A few years back, in the West Yorkshire pit village where my parents met and married, my gentle godmother and her sister were mugged while visiting their brother’s grave. What shocked me more even than the attack itself was that they had expected it. The local cemetery was a known haunt of heroin addicts and so my godmother hadn’t brought her purse, only a bus pass that the scumbag junkie snatched anyway, ripping her coat.

My childhood memories are not sepia-tinted: dog-turd strewn back alleys, tough and ragged kids, old ladies in one-bar fire destitution, my medieval dentist. As my father always says, there were no good old days. It was the Yorkshire described in Barry Hines’s 1968 novel A Kestrel for a Knave, which reminds us that the only thing new about brutal, dissolute families is that we now see them as the State’s business. In so many ways lives are easier today, yet it was inconceivable then that elderly ladies would be taking a calculated risk placing flowers at a gravestone.

Former pit villages like this, or Edlington outside Doncaster where two boys committed their grotesque crimes, are so little understood, so misrepresented, perhaps because they are neither wholly rural nor urban, but rugged hybrids that take the worst of both worlds. Their folk have tough characters borne of a heavy industrial heritage, yet are miles — and a shabby bus service — from proper towns. They are edged by open fields but lack, for the most part, a tradition of country ways or knowledge.

But these ugly red-brick places are, as much as any honey-stoned Cotswold hamlet, still villages: the two victims, aged 9 and 11, were off fishing without adult supervision, a childhood freedom denied most urban British kids. It is just that the land they roam, like the half-filled brick pit-turned-nature reserve where their barely alive bodies were tortured, is scarred by the digs and spoil of long-dead industry.

When the Tories utter their lazy soundbites about “broken Britain”, I’d guess that plenty in Edlington or my parents’ village would retort: “Well, it was your lot who broke it.” The closure of the mines — the sole employer, the community’s raison d’être, provider of an identifiable, albeit a harsh and dangerous future for young men, the source of cash not just to buy shoes and food and rent but to fund football teams, brass bands and youth groups — destroyed a fragile ecosystem. Twenty-odd years have passed and the political statute of limitations is probably up on blaming Mrs Thatch for everything. But the damage is not repaired, not by a long way.

A fifth of Edlington is on income support, the local comprehensive school was torched, few kids stay on to A levels, since why bother when so many of their parents have never worked. And pit villages are victims of topography as much as economics. Remote and insular, they feel forgotten because they’re easy to forget. They abhor difference and ambition, distrust it, knock it down. The cleverest almost always leave.

Their professional servants — doctors, solicitors — will live a good drive away into open country. I recall the kids bussed into my Doncaster secondary school from outlying pit villages and, even in the late 1970s when their miner fathers were working, their accents were broader, their aspirations lower than those of us from the newly built suburbs.

How seldom credit is given to the people in the post-industrial North who retrained, revised their expectations, showed ingenuity or went off to work at a soulless call centre or, in my parents’ village, a huge catalogue distribution depot, when it set up to make use of cheap, eager labour. But they are heroes, these families who, through hardship and worry, carried on doing their best, those redundant middle-aged men slogging the night shift as minicab drivers, yet who never forgot their community kindnesses — and most did not — after all the old certainties had died.

After the Shannon Matthews fake kidnap case, when David Cameron went to her Dewsbury Moor estate in West Yorkshire to grandstand about how “a drug and crime-ridden community” was “fighting a losing battle against degradation” he was rebuked by the residents for misrepresenting their lives, not bothering to look around and being so rude as to address them tieless in shirtsleeves.

Cases like Matthews and the Edlington boys are freak outcrops by which a community can rarely be judged. These communities did not produce these two derelict mothers; rather, they suffered most, in crime and fear, from their proximity. And while Edlington without Yorkshire Main Colliery is dirt-poor, it has a thriving swimming club — where I took lessons as a child — and a couple, who although in their sixties, offered a foster home to those two violent and disturbed brothers. Edlington’s biggest problem is that its houses, like those in other parts of Doncaster, are so cheap that many are bought up by landlords who then rent them out to tenants on benefits, who take and deal drugs.

All over London I keep seeing police signs warning against the dangers of drug-driving, when the greater crime — the one that led to these ghastly attacks — is drug-parenting. From South London, where thousands of addicts’ children are fed and clothed by Kids Company, to south Yorkshire, it is drugs, both hard and “soft”, that foster parental neglect.

Once, the substance guaranteed to wipe out misery and boredom had licensing hours, was consumed in public among your judgmental peers. Now it is an indoor, all-day vice. The Edlington boys’ mother, high on skunk, stopped feeding or caring for her children, let them turn feral.

She slipped the drug into their tea so she could get an early night, doing who knows what psychotropic harm to their delicate brain chemistry.

If the Tories truly wanted a populist message, one that would chime with these communities, a ruthless zero tolerance approach to drug dealing and usage — even if it required special draconian powers — would be of more use than invoking The Wire. However ghastly the crimes committed by those two damaged boys, the only surprising thing about them is that they began so very young. If they had held off just a few years, they would have provoked little comment but just as much damage, perhaps breaking their baby’s spine like the father of another Edlington child, 16-month-old Amy Howson, or lying in wait for old ladies visiting graveyards.

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