I am the younger daughter of John Horner, a British trade unionist and politician who was born in 1911 in Walthamstow, the son of an illiterate building labourer from rural Essex. His mother was a second generation Londoner with five years at elementary school before she left at the age of eleven, as she told me, ‘To scrub other people’s doorsteps’. 

I am currently writing about how John Horner and  my mother, Pat  joined the British Communist Party and how and why they left the Party after twenty years committed membership.