Have a Good NEWS

Colin Fancy was still in the womb, as he went on his first demo with his parents. It was to protest the start of a life - and now he takes his own children on marches

My mom and dad took me to my first march, before I was even born. I saw this on the massive anti-cuts TUC demonstration recently. At Easter 1960 my parents went through the annual Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament 's march to Aldermaston. You 'd left my 18-month-old brother with my gran and granddad, but I wasn' t due until August, Mum had to take me with her. The first time I marched was old as walking, talking for two years. I was told that "it \ to fight and war" \, so it could march a CND. (My grandmother even had a parrot, you might say, "Ban the bomb!") It proved easy to me "5 miles" before he returned home with my father. My brother, who was four years old, marched with my mother for "10 miles" and had to be taken playgroup swollen the next day in my stroller because his feet were so.

Dare I wasn 't realize at the time but between these two marches from his own father had to join Bertrand Russell and the Committee of 100 to sit in front of a U.S. war plane. Hundreds of demonstrators were arrested, and he spent a week in jail. My mother recently confided that he was the "best week of my married life, as I have didn 't to cook breakfast and dinner". I 'd seriously in a clear family, the protest was born.

Full of initiative, wrote my six year old brother of his petition and stuck it on our garden gate. He and my father often talked about the history of the table and read the petition, ". If you want to kill the QUEEN SIGN HERE" A name was on it - mine. I 'd happily up, signed but Stuart, clever as ever, hadn' t. He waited for passers-by with a pencil. If a proposed big boy on a bicycle, that we who 'd have cut off our heads, I left it and moved into the house of Stuart.

One day in 1970, the speech was in my elementary school, the newly elected Tory Prime Minister. He came that evening to a dinner held in the local stately home. I was embarrassed that our family would be the only people protesting at the gates are great. To connect but when we went down the street, I felt excited, others as a good friend with his fireman father. Another school friend whose father was a policeman, had told us he was definitely not coming. More mothers and children, came to a small group stood outside the gates - the most recent picket in the country. We played around and joked with the three police officers in uniform, to a long, black car drove down the road. The atmosphere changed immediately when we got ourselves and the police formed a line drives us back to the sidewalk. My mother and the other parents shouted as the large, broad figure of Ted Heath came out of the car and made his way easily through the gates.

Her determination to go on the march was persuasive – plus I fancied her friend. So my mate and I joined them on the demonstration. We got the bug, and a couple of weeks later we were marching for the right to work. I wasn't sure that working was a right I wanted, and I was dodging exam revision to go.

I hated getting up early, but for the sake of joining miners picketing a power station in Kent, some of us made the sacrifice. As we gathered in the college car park before it was light, I noticed a student who hadn't been involved before. I remembered her challenging me about picket line violence while I was rattling the "dig deep for the miners" collection bucket in the college bar. I welcomed any new person taking part, but this young woman standing quietly in her thick jumper and tracksuit bottoms was somehow extra appealing to me. On the coach I left my friends to go to talk to her and on the way back the two of us sat chatting for most of the journey. As she wandered away from the coach on our return to college, my friends, who'd been unusually polite, turned to me and asked, "What's going on, Colin?" Maybe meeting Kirsti is why I don't remember anything else about the picket.