Chapter 12
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 about 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.
The following Tuesday they rang to say she had died at home. She was fifty-two, no age at all.
A week or so later, I was driving back from a court case outside London when the dam burst. I pulled over, and as cars swished past me in the rain, I just sobbed and sobbed. When I was a newborn baby, it was Audrey who rushed home from her job as a telephonist to play with me. It was Audrey who took me in at lunch when I was at Seafield. It was Audrey who showed me that politics wasn’t just for men. It was Audrey and her husband and children who showed me how a normal family life could be. She was a friend to my mum when my dad left us. She was a vibrant, outgoing person, who always had time for everyone. And now she was gone, and the world was a bleaker place without her.
Easter was late that year, so her funeral was at the end of April, coming up to May, and we sang the May Day procession hymn that is sung when Mary is crowned. It wasn’t a funeral hymn — quite the opposite — but we chose it because we knew it was one of her favorites.
In 1987 we also said good-bye to Angela, who had become much more than a nanny. She and I had discovered a shared interest in athletics, and we would regularly go to the National Sports Centre at Crystal Palace in south London together. She was a very good cook, and what she really wanted to do was run a sandwich business. That spring a friend of hers heard that British Rail was starting a hospitality suite for first-class passengers and suggested she contact the company. The idea was that she could learn about running a catering business while being paid for it at the same time. So that was what she did. She is still a family friend.
Having had such success with Angela, I once again advertised in the Northern Echo. With no baby to look after and Euan now at St. Joan of Arc nursery school every morning, I decided that a trained nursery nurse wasn’t really necessary and took an eighteen-year-old straight from school. She had never been to London, though she did drive. In retrospect I realize it was asking too much. At the interview I was pleased when she told me she was religious. It was only after she came down that I realized she was quite fundamentalist, and she was soon involved with a local sect. One day I got home to find Euan in a terrible state. He was then just over four, and it seemed he had come out with a swearword, and she had squirted liquid soap into his mouth.
I was shocked, and it showed, but beyond telling her that this was unacceptable behavior, I decided to do nothing before discussing it with Tony. That weekend we went up to the constituency, where we talked about sacking her, but by the time we got back on Sunday, she had already left. A note told us that her future lay with her new friends at church and she had decided to join them. So it was back to the Northern Echo for the second time in three months.
Luckily we then found Gillian, who came from near Richmond, in Yorkshire. She was a fantastic young woman who stayed for three years, when she left to get married.
I had never yearned for a large family. Once I had Euan and Nicholas, I decided that was quite enough. Yet in those weeks after Audrey died, I found myself thinking, I want another baby. What I really wanted — though I never voiced it, even to myself — was a daughter. I was able to tell my grandma that I was pregnant shortly before she died the following August.
Grandma never knew that her own daughter, Audrey, had died. For some time she had been increasingly confused, so in many ways she had already left us. After my mum moved out of Ferndale Road, Uncle Bob moved back in to keep an eye on Grandma. Eventually he couldn’t cope, so she went to a retirement home. I wasn’t very happy about that, but as she could no longer look after herself, there was no alternative. Realistically, I couldn’t bring her down to London.
Grandma wasn’t at the retirement home long, perhaps a year, before she passed away. Until I was two years old, these two women, Grandma and Audrey, had been everything to me — one a surrogate mother, one a surrogate sister — and losing both of them within six months marked a watershed in my life.
My father was devastated. In a little over twelve months, he had lost his wife, his sister, and his mother. It could have sent him back to the bottle — which he had forsworn after his brush with death — but thank God, it didn’t.
Our daughter, Kathryn — blessed with the auburn hair of both her great-great-grandmother Tilly and Tony’s mother, Hazel — was born on March 2, 1988, nine months to the day after the 1987 general election.
That night in June, we had been in a celebratory mood. Although the Labour Party in general had fared barely better than it had five years earlier, Tony had increased his margin of victory.
For a newcomer to Parliament, he had done well in the previous five years. In his maiden speech to the House of Commons, he had said: “I am a socialist, not through reading a textbook that has caught my intellectual fancy, nor through unthinking tradition, but because I believe that, at its best, socialism corresponds most closely to an existence that is both rational and moral. It stands for co-operation, not confrontation; for fellowship, not fear. It stands for equality.”
However well this might have gone down in the reformist camp, it did nothing for the harmony of daily life at Westminster. When he arrived, Tony was allocated a room with Dave Nellist, the MP for Coventry South-East, one of three Labour MPs who belonged to Militant. This was a marriage made in hell. Not only was Tony a barrister — in itself a class crime — but he was a barrister who, when working with Derry, had tried to get Militant expelled from the party. It wasn’t long before Nellist got himself transferred to another office, which he shared with another, younger Militant, while Tony was allocated a room with a Scottish MP named Gordon Brown. They found common ground immediately. Both were bright, both had been elected in the 1983 general election, and both had fought a previous election in an unwinnable Conservative constituency. Gordon was more established in politics, and he certainly considered himself more senior, which I think Tony would have agreed with, not least because Gordon was older, though only by two years.
As Gordon didn’t have a family, we didn’t tend to socialize with him. Our Labour milieu was in London, while Gordon spent his time in Scotland, and he wasn’t used to the presence of small children.
It was inevitable that Labour would lose the 1987 election. However, the failure at the polls convinced Tony that something had to be done. In British politics the team of senior politicians who head up government departments is known as the Cabinet. The opposition’s parallel team is known as the Shadow Cabinet, and both Tony and Gordon were determined to get elected by fellow Labour MPs to this select body in order to move the Labour Party from an unelectable force into an electable one, which was something I fully agreed with.
At the 1987 Labour Party Conference that September, they both stood for the Shadow Cabinet. Gordon got in (becoming Shadow Secretary of State for Trade and Industry), while Tony was the highest runner-up. Their campaign manager was Nick Brown, whom Tony had introduced to Gordon. He, too, had entered Parliament in 1983, when the previous incumbent of Newcastle East went over to the SDP. We had got to know him because, having a local constituency, he would regularly drop in at Myrobella. He was basically a fixer, with fingers in all sorts of pies. He had been a legal officer for the GMB and for a short time had been on the Newcastle City Council. He had future Chief Whip written on his forehead even then. He was unbelievably patronizing, always calling me “love,” and clearly felt that women should be seen and not heard in the Labour Party. I saw him as a bit of a political thug.
My career was also in a state of flux, but with things moving so fast in the Labour Party, Tony had other things on his mind. Along with many other young barristers, I believed that we needed to find a new system for paying the clerks. While he was still at Crown Office Row, Tony had pushed for just such a change, and he and Chris Carr had put their case to Derry. The old-fashioned system of a clerk getting 10 percent of each fee when there were nine or ten tenants was one thing, they said. But now that there were twenty-five of them, David was getting paid ridiculously well. Tony and Chris thought that they would all be better off in their own chambers. The split eventually happened, with Derry taking off his people and forming 11 King’s Bench Walk. Although Tony had been very active in pushing for it, almost as soon as it happened, he left the Bar for good.
At around the same time, tensions had begun to develop in 5 Essex Court. A split opened up between the silks in the north and the junior barristers down in London, which included me. Normally juniors could hope to build up their practice by picking up work that trickled down from the silks, but as the silks were on an entirely different circuit, that wasn’t happening. Then Freddie Reynold, who had originally taken me on, took silk, and he and Alastair Hill — another of the original London members who took silk at the same time — decided that they, too, would do better to cut loose.
Word of this plan eventually got out. The silks whose practices were based entirely in the north didn’t really care, but those who had mixed practices were not at all happy. It didn’t help when libel and criminal lawyer George Carman, who by this time was famous, suddenly decided that he wanted to join the renegades. On the one hand, we weren’t that keen to have him, because “selfish” and “George” were two terms that definitely went together. On the other hand, his income would be useful.
I was for the split from the beginning, and once we moved into our new premises, I became very much a player on the management committee. Also, although I wasn’t the only woman, I became the mother hen, with everyone coming to me with their problems. Perhaps because I couldn’t channel all my mothering instincts into my children at home, these grown-ups got it instead.
Everything was quite tense in the run-up. The northern silks refused to move out of the building, saying it was theirs; we — the ones who actually worked there — said it was ours. Today it is increasingly common for chambers to set up in premises outside the Inns, but that wasn’t the case back then, and space was at a premium. Eventually Gray’s Inn — in this case the de facto landlord — managed to find us space in New Court Chambers, as they wanted to avoid a major fallout on their doorstep.
For the first time in my joint career of mother and barrister, I had some financial relief when I was expecting Kathryn. Three months after I fell pregnant, Gail Carrodus, the other female tenant in New Court Chambers, also fell pregnant. Unlike me, she was horribly sick and unable to work. Feeling desperately sorry, chambers offered her a three-month rent-free period, so I said, “Hello! Do you think I should have a rent-free period, too?” They agreed. We were one of the first chambers to do that, and eventually it was enshrined by the Bar Council in the 1990s.
With Gillian’s approval, I decided that this time I was going to have a home birth, not least because the hospital I’d used for Euan and Nicholas had closed its maternity wing. Every few weeks I would visit my GP to make sure that all was well, and from time to time I’d have a scan. I should have had one at thirty weeks, but work was picking up and I was just too busy. At thirty-four weeks the doctor said that I couldn’t postpone the scan any longer. I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. Scans were necessary for first-time mothers perhaps, but not experienced hands like me. I was feeling fine, and I thought the baby’s head was engaged. Nevertheless, I submitted.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Blair,” the technician in charge of the ultrasound said, sweeping my swollen belly. “That’s not the baby’s head that’s engaged; it’s the baby’s bottom. This is a breech.”
The doctor’s verdict was unequivocal: “You cannot possibly have a home birth. Indeed, I rather think we’re looking at a cesarean.”
I was so adamant that I didn’t want a cesarean that they took an X-ray of my pelvis.
“Well,” the doctor said as I stared at the X-ray, “if you want to kill yourself and your baby, then have a home birth. But otherwise you’re going to have a cesarean.”
I was booked in on March 3, 1988. A few days earlier, a computer had been delivered from chambers. We had just started to modernize, and I had resolved to teach myself how to use it. (Until then we had written everything by hand, and a typist would type it up.) As soon as I began to get the hang of it, I was hooked.
Tony had arranged to take me to the hospital the evening of March 2, and I decided to use the time beforehand typing an opinion on the computer, though I was barely able to reach the keyboard over the bump. I was aware that contractions had started, but I carried on anyway, while Gillian fussed in the background.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” she asked repeatedly.
“Quite sure. I’m just going to finish this advice.”
“I’m really not happy about this.”
“I’m fine. Really.”
“You are not fine, and I’m going to ring Tony to come now.”
I was still typing away when Tony arrived. When we got to the hospital, there was a line for emergency cesareans, and at that point I started to worry because of my experience with Nicky.
“I’m warning you,” I said to Tony, “if it’s a boy, I’m going to cry.”
Then came the epidural, which the doctor had agreed I could have rather than a general anesthetic. It took ten attempts to get the needle in, as I watched Tony turn whiter and whiter. Then, more quickly than seemed possible, the surgeon cut me open and scooped up the baby: a gorgeous baby girl. I cried anyway.
In fact, I was soon screaming.
“In about two percent of the population, the epidural doesn’t reach there,” the surgeon later explained as he immediately stopped stitching me up. He had no alternative, he said, but to knock me out, just briefly, to finish the job. I had to stay in the hospital for five days. When I got home, I read the advice I’d been writing on the computer when I’d left. Fortunately I had not had time to print out. It was complete and utter garbage.
My friend Francesca had also had a cesarean a few months before. She had married John Higham, one of the barristers who had done his Bar Finals at the same time as Tony and me. Like us, they had moved to Hackney, and their first baby had been born around the time I discovered I was pregnant with Euan. During those early days when I was an inexperienced mum at home on my own, she was very kind in showing me the ropes. She had a second baby a year before I had Nicholas. When she was feeding him, she noticed a lump in her breast. Her doctor, who was our doctor, too, thought it was an engorged milk gland. It wasn’t. By the time they realized it was cancer, it had already taken hold. She was operated on, and all seemed to go well, although the oncologist told her that she should not get pregnant again. But Francesca, who was half Italian, was a Catholic, and she did get pregnant, and the cancer returned. As soon as the baby was viable, she had her cesarean. It was a boy, and though tiny he lived. His mother did not. I went to her funeral just three days before Kathryn was born and wept for another life lost, another family left devastated by breast cancer.