Speaking for Myself

by Cherie Blair

  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

  On 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 Decemb
er 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.”

  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 an
d 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.