Julie Critchlow, housewife turned Antichrist, is standing outside Chubby’s sandwich bar drawing angrily on a cigarette and glaring at the secondary school opposite. Her children — Rachel, 15, and Steven, 11 — are coming home for lunch so she is buying crisps and pop. Although Chubby’s is less than 200 yards from her front door, Critchlow has brought the car.
Still, it’s an improvement of sorts. This time last week she was in the graveyard over the road, with fellow “sinner ladies” Sam Walker and Marie Hamshaw, posting burgers and chips through the school fence to a throng of mutinous sugar-deprived schoolchildren. Pictures of the scene — which looked like some grotesque Little Britain sketch — were splashed across the newspapers and Critchlow was called “the worst mum in Britain”.
The trouble began at the start of term when Rawmarsh community school in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, banned pupils from leaving the premises during their lunch break. Even more incendiary, the school then started peddling a Jamie Oliver-inspired school dinner menu of “healthy” fare, such as ratatouille pancakes and salad.
Unlike the grateful urchins who feature on Jamie’s School Dinners (Oliver’s fiercely popular television crusade for better food in schools), the Rawmarsh children came home complaining of overpriced baked potatoes, yucky tomatoes and not enough chips. Some of the mothers began delivering them fast food in the lunch hour, first to their own children, then to 60 or more of their friends. The school freaked out and tried to ban the mums. The mums screamed bloody murder. The police were called and, last Monday, a very uneasy peace was reached.
To an outsider, Rawmarsh sounds like hell; a place where fat stupid mothers fight for the right to raise fat stupid children. Did these women care nothing for St Jamie, terrifying obesity rates or early onset diabetes? Did they not read the daily horror statistics? Only last week it was revealed that children who eat a packet of crisps a day end up drinking more than five litres of cooking oil a year.
A first glance at the town suggests that the answer to all that is “nope”. Rawmarsh is Jamie’s worst nightmare; shop shelves lined with cherry colas, toddlers eating Monster Munch in the street and the locals either bandy-legged twigs or, more often, fat — really, really fat in some cases. Some aren’t even ashamed of it: one fat man has taken his shirt off to eat a battered sausage in the afternoon sun.
Surprisingly, Critchlow, 43, having refused all other interview requests, invites me to join Walker, 39, and Hamshaw, 44, in her front room. As the place fills with fag smoke and cackling laughter, it seems impossible to imagine three women more at odds with the current trend for health obsessed parenting.
Critchlow’s favourite adjective is disgusting. This is how she describes the food that the school is now serving and “totally disgusting” is what she calls John Lambert, the headmaster.
“None of this would have happened if he hadn’t locked these kids up,” she says. “I don’t have a problem with the school not selling them fatty food. My problem is that some of these kids are 16 and they’re not allowed to choose what they eat for lunch.”
“Next they’ll be going through our cupboards telling us what we can feed them at home,” says Hamshaw, who has two children, aged 13 and 16, at the school. “But we know how to give our children a proper meal better than any school.” ()
Er, weren’t you taking them chips every day for lunch? “That is such a lie,” says Critchlow. “We were taking all sorts — baked potatoes, salads, tuna sandwiches. You try getting teenage girls to eat a hamburger every day. Most of them won’t touch the things.”
“There were a few chips,” admits Walker, mother of an 11-year-old and 16-year-old, “but any nutritionist will say that a little bit of fat now and then isn’t the end of the world.”
“But Lambert labelled us junk food pushers,” says Hamshaw, “We’re not stupid, though. I saw Supersize Me. No one in their right mind would feed their children fast food every day.”
In fact, they say, the school’s food laws are promoting bad habits. “All kids are fussy eaters,” continues Hamshaw. “If they don’t like something they won’t eat it, so lots of the kids take one look at what’s on offer at lunch and then eat crisps.
“Every mother knows that it’s an art to get your kids to eat good food, like I know my Gary won’t eat greens but will eat carrots. This ‘we know best’, one-size-fits-all attitude they’ve got at the school definitely means he ends up eating more rubbish.”
“But Jamie Oliver has come in his shiny armour and people think everything he says is right,” says Walker, “like calling parents names if they let their kids have a can of Coke. Life isn’t that simple though, Jamie. It’s always a compromise.”
“You have to be clever,” says Critchlow. “Kids have got their own minds and sometimes all you can do is try and persuade them to do the right thing.”
Who could have expected such wisdom? While the mums don’t have an A-level between them, when it comes to child rearing they’ve got more than 60 years’ experience.
“I don’t want to sound hysterical,” says Hamshaw, “but Adolf Hitler tried putting kids into summer camps to create perfect children and he faced the same problem this government is going to face — there is no such thing as a perfect child. You can’t make carbon-copy kids who all love tomatoes. Schools should stick to educating children, not trying to raise them.”
The school is not backing down, saying that for the children’s safety they must stay in at lunch (unless collected by parents). The headmaster, uncharacteristically taciturn, declined to speak to me but released a statement to say he has now met the mums and progress was being made.
Sonia Sharp, of Rotherham council, insisted that the food at the school is very nice and cheaper than anything else on offer, and pointed out that uptake of school meals has risen from 350 to 600. She conceded that this might have something to do with the fact that the school has now got a captive audience.
More than food, what grates upon the Rawmarsh mums is the feeling that their choices as parents are being undermined by their government. “This country is turning into big brother,” sighs Hamshaw, “and it’s not like we need a nanny state. We nanny our kids quite enough on our own.”
The women nod gravely and light more cigarettes. “This battle,” says Critchlow, “has only just begun.”
