Chapter 4
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 behavior 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.
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.