) started laying into the bus driver.
“Did you just call me LOVE?”
“Yes love.”
The ensuing argment went on for what felt like forever. Back and forth.
Accusations of him being a sexist. I’m not sure if “women’s lib” as it was known then, was even on his radar. He kept polite. She was determined to win the argument.
Life went on. Embarrassing though it was being “different” they were ahead of their time.
At some point we moved to a house with an actual garden on the outskirts of London.
It was surrounded by blackberry bushes, and my parents started growing marrows, and runner beans. The freezer was stuffed full of the berries and beans once picked, and consumed all winter.
Every meal seemed to be concluded by defrosted blackberries whipped into yogurt or cream as dessert. Runner beans lurked everywhere - from stir fries to curries, and various stuffings were “stuffed” into marrows.
We had blackberry jam all the time.
Figs from the fig tree in Autumm - again I refused them.
And a pink bath tub that always had a dark green scum ring around it - from where mum had been soaking mounds of fresh herbs - rosemary and lots of other green leaves from the garden such as borage for a relaxing soak.
Any of you who know about eating for a healthy microbiome - which we didn’t even know about at the time - will be thinking. Wow! All that unprocessed fibrous polyphenol-rich diverse food. All that fresh air, and dirt and mingling with other people’s germs.
Yes.
And how cool was my mum right?
I just tried to find that tassled handbag that looked a bit gypsy-like online - that would be spot on in the wellness world in Ibiza today.
How cool I experienced the Greenham Common women’s protests - now etched in modern history.
Wasn’t it great to see women standing up for equality on the bus?
Even Clothkits! I’ve just looked online and someone has revived them and are selling that stuff I was complaining about just now.
And you know what, uncomfortable (and stressful) though some of it was at the time, I now see it formed who I am today.
In one of the comments to last week’s borage article, one of our community (Noel) said that
of Fermented Vegetables book fame also had an unorthodox childhood - and wanted normalcy.“Yet look at you two now!!!”
Kirsten chipped in with a story about how difficult her mum’s garlic-smelling hummus sandwiches made her life in a school in a very conservative town.
wrote: “ I love a 1970s mum”It’s just such a shame my mum died before seeing that I became a nutritional therapist and wrote my gut health, time-restricted eating books and this Substack.
Because she was the woman who paved the way here, and she would have enjoyed it all.
Does any of this resonate with you? Feel free to share this article, and do comment if you’re a paid subscriber below. Let’s talk about the food and influencers of the day that got us here…Jeannette x
Oh, this is great!
Lovely to know about your mum because my own children of the 70’s will identify with you when I show them this!
Their lunch boxes never saw a crisp or a biscuit, I made everything from scratch. They put up with (for example) cheese, carrot and oat slices, my wholemeal bread for sandwiches, carob fruit & nut biscuits, and a piece of fresh fruit, before coming home to such things as lentil lasagna, millet burgers, wholemeal pastry cheese broccoli flans, Cranks Homity pies etc, etc. The work surfaces were cluttered with sprouting alfalfa seeds, mung beans and flasks of fermenting natural yogurt and a 72kg sack of Canadian wholemeal flour sat in the corner next to my orange and brown Kenwood mixer.
I made 3 loaves at a time so that I always had some in the freezer, also rolls and pizza bases.
Ah! Clothkits! My three were lucky that when I ordered some, I thought the cotton was too stiff for them, so made their clothes from softer fabrics, however I made some Clothkits items for myself and wore them with the matching colour tights. I loved a kaftan and an ethnic poncho!
I still have all my cook books from the 60’s onwards and somewhere in the loft are 2 unmade cloth kit garments. The fabric designs were too nice to get rid of.
Lovely to hear about your mum, Jeanette.
Thank you ❤️
My children still refer to their deprived childhood! 🤣
Loved reading this Jeanette. To think, I grew up with the findus pancakes, Birds Eye beef burger. angel delight, Heinz soup and chips most nights followed by a chocolate biscuit!!