My Visit to Netflix's Toxic Town Twenty Five Years Ago

Let me cast my mind back if you will, it is about 25 years ago now and so my memories are pretty hazy, but I do have an uncanny memory for a story – for other people’s lives at least. Ernest Hemingway warned about this when he was a war reporter, that journalists who tell the stories of others risked forgetting the details of their own lives. This has definitely happened to me.

But, in this memory, I am around 23 years old, newly married, and I am sitting in a squashy armchair with my shorthand pad in my hand, my pen poised and one of those old ‘brick’ phones somewhere in my handbag. The house is clean, small and cosy, studio photos of two boys smile down from the walls and toys are stacked in corners of the room, tidied away perhaps especially for this London magazine journalist’s visit.

It is the late nineties or early 2000s and I have travelled to a Northamptonshire town to interview a woman called Susan McIntyre. After our chat she is going to introduce me to a few other women in a similar situation to her, that is that they all believe that toxic waste released during the clean up of the town’s former steelworks had interfered with their babies’ development in the womb. This had resulted in them being born with malformed hands or feet.

From this hazy memory of mine, I seem to remember us taking a short walk from her modern, dark red-brick council house to one of her friend’s, another woman in the same position, and as we do she points towards the wasteland. It’s not far from this Corby council estate.

Corby, for those who don’t know, is a very nondescript English town. It’s a modern Midlands town built to house the influx of steelworkers from Scotland. Other than that the only thing the area is known for is making shoes — that was the biggest industry before steel.

It’s been a long time since I’ve thought of that interview, that woman and her son. I met them when they were at the very beginning of their fight for justice, when no-one was particularly interested in their story, but I had spotted the story in a local newspaper of mine and managed to persuade a women’s magazine called Real to publish it. That magazine doesn’t exist anymore.

This is how The Sunday Times reported in back in 1999

It was only on Saturday night, when I sat down to watch the first episode of a new drama on Netflix called Toxic Town, that Susan and those other women started to take shape in my mind. I didn’t recognise Susan at first from the depiction that Jodie Whittaker had drawn of her, especially the fact she had a husband, a father to her kids, because when I met her she was a single mother. Most of those woman I interviewed were. They were single mothers, all working class, and I have to be honest I left their homes believing the odds were well and truly stacked against them. I never thought they would see a day when they got justice for what had been done to their children yet I didn’t doubt their stories.

But it’s amazing what comes back to you, when Susan’s character got pregnant in the show, I instantly remembered that boy was going to be called Connor when he was born. So we do store these stories somewhere, but I have so many of them, you see. So many women that I have sat down with over the years and captured their stories, their lives.

For many years I worked on those weekly women’s magazines that you see in supermarkets. It was where I cut my teeth as a feature writer, and now I look back and think how lucky I was, what rich, fertile ground it was. I started working on those magazines when I was 21 – my first job in London. I remember at the time that I got that job, I was earning £11,000 as a reporter on a local newspaper, I had asked the magazine, (it was called that’s life!), to fax through the salary offer to my mum’s office, and I had nipped out of court where I was reporting to call my mum from a payphone to see what it said. I remember hanging on the phone as the fax came through: ‘Oh my god, it’s £22,000!’ my mum said. I was doubling my salary and wondered how on earth I’d be able to spend all that money fast enough. (Reader, I had no problem).

You might be interested to know that my first editor on that ‘trashy’ magazine was Janice Turner who is now a columnist at The Times. She was also my editor on Real magazine, the one that commissioned that story from me about the mothers fighting for justice in Corby.

The drama on Netflix is told in four parts, and dramatised for TV of course, Susan was not the quick-witted, sassy single mum Jodie Whittaker depicted in my memory, but she was completely devoted to her two boys and determined to get justice and answers for what had happened to her youngest, Connor, as well as many other women across her council estate and further afield.

What those ‘trashy’ magazines like the kind I worked for in my early twenties did (though I have to say Real was very smart and glossy), was give voice to women like Susan and her friends. For years I was slightly embarrassed to say I worked for them, and I remember at forty, when I went to do my master’s degree in creative writing at the University of East Anglia, one of my lecturers there (Giles Foden, the guy who wrote The Last King of Scotland) offered to supervise a PhD for me if I would consider exploring the impact on those working class women of being able to tell their stories. I wasn’t keen then, I wanted to move away from that time in my career, I wanted to be ‘literary’ now, and while I was studying there I had a literary memoir in the Sunday Times Bestsellers, but now I think differently.

It would have been a big day when I went to interview those women, because they were finally being heard, they were finally being given a platform. I only wish I had the cutting from the piece to show you, I could scramble up in my loft but I didn’t keep all my work, there was just so much of it, so many lives and stories every week. Because week in, week out, that’s what I have done for the last 30 years of my career, tell women’s stories, first on a local newspaper, then in national magazines, then on national newspapers and finally in books. And on the weekend during which we have celebrated International Women’s Day, I wanted to highlight the story of those women in Toxic Town to you, those women who did not give up, who did not walk away, who kept on telling their stories over and over and over again, to reporters, to panels, to judges, and who eventually got their children a payout of £14.6m from Corby District Council who had let them down so badly.

Women are incredible. And remember, many of those women were doing this fighting alone, as single mothers, but they did not and would not give up. And this is the power of storytelling. I did a Ted Talk about it ten years ago or so, you might like to have a watch of it here (please note I was absolutely terrified as I had to remember the entire thing without notes or prompts and had not practised — typical me!).

Toxic Town is a brilliant drama, you’ll want to punch the air when the women finally get justice. I know I did, and not just because I had met them at the beginning of their long journey.

But this is the power of women banding together, of women telling their stories. That’s why I wanted to show you last week what happens when women don’t, and the impacts on them.

The Cost To Women of NOT Speaking Out

I’m working with four women at the moment who know they have a powerful story to tell, I am mentoring them and helping them to shape what they have come up with on their own, figuring out the roadblocks, giving them the confidence to keep going. Sometimes we just need a bit of hand-holding to get our work done, just some confidence. In one call last week with one of my subscribers whose manuscript I am currently assessing I reminded her that her intuition is already telling her that she has a good story on her hands, that’s why she can’t let go of it. Sometimes women need to be reminded to trust that inner voice of theirs.

Susan McIntyre and her friends did. They knew instinctively that somebody had failed them and they were determined to uncover that. I was impressed by them twenty five years ago, I am even more impressed by them now. I left that Corby council estate, I drove away in my little Peugeot 104 and I’ll admit, I didn’t have high hopes for them winning their case. I’m very happy that I was wrong.

Here’s Susan & her son Connor, now 28. Picture credit David Bebber/The Times

I know it can be hard to tell our stories, I know that sometimes it’s easier to think of a thousand reasons not too. But when you do that, think of Susan and her friends, think of their determination, and just what a change it can make, that ripple effect of one woman telling her story, of encouraging another woman to tell hers. And we must support that. Always.

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Here are those women I met 25 years ago today. Pic courtesy of The Times