From poverty-stricken childhood to best-selling author

She told us how her poverty-stricken upbringing in post-war Blackburn shaped her into the remarkably successful writer she is today.

JOSEPHINE Cox's gritty novels may have won her a legion of fans and made her a millionaire, but her Blackburn roots are never far away.

"I'm still that snotty-nosed kid from the backstreets," said Josephine, with a laugh.

"You can't deny your roots or change the past and it's stupid to do that anyway because you're denying who you are."

Josephine, 66, or Jo as she prefers to be called, was born into a life of poverty in post-war Blackburn.

She was fourth of 10 children - three daughters and seven sons - with a father who liked a drink and a mother who had to work in the local cotton mill despite having so many children to raise.

The family were so crushingly poor that they slept six-to-a-bed and luxuries were few and far between.

"Life was very grim," remembered Jo, who now lives in Bedfordshire.

"Poverty and deprivation were rife. Quite often mum would take us up to Nazareth House Institute for Orphan Children and Aged Poor where we would sit on the bench with the tramps and the nuns would bring us some bread and dripping."

As well as grinding poverty, Jo witnessed her father's violent behaviour tear her family apart.

"There were lots of arguments. My dad Bernard earned a pittance as a road-sweeper for the local council and on Fridays he would drink - he was like a Jekyll and Hyde character.

"During the week he was lovely, funny and interesting - until Friday came around. He had to go to the pub to meet the foreman who held the wages.

"You're in the pub and you get your wages - what do you do? Spend it on drink.

"He would come home and there would be fights and nastiness.

"My father wasn't deliberately violent - he would just knock everyone out of the way as he stumbled around drunk.

"My mam Mary Jane worked in Cicely cotton mill simply to put food on the table, and even then it was never enough.

"Our staple diet was bread with condensed milk spread over it or bread with a bit of sugar on top.

"Some Sundays when mam was determined to have a proper sit-down family meal all the children were sent to the local market as it was closing down for the night to pick all the waste vegetables from the floor.

"Mam washed them, cut off the bruises and cooked them in a large pot and that was our meal."

But although she grew up in difficult circumstances, Jo has many wonderful memories of her home town.

"Blackburn was a lovely place to grow up even though we were desperately poor.

"Everybody down your street was in the same boat so it wasn't until you went to school and saw little girls all dressed nicely with their hair in ribbons that you realised you were different and the bullied and teasing started.

"My earliest memories are from when we lived in a terraced house on Derwent Street, which was an old-fashioned cobbled street off Montague Street. It's been demolished now.

"Every family on the street had lots of children and we all belonged to each other, they were like your brothers and sisters and their mams were like your mam.

"When you're a kid you explore everything for miles around you and I knew every street, every nook and cranny, every house.

"On a Sunday we used to go to Blackburn Ragged School in Bent Street, along with all the other kids that were poor.

"We had to go into chapel and sing hymns then we'd get fed.

"At Christmas we'd go into hall and girls would queue one side, boys the other, and they'd have these big tea chests full of toys that better-off children had discarded.

"One year I got a one-legged teddy and I loved it to bits.

"I had that teddy for 22 years and when I lost him in a house move I was heartbroken."

Jo began what was to become a long and prosperous career in story- telling on the streets of her beloved Blackburn.

"All the kids down our street would sit on the World War II bomb rubble in Ainsworth Street and I'd charge them a penny to listen to stories I'd make up about my granddad and his terrier dog.

"If they didn't have a penny I'd tell them to clear off - that money was for my mam to put in the gas meter."

And Jo was encouraged in her story-telling by one teacher, Miss Jackson, who spotted her potential when she taught her at St Anne's RC Primary School.

"I'm ashamed to say I played truant a lot because of the bullying and I left with no qualifications, but I was determined to be a teacher like Miss Jackson, who was really wonderful," said Jo.

"I once won a short story competition at school and Miss Jackson gave me my prize on stage, just a writing book and a couple of pens, but she told the whole assembly 'One day the whole world will read Josephine's stories'."

Now many of Jo's gripping stories are inspired by her tough upbringing in Blackburn.

"I've got one of those photographic memories, I can remember everything," she said.

"Every face I've ever met, everything that ever happened down our street. I can see it like a film.

"I remember there was this scruffy little man who owned a bike shop on the corner of Craig Street.

"For fourpence you could hire a bike on Friday and not take it back until Sunday afternoon.

"I used to work all week after school, pushing an old pram round the streets collecting paper from people's houses to take down to the paper factory to earn half a crown.

"I'd get my bike, ride to see my grandma and granddad in Accrington, then prop it up outside the house.

"I must have been thick because ever week my sister stole it and didn't fetch it back until a few minutes before it had to be back, but every week I let her!

"Then there was the woman who lived at the bottom of the road when we lived at William Henry Street who never had a bath from one year to the next.

"We called her Smelly Kelly.

"One day the women kidnapped her, dragged her in and gave her a bath and that was the first time I ever heard such foul language coming out of a woman's mouth!"

Jo said she believes her memories of Blackburn will keep her writing for the rest of her life.

"I think I'd better live to be 200 years old to get them all the stories in my head," she said.

"And even then there would still be more. I'd sit on the front step of our house in Derwent Street just watching things unfold in front of me.

"I'd see people making love in doorways, others fighting, kids crying because they'd been chucked outside when they wouldn't behave. I've seen girls pregnant at 14 and thrown out, all of these are stories.

"I can't not put Blackburn in my books because it's where my heart takes me.

"I'll always love it because it was such a vivid part of my life.

"Anyone born and brought up in Blackburn will tell you it's in your blood."

In fact, it was being wrenched away from her beloved Blackburn in 1953, that Jo considers the most traumatic experience of her life.

"One morning after my dad had left for work my mam rounded us all up on the rec, near our house in William Henry Street, and told us she was leaving him and we were going to stay with Aunty Biddy in Bedfordshire.

"We were all crying and desperately upset. I remember thinking 'This is the end of my world' .

"It was very traumatic and it still hurts now to think about that day.

"I truly believe the trauma stopped me growing - I was 4ft 11 and a half then and I'm still that today.

"Mam was very brave, she was seven months pregnant, she had no money and Aunt Biddy had said we could stay there for three weeks and no more, but she still left. It was the worst time of my life."

Jo managed to make a life for herself down south.

She married her teenage sweetheart Ken, at 16, and soon had two sons, Wayne and Spencer.

Life wasn't easy, and in the 1970s Ken's haulage business, secured against the house they owned, sucumbed to the recession and Jo and Ken lost their home and were forced to move in with relatives.

"We clawed our way back through sheer hard work," remembered Jo.

In December 2002, Ken, the man with whom Jo had grown up and made a family, who she described as "my best friend and right arm" unexpectedly died of cancer - a brutal shock for Jo.

She has since said that "life takes on a different colour since losing Ken" .

But Jo firmly believes her struggle against the odds has shaped her into the person she is today.

"Poverty makes you aware of other people's problems and still, today, I can't stand to see anybody crying.

"Several times I've been in the queue at the supermarket and somebody in front of me, a little old lady maybe, has gone to pay and she hasn't got enough money and I'll very discreetly slip a fiver into her hand.

"I'm not materialistic in any way shape or form.

"If I lost everything tomorrow, as long as I had my family and friends I'd manage.

"I'd get a job, I'd sweep the streets if I had to.

"I've met some characters who I grew up in the same street with who deny what it was like because they've done well and now they're worth a bob or two they don't want to be reminded of it, but I say it's what makes you who you are."

Jo's down-to-earth attitude had stuck with her thorough the years, sometimes to the frustration of her staff.

"A short time ago I was doing a PR event and I arrived half an hour early because the traffic was good.

"It was a dark cold wintery night so when people started arriving I began pouring tea for them.

"When the PR lady arrived she went absolutely beserk and told me I mustn't go round serving tea.

"I said 'Why on earth not? These people are freezing cold!'.

"Some people put you on a pedestal but they shouldn't.

"I don't consider myself any better than anyone else, just more fortunate."