An unrepentant teenage Jihadi bride does not deserve our forgiveness

She is the British born teenager who at age 15 ran away to join Islamic State (IS) and who now wants to return to her east London home to live a quiet life with her new-born son.

She’s unrepentant about her escapade despite her marriage a month after her arrival in Syria to a jihadi fighter and the loss of her first two children to starvation, she claims.

Seeing severed heads in a bin didn’t even faze this jihadi bride whose sense of entitlement to British status stuns us all.

So having read all this I took time out to try to remember what I and my friends were like when we were 15 in 1961.

Pop stars were emerging on the scene giving us a new perception of music, a far cry from the BBC’s offering of Music While you Work.

Elvis Presley was on the rise and with him came that awakening of the boy/girl relationship and just the smidgen of a new sense of freedom around such relationships.

Like all mothers of the day though with daughters to bring up – I was one of seven girls – my mother made sure her daughters came home at a decent hour if we were out visiting a friend (which was about the height of my social life then) leaving enough time to complete homework for the next day.

It wasn’t long before I got a Saturday job in a clothes shop.

My new found financial independence was a joy.

It paid for the bus fares to go shopping and trips to the cinema with my close friend June.

We hadn’t much of a clue what was going on in the world except that the new President of the United States, John F. Kennedy, was a much better looking guy than any who had gone before.

Yes, we were aware of the Russians putting a man into space that year and, not to be outdone, JFK announcing he would go one better and get a man on the moon.

There was a dark side of course.

We didn’t know much about a wall that was starting to be built in Berlin but we were aware that east Germans were trying to defect to west Germany. That news was delivered to the nation by radio.

However, it was all so far away and anyway the Second World War was long over.

Sure we hardly knew where London was never mind Berlin.

School exams were dreaded but there was one consolation.

On the way home from school we could call into a café and order the latest drink – a cup of coffee.

Heavens I hated the stuff but drank it anyway, as it was the smart thing to do at the time.

My mother always kept a bottle of Camp coffee in the cupboard well hidden from the rest of us. But the café variety seemed so much more glamorous.

Juke boxes had arrived by then and the threepenny bits were saved to play our favourite pop songs as we drank the lurid brown stuff which tasted like a bad toffee.

Pennies were also saved to make phone calls from the red box at the bottom of the town.

Mobile phones were decades away.

In fact, while my generation of 15-year-olds were getting a reasonable education socially, we were misfits because though television was slowly gathering pace there was little of interest on it to inspire us.

In those days most women with children were stay at home mums.

This meant there was always a smiling face to meet you on your return from school and a slice of toast or a home baked scone to eat.

The idea that life could be much different to this never occurred to us.

Shamima Begum and her fellow travellers to Syria came up in a totally different world, a world which has taken childhood and changed it beyond recognition, separating growing children from their parents in a dangerously, ugly way.

And all in the space of less than 60 years.

Life in 1961 wasn’t so bad after all.