Speaking for Myself (18 page)

My father was devastated. In a little over twelve months, he had lost his wife, his sister, and his mother. It could have sent him back to the bottle — which he had forsworn after his brush with death — but thank God, it didn’t.

Our daughter, Kathryn — blessed with the auburn hair of both her great-great-grandmother Tilly and Tony’s mother, Hazel — was born on March 2, 1988, nine months to the day after the 1987 general election.

That night in June, we had been in a celebratory mood. Although the Labour Party in general had fared barely better than it had five years earlier, Tony had increased his margin of victory.

For a newcomer to Parliament, he had done well in the previous five years. In his maiden speech to the House of Commons, he had said: “I am a socialist, not through reading a textbook that has caught my intellectual fancy, nor through unthinking tradition, but because I believe that, at its best, socialism corresponds most closely to an existence that is both rational and moral. It stands for co-operation, not confrontation; for fellowship, not fear. It stands for equality.”

However well this might have gone down in the reformist camp, it did nothing for the harmony of daily life at Westminster. When he arrived, Tony was allocated a room with Dave Nellist, the MP for Coventry South-East, one of three Labour MPs who belonged to Militant. This was a marriage made in hell. Not only was Tony a barrister — in itself a class crime — but he was a barrister who, when working with Derry, had tried to get Militant expelled from the party. It wasn’t long before Nellist got himself transferred to another office, which he shared with another, younger Militant, while Tony was allocated a room with a Scottish MP named Gordon Brown. They found common ground immediately. Both were bright, both had been elected in the 1983 general election, and both had fought a previous election in an unwinnable Conservative constituency. Gordon was more established in politics, and he certainly considered himself more senior, which I think Tony would have agreed with, not least because Gordon was older, though only by two years.

As Gordon didn’t have a family, we didn’t tend to socialize with him. Our Labour milieu was in London, while Gordon spent his time in Scotland, and he wasn’t used to the presence of small children.

It was inevitable that Labour would lose the 1987 election. However, the failure at the polls convinced Tony that something had to be done. In British politics the team of senior politicians who head up government departments is known as the Cabinet. The opposition’s parallel team is known as the Shadow Cabinet, and both Tony and Gordon were determined to get elected by fellow Labour MPs to this select body in order to move the Labour Party from an unelectable force into an electable one, which was something I fully agreed with.

At the 1987 Labour Party Conference that September, they both stood for the Shadow Cabinet. Gordon got in (becoming Shadow Secretary of State for Trade and Industry), while Tony was the highest runner-up. Their campaign manager was Nick Brown, whom Tony had introduced to Gordon. He, too, had entered Parliament in 1983, when the previous incumbent of Newcastle East went over to the SDP. We had got to know him because, having a local constituency, he would regularly drop in at Myrobella. He was basically a fixer, with fingers in all sorts of pies. He had been a legal officer for the GMB and for a short time had been on the Newcastle City Council. He had future Chief Whip written on his forehead even then. He was unbelievably patronizing, always calling me “love,” and clearly felt that women should be seen and not heard in the Labour Party. I saw him as a bit of a political thug.

My career was also in a state of flux, but with things moving so fast in the Labour Party, Tony had other things on his mind. Along with many other young barristers, I believed that we needed to find a new system for paying the clerks. While he was still at Crown Office Row, Tony had pushed for just such a change, and he and Chris Carr had put their case to Derry. The old-fashioned system of a clerk getting 10 percent of each fee when there were nine or ten tenants was one thing, they said. But now that there were twenty-five of them, David was getting paid ridiculously well. Tony and Chris thought that they would all be better off in their own chambers. The split eventually happened, with Derry taking off his people and forming 11 King’s Bench Walk. Although Tony had been very active in pushing for it, almost as soon as it happened, he left the Bar for good.

At around the same time, tensions had begun to develop in 5 Essex Court. A split opened up between the silks in the north and the junior barristers down in London, which included me. Normally juniors could hope to build up their practice by picking up work that trickled down from the silks, but as the silks were on an entirely different circuit, that wasn’t happening. Then Freddie Reynold, who had originally taken me on, took silk, and he and Alastair Hill — another of the original London members who took silk at the same time — decided that they, too, would do better to cut loose.

Word of this plan eventually got out. The silks whose practices were based entirely in the north didn’t really care, but those who had mixed practices were not at all happy. It didn’t help when libel and criminal lawyer George Carman, who by this time was famous, suddenly decided that he wanted to join the renegades. On the one hand, we weren’t that keen to have him, because “selfish” and “George” were two terms that definitely went together. On the other hand, his income would be useful.

I was for the split from the beginning, and once we moved into our new premises, I became very much a player on the management committee. Also, although I wasn’t the only woman, I became the mother hen, with everyone coming to me with their problems. Perhaps because I couldn’t channel all my mothering instincts into my children at home, these grown-ups got it instead.

Everything was quite tense in the run-up. The northern silks refused to move out of the building, saying it was theirs; we — the ones who actually worked there — said it was ours. Today it is increasingly common for chambers to set up in premises outside the Inns, but that wasn’t the case back then, and space was at a premium. Eventually Gray’s Inn — in this case the de facto landlord — managed to find us space in New Court Chambers, as they wanted to avoid a major fallout on their doorstep.

For the first time in my joint career of mother and barrister, I had some financial relief when I was expecting Kathryn. Three months after I fell pregnant, Gail Carrodus, the other female tenant in New Court Chambers, also fell pregnant. Unlike me, she was horribly sick and unable to work. Feeling desperately sorry, chambers offered her a three-month rent-free period, so I said, “Hello! Do you think I should have a rent-free period, too?” They agreed. We were one of the first chambers to do that, and eventually it was enshrined by the Bar Council in the 1990s.

With Gillian’s approval, I decided that this time I was going to have a home birth, not least because the hospital I’d used for Euan and Nicholas had closed its maternity wing. Every few weeks I would visit my GP to make sure that all was well, and from time to time I’d have a scan. I should have had one at thirty weeks, but work was picking up and I was just too busy. At thirty-four weeks the doctor said that I couldn’t postpone the scan any longer. I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. Scans were necessary for first-time mothers perhaps, but not experienced hands like me. I was feeling fine, and I thought the baby’s head was engaged. Nevertheless, I submitted.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Blair,” the technician in charge of the ultrasound said, sweeping my swollen belly. “That’s not the baby’s head that’s engaged; it’s the baby’s bottom. This is a breech.”

The doctor’s verdict was unequivocal: “You cannot possibly have a home birth. Indeed, I rather think we’re looking at a cesarean.”

I was so adamant that I didn’t want a cesarean that they took an X-ray of my pelvis.

“Well,” the doctor said as I stared at the X-ray, “if you want to kill yourself and your baby, then have a home birth. But otherwise you’re going to have a cesarean.”

I was booked in on March 3, 1988. A few days earlier, a computer had been delivered from chambers. We had just started to modernize, and I had resolved to teach myself how to use it. (Until then we had written everything by hand, and a typist would type it up.) As soon as I began to get the hang of it, I was hooked.

Tony had arranged to take me to the hospital the evening of March 2, and I decided to use the time beforehand typing an opinion on the computer, though I was barely able to reach the keyboard over the bump. I was aware that contractions had started, but I carried on anyway, while Gillian fussed in the background.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” she asked repeatedly.

“Quite sure. I’m just going to finish this advice.”

“I’m really not happy about this.”

“I’m fine. Really.”

“You are not fine, and I’m going to ring Tony to come now.”

I was still typing away when Tony arrived. When we got to the hospital, there was a line for emergency cesareans, and at that point I started to worry because of my experience with Nicky.

“I’m warning you,” I said to Tony, “if it’s a boy, I’m going to cry.”

Then came the epidural, which the doctor had agreed I could have rather than a general anesthetic. It took ten attempts to get the needle in, as I watched Tony turn whiter and whiter. Then, more quickly than seemed possible, the surgeon cut me open and scooped up the baby: a gorgeous baby girl. I cried anyway.

In fact, I was soon screaming.

“In about two percent of the population, the epidural doesn’t reach there,” the surgeon later explained as he immediately stopped stitching me up. He had no alternative, he said, but to knock me out, just briefly, to finish the job. I had to stay in the hospital for five days. When I got home, I read the advice I’d been writing on the computer when I’d left. Fortunately I had not had time to print out. It was complete and utter garbage.

My friend Francesca had also had a cesarean a few months before. She had married John Higham, one of the barristers who had done his Bar Finals at the same time as Tony and me. Like us, they had moved to Hackney, and their first baby had been born around the time I discovered I was pregnant with Euan. During those early days when I was an inexperienced mum at home on my own, she was very kind in showing me the ropes. She had a second baby a year before I had Nicholas. When she was feeding him, she noticed a lump in her breast. Her doctor, who was our doctor, too, thought it was an engorged milk gland. It wasn’t. By the time they realized it was cancer, it had already taken hold. She was operated on, and all seemed to go well, although the oncologist told her that she should not get pregnant again. But Francesca, who was half Italian, was a Catholic, and she did get pregnant, and the cancer returned. As soon as the baby was viable, she had her cesarean. It was a boy, and though tiny he lived. His mother did not. I went to her funeral just three days before Kathryn was born and wept for another life lost, another family left devastated by breast cancer.

Chapter 13

Moving On

I
n 1989 I received the ultimate accolade for a junior barrister when the Queen’s Counsel who had led me in a very difficult wardship case gave me a red bag. All barristers carry their robes in a blue bag, but a red one can be given only by a Queen’s Counsel for what he or she deems exceptional work. There is a whole ritual surrounding the presentation, including the £10 tip you are supposed to give the junior clerk who delivers the bag to your chambers.

Maggie Rae was the instructing solicitor in the case concerned, and everything about it had been difficult. The family of the children who had been taken into care were involved in prostitution. The grandmother was the madam of a brothel, and the mother was now putting her own children “on the game.” The evidence was harrowing. Now that I was the mother of a daughter myself, I was finding these family law cases increasingly hard to cope with. I remember one case involving a woman whose newborn baby had been taken into care. She was devoted to her child, but the baby had drug withdrawal symptoms when it was born. The mother was a heroin addict, and the medical view was that she was going to die. She was devastated when the baby was placed for adoption.

In another case, a young woman was accused of injuring her baby, but she denied it. We argued her case, and I convinced the magistrate that it hadn’t happened. The baby was delivered back to the woman on a Friday. By the next Monday she had called social services and said, “I did do it, and I can’t cope. Please take him back.” Otherwise, she said, she feared she’d hurt him again. The saddest thing about it was that now she was going to be prosecuted for perjury on top of everything else, and I thought,
Please, don’t do that
.

It was very difficult not to get emotionally involved. I represented one client who was accused of sexually interfering with his children, which he denied, but I was deeply dubious about his denials. His defense was quite straightforward: “Yes, I did beat them, I did commit physical violence against them, but I didn’t sexually abuse them.” After the second day of the trial, things were looking bad. When we arrived at court the following morning, we were told that he had committed suicide overnight. That wasn’t the end of it, however. The judge said that we had to continue with the case. The local authority wanted to make the findings a fact and to take the children into care. They didn’t want them to be handed back to the mother, who they believed was, at worst, complicit in the abuse or, at best, prepared to turn a blind eye. So that’s what happened: the defendant had given his evidence, and the judge duly found against him.

There came a point where I could no longer face the hideous things that some people do to their children. It seemed rarely to be a matter of simple sexual intercourse. A lot of it involved horrible acts that these people forced their children to perform, things that I then had to stand up and talk about in court as if it were the stuff of everyday life. Although the judges are all family law judges, and thus are familiar with most of these practices, barristers are obliged to go through the evidence point by point. I still think it’s a really important job — so many women’s issues throughout the world revolve around children and what happens when family relationships break down — but on a day-to-day basis, it was hard going, and luckily I had another string to my bow.