Emma Goldman’s mother, Joan

WHEN I was growing up in the 60s and 70s, my writer father’s books no longer brought in much money. It meant my mother Joan was effectively head of household.

Cheerful and always present, it seemed a side-line that she also taught at the local school, wrote weekly for three national papers and was a guest on the radio talking about her books on education.

Because we normalised her, it took decades to realise we had grown up with an extraordinary female role model.

She continued to be one until she died. In her mid-80s, browsing the local charity shop, she found a set of Beatrix Potter stories translated into Latin. Using Peter Rabbit and Mrs Tiggywinkle as a starting point, she embarked on teaching herself the ancient language.

In her final year, she wrote her autobiography. And it is my mother’s forever optimism, on both a personal and political level, that has stuck with me.

It was a gift she also gave my sister, Joanna. Joanna was 20 when she joined the protest camp at the American cruise missile base at Greenham Common.

An all-women camp, it had begun in 1981 when five housewives marched from Wales to demonstrate against having American nuclear warheads on British soil.

When they got there, they decided not to leave till the missiles were gone.

Joanna stayed for three years. Intermittently, she and her companions used the nearby phone box to call political sympathisers and discuss forthcoming mass demonstrations. There were none such. The calls were made only to test whether the line was tapped. Always on the dates spoken, vanloads of cops turned up at five in the morning to kick down tents and trample on belongings with shouts of “lezzies” and “go back to your husbands”.

The Greenham camp became a focal point for the national and international peace movements. Women from home and abroad joined it. Nineteen years after its formation, the missiles were flown back to America.

Emma Goldman’s sister Joanna and, right, her grandmother Rebekah

Our paternal grandmother Rebekah died before Joanna and I were born. Yet I feel her presence powerfully, especially when things go wrong and I am looking for strength.

Along with thousands of other Jewish refugees fleeing the Russian pogroms at the turn of the 20th century, Rebekah Halpern left what is now modern-day Lithuania. Many died on their trek to a better life. Cold, hunger and disease were some of the enemies.

I try to picture the journey from Vilnius to London’s east end Jewish ghettos. I wonder – what was she feeling? What was it like for a young woman who spoke only Yiddish and Russian to be leaving her homeland carrying nothing but the bag on her back? As if through a wide camera lens, I see feet tramping. Then mud and the skies of Europe. Was my grandmother afraid on the choppy waters of the Channel? What was it like when she first glimpsed the English coast? And set foot on the damp sands of Dover?

In London, Rebekah met Benjamin Goldman. From Bessarabia, he was also fleeing the pogroms. His seven brothers, opting to stay behind, had all been killed.

The first born of Rebekah and Benjamin was my father. At six months, he had a simultaneous attack of pneumonia and scarlet fever. The doctor said if he lasted the night he would survive. I picture that terrible night, my grandmother rocking her child through the long, cold hours, wiping his brow, praying, murmuring, ordering him to live. Because he had to. She hadn’t left the motherland and trudged all that way only for him to die on her.

Rebekah and Benjamin had seven more children. They shared a room with the cart Benjamin used for selling fish in the market. Back then, the horrors of poverty must have held another layer for pregnant women and mothers. No time off between births to recover, and no real concept of the attendant exhaustion, it was a time when being a mother went almost without consideration. I think of Rebekah in the noise and cramped spaces of the slums. In accommodation not fit for human habitation, there would have been a pot of food forever on the stove, children at her feet, and a newborn in her arms.

Twenty years on, came the neighbouring Battle of Cable Street, when Oswald Mosley brought in his fascist henchmen. Was my grandmother frightened? Only another four years later came the raining bombs of the Blitz.

Perhaps some of the best inspiration happens osmotically. When good belief systems are absorbed as the norm and it is only clear in retrospect how they have fed and shaped. I am part of the legacy of my mother, sister and grandmother, who each in her own small way helped create a better world.