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

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