Speaking for Myself (7 page)

It turned out that David’s mum had gone bananas about his seeing me, just as he’d predicted. Although he’d denied that anything had “happened” the previous night, she was not convinced. If he continued to see me, she said, she would cut off his allowance, which would mean an end to his university career. She had already been telling him that she thought I was after his money, and in her eyes “making” him stay out all night showed that my motives were dishonorable.

“He says to tell you that he’ll have to lie low for a few days, give her a few days to calm down, but you shouldn’t try to call him,” Michael said.

“Don’t worry,” I told him. “It’ll be all right. I know it will.” I stood on the doorstep and watched him walk back down Ferndale Road toward the park.

Later that night, as we were watching TV, the phone rang. “That’ll be for you, Cherie,” Grandma said with a nod of her head.

I sighed. The idea that I wasn’t good enough for Mrs. Attwood would drive her mad. I didn’t rush to get it. It wouldn’t be the one person I wanted it to be.

I was wrong. I felt a rush of blood to my head when I recognized David’s voice. “I thought you weren’t going to call,” I said.

“I had to,” he said, then paused. “Something awful’s happened.” Gradually I began to make sense of what he was saying. About an hour after Michael had been to see me, he’d collapsed playing golf. They’d taken him to the hospital and found that he had an enlarged spleen. Leukemia. Our little difficulties suddenly seemed unimportant.

From then on, there was no more talk about splitting us up. I didn’t see Mrs. Attwood before I went back to London. When I was next in Crosby, she barely noticed I was around. There were more important things in life than worrying about whether David was involved with the right kind of girl.

Nine months later Michael was dead. The funeral was really shocking. I had been to family funerals before, and Grandad’s had been painful for all sorts of reasons. But even Grandad, important as he was to me, had been old. This was entirely different. The church was full of boys from St. Mary’s — sixteen, the same age as Michael, the same age as Lyndsey. For Dr. Attwood it was terrible. You could sense what he was feeling just by looking at him. There he was, a doctor, and he couldn’t even save his own son.

It was around this time that I renewed contact with my dad, perhaps sensing that life is too short to hold grudges against the people you love. My grandma had always wanted me to keep in touch with him, and in her own way so had my mother, though her feelings were obviously more complicated.

Following my grandad’s funeral, things had begun to thaw a bit between my parents. By then my dad’s relationship with Julie Allan, Jenia and Bronwen’s mother, had ended. His drinking had finally become too much for her, and she had gone to America, taking her daughters with her. Her father was a successful Canadian screenwriter, who she knew would provide both practical and emotional support for his grandchildren. From my mum’s perspective, this made things easier. For my dad, however, it was devastating. He didn’t see his girls for years.

When I was about eleven, my dad started writing to Lyndsey and me. He also sent us books. The first one I remember was a leather-bound
Pride and Prejudice,
which I fell in love with. Most, however, were rather more radical or eccentric in nature. I particularly remember
The Female Eunuch
by Germaine Greer and later
The Doomsday Book: Can the World Survive?
by Gordon Rattray Taylor. (I got off lightly. He sent Lyndsey
Portnoy’s Complaint
.) The
Doomsday Book
was an early broadside on the environmental disaster that was about to be unleashed on the world. Not surprisingly, with books like these I found plenty to write back to him about, and so a relationship gradually developed. Not so with Lyndsey; she never replied. Because she was so close to our mother, I think she always felt his betrayal more acutely than I did.

My father was now famous. He was the living embodiment of the opinionated loudmouth he played on the hit TV series
Till Death Us Do Part.
One of the most popular comedy shows in British television history, it ran from 1966 through 1975. As a prominent Labour supporter, Tony Booth had even been invited to Downing Street by Harold Wilson, which made me immensely proud. He completely inhabited the character of the Scouse Git: when he wasn’t spurring on left-wing politicians, he was haranguing Tories.

In 1970 he was back in the headlines as one of the original cast of
Oh! Calcutta!
an “erotic revue” in which the actors, male and female, performed naked. The mix of serious, if explicit, writing and full-on nudity was described by critics as groundbreaking. Cringe making would have been my verdict — not that I ever saw it.

My father’s potential for embarrassment proved endless. In 1974, in my second year at the LSE, he costarred in
Confessions of a Window Cleaner,
a sort of X-rated version of a more mainstream, low-budget British comedy. Needless to say, I didn’t see that either. My grandma wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity to see her errant son on-screen, however, and when it came on at the Waterloo Odeon, she informed the box office that she was the star’s mother, demanded a free ticket, and got it. She told me afterward that she couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. It was a huge commercial success and led to several more
Confessions of . . .
films, each one a source of acute misery for me. Jibes by fellow students were the least of it; most children find their parents’ sexuality faintly disturbing. But having it be so public was even more difficult. The paradox is that at the same time I was appalled, I was immensely proud of my father — proud of what he’d achieved in his chosen profession, proud of his forthright views on politics, proud that I was his daughter.

Successful though he was in the public perception, he was a complete disaster in his private life. After Julie Allan left him, he started drinking even more heavily and smoking cannabis — another reason my mum was nervous about my seeing him. By then he had fathered two more daughters, Sarah and Emma, by a woman named Susie Riley, whom my dad had met when reeling from Julie’s departure. Susie was a model, and my father now describes their relationship as “mutually ruinous.” By the time I met Sarah and Emma, they were perhaps five and two. I would regularly go to my father’s flat in West Heath Road, Hampstead, to babysit. Things were not good there. There were times when the girls had to get themselves up and dressed. There was no structure in their lives. Even if I hadn’t planned to, I’d often stay the night, as I just couldn’t leave these so-called parents in charge of my half sisters.

Although I didn’t analyze it at the time, I suspect this was one reason I never got involved with drugs myself, although there were plenty of them around. I don’t even remember being tempted. If your father is behaving like that, it’s guaranteed to put you off. Who wants to look that stupid?

As far as Sarah and Emma were concerned, I did what I could when I could, but an instinct for self-preservation kept me at a reasonable distance. The only stability in their lives was provided by Susie’s parents, who would take the girls on weekends and give them some love and affection.

At the end of my third year at the LSE, it was clear that I was going to get a top-class degree, so my tutors were encouraging me to do my bachelor of civil law (BCL), the master of arts (MA) of law. The next stage in my student career should have been straightforward. Following my bachelor’s degree at the LSE — a First, the highest grade awarded — I was invited to study for my master’s at Wadham College Oxford. But when I was offered a scholarship to study for the Bar exams at Lincoln’s Inn, I decided that was a better option. Although an academic career had its attractions, the life of a practicing barrister had more instant appeal.

As an undergraduate, I had been lucky enough to spend three years in residence halls, but “home” was now a hideous bed-sit in Weech Road, West Hampstead. The one time my grandma came down to see me — bringing some pots and pans she thought I might need — she cried her eyes out because she thought it was so awful. For her, cleanliness was everything, and I can see her now, peering round the bathroom door, nearly apoplectic. London water is notoriously full of iron, and the combination of lime scale and rust made everything in the plumbing line look disgusting. Elsewhere, the bed-sit was the usual thing for those days: dirty linoleum; peeling paint; windows you couldn’t see out of; electric and gas meters into which you’d put a coin and which would always run out at the worst possible moment. I shared a couple of gas rings on the landing with another girl, and I didn’t have a fridge; I kept anything that needed to be refrigerated on my windowsill.

At the LSE there had been a fair sprinkling of women, but the Bar was still overwhelmingly masculine. That year was the first time the number of women at Lincoln’s Inn exceeded 10 percent. During the formal dinners there, a group of us tended to sit together, and I was the only girl.

The main way of learning to be a barrister is by watching and helping an experienced junior barrister, known as a pupil master. In those days this was very much a hit-and-miss affair. Some pupil masters took their teaching duties seriously; others saw their pupils as unpaid servants. Of all the specialties, commercial law is the most lucrative, but I had already decided it was not for me. In the end I opted for employment law. I thought it would be intellectually challenging, and from a career perspective it had one overriding advantage: it was all very new, so there was a real shortage of people doing it.

When I consulted the professor who had taught me employment law about pupil-master possibilities, he told me that very few practitioners were holding themselves out as employment lawyers, and he could recommend only three names.

One of them was Alexander Irvine, more usually known as “Derry,” and he was anything but a traditional barrister. He was larger than life: overweight, bullish, and blunt. Derry spun me the line that he was a down-to-earth, working-class boy who’d gone to Glasgow University and somehow ended up at Cambridge. In many ways I understood where he was coming from.

Because you shadow your pupil master for a year, the relationship is crucially important. Pupil masters form the core of your professional life. If things go well, you hope to be taken on — given tenancy, as it’s called — in the same set of chambers, so developing a good personal relationship is crucial.

The interview with Derry didn’t start well.

The first thing he said was “Why are you wearing that dress?”

“What’s wrong with it?” I asked. It was dark blue with a paisley pattern, and I had been rather pleased with it. I was very thin in those days, and as it was ruched round the waist, it made the most of my not-very-curvy figure.

“Don’t you know lady barristers are supposed to wear black and white?”

I remember thinking,
What a nerve! It’s all right for you with all your money, but this is the only smart dress I’ve got, and I have to wear it for other things besides being interviewed by pompous barristers.

What I actually said was “Well, this is the only decent dress I’ve got, and I bought it especially for interviews. So sorry it isn’t black.”

It clearly did me no harm, as he offered me a pupilage there and then, or as he put it, “Okay, you can start in July.”

“And just one more minor thing,” he added as I was leaving. “I’ve half-promised this place to somebody else, some fellow from Oxford.” Then he paused and gave me a broad smile. “But don’t you worry about that. I’ll get rid of him, and I’ll take you instead.”

I had won an entrance scholarship to Lincoln’s Inn, but there were also major scholarships intended to help fund the year of pupilage. Once again the blue paisley dress was dusted down, and on the appointed day I found myself in the anteroom sitting next to another scholarship hopeful. His suit was far less appropriate than my blue dress, I decided, being made of some kind of tweed, an old-fashioned thing complete with cuffs. He had obviously been privately educated in what the British rather confusingly call a public school, which is anything but. Equally obviously, he had just had his hair cut. As there were only the two of us sitting there, I decided to break the silence.

“I think we must have names close to each other,” I said by way of introduction. “My name’s Cherie Booth.”

“Then I’ll be going in before you,” he said. “Tony Blair.”

He smiled — a wide, broad smile. His voice wasn’t as public school as I thought it would be from his appearance. Indeed, there was a slight accent I couldn’t place. Only later did I realize that it was a hint of Scottish left over from his time at Fettes College, a boarding school just outside Edinburgh.

We talked for a few minutes, then I asked him whether he had got pupilage yet.

“Yes, thank goodness. Two Crown Office Row. Derry Irvine. What about you?”

For once in my life I was speechless. I was about to say something when he was called in.

Chapter 6

Brief Encounter

I
n order to boost my limited income I had taken a part-time post teaching law at the Polytechnic of Central London. In the spring and summer of 1976, I spent most of my nonteaching hours in the Lincoln’s Inn library. While everyone else took a break at lunchtime, I stayed: reading, making notes, and eating my sandwich. Even with the money I got from teaching, I had to eke things out. Every week I would buy a loaf of bread and a little round box with six triangles of processed cheese wrapped in silver foil. I would keep them out on the windowsill and make up one sandwich every day, the cheese getting softer and softer as the summer built up to a heat wave. It was all I could afford.

Although I didn’t know it at the time, my lunchtime eating habits were being watched.

“You know, Tony Blair quite fancies you,” an odd but clever chap called Charles Harpum told me one evening as we were dining in the Great Hall — one of the obligatory twelve dinners, an old tradition dating back to the sixteenth century — the only times I would have what my grandma would call a proper meal.