by Cherie Blair
Just because I was pregnant, I saw no reason to slow down. Now that Tony was MP for Sedgefield, he was up there every weekend, and I’d go with him, though usually on a later train. Then as now, on a Friday night it would be standing room only. Young and healthy as I was, this was a strain the bigger I got, not least because I had usually been on my feet in court earlier in the day.
I was due on January 29, 1984. At my first checkup after Christmas, I was told that the baby was too small. “The baby is not receiving sufficient nourishment,” the doctor said. “You are doing too much. At eight months this workload is completely unacceptable.”
I was taken to the hospital for bed rest and went nearly mad with boredom. After ten days, there being no improvement, they said they wanted to induce me. I wasn’t keen, I said.
“Mrs. Blair, your baby is not growing. It’s not a question of not being keen.”
Tony and I had gone to all the birthing classes, and I had fully expected to have my baby naturally. But they broke my water and put me on an IV, and immediately I was right into a very painful experience. My firstborn made his appearance at about eleven-thirty, on January 19, 1984, after an epidural and a high-forceps delivery. So much for natural childbirth.
As birth experiences go, it was utterly ghastly, including a third-degree tear, because they yanked him out. It was the human equivalent of going from zero to sixty in five seconds. Lyndsey and Tony’s sister, Sarah, were now sharing a flat, and when they arrived at the hospital, I was still in trauma. There was blood all over the place, and Sarah said it put her off having babies forever. Luckily for the future of the planet, a new mother quickly forgets the pain as she is overwhelmed by love for this perfect little person. This was certainly my experience, and from the first blink of those little unfocused eyes, the curl of those tiny fingers, I was hooked. We called this precious creature Euan, after Euan Uglow and also a school friend of Tony’s who had died far too young.
Tony had been there since the induction. It would be nice to say that his presence had made all the difference. It would be wrong. He was completely useless. Like practically all new fathers, he hadn’t been expecting it to be quite so gory. My husband has always been good at empathizing, but when it comes to childbirth, empathy only goes so far. Once Euan was cleaned and wrapped and smelling delicious, however, Tony’s pride and delight in his son was such that you’d think he had taken more than a queasy spectator’s role. He made up for it later, becoming as adoring and hands-on a dad as anybody could wish for. That afternoon Tony told me I had a visitor. I was about to have my picture taken, he informed me, by a photographer from the Northern Echo: Sedgefield MP, wife, and newborn son being the theme. I think the caption was something like “Euan Brings Labour for Labour.”
I was given a rubber ring to sit on so that at least I could force a smile. As the guy went about his business, focusing and clicking, all I could think was An appearance before the highest court in the land is a cakewalk compared to this. I am never going to do this again.
My last thought as I went to sleep that night was of my husband: I hate this man.
Euan was comparatively small, so the numerous hats and coatees I had knitted, though far too big, came in handy, as he needed to be kept very warm. He was both families’ first grandchild, and we were well looked after: my mum came down, then Auntie Audrey, then Olwen. But it couldn’t last. I needed to get back to work; I needed a nanny.
Euan was christened in Sedgefield, and that same weekend I found Angela, who stayed with us for four years. I had advertised in the Northern Echo because I wanted someone who wouldn’t mind spending time in the northeast. Angela was a farmer’s daughter from North Yorkshire with a strong Yorkshire accent and a passion for Manchester United soccer. A down-to-earth girl, then in her midtwenties, she had already worked for a couple of other families. She spoke her mind and was completely trustworthy and sensible, and we just clicked.
No matter how confident I was that Angela would care for Euan as well as, if not better than, I could have, it was incredibly hard for me to leave him. Apart from the first few weeks, I’d had sole care of him; to hand him over to somebody else was torture. We had our own little routine; everything was a pleasure and a game. For four months the center of my world had resided in this small, helpless creature. I was still breast-feeding when I went back to work, and my breasts had no scruples in showing exactly how they felt. Sometimes I’d be sitting in court, aware only of the intense pain of the swelling and knowing that by the time I got out, my bra would be soaked. I would express milk with a breast pump in chambers during the day, put it in the fridge, and then take it home for the next day.
It was hard, but I didn’t dare slow down. I’d put in so much effort to build up my practice that it would have been mad to let it go, particularly at a time when Tony had effectively given up his. Tony’s election had already put an end to any thoughts of standing for Parliament myself. There wasn’t a pact between us, as has been speculated; it was simply impractical. Nor can I say I minded. I loved my job, and with Tony a committed MP (I knew even then he was determined to go as far as he could), I would get all the exposure to politics I wanted — and then some.
Our first summer at Myrobella, in 1984, was the year of an intense and sometimes violent miners’ strike, which ultimately resulted in significant damage to trade unions throughout the country. Although there were no longer any mines in the constituency itself, the Fishburn coke works were affected, and a number of Tony’s constituents were miners. It was a painful time, not only for the individuals and the families concerned but also for the communities as a whole and ultimately for the Labour Party.
Once we were a family, Nicky came along quite naturally. I didn’t want Euan to be an only child, and given that the system was now in place, we thought we might as well get on with it, especially as my practice had definitely flattened out.
I remember our second summer in Myrobella — the summer I was pregnant with Nicky — as a kind of idyll. Driving up the road from Sedgefield, through Fishburn past the coke works, I felt almost as if I was going back to my roots. Perhaps it had to do with being pregnant, but the smell of coal fires — a smell that was there even in the summer — reminded me of my childhood. Living in Trimdon was, in some sense, going back into that community. Just as in Ferndale Road, we always had an open door, and there was a group of local kids — they must have been about age ten — who would come in and play with Euan, by now a sturdy toddler. I used to do cooking with them. At that time garlic was exotic, and I remember introducing them to it, showing them how to peel it.
We went up to the constituency every weekend. Tony would usually go on Thursday, and I’d follow on Friday. Looking back, I don’t know how we did it.
When Euan came along, we became a two-car family. Tony had a Rover — Parliament had done a deal with Rover, so MPs got them at a discount — and I had a beat-up Mini Metro, which got progressively more beat-up because I was such a terrible driver. I have no spatial awareness whatsoever.
During my first driving test, the examiner told me to stop after only ten minutes. “In the interests of public safety, I’m terminating this test,” he said. “Stay here. Do not touch the car. I’m going to go back and get your driving instructor to come and get you.”
On my second attempt, I spent the entire time with my foot hovering over the brake, expecting the examiner to stop me at any second: failure number two. The third time, the test seemed to go on far longer than usual. “I thought you needed settling down,” the young examiner explained. I’d put it down to mine being the first test of the day and the lovely spring weather.
On the way home, I called Tony from a phone box. “I passed!” I said.
“You can’t have. It’s a disgrace. He should never have passed you — you’re a hopeless driver.”
The following day I volunteered to take Geoff and Beverley Gallop, who were staying with us, on a tour of junk shops round the backstreets of Hackney. At o
ne point another car got a bit too close, and there was a crunch. I found a phone box and rang Tony. “You’re going to have to come and get me.”
If anything, I found the open spaces of the northeast even more daunting than London, particularly the lack of lighting after dark. On at least three occasions over the years, I landed in a ditch, with the kids screaming in the back.
As far as the people in chambers were concerned, my driving was a standing joke. To accept a lift from me was a rite of passage.
My second pregnancy was a breeze compared with the first. I was fit and well and had a support system with Angela, and we had our own home in the constituency.
On Thursday, December 5, 1985, I woke up feeling unusually anxious. Tony was due to go up to Myrobella, but I didn’t want him to leave. I had a feeling the baby might be coming, I told him.
“But you’ve still got two weeks to go.”
“Euan was early.”
“Because Euan was induced!”
It wasn’t that Tony was being difficult. It was a matter of diplomacy, he explained: Prince Andrew was going to be opening something in the constituency the next day, and he was due to have breakfast with him.
“If you can assure me that the baby’s coming this weekend, then of course I won’t go. And don’t forget you’ve got your mum coming.”
Friday being my mum’s day off, most weeks she would take the bus down from Oxford to spend the day with her grandson. She didn’t usually stay the night because she had to work on Saturday. In fact, that weekend Auntie Audrey was also expected for her annual Christmas shopping expedition.
Tony left Mapledene Road around 4:00 p.m., and the contractions started in earnest around 8:00. At about 9:00 I called Myrobella. No reply. I called the Burtons’ house; Lily answered. The ancient Daimler Tony kept in the constituency for when we went up by train had packed up, so John had gone to collect him at the station.
In the meantime my mum had begun to panic.
Finally the phone rang. “There’s no question about it now,” I said. “I think you’re going to have to come back!”
“How can I? The Daimler’s dead, and there are no more trains tonight.”
“Well, what am I going to do?” I knew I was in no state to drive myself to the hospital.
“Get Lyndsey to drive,” he said. “I’ll borrow John’s car and get there as soon as I can.”
Lyndsey had just passed her driving test that week. She had never driven my car, never driven in the dark, and never driven into central London, and she had no idea where the hospital was. Other than that, it was fine.
The moment Lyndsey arrived, I waddled out of the house in my dressing gown and eased myself across the backseat. Mum sat in the front with the A–Z map of London, and we set off. Between groans I gave directions, wincing at the grinding of gears and the regular stalling. “Push your clutch down!” I yelled as the car bucked and whinnied through east London.
Somehow we got there. As Lyndsey lurched to a stop, I flung open the door and propelled myself toward the entrance. Once in a wheelchair, I was rushed straight to the delivery ward, my mum struggling to keep up. The moment we got there, I dashed to the toilet, and they had to pull me off. Sure enough, I was ten centimeters dilated.
“How fascinating to see it from this angle,” I heard my mum say as I was pushing Nicky out.
I’m ashamed to confess that I wasn’t very nice to her. “I don’t want you here!” I shouted. “Where’s my husband?”
Less than half an hour after we arrived, our second son came gliding into the world. He was born incredibly quickly. No drugs, no forceps. It was over in what seemed like minutes, and my mum was the first one to hold him.
Tony arrived about 4:00 a.m., exactly twelve hours after he had left, having borrowed John Burton’s old banger and driven through the night on near-empty roads — which was a good thing, as the brakes failed just as he came into London. On the way down, he’d been thinking about what to call our son, he said, and had come up with Colin.
“Colin? You can’t call a baby Colin!”
Fortunately my mum agreed, and as he was born on St. Nicholas’s Day, Nicholas he was.
The following week we took Nicky on his first plane ride, when the entire family flew up to Sedgefield for Christmas, our second at Myrobella. To have a new baby at Christmas was a joy, and we had a full house, with Mum, Lyndsey, and Grandma somehow all squashing in. Although Grandma was becoming increasingly frail and forgetful, she still loved babies and happily spent the entire holiday cooing with delight over her new great-grandson.
This would be the pattern of our Christmases for the next twelve years: the family all assembled at Myrobella, me cooking a huge turkey from our wonderful local butcher and next-door neighbor Eddie Greaves. It was always over too quickly, and that year — like every other — I was back at work by the beginning of January.
Chapter 12
Departures
When Nicky was three months old, we left Mapledene Road and moved to Highbury, in north London. With a baby, a toddler, and a nanny, we simply needed more space. Not only did the new house have four bedrooms and a conservatory — and two bathrooms — but it was also better situated in terms of public transport.
I was rapidly discovering that two children are very different from one. When we had only Euan, I continued to work with the Labour Co-ordinating Committee — to the extent that I would even be breast-feeding at the meetings. But once Nicholas came along, it was just too much. For the same reason, I also had to stop the legal advice sessions I’d been conducting in Tower Hamlets.
Now that Tony was an MP, it wasn’t appropriate for him to get involved in the local Labour Party. With two small boys, we decided that joining a church would be a more practical way of becoming active in the community, and we started going to nearby St. Joan of Arc. Not only was it within walking distance, but it had both a primary and a nursery school attached. We were learning that as parents, we had to think ahead. I might not have minded being married in a Protestant church, but I was insistent that the children be brought up Catholic.
In July 1986, Pat Phoenix died. My dad was utterly distraught, not least because it came as such a shock. Among women of that generation, cancer was not something you admitted to, and Pat did not admit how ill she was until the end. My father couldn’t bear to think that she might be dying. Although she and my father had been together for six years and the subject of their marital status was regular tabloid fodder, they married only a day or so before she passed away. She had tried to persuade him for some time to “regularize” their relationship, but he had always resisted. Marrying him was her last great kindness: now he would be financially secure.
Indeed, Pat’s generosity was boundless, from looking after my dad when he was physically and psychologically at rock bottom to supporting Tony in his campaigns. She was an avid collector, and Myrobella had been largely furnished with what she could not fit into her own house in Cheshire, including a number of risqué William Russell Flint paintings that adorn Myrobella’s walls to this day. Her funeral was extraordinary, and the streets of Manchester were lined with her fans.
The news hit me like a brick, not least because she had been having treatments in the same specialist cancer unit where I knew Auntie Audrey was getting her own radiation treatments. Three years earlier, while she and Uncle Bill were in America visiting old friends Gerry and Shirley Quilling, Auntie Audrey told Shirley that she had a lump but didn’t want to go to the doctor about it. Shirley took charge at once and arranged for her to see her own doctor. As soon as he saw it, he said, “That’s got to come off.” She had the operation there and then. She called me at work and told me she had breast cancer. She wanted me to tell her mum, my mum, and Lyndsey.
“But, Cherie, whatever you do, don’t say anything to my kids,” she said. Catherine was then about twenty, Christopher a year younger, and Robert only fifteen. It seems incredible now that there was still such a taboo against talking a
bout breast cancer. It was as if by not talking about it, you could deny its existence. When I eventually became a patron of Breast Cancer Care and other related charities, talking about it became very important to me, not least because I am convinced that had Auntie Audrey seen someone earlier, the outcome might have been different.
Even though I was one of the only people who knew how ill she was, she never talked about the cancer with me. Sometimes it was obvious that she was having the chemo and that things weren’t all that great, which was why it was nice that she was there when Nicholas was born, but it was never clear how she was faring. She’d be ill, and then she’d be well. She took such pleasure in Euan and Nicky, coming to stay with us whenever she could and boasting that she was the one who fed Euan his first solid food. It was as if she knew she wouldn’t live long enough to see her own grandchildren, and the boys were the nearest she would have.
In addition to our Christmas gatherings at Myrobella, the family would always spend Easter with us. In the spring of 1987, Auntie came over on Maundy Thursday, three days earlier than usual, in order to spend time with the boys, and it was obvious that she was very ill. She helped put Euan and Nicky to bed and read them a story, but that night she was in a really bad way. By this time the cancer had spread to her lungs, and they filled up with fluid and needed to be drained. She couldn’t breathe and was in pain, so the next morning Uncle Bill took her home. As I held Nicky up to wave her off, I knew this would be the last time I would see her. It was only then that I realized that whereas I thought she had come to spend Easter with us, she had really come to say good-bye.