Speaking for Myself by Cherie Blair Read Free Book Online Page A

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