by Cherie Blair
For a long time I had an ambivalent relationship with my grandad. Of course I loved him, but whenever he came back from sea, I’d be ousted from my place, obliged to sleep on a camp bed in my mother’s room. My resentment was always short-lived. Who could resist someone who played all your favorite songs? The first Sunday he was back on shore, our front room would be filled with aunts, uncles, and cousins for a sing-along. Grandad would always start with “Thank Heaven for Little Girls,” dedicated to Lyndsey and me. Then one tune would flow into another, and we’d all join in, with people asking for their favorites, Broadway musicals mainly: My Fair Lady, South Pacific, West Side Story, and, best of all, The Sound of Music. There was a time when I knew every single word.
Grandad was not without vices. The first was horses: he was always trying different “systems,” but he never seemed to win. The second was smoking: cigarettes were cheap at sea, and he would get through forty untipped Senior Service a day. He coughed his guts out the last few years before he died. As a result, I have never touched a cigarette in my life. His third vice was drinking: not alcohol, but very strong tea sweetened with lashings of condensed milk, which also came in handy for sticking tiles on the wall in the bathroom whenever they fell off, a regular occurrence.
For the next eighteen months, my father worked in various theaters around the north, based with us but in reality visiting only on weekends. The only time he actually lived with us was when he did a season at Liverpool Playhouse, but when that came to an end, he headed back to London. Realistically it was the only place he could forge a career. Once he’d found somewhere to live, he told my mum, we’d join him. It never happened. It was during this time that he first played opposite Pat Phoenix, then an unknown actress called Patricia Dean, who would later become an important person in his life — and in mine.
Chapter 2
Growing Up
School was naturally St. Edmund’s Catholic Primary, where my father, Auntie Audrey, and Uncle Bob had all gone before me. The school was attached to St. Edmund’s Church, where Father Bernard Harvey, my grandma’s cousin — the one who had baptized me — was the parish priest.
I suppose that for the first day or two, I must have been taken to school, but from then on I would go on my own and later took Lyndsey with me. Hand in hand we would walk or skip down St. John’s Road, past Ronnie the cobbler, who had been at school with my dad and who always said hello. Farther along there was the pawnbroker’s on the corner, with a window made entirely of black glass that came down to the pavement. If you pressed your nose to the glass and raised an arm and a leg, you looked as if you were flying. Then we’d continue up over the railway. If a train was coming, we would stand on the footbridge and shriek as the steam billowed round us, lifting our skirts and warming our bare legs in winter. On the far side lay Little Scandinavia, a shortcut to school. The streets here were still cobbled, making the game of never stepping on the cracks far more challenging than on the hopscotch sidewalks of Ferndale Road. In the middle of this labyrinth, the rag-and-bone man kept his horse. In Crosby we had had miles and miles of dunes — you could even see the sea from my classroom window — but this was the nearest we got to the country. So whenever the old man wasn’t around, we would clamber up and peer over the wall at his poor horse. If the old man found us, he’d yell abuse and we’d scramble down, scraping our knees on the brick, then rubbing them better with lick. Another game was breaking empty milk bottles. All you had to do was pick one up, drop it, and then run down one of the entries before an aproned housewife could reach the door. One morning my friend Margot and I were spotted, and I’ll never forget the shame of having to stand in front of the whole school while our hands were rapped with a ruler.
On the way home we might stop at my uncle’s shop, a grocer’s cum sweetshop, and buy a piece of candy. We had to pay: Uncle Bill was far too canny a businessman to give anything away, even to us. He used to have these little cereal packets for display purposes, though, and when he changed the window, he’d let us have them to play shop.
As soon as I was old enough, I’d be sent out on errands — “messages,” as they were called. Grandma made us memorize her requests, and they had to be delivered word perfect or else. “Four nice, lean lamb chops, please, for Mrs. Booth.” God help either me or the butcher if they weren’t. The question for the baker was “Is it fresh?” If what he gave me turned out not to be, then woe betide. I’d be packed off back with the stale loaf, where my new line would be “Mrs. Booth is not satisfied.”
Life could not have been easy for my mother. From the beginning, her mother-in-law made it clear that, grandchildren or no grandchildren, we would have to pay our way. If anyone had expected my dad to support his family, they were mistaken. His career was going well, with work on both the stage and the small screen (television) steadily coming his way, but that made no difference. Thus Mum would get Lyndsey and me up and breakfasted and ready for school before setting off by bicycle toward Seaforth, two miles away. There she would work behind the counter of a small fish-and-chip shop from ten o’clock till two. Grandma would give us our lunch, but Mum would be back in Ferndale Road in time to give us our tea. She would work again from four to six, then come home to get us ready for bed before heading back on the bike for her final stint from eight till midnight. All for a princely four pounds ten shillings a week, enough to cover the rent of a small room.
It’s hard to imagine what working at the Seaforth chippie must have felt like for my mum. Only a few years earlier, Gale Howard had been a rising star at RADA, glamorous, accomplished (Jackie Collins had been one of her contemporaries), and with the world at her feet. Now here she was, serving penny packets of cod and chips and sausages to drunken sailors. I can just imagine the leers she got late at night. How long she suffered it, nobody remembers now. Months, certainly. Luckily salvation was at hand in the shape of Auntie Diane, her friend in Stoke Newington. Since qualifying as a designer, she had started work at Selfridges department store as a trainee buyer. Diane managed to get Mum an interview at Lewis’s, Selfridges’ parent company, whose flagship store was in Liverpool. Mum got the job.
Whereas an ordinary shop assistant’s wage was £7 a week, my mum went straight in at £11, nearly three times what the fish-and-chip shop was paying her. Every week from then on, she gave half of whatever she earned to her mother-in-law. In addition, she continued to do the washing and ironing — although the new job meant that we soon got a top-loading washing machine. Naturally she also bought our clothes. Another plus of working for Lewis’s was that she was entitled to a discount, which increased the longer she worked there. The bicycle was dispensed with, and from then on Mum took the bus, did a full day’s work, and then took the bus back in time to put us to bed. As for her own life, she put it on hold. For a while she kept nursing the hope that her husband would come back, but he didn’t. The money stopped; the visits stopped; there were no more telephone calls, or none that I remember, until the fateful one.
It was April 1963. The Easter holidays. I was eight, and Lyndsey was six. As a special treat, Mum had taken us to see Summer Holiday, a movie about a bus conductor who takes a London bus all the way to Greece for a holiday. We didn’t often go to the movies, and I’d been looking forward to it ever since I’d heard it was coming to Crosby. I already had a poster of Cliff Richard, the film’s star, pinned to my bedroom door. When we got back, Lyndsey and I were packed off upstairs to bed and banned from going downstairs again. Instead we played one of our favorite games, which we called “policewoman’s training.”
My grandma was always obsessed that burglars were about to come in and steal our nonexistent worldly goods. Policewoman’s training involved creeping downstairs, touching the front door, and rushing back up again, before Mum and Grandma, who would be watching television, could catch us. The rules were no noise and no giggling. Sometimes I’d lift Lyndsey onto the banister and give her a little shove so that she slid down to the bottom. On one occasion my hands slipp
ed, so instead of putting her on the rail, I pushed her right over, and she plummeted down into the hallway. There was a sudden scream from downstairs, then Lyndsey was bawling out at the top of her voice, “Cherie tried to kill me!”
Lyndsey was only winded, and neither of us was punished, but I still remember hiding behind my grandma’s bedroom door, shaking with fear.
On this particular Thursday night, we were playing policewoman’s training when the phone rang. Scuttling hurriedly back upstairs, I crouched outside the bathroom as my mum came into the hall and picked up the phone. She didn’t say anything, apart from hello at the beginning. Then suddenly she began to cry. I had seen her cry before, but nothing like this, and it was somehow worse because she didn’t say anything to explain it. Then my grandma came out and started hissing, “How could he? . . . It’s absolutely unforgiveable! . . . As for the Crosby Herald . . .” Then she put her arm round my mum, which was something she didn’t usually do.
Eventually they went back into the front room, and I just sat there on the landing, feeling my eyes prick as if I was going to cry. Then I found Lyndsey and told her that something terrible had happened, but I didn’t know what.
The next morning at breakfast, everyone was quiet. Mum had obviously been crying all night, but nothing was said.
“Why don’t you two run along to the park?” Grandma suggested.
So we did. The park was just at the end of our road. It was a lovely, sunny April day, and you could always find somebody to play with. I remember Lyndsey took her jump rope, and there was some discussion about whether we needed sweaters.
As soon as the other children saw us coming, they began staring and whispering. Finally I got up the courage to say something.
“What is it?” I asked one of my friends. “What are you looking at me like that for? What’s happened?”
“You should know,” she said, then shrugged and looked down at the ground. Then a group of boys started giggling and chanting my dad’s name.
“Tony Booth, Tony Booth, Tony Booth!”
Even though he hadn’t lived in Crosby for years, everyone knew who my father was. He was on the telly!
And then it all came out: the Crosby Herald was published on Friday, but the first edition appeared the night before, and that week, on the announcements page, top of the list, was the following:
BOOTH, Anthony, late of 15 Ferndale Road, Waterloo, and Julie née Allan proudly announce the arrival at the London Clinic of their daughter Jenia, a half sister for Cherie and Lindsay.
We had no idea. Mum had no idea. Grandma had no idea. Crosby had no idea.
It had generally been accepted in the family that my father had abandoned us, and by then Mum knew he was seeing someone else: she was even considering giving him a divorce. But when the new woman, Julie Allan, decided to force her hand with this announcement, it backfired spectacularly. Divorce was the one thing Mum could withhold.
It is difficult to overestimate the humiliation — to my mother, to his mother, and, of course, to his children. This was 1963, in the heart of Catholic Liverpool. People didn’t get divorced, or if they did, they didn’t talk about it. Girls who had the misfortune to get pregnant were sent away to convents to have their babies, who were then offered for adoption. As for “single parent,” it was a term that hadn’t yet been invented. To broadcast your sins to the world by placing an announcement in the local paper which everybody would read was a crime against society, against the church, and against everything any decent-minded person stood for.
And he hadn’t even spelled Lyndsey’s name right.
Chapter 3
Girlhood
Shortly after the painful business with my father, Uncle Bob, who had moved in with us, occupying my great-grandmother’s former room after her passing in 1961, left home. He, too, had decided that he was going to be an actor and had taken up a place at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London. All at once the house felt very empty. The sole advantage was that I was given his room, which I would gladly have done without to have him back. He had been more like a brother than an uncle, and in a fatherless household, he had contributed a healthy dose of masculinity. I also missed his car, a sparkling Triumph Roadster, which had facilitated numerous adventures.
Children can be horribly cruel to anyone they sense is vulnerable or different, and I remember standing in a corner of the playground, with taunts of the “you’re not a proper family” and “your dad doesn’t love you” variety ringing in my ears. Newton’s third law of physics tells us that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, and mine was to fight. I pulled hair. I punched. I bit. Friends stopped knocking at the door to ask if I could come out to play. Whether this was their own decision or their parents deciding that the Booths weren’t the kind of people they wanted their kids to mix with, I don’t know, but the effect was the same. I remember going down to the swings in the park, swinging as high as I could, my legs pumping away, wishing that a rope would break, and like Katy in the classic children’s book What Katy Did, I’d come crashing down, break my neck, and spend a lifetime as a cripple. Then they’d be sorry.
During those dreadful months, reading became my refuge. Although my grandmother had no education worth the name, she had always been a great reader and would pass on books she thought I might like, books that were far more sophisticated than a ten-year-old usually had access to. One of her favorite authors was Daphne du Maurier, and in Frenchman’s Creek and Jamaica Inn, I could escape from the misery of the playground to nineteenth-century Cornwall and beyond. It was thanks to her that I discovered Wuthering Heights and fell in love with Heathcliff, Emily Brontë’s dark-skinned orphan from Liverpool. Luckily Mrs. Savage, my teacher, was a woman of both sensitivity and sense. I had read my way through all the children’s books in the local library, so not only did she arrange with the library to bend the rules and let me borrow adult books, but as the summer term drew to a close, she spoke to my mother and suggested that the following September I skip a year in school. I was bored, she said, and it was no wonder I was getting into trouble. It was simply that I wasn’t being stretched.
I remember my mum sitting on my bed that night, holding my hand and telling me what had been decided — and yet warning me at the same time.
“Now remember, Cherie, you’re going to be with children a whole year older than you, and it’s going to be difficult.”
Even so, it seemed as if I had won some sort of small victory, and my recent experience of trial by taunt only served to strengthen my resolve. I was, as my grandma used to say, “contrary.” If my mum was saying it would be difficult, I’d show her she was wrong.
I succeeded. At the end of the year, my final year at St. Edmund’s, I finished at the top of the class, and I remain convinced that it was the prompt action of this caring and farsighted teacher that stopped me from going completely off the rails.
The only thing that really suffered by my missing a year was my handwriting. To catch up, I had to do extra arithmetic while the others in the class were having handwriting lessons. As a result, it is still absolutely terrible (my grandad would be appalled). By the time I was in secondary school, it was too late for remedial treatment.
That last year at primary school was a magical time for me. Mr. Smerdon was one of those charismatic teachers you never forget. He had been a fighter pilot in the war and would devote hours recounting his experiences. However unconventional his instruction, it certainly did me no harm. A larger-than-life figure, he had theatrical aspirations and would occasionally disappear to London for auditions. He was also in charge of the school choir, of which I became a very enthusiastic member. He became a significant male presence in my life, the sort of man my father might have been if he had not left home.
Now that we didn’t have Uncle Bob to take us out, Grandma decided we needed a car of our own. So in 1964, in an uncharacteristic act of generosity and folly combined, she bought a Mini. I can still remember the number p
late: ALV 236B. She had no intention of driving it herself; this masterpiece of modern engineering and design was for Grandad.
Grandfather loved that Mini and was ridiculously proud of it. There was one small problem, however: he couldn’t pass his driving test. I don’t know how many times he took it, but he always failed. It didn’t stop him from driving, although he never went very far. He and Grandma would take us down to the seafront, where Lyndsey and I could play on the beach while they watched the great ocean liners, including the Queen Elizabeth and Queen Mary, make their stately way from the docks to the open sea, bound for New York. Grandad had retired by this time, due to his bad heart, but the sea and ships were still in his blood.
Otherwise life in Ferndale Road continued much as usual: Mum went out to work, and Grandma stayed at home. Mum did the washing and the ironing, while Grandma did the cooking. She was what was known in those days as a plain cook, but a good one. The menu never varied. Sunday: roast shoulder of lamb. Monday: leftovers. Tuesday: mutton stew with potatoes. Wednesday was baking day, and we’d have steak and kidney pudding and apple pie. Nobody could make pastry like my grandma. Thursday was the “four nice, lean lamb chops” I’d learned to ask for. Friday was inevitably fish and chips, and Saturday was mincemeat pie. And so it continued, week in, week out. We rarely had chicken, which, in those days, before factory farming, was expensive. Shoulder of lamb was cheap (if bony), and the great Sunday treat was gnawing the sweet meat off the bone. I will never forget Grandma’s mortification when, right in the middle of Mass, my cousin Catherine shouted, “Grandma, are we having bones for dinner?”
Sunday Mass was an important ritual. It wasn’t simply our weekly appointment with God; it was the weekly get-together of the various branches of the family. The only person who didn’t participate was my mother, although she’d always come to the big celebrations, such as my first Holy Communion and Easter. Whatever the current crisis, standards had to be upheld, so we would always dress up in our best coats and hats. When I was very young, the Mass was entirely in Latin, even the gospel readings. Then, as the Second Vatican Council began to take effect, the gospel at least was in English, though sung High Mass remained in Latin. (This at least had the advantage that I can now understand the service wherever I am in the world.)