Speaking for Myself

by Cherie Blair

  During the years immediately following the discovery of my father’s other family, he kept in touch with his mother sporadically but rarely came home. There came a point where my mum became a more important part of the household than he was. My grandad was especially fond of her, and he consistently refused to have anything to do with my dad.

  From time to time Uncle Bob would see my father in London, and I remember on one visit to Liverpool, he showed me a photograph of my dad smiling broadly with Jenia, still a toddler, and a new addition: Bronwen, who had been born only a year later. I must have been upset — I can’t imagine that I wouldn’t have been — but whether I kept my feelings hidden at the time I can’t remember. As to why Bob showed the photo to me, who can tell? Perhaps he thought it was a way of easing me in gently.

  Over the next ten years or so, I saw my father only rarely. The first time, I was in the ninth grade at St. Edmund’s. Crosby Baths was a state-of-the-art indoor swimming pool recently built on wasteland behind Crosby beach. St. Edmund’s being just down the road, our class had been learning to swim. I have always been very uncoordinated physically and was as hopeless at swimming as I was at riding a bicycle (something I still can’t do). Nevertheless, at the end of term there was going to be a gala, and for some reason my dad came along, ostensibly to see me compete.

  When he arrived, there was pandemonium, as he had just appeared in the pilot for a new show called Till Death Us Do Part. The show had become an instant hit, and Tony Booth would soon become one of the most recognizable faces on television. Playing a left-wing, working-class Scouser (a character based on my father himself) made him a near god in left-wing, working-class Liverpool. But while everyone swarmed about him, I felt nonexistent.

  My father is not one of nature’s diplomats, and over the years, whenever he was interviewed in the newspapers, it was always his current daughters he talked about. At the time of the Crosby Baths gala, it was Jenia and Bronwen. Later their place would be taken by his next batch, Sarah (later known as Lauren) and Emma. I pretended I didn’t care. But I did.

  The only time I saw him at home was after my grandad died in September 1968. The death certificate said heart disease, but he’d been going downhill for some time because of his smoking. The heart got him before the lung cancer did.

  Grandad’s funeral was the first one that really affected me. I’d been only seven when my great-grandma had died, and Mum had decided I was too young to attend. I wasn’t unused to the rituals of Irish death, however. As my grandma’s favorite, I’d gone to any number of wakes when the various members of the Thompson clan had returned to their Maker. But Grandad was Grandad, and I was devastated. His body was laid out in our front room, and despite my mother’s protests, I insisted on seeing him.

  So there we all were in church — red-eyed and somber, waiting for the service to begin, while I tried not to stare at that horrible, shiny coffin where I knew his poor old body was lying, wondering what was going to happen to him when it was put into the ground, wondering how long he would have to stay in purgatory, whether God would have mercy on his soul and let him go straight up to heaven — when there was a sudden clattering and banging of the door and the thud of heavy footsteps crashing down the nave. And there was my dad, barging through the ranks of other family mourners to get to the front. It had been four years since I had last seen him at the Crosby Baths, and I clearly remember my fourteen-year-old self sitting there thinking, What is he doing here? It wasn’t just outrage that he couldn’t even turn up at the right time. My concern was largely for my mum and what she was feeling. I had reached the age where I was beginning to understand the wider implications of what he had done, specifically what it had meant to her. Ironically, although he had abandoned us, my sister and I were very much part of his family, in which he was inevitably a central, if absent, figure, whereas we were not really part of my mother’s family at all. That he was late to his own father’s funeral was in some ways predictable: Tony Booth was a man who knew how to say hello but never thought much about saying good-bye.

  I went on to Seafield Grammar after St. Edmund’s. Seafield was run by nuns, a French order called the Sacred Heart of Mary.

  From the seventy pupils in my year at St. Edmund’s, only four girls got into Seafield Grammar. One couldn’t go because her parents couldn’t afford the uniform. When Lyndsey followed me to Seafield three years later, she inherited my old blazer, and I got a new one. On her first day at school, she was singled out by the headmistress. “Why are you wearing that shabby blazer?” the headmistress demanded. Poor Lyndsey said later that she had stammered and blushed and wished the ground would open up and swallow her. The truth was, of course, that my mother couldn’t afford to buy two new ones, even though she got a discount, Seafield’s school outfitters being Lewis’s.

  By the late sixties, after years of being little more than an embarrassing joke, Liverpool had become the center of the universe. Although I had been too young to go to the Cavern and see the Beatles, we were all very proud to be Scousers. After all, it wasn’t only the Beatles; there were also the Searchers, the Swinging Blue Jeans, the Merseybeats, Cilla Black, Gerry and the Pacemakers, and dozens more, now forgotten. By the time I was old enough to go out, however, folk was my music of choice. Together with a friend from Seafield, I had learned to play the guitar, and we would do versions of traditional songs that the Spinners, a homegrown band that revived “Scarborough Fair” long before Simon and Garfunkel recorded it, were bringing to a wider audience. The Spinners became famous for songs about Liverpool, including “Maggie Mae,” about a Liverpool sailor and a prostitute — nothing like the later Rod Stewart version. Another favorite was “In My Liverpool Home”:

  I was born in Liverpool, down by the docks

  Me Religion was Catholic, occupation Hard-Knocks

  At stealing from lorries I was adept,

  And under old overcoats each night I slept

  Once I was a Seafield girl, I no longer saw my friends from primary school who had gone to St. Bede’s. It wasn’t that I was hostile to them; they were hostile to me. I was now “posh.”

  There were other changes, too, and it took me time to settle down. Relative to St. Edmund’s, the regime was strict. Although the majority of the teachers were not nuns, the sisters ran the school and lived in the convent attached to it. Skirts had to be a regulation two inches above the knee (though of course as we got older, we got bolder and were always hiking them up). The moment we got into school, we had to change our outdoor shoes for indoor shoes, and there was no running in the corridors. The nuns used to keep the oak floors polished like mirrors, and heaven help us if we transgressed.

  The worst aspect of life at Seafield was the school lunch. At St. Edmund’s I had been close enough to go home at midday. Seafield, however, was a good twenty minutes’ walk away; by the time I got home, it would be time to go back. Furthermore, I’d only ever had my grandma’s cooking, and she encouraged me to think that nobody else could meet her high standards. Faced with this dilemma, I could see only one solution: I didn’t eat.

  I had always been what in those days was called “painfully thin,” and the first sign that something was amiss was an asthma attack. It was then that the doctors decided I was malnourished. I could not go a whole day without food, they said, no matter how good a breakfast I had. By chance, my auntie Audrey lived only about fifty yards from Seafield, on the opposite side of the road. As her third baby had just been born, she was at home during the day and agreed to give me lunch. This arrangement continued until I was fourteen, when Auntie’s husband, my uncle Bill, was promoted to bank manager, at which point they sold their house and moved.

  Over those three formative years, Auntie Audrey and I became very close. I even started my periods at her house. Back then this was still considered something shameful and not to be discussed, but thanks to her, I was spared all of that. Though never an academic, she had always been politically aware. I was used to my grandad and the
other men in the family talking politics, but women largely kept out of these conversations. In retrospect I think it likely that I owe my early interest in politics to her. Whatever the trigger, by the time I was fourteen, when asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would answer, “Prime Minister!” Whether it was simply the smart-aleck reply of a teenager who wanted to impress, I don’t remember. What is in absolutely no doubt, however, is that in 1970, at the age of sixteen, I was committed enough to join the Labour Party.

  Chapter 4

  Convent Girl

  As far as academic progress was concerned, although I was always among the top students, I was never first in the class until I reached the sixth form. I was useless at languages, so until I could drop them, they pulled me down. Looking back, I realize that dropping them was a mistake, as, unusually for the time, I had every opportunity to get practical experience.

  Right from when we were small, Lyndsey and I had always gone away on holiday, usually day trips and drives to resorts in Wales. In hindsight I know that it was the one chance our mum had of having us to herself.

  Once my mother was transferred to Lewis’s travel department, however, our horizons broadened. As a matter of routine, counter staff were encouraged to take advantage of the subsidized travel offered by companies whose holidays they were selling, this being particularly important for new destinations. Mum could go free, and Lyndsey and I could tag along for a nominal cost.

  My first taste of “abroad” was a bus tour to Spain when I was around twelve. It was right at the beginning of the package-holiday era, when the Costa Brava was still relatively undeveloped. I was horrified by the toilets we had to use when we stopped, which were hole-in-the-floor affairs. To someone brought up with Grandma’s near-holy attitude toward toilet cleanliness, it was a salutary lesson. When we eventually reached Calella, then no more than a fishing village, I remember being astonished at seeing oranges and lemons growing on trees and having fresh juice to drink instead of sweetened concentrate.

  The following year we went to Italy, to a village on the Italian Riviera. This time we flew, and the whole thing seemed incredibly glamorous and exciting. I loved flying and still do. Our next trip was even more exotic — to Romania. As this was shortly after Grandad died, Mum felt obliged to take Grandma with us. I had never seen her so unnerved. First time out of England, first time on a plane, first time hearing foreign voices. Romania was still a communist country, and we had been advised to take tights as presents for the chambermaids. We flew into Bucharest, but we were mainly based in a down-at-heel resort on the Black Sea. As part of my mother’s research, we visited a health spa, where the treatment consisted of being covered entirely in mud. It was all very un-English, and although it might not have helped my language ability, it certainly gave me a fascination for the wider world.

  By this time my social life revolved around the Young Christian Students (YCS) — the best chance a good Catholic girl had of meeting a good Catholic boy, which for Seafield girls meant boys from St. Mary’s. Although the two schools faced each other across Liverpool Road, opportunities for getting to know one another were extremely limited. Hanging round the bus shelter rarely did the trick, and debating only really got going in the sixth form.

  I joined the YCS at the same time as several friends, who pretended to be scandalized when, at about age fifteen, I began going out with a boy in the year below me named Patrick Taaffe. (In fact, because I had skipped a grade, there was not much difference in our ages.)

  Patrick’s father was a general practitioner (GP) on the Scotland Road, which in those days was one of the roughest parts of inner Liverpool. The Taaffes were the first middle-class family I had ever come across. They lived in a detached house in Blundellsands, complete with drive, conservatory, and garage. They also had a holiday cottage in North Wales, and during the two years Patrick and I went out, they would take me there on weekends. It was another world.

  Patrick’s mother, Meriel, was a nurse, and she became very fond of me. (She and her husband even came to my wedding.) “You remind me so much of me when I was your age, Cherie,” she would say rather wistfully. She was a really bright woman who, though she would never admit it, had not fully realized her potential, and I think she wanted me to realize mine. Later, when the time came to think about university, it was Meriel who came up with the idea that would change my life.

  “You’re good at debating,” she said. “You’re good at drama. Have you ever thought about becoming a lawyer?”

  After the end-of-year exams, Dr. Taaffe gave me a job in his office helping out the receptionist over the summer. Occasionally he would give me a lift home after work. He’d usually have one or two visits to make, and rather than wait in the car, I’d go in with him. It was the first time I had come across this level of poverty, and I was shocked: no inside toilets; dirty, damp, and depressing; old back-to-backs and tenements; mold everywhere; too many children, their mothers hollow-eyed and worn down by everything.

  “You cannot imagine what they’re like,” I would tell my grandma after Patrick’s father had dropped me off.

  “Oh, but I can, young lady. We didn’t always live in this kind of luxury, you know.” Where she grew up, she said, the doors opened straight onto the street. There weren’t even sidewalks. The only people who lived there were fishermen and dockers. She called the women “fishwives” and said it was all they could do in those conditions to feed their kids and keep them clean.

  The central pillar of the YCS was community work. In the late sixties, inner-city Liverpool was being torn down, and people were being moved out to new suburbs. Even then it was obvious that the policy was a disaster. These new towns had been built with no social facilities: no doctors’ offices, no cinemas, no pubs, no bus links, nothing. They were just dormitories. The residents were completely isolated.

  The nearest of these to us was Kirkby, a few miles to the northeast of Crosby, and during the summer the YCS ran a summer school and a whole range of activities for the kids during the holidays. We were based in one of the local primary schools. Each project involved a twenty-four-hour commitment, and we slept on the floor in sleeping bags. On one level, of course, it was fun. I’m sorry to say that we probably wouldn’t have done it with such gusto if it hadn’t been. But I ended up feeling that whatever else you might say about where I lived, it was at least a real community. These new towns were not, and the people there knew it.

  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 behav
ior 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.