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Authors: Cherie Blair

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BOOK: Speaking for Myself
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The alternative to working in the community was a week of spiritual reflection, and the following summer I went to one such retreat in a town called Rugeley. It was 1971, and peace and love were breaking out all around. The YCS retreat was no exception: there was a lot of scurrying about in the dark while more saintly souls sang songs round the campfire. In the daylight hours the debate was as much political as spiritual. As revolutionaries went, we were pretty tame. Nonetheless, we saw ourselves as part of a kind of “workers of the world unite” movement. It was all vaguely left-wing Christian socialism.

Until then the only boys I’d met through the YCS had gone to St. Mary’s. But the boy I was scurrying around with in Rugeley lived in Leeds, a distance that required a certain amount of ingenuity to keep the romance going. His name was Steven Ellis, and he was the national secretary of the YCS, so my friends were dead impressed. We could write to each other, but that took time. Best was the telephone, but in those days it was still very expensive, particularly long distance, and when it came to making calls, Grandma was very strict. She had a specially designed money box on the hall table next to the phone which said, “Phone from here when e’er you will, but don’t forget to pay the bill.”

As long as you weren’t the one doing the phoning, you could talk as long as you liked. So Steve and I developed a wonderful scheme — though with hindsight, scam would be a more appropriate description. Steve would ring from a call box — his family didn’t have a phone — I’d answer it, then close the door to the hall. This was considered perfectly reasonable behavior if your young man was phoning you. Then very quietly I’d put down the receiver and dial him straight back — and nobody was the wiser!

After a few months of this mild deception (as I saw it), the inevitable happened. A phone bill arrived. A very substantial phone bill. My grandmother went berserk: the bill for that one quarter exceeded the total of the entire previous year, and she just couldn’t account for it. It had to be a mistake, she said. So naturally she called the telephone company to give them an earful.

“There’s been a mistake,” she said.

“I’m afraid not, Mrs. Booth. There’s no mistake.”

I genuinely hadn’t realized just how much my little chats were costing, and I knew that if I didn’t own up, the blame would fall on my mother. I had no choice. To say I got a tongue-lashing is putting it mildly. I couldn’t pay because I didn’t have any money. In the end it was my poor mum who had to foot the bill, but at least she wasn’t blamed. There were no more phone calls after that.

If my relationship with Steve was to continue (and it did, though not for too much longer), hitchhiking was the only answer. In fact, it proved so successful that from then on, I hitched all over the country.

Although the nuns knew that I was doing well in school, they didn’t see fit to communicate the good news to either me or my mother. At the final awards ceremony, she was shocked to discover that I had won all the prizes except the one for religion. As I kept going up to the dais to collect the various awards, Mum was falling under the seat with embarrassment, she said. My reports had been nothing exceptional, and as for parents’ evenings, when in the normal course of events you might expect a bit more depth, the nuns would tell her nothing beyond the fact that they couldn’t read my handwriting, and it was a shame she hadn’t done something about it earlier. Why did they treat her like this? Because she didn’t have a husband. For all their lip service about independence and individuality, when it came right down to it, they were the same as everybody else, and my poor mother, who had given up her career and worked hard all her life to do the best she could for us, was treated with disdain.

Meriel Taaffe couldn’t have known how well her idea of a law career would be received back in Ferndale Road. My grandmother had always been an admirer of strong, independent women who made a mark on the world, and Rose Heilbron, the most famous defense lawyer of her generation, fulfilled those criteria. She was a true pioneer: The first woman to win a scholarship to Gray’s Inn, one of the four professional associations to which every English barrister must belong. The first woman to become a King’s Counsel, the most senior sort of lawyer. The first woman to be defense counsel in a murder trial. The first woman judge to sit at the Old Bailey. As Rose was married to a Liverpool doctor, she continued to practice on the northern circuit, with chambers (as barristers’ offices are called, from the days when they lived in them) in Liverpool. From time to time my grandmother would go down to watch her in action at the Crown Court — when trials were still conducted in the baroque splendor of St. George’s Hall — and come back glowing.

If that wasn’t enough, Rose was also beautiful, and by the 1950s, with dozens of murder trials to her name, she was a celebrity in her own right, to the extent that a television series was based on her. Called
Justice,
it starred Margaret Lockwood. At my grandmother’s instigation, I watched the actress dishing out justice on TV in her wig and gown, and when Meriel Taaffe made her suggestion, that image shot into my mind: I could be another Margaret Lockwood!

The big question now was which university? No one in either the Booth or Thompson family had ever done such a thing, so I had no one to advise me. The London School of Economics (LSE) was the last one on my list of five, put there in part to annoy the nuns, who thought I had rebellious tendencies anyway. In the early 1970s, the LSE was seen as a hotbed of revolution. Many of my Liverpool contemporaries considered London to be one step short of hell, but it wasn’t that off-putting to me. My dad lived there. Uncle Bob lived there. My mum went to London regularly for her work. So when the LSE made me an offer, I didn’t wait to hear about the other places I’d applied to. I accepted straightaway.

As for the nuns, they continued to disapprove. They didn’t understand why I couldn’t have stayed in Liverpool. Or if I really wanted to spread my wings, Manchester was very good. “Lots of Seafield girls go there,” they said. Exactly.

“You know, Cherie, you could be a good leader, but you’re very headstrong. If you go to London, you had better be careful.”

They didn’t have high expectations of me, and who could blame them? During my time in the sixth form, I set a world record for late marks. I wasn’t that keen on assembly and often wouldn’t bother to turn up until it was finished. The nuns turned a blind eye because they recognized my academic potential.

I’d always had holiday jobs. The first had been with Dr. Taaffe in the summer of 1969, but as soon as I could, I went to work at Lewis’s, for all the obvious reasons. The summer of 1971 they put me in the baby clothes department — about which I knew absolutely nothing. Like my grandma, though, I have always loved children, so it couldn’t have been better. The following summer, as soon as I’d finished my A levels (advanced school-leaving exams), I started in the school-outfitting department, about which I knew considerably more. On the same floor, just along from me, was gents’ outfitting, where I couldn’t help but catch the eye of another student who looked equally bored. His eyes were blue, and he was slim and dark, with hair considerably longer than St. Mary’s boys were allowed. He even had a cute-looking beard! With his John Lennon glasses and well-cut clothes, he was the last word in trendiness. We started taking breaks at the same time, chatting over coffee in the canteen. His name was David Attwood, and he was two years older than me and at Liverpool University reading law. His father was a GP who worked in Scotland Road, in the very same practice as Dr. Taaffe. Like the Taaffes, the Attwoods lived in Blundellsands. With all these coincidences, we had plenty to talk about.

Toward the end of the summer, Mum took us off on our annual holiday, this time to Ibiza, when it was just an ordinary holiday island, with none of the hard-drinking, hard-dancing reputation it later gained. Imagine my surprise when whom should I see on the beach but my fellow flirt from gents’ outfitting! He was there with a group of friends from university. It was the perfect holiday romance: sun, sea, sand, and sangria. As for my mother, she was putty in his hands.

I was due to leave for the LSE at the end of September, but David and I made full use of the few weeks left to us back in Crosby. The weather was still lovely and the evenings still long. The one fly in this romantic ointment was the Blundellsands-Waterloo divide. With the Taaffes it had never been a problem, but although David’s mother had always been fine with me, he thought it prudent to play it safe. He told her only that I lived near Merchant Taylors’, the smart Protestant school that is a Crosby landmark, which wasn’t entirely a lie. Eventually she would find out exactly where I lived, and just as David had suspected, all hell broke loose.

Chapter 5

Student Life

O
n September 24, 1972, the day after my eighteenth birthday, my mum and I took the train from Liverpool to London. The night before, I’d had a combined birthday and farewell party at home with a few of my YCS friends and made a little speech saying how I owed everything to my mum — sentiments that were overtaken by my embarrassment as she burst into tears when the time came to leave me at the residence hall.

The term didn’t start till the following week, but first-year students, called freshers, arrived early to get the hang of things. As the first in my family to go to university, I hadn’t considered a few basics — such as where I was going to live. Although the school had found me a place for the short term, I needed a more permanent solution. I was sent to an address in Pembridge Villas, Notting Hill, which turned out to be a lodging house for the Digby Stuart Teacher Training College — run by the nuns of the Sacred Heart: dormitory accommodation and in by ten. I could just imagine what they must have thought: good Catholic girl, barely eighteen — a convent is the very thing. Well, they thought wrong. I was not going into a convent. I did not want to be a good Catholic girl. I intended to put all that behind me and have a bit of fun. I went straight back to Passfield Hall, the residence hall in the heart of Bloomsbury, in central London, where I’d been staying till then. Somehow, after a plea that would not shame a defense counsel in a murder trial, I was squeezed into a room with two other girls: Caroline Grace and Louise Oddy, both of whom were also studying law.

The LSE differs from all other English universities in that it has always been political. Though now part of the University of London, it was originally set up at the end of the nineteenth century by Beatrice and Sidney Webb, founders of the Fabian Society, who believed in advancing socialist causes by reformist rather than revolutionary means. Its full name is the London School of Economics and Political Science, and the Fabians envisioned it as a research institution that would focus on the problems of poverty, inequality, and related issues. Certainly in the seventies, this ethos remained at the heart of the place — one of the reasons I’d decided to go there. Instead of teaching law in order to churn out solicitors (lawyers who advise clients and represent them in lower courts, as opposed to barristers, who try cases before higher courts), the LSE saw the subject more in terms of its impact on every area of political and economic life. This was the kind of work I saw myself doing — helping in the more politically relevant areas where ordinary people were traditionally shortchanged by lawyers.

In fact, during those first few years in London, I was in too much of a hurry to get on in the world to waste my time on fashionable student politics. There was a Labour club, but I wasn’t active.

That first term David Attwood came down from Liverpool a couple of times to see me, but sharing a room with two other girls didn’t leave much space for romance. Things weren’t much easier when I got back to Crosby. He would borrow his mother’s car, and we’d park on Marine Road, where street lighting was at a minimum. The sand dunes were still there, of course, but December on the banks of the Mersey is cold, and no amount of youthful passion could cope with the near-zero temperatures.

I’d been so looking forward to coming home that I hadn’t realized how quickly I’d got used to my new life. My family was inordinately proud of me but knew nothing about universities, hadn’t a clue about what I did or what any of it meant. As for the law, with its arcane vocabulary, that was a foreign country. It was as if a chasm had opened up between us, a split in the earth that would only grow wider.

I began to see how unworldly they were. At Passfield Hall I’d have a shower every day. At Ferndale Road I’d have a bath once a week, because hot water was heated by our coal fire in the sitting room. Lyndsey and I would go first, and then my mum and grandma would use the same water, with a kettle or two added to keep it hot. Meanwhile we’d wash our hair and sit in front of the fire and let it dry. If we needed a heater upstairs — for example, if someone was ill — there was a paraffin stove. I can still remember that smell.

That Christmas David took me out to my first restaurant — a steak house a few miles up the coast. I can remember even now what I had: shrimp cocktail, followed by steak, some sort of ice cream, and an Irish coffee. I imagine there was wine or sherry. I arrived back home in a state of near bliss, swiftly dented by my grandma’s comment: “a waste of money when it could have been spent on good home cooking.”

On New Year’s Eve, David took me to a party given by student friends of his in Liverpool, and we stayed out all night. When we eventually got back, my mum was fine about it. I remember her saying that she hoped I’d been careful.

Later that afternoon there was a knock at the door. It was David’s younger brother, Michael. I was upstairs.

“Cherie, there’s someone to see you,” my mother called. I peered down to see Michael standing on the step looking cold and miserable. I immediately sensed that something was wrong. Michael had never been to our house before.

“What’s wrong? Is David okay?” I asked.

“He’s okay, but . . .”

“You’d better come in,” I said. “You’ll catch your death standing out there.”

BOOK: Speaking for Myself
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