Chapter 3
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 plate: 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.)
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.