LYNN Camsell can remember life before the miners' strike but she can't really recognise the person she was back then. Apart from a slight weathering over the years, she didn't look much different. But it's as if she transformed in the year of 1984 into a different character entirely.

Up until the strike, men went down the pit, she ran a home, the children had summer shoes. Politics was something that happened in a land far, far away. And then Margaret Thatcher launched her unrelenting attack on strikers and the comfortable world Lynn had spent years creating came crashing down.

That's when she changed from being an ordinary mum, with ordinary domestic concerns, into someone who suddenly felt a fierce sense of political injustice.

"We had no money and none of the miners had any work," says Lynn, 46, now Chairman of the Northumberland County Council Labour group and Secretary of the cabinet.

She had to stretch a budget of £11 and six pence across a week and feeding her husband David, as well as two young sons, Barry, now 21, and Steven, now 27, was growing harder.

Fed-up of the long, painful wait for the miners crisis to be resolved, Lynn decided to do something about it. "It really started to hit me in the summer of 1984. I remember all the children desperately needed shoes that summer and we couldn't afford to buy them.

"And I'll never forget Margaret Thatcher saying Victorian children didn't need shoes, so we shouldn't need them either!" says Lynn, who was on the local government improvement programme last year and part of the national review team for Gloucester city council.

Lynn and a couple of other women in Blyth, Northumberland, decided to take matters into their own hands and set up a women's support group. The three miners' wives took a bucket out on the streets and started collecting for their town in cities as far afield as London and Lancaster.

They would spend hours of the day collecting money and then go home and make dinner for the family. It was a hard time but Lynn says the adversity actually helped rally the community together.

"I broke the mould when I started to get political. My parents had never been very interested in politics when I was growing up and I just followed in their footsteps - until the strike."

And not only did every child in Blyth get sand-shoes that summer, but the wives got more sympathisers than they ever bargained for and it was amazing how quickly other women joined in with the collecting.

Though she had shown no interest in politics before then, her social conscience began to grow as she saw the conflict around her and it was a case of the personal becoming the political.

People started to protest at the £4-a-week striking miners' families were being given by the borough council, so that had to be stopped - leaving hundreds of miners, wives and their children in dire need.

"As well as all the support over the strike, there was quite a backlash as well and it was only then I realised the power of politics and its ability to touch our daily lives."

Though Lynn was juggling family responsibilities with her job as a carer at a residential home, her interest in politics grew from around 1985.

She stood for a councillor's seat in 1989 after being egged on by the men at her local Labour Party branch. Although there were only men in the branch back then - with just three female members even now - Lynn always felt welcome into the all-male political arena.

"It was an exciting time for me but I was also struggling a bit because of all my duties. It got worse when I became cabinet secretary and I found I was in meetings in the day and running to my job as a carer in the afternoon, without even going home in between. My husband was incredibly supportive and my mother helped a lot with child-care. That's how I got through it," says Lynn, whose husband David, 46, now works for Alcan aluminium power plant in Ashington.

Looking back to her blissfully domestic days as a non-political wife, she says she was, in those days, also infused with a blissful ignorance which can be dangerous and dis-empowering. Since her entrance into the local council at the ripe age of 30, she's had assertiveness training and public-speaking courses which have all fuelled her with confidence - a far cry from leaving school at 16 with two O levels.

"It's only when my family's livelihood was taken away that I saw what politics could do to you and how it can control your life.

"Not enough women get involved in politics, just as I didn't at one time. We've organised evening meetings for the whole family and not a lot of women turn up. And many of the ones who are interested don't have the time.

"I always encourage them to get involved in any way they can and I'd love to see more women in the regional assembly and Parliament. But having said that, I don't feel I stand for all women and their concerns in politics. There are plenty of male councillors who are aware of women's concerns and push for them. The bonus in having women sitting in councils though, is that they have a different outlook which can enrich the life of local communities. In fact, I sometimes think women are more understanding and more sympathetic which can't be a bad thing for politics. Their presence calms things down."

She says local politics is not filled with testosterone-fuelled councillors and though the council chambers may largely be occupied by men, she manages to shout above the crowd and make herself heard.

Lynn agrees it is harder to have a hand in politics when you've got to go to the supermarket, pick-up the children and earn money - but she also feels women could lose out if they don't participate.

"We have more provisions now in local council than we ever did, such as child-care allowance and travel allowance. The situation is nowhere near perfect but we've certainly improved matters. Both men and women who are parents have also been known to bring their children to council meetings. They sit with coloured pens and paper while we talk.

"And in a way, it is a terrible waste to think that Emily Davidson threw herself in front of a horse and the Suffragettes chained themselves to rails for women to ignore their vote - and to ignore the world of politics in the 21st Century."

She has actively gone out and talked to women about political apathy. She says the ordinary mum trying to make a house run smoothly doesn't always understand that politics defines her life.

"It's hard to explain to some women that everything available to them in society is political.

"It is only if a library, or a school, closes down or is under threat that it hits home. Until then, it is all taken for granted and regarded as non-political. We are surrounded by politics and the decisions others make for us. So it's empowering if we decide to have some control in that decision-making."

Lynn says although the miners' strike was a rude awakening to the rough and tumble of local political life, she is grateful for that awakening, for if it hadn't happened, who knows? She may have been living without a care in the world for what was going on beyond her own back yard.

WOMEN IN POLITICS

* Less than one in four candidates standing in the North-East of England at the general election are women, according to research conducted by The Fawcett Society.

* The research shows only one woman has been selected to contest a retirement seat by any of the parties.

* Only 33 of the 156 candidates contesting seats in the North-East are women.

* Only seven of the 32 candidates contesting the target seats for the parties are women.

* The small number of women selected in the North-East is reflected in the national picture. l The Fawcett Society research shows that nationally, less than 20 per cent of candidates selected so far are women.

* At the forthcoming elections, the number of women MPs could fall for the first time since 1979.