Chapter 7
Once both Lyndsey and I had left home (she, following in my footsteps, had headed off to study law, though she did so in Cardiff instead of London), there was no further reason for our mum to stay in Ferndale Road. It’s one thing living with your mother-in-law when you have no real option, but Grandma was now well into her seventies, and my mum was more or less looking after her. As it turned out, she wasn’t the one to make the decision. One day, when my mum got back from work, Grandma made her sit down. There was something she wanted to say: “Now, Gale, have you thought what you’re going to do when I die?”
“Whatever do you mean?”
“Well, when I die, this house is going to be sold and divided among my three children, so what’s going to happen to you?”
In fact, my mother owned nothing beyond what was in her wardrobe. Even though by this time the bed she shared with Lyndsey was sagging and everything was falling apart, Grandma hadn’t let her have anything. The only thing Grandma had let her buy was a television from Lewis’s, and of course she left that there when she moved out.
Housing was controlled by the local authority. Because she still had one daughter in full-time education, my mum was given a two-bedroom flat in Seaforth, down by the docks in a pretty rough area, not far from the fish-and-chip shop where she’d worked all those years before. The flat was on the sixth floor and was actually very nice, with lovely views out across the sea. I stayed there that Christmas, but it never felt like home.
One afternoon shortly before New Year’s, the phone rang. My mum answered it, then passed it to me with an odd expression.
“It’s for you,” she said.
Much to my surprise, it was Tony. He had vaguely suggested that as we would both be in the north, I might go to his father’s house near Durham sometime over the holiday. Now he was calling to see what was happening.
“Who was that?” Mum asked accusingly. “No one from round here, in any event. Not with that voice.”
“Tony Blair. You remember. Derry’s other pupil. You met him at the ceremony.” Although I’d warned John to stay well clear, I’d had no qualms about introducing Tony to her.
“I don’t remember.”
“Well, you did.”
“So what did he want, then?”
“He wants me to go over there.”
“Where?”
“A village near Durham. Where his dad lives. His sister is there, and he thought I might like to meet her. She’s reading law at Oxford.”
She was definitely suspicious.
“I told him I’d go.”
“I heard. Well, you know what you’re doing, I suppose.”
“I’ll go on my way back to London.”
“Just don’t you forget, Cherie, an accent like that is as much of an accent as a Liverpool accent.”
All went well till I arrived at Durham, when my bag — inconveniently containing a bottle of disinfectant and some cheap bleach I’d picked up back home in an attempt to save money — fell out of the luggage rack. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Tony wasn’t there to meet me, as he’d promised he would be. I was so irritated that I thought I’d take a taxi and go straight to his father’s house. So I got in this cab, reeking of cheap disinfectant, and gave the driver Tony’s dad’s address. Just as we pulled away, I saw Tony getting out of a car behind me. I was so cross that I said nothing to the taxi driver. But Tony must have seen me get in, because as we drove along, my driver kept saying, “There’s a fella behind us keeps flashing his lights.” I told him to carry on. I thought, I’ve put myself out for him, so he can bloody well lump it.
We arrived at the same time. It wasn’t a great start, admittedly, but at least I had the moral advantage. And he paid for the taxi.
I don’t know now what I’d been expecting, but the house wasn’t remotely grand. I knew a bit of the backstory already, and it was really tragic. When Tony was only ten, his father had a stroke. He’d been a lecturer in law at Durham University and a part-time barrister in Newcastle. He’d been planning on going into full-time practice as a barrister when it happened, with a view to becoming a Tory member of Parliament (MP). Tony’s mother, Hazel, had died of throat cancer the previous year, just two weeks before Tony left university. His parents had always talked about moving to Shincliffe village and had finally found this house, which they really liked. But Tony’s mum had died before they could move in, so it was all very sad.
Only a few hours before, I had been in Ferndale Road, and now I was here. I surprised myself at how easy it was to move from one world to the other.
All five of us at the house were “legal”: Leo, Tony’s father; his brother, Bill, who had a commercial practice in the Middle Temple; Tony and I; and Sarah, who was then at Oxford reading law, though not entirely happy with it, as I soon found out. Looking at the lineup of Blairs in the kitchen, I was surprised at how tall Tony was in comparison with the others. He was a good six feet, while his father and brother were almost six inches shorter, as was Sarah.
She and I hit it off immediately. Leo turned out to be fairly right-wing, so sometimes he would come out with something completely outrageous. I would inevitably rise to the bait, then Sarah would join in, the pair of us taking the feminist stance. But it wasn’t just women versus men. I never forgot that Tony was the competition, and I was trying to counteract the notion that anyone who wasn’t from public school and Oxbridge didn’t cut the mustard.
I can’t imagine what his family made of this rather odd girl who, having stunk the kitchen out with the smell of cheap disinfectant, proceeded to harangue their father about why women are as good as men, while their sister cheered from the sidelines. I could certainly hold my own. My mum, having trained at RADA, had always spoken well herself, which had served to temper the Scouse that was all around us — though no one could doubt that I was a northern lass. In addition, the nuns had seen to it that we had elocution lessons. Those things were important if you were going to get on in life.
The moment Tony and I were back in chambers, Derry started a big case. Unusually for him, it was a criminal case concerning a huge scandal in Singapore. Derry was representing the Singapore government, which was trying to extradite a number of British businessmen to stand trial for fraud. The two key individuals involved were Jim Slater, the main protagonist, represented by a famous criminal barrister, and Dick Tarling, managing director of Slater Walker’s Singapore subsidiary, represented by Michael Burton, fellow tenant of 2 Crown Office Row. The case was being heard at Horseferry Road Magistrates Court in central London, and Tony and I went along. Our job was to see that Derry had what he needed, passing him the necessary papers, taking notes, and doing whatever else was required. The court was close to the Tate Gallery, so every lunchtime Tony and I would go to the museum, and it was then that he really began to open up.
He talked to me about his mother, whom he missed tremendously. Also about religion, which was obviously very important to him. Although the Blairs were not a churchgoing family, the two boys had been sent to the Chorister School, attached to Durham Cathedral. He told me that he had been confirmed during his time at Oxford. His father wasn’t a believer, however, perhaps explaining why Tony hadn’t been confirmed earlier.
At Oxford he had met an Australian priest called Peter Thomson, studying theology as a mature student. Their discussions were all about liberation theology: Christ as a radical and how it all fits in and resonates with socialism. That was exactly what had inspired those campfire debates when I was with the YCS.
Even at that very early stage in our relationship, Tony and I spent hours talking about this kind of thing, about God and what we were here for. I don’t think it would be too much to say that it was this that drew us together. This and the fact that he had just lost his mother. He was incredibly honest and open about his feelings, which was unusual in a man at that time. He had very firm views on marriage, for example. He genuinely thought that two people could be together for life. Having seen what had happened to my mum, I thought this was a wonderful thing to aim for, though I wasn’t sure any man was up to it. I certainly wanted it to be true, not least because I had seen for myself how damaging a wandering male can be to his family. Yet when Tony talked about love and fidelity, there was no sense that these were anything more than general conversations. He always kept me guessing in that department, which I found intriguing and not a little challenging. What I really admired was his honesty, his desire to get to the heart of things, and his belief that we were here for a purpose. I loved talking to him, and on the odd occasion when we couldn’t have lunch together at the Tate, I felt as if something was missing.
By now he was introducing me to his friends as his new girlfriend, and I’d say, “I’m not sure I’m your new girlfriend.” But I liked his friends.
The house where he was living in Primrose Hill was owned by the mother of a guy he’d known at Oxford called Marc Palley. The family was originally from Rhodesia, where Marc’s MP father had been described by Ian Smith, Rhodesia’s white supremacist leader prior to independence, as a “one-man opposition.” His mother, Claire Palley, was a law professor at Oxford, as vociferous as her ex-husband in terms of African emancipation and an extremely formidable woman, though not a very motherly one. Marc lived in one of the flats with his girlfriend, Bina (short for Sabina), while Bina’s brother Dave, who had also been at St. John’s, was in the flat below with Tony and another St. John’s friend, Martin Stanley. They were all quite posh, but surprisingly, I liked them. At the LSE I had avoided anybody like that. The first time I met Marc, he said, “Oh, Tony’s been talking about you. You’re not like his usual girlfriends. He usually wears his girlfriends like a flower on his lapel.” At the time I thought this was a dig, but later I realized it was meant as a compliment, meaning that I wasn’t just a pretty face.
Once Tony’s Oxford friends had given me the thumbs-up, it was his school friends’ turn. He was really wooing me now. One weekend he wanted to take me to Reading, where Ian Craig, a friend from Fettes, was studying agriculture. In order to go, I told John that a friend from the LSE had been dumped by her boyfriend, so I had to spend the weekend propping her up.
It was around this time that I first met Geoff Gallop and his wife, Beverley. Geoff, who would later become Premier of Western Australia, was a couple of years older than Tony. They had met at St. John’s when Geoff was a Rhodes scholar studying philosophy, politics, and economics. He had been in the International Marxist group at the time, and it was Geoff who had introduced Tony to left-wing politics. It was also Geoff who had introduced him to Peter Thomson, who had rekindled Tony’s interest in theology. So Geoff was a very important figure in Tony’s life. When I met him, he had just arrived back in Oxford to do a Ph.D. I was totally captivated by him.
Although John had been to Cambridge, I just didn’t seem to have the same kind of conversations with his friends. By now he was even more in evidence than ever, always wanting to come to the flat and generally being overkeen and clingy. He must have sensed I was losing interest. He certainly felt that there was something between me and Tony, but he didn’t know what. I was beginning to feel very uncomfortable about the whole thing.
And then there was David.
The previous summer David’s sister had married her Welsh solicitor boyfriend, and it was just as you’d imagine a wedding at Blundellsands to be: morning suits, frocks, hats, the tent, the flowers, the champagne. Already I must have known it wasn’t going to work with David, because I did everything I could to stay out of the photographs. Nothing to do with Tony — I barely knew him then — nor even to do with John. It was simply that although David and I were compatible in so many ways, we disagreed politically. He was definitely a Conservative, and I definitely was not. Although we had never really talked about politics, it was a fundamental difference between us, and it mattered. What made it so difficult was that I was very fond of him and we had a connection, a quite deep connection that went back a long way.
Over that Christmas I tried to tell David how I felt, coming out with things like “There’s no future in this.” Basically I was a coward, and I didn’t have the heart to do what I had to do. It didn’t help that he and my mother had become so close. She’d met somebody in Canada on one of her trips abroad and had begun to think about the future — even talked about emigration — and David was helping her get a divorce based on more than five years’ separation.
Then one evening, sometime that spring, out of the blue David turned up on my doorstep at Abercorn Place. When he knocked on the door, John answered with a shoe in his hand — mine. (He was one of those men who enjoy cleaning shoes.) At that point David realized that was it. He was very upset and left immediately.
My mum could barely bring herself to talk to me. David had gone back and poured out his heart to her. Not surprisingly, she was really angry, and was probably right to be. There is no doubt that I behaved very badly. I don’t regret many things in my life, but I do regret how I treated David. I had known for some time that we weren’t going to walk off into the sunset together, yet I couldn’t find the courage to tell him. I know that he found it hard to forgive me, and I don’t blame him. Fortunately young people are resilient, and two years later David met and fell in love with a friend of my sister’s. They married and had two daughters. I am happy to say that a few years ago, David and his wife came to see us in Downing Street. So at some level, anyway, I hope that I’ve been forgiven.
After this incident, of course, John thought he was in the ascendant. Once again cowardice got the better of me. The more time I spent with Tony, the less I wanted to be with John. The situation was complicated by the fact that Tony and I were still professional rivals and would be until the question of tenancy was settled.
Sometime that spring Derry asked me and Tony to dinner at his house. He didn’t often ask his pupils to dinner, but I think someone else had dropped out.
Among the other guests was a painter called Euan Uglow. He was about the same age as my father. A small, wiry man with a neat mustache and a very eclectic dress sense — whatever the weather, he always wore sandals, for example — Euan was charming, intense, and quietly spoken, with the manners of somebody from a previous age. He told me that he was always on the lookout for models and asked if I would like to sit for him. He knew enough about the Bar to know that pupils were usually in need of extra cash. The standard fee, he said, was £3 an hour. Why not? I thought. It wouldn’t take very long, I surmised, and I was always one for new experiences. I said okay, and he said he would give me a call.
So one afternoon, when nothing very much was happening at chambers, I went along to his studio in Battersea. I had no idea when I went there that he was one of the most important figurative painters of the second half of the century. The pictures in his studio were mostly of women.
“I’m currently doing two paintings of a standing nude,” he explained. “One is of a blond girl, and you’re going to be the dark girl. Here’s the one I’ve already started.”
The blond girl was looking left, and she was wearing practically nothing.
I was going to be facing the other way, he said, then handed me what he called “a blue dress” that he wanted me to wear. The blue dress turned out to be just a piece of material he had stitched together, almost like a hip-length waistcoat. It was completely open down the middle. The pose he wanted was very straightforward. I had to have one leg out in front and the other behind, as if I had been caught in the middle of a stride. It had never occurred to me that I would be expected to pose naked, or as good as. What could I say?
“Fine.”
During the first few sessions, as I stood desperately trying to hold the pose, I thought, What on earth am I doing this for? But at the same time it went through my head that one day I might want my children to know that I wasn’t such a dull-o, bluestocking Goody Two-shoes after all.
To keep me still and engaged, he put pictures of paintings he admired in front of me on another easel, then talked about them. The minuscule amount I know about art was taught to me by Euan Uglow.
A barrister’s work, particularly in the first few years, is very hit-and-miss, so when I didn’t have anything on, I’d ring up Euan and say, “Can you fit me in?” Then I’d go round to his studio. Or I might be at the magistrates court just down the road in the morning and when I was finished, pop over to the studio. He’d give me lunch and talk about what he was doing and why, about the system of plumb lines he used, how the light changed and its effect on my skin and my stomach, and how he saw the different colors. Over the many months I posed for him, we became very fond of each other. Neither of us had much money, so we agreed to make each other Christmas presents. I gave him two tea cozies, which I religiously knitted in two very different patterns. He made me a miniature lectern with a marble base. It was too heavy to take to court, but I still have it.
I really loved him. He was such a gentle, intelligent man, with a lovely smile. After about eighteen months, or even two years, I realized that I just didn’t have the time to continue. Also, Tony had begun to query why I was spending quite so much time with this man.
Not surprisingly, I found it really hard to tell Euan that I had to stop, but in the end I said that I didn’t feel it was fair to him. I was thinking, He makes his living like this, and he’s wasting time on me, when actually he could be doing a painting of somebody else. He told me not to worry and that he’d get another dark model to take my place. He had never got round to doing my face, though you could still see it was me. I think he did try to get a replacement, but it didn’t work out, so he decided to leave my painting unfinished. It still exists somewhere, but where I don’t know. I would love to have it, of course, but his paintings are very valuable, even more so now that he’s no longer alive. He died in 2000, and I was very proud to go to his memorial service.
In all the time I was going to Battersea to model for Euan, Tony never knew that I was posing nude. There came a point when I think Derry hinted at it. Possibly Derry had seen it as a work in progress. I don’t know. Either way, Tony, when he eventually learned the truth, was very uncomfortable with it. He still is.
Meanwhile the business of what was to happen when my pupilage came to an end was like a nagging headache that, no matter how many aspirin you take, won’t go away. A set of chambers is a bit like a family. Different members have different roles and contribute in different ways. On the one hand, the tenants doing commercial work were earning huge amounts of money, a percentage of which they would pay as “rent.” Given that their financial contribution was higher than anyone else’s, they wanted more of a say about who came in. On the other hand, those doing crime and family law were saying, “We’re providing a good service. You commercial boys are forever insisting we take on your pupils, and yet we also need people to do our work, and the people who come via you don’t want to do our work.”
So that spring of 1977 there was an internal power struggle going on in 2 Crown Office Row. The last four or five pupils who’d been taken on had all been Derry’s, and Michael Burton, who had a highly paid commercial practice, was saying that it was his turn now. Like Derry, he was an up-and-coming junior who would shortly become a Queen’s Counsel — the most senior level of barrister, known colloquially as a “silk.” Some of it, I suspect, was simply him flexing his muscles.
One evening in late spring Derry took me out for a drink and said that in his view, he couldn’t get both Tony and me taken on and that obviously, since one of us was a girl, it would be easier to get the boy taken on. Not that he could guarantee Tony would get it either, because Michael Burton was pushing hard for his pupil, but at least Tony would stand a better chance. He proposed to find me somewhere else to land.
Of course I was hurt. It was the first time I had ever been discriminated against because of my gender, and it was hard to accept that I was being pushed out simply because I wore a skirt. But at the time I thought, That’s life. I wasn’t on a crusade.
Derry put me in touch with Freddie Reynold, whose chambers were in 5 Essex Court. As luck would have it, Freddie and I got on instantly. He came from a family of immigrant German Jews and was about the same age as Derry, whom he had got to know through doing work for the same trade union solicitors. Freddie himself did a lot of trade union work, which was another reason Derry probably thought the arrangement might work — he had me down as a committed leftie. Of course Freddie himself could not offer me tenancy — that right belonged to the head of chambers. But as the senior figure was based in the north of England, Freddie basically said yes.
When Chris Carr heard what had happened, he couldn’t believe it. “Listen, Cherie. You are much better qualified than Tony. You are mad even to think about moving. You must stay on and fight for your place, because you deserve a place.”
Maybe. But then there was the whole romantic complication, which neither Chris nor anybody else in chambers knew about. Although I wasn’t about to admit it even to myself, the truth was that I was in love with my witty, charming rival, and the last thing I wanted was to jeopardize that, even subconsciously. As for the battle of 2 Crown Office Row, in the end Michael Burton didn’t get his pupil taken on. Instead Derry, the more senior, got his: Tony.
I probably should have stayed and fought. But I could easily have not got tenancy. Then what would I have done? Hung around like the other squatters for another six months, and then another, living on whatever crumbs Derry and the others decided to throw my way? Put Tony into the equation, and it was a real mess. A tenancy in those days meant you were there for life. In the end, of course, I didn’t stay in 5 Essex Court for life, but thanks to Freddie, I was in.