Speaking for Myself (17 page)

On the way home, I called Tony from a phone box. “I passed!” I said.

“You can’t have. It’s a disgrace. He should never have passed you — you’re a hopeless driver.”

The following day I volunteered to take Geoff and Beverley Gallop, who were staying with us, on a tour of junk shops round the backstreets of Hackney. At one point another car got a bit too close, and there was a crunch. I found a phone box and rang Tony. “You’re going to have to come and get me.”

If anything, I found the open spaces of the northeast even more daunting than London, particularly the lack of lighting after dark. On at least three occasions over the years, I landed in a ditch, with the kids screaming in the back.

As far as the people in chambers were concerned, my driving was a standing joke. To accept a lift from me was a rite of passage.

My second pregnancy was a breeze compared with the first. I was fit and well and had a support system with Angela, and we had our own home in the constituency.

On Thursday, December 5, 1985, I woke up feeling unusually anxious. Tony was due to go up to Myrobella, but I didn’t want him to leave. I had a feeling the baby might be coming, I told him.

“But you’ve still got two weeks to go.”

“Euan was early.”

“Because Euan was induced!”

It wasn’t that Tony was being difficult. It was a matter of diplomacy, he explained: Prince Andrew was going to be opening something in the constituency the next day, and he was due to have breakfast with him.

“If you can assure me that the baby’s coming this weekend, then of course I won’t go. And don’t forget you’ve got your mum coming.”

Friday being my mum’s day off, most weeks she would take the bus down from Oxford to spend the day with her grandson. She didn’t usually stay the night because she had to work on Saturday. In fact, that weekend Auntie Audrey was also expected for her annual Christmas shopping expedition.

Tony left Mapledene Road around 4:00 p.m., and the contractions started in earnest around 8:00. At about 9:00 I called Myrobella. No reply. I called the Burtons’ house; Lily answered. The ancient Daimler Tony kept in the constituency for when we went up by train had packed up, so John had gone to collect him at the station.

In the meantime my mum had begun to panic.

Finally the phone rang. “There’s no question about it now,” I said. “I think you’re going to have to come back!”

“How can I? The Daimler’s dead, and there are no more trains tonight.”

“Well, what am I going to do?” I knew I was in no state to drive myself to the hospital.

“Get Lyndsey to drive,” he said. “I’ll borrow John’s car and get there as soon as I can.”

Lyndsey had just passed her driving test that week. She had never driven my car, never driven in the dark, and never driven into central London, and she had no idea where the hospital was. Other than that, it was fine.

The moment Lyndsey arrived, I waddled out of the house in my dressing gown and eased myself across the backseat. Mum sat in the front with the A–Z map of London, and we set off. Between groans I gave directions, wincing at the grinding of gears and the regular stalling. “Push your clutch down!” I yelled as the car bucked and whinnied through east London.

Somehow we got there. As Lyndsey lurched to a stop, I flung open the door and propelled myself toward the entrance. Once in a wheelchair, I was rushed straight to the delivery ward, my mum struggling to keep up. The moment we got there, I dashed to the toilet, and they had to pull me off. Sure enough, I was ten centimeters dilated.

“How fascinating to see it from this angle,” I heard my mum say as I was pushing Nicky out.

I’m ashamed to confess that I wasn’t very nice to her. “I don’t want you here!” I shouted. “Where’s my husband?”

Less than half an hour after we arrived, our second son came gliding into the world. He was born incredibly quickly. No drugs, no forceps. It was over in what seemed like minutes, and my mum was the first one to hold him.

Tony arrived about 4:00 a.m., exactly twelve hours after he had left, having borrowed John Burton’s old banger and driven through the night on near-empty roads — which was a good thing, as the brakes failed just as he came into London. On the way down, he’d been thinking about what to call our son, he said, and had come up with Colin.

“Colin? You can’t call a baby Colin!”

Fortunately my mum agreed, and as he was born on St. Nicholas’s Day, Nicholas he was.

The following week we took Nicky on his first plane ride, when the entire family flew up to Sedgefield for Christmas, our second at Myrobella. To have a new baby at Christmas was a joy, and we had a full house, with Mum, Lyndsey, and Grandma somehow all squashing in. Although Grandma was becoming increasingly frail and forgetful, she still loved babies and happily spent the entire holiday cooing with delight over her new great-grandson.

This would be the pattern of our Christmases for the next twelve years: the family all assembled at Myrobella, me cooking a huge turkey from our wonderful local butcher and next-door neighbor Eddie Greaves. It was always over too quickly, and that year — like every other — I was back at work by the beginning of January.

Chapter 12

Departures

W
hen Nicky was three months old, we left Mapledene Road and moved to Highbury, in north London. With a baby, a toddler, and a nanny, we simply needed more space. Not only did the new house have four bedrooms and a conservatory — and two bathrooms — but it was also better situated in terms of public transport.

I was rapidly discovering that two children are very different from one. When we had only Euan, I continued to work with the Labour Co-ordinating Committee — to the extent that I would even be breast-feeding at the meetings. But once Nicholas came along, it was just too much. For the same reason, I also had to stop the legal advice sessions I’d been conducting in Tower Hamlets.

Now that Tony was an MP, it wasn’t appropriate for him to get involved in the local Labour Party. With two small boys, we decided that joining a church would be a more practical way of becoming active in the community, and we started going to nearby St. Joan of Arc. Not only was it within walking distance, but it had both a primary and a nursery school attached. We were learning that as parents, we had to think ahead. I might not have minded being married in a Protestant church, but I was insistent that the children be brought up Catholic.

In July 1986, Pat Phoenix died. My dad was utterly distraught, not least because it came as such a shock. Among women of that generation, cancer was not something you admitted to, and Pat did not admit how ill she was until the end. My father couldn’t bear to think that she might be dying. Although she and my father had been together for six years and the subject of their marital status was regular tabloid fodder, they married only a day or so before she passed away. She had tried to persuade him for some time to “regularize” their relationship, but he had always resisted. Marrying him was her last great kindness: now he would be financially secure.

Indeed, Pat’s generosity was boundless, from looking after my dad when he was physically and psychologically at rock bottom to supporting Tony in his campaigns. She was an avid collector, and Myrobella had been largely furnished with what she could not fit into her own house in Cheshire, including a number of risqué William Russell Flint paintings that adorn Myrobella’s walls to this day. Her funeral was extraordinary, and the streets of Manchester were lined with her fans.

The news hit me like a brick, not least because she had been having treatments in the same specialist cancer unit where I knew Auntie Audrey was getting her own radiation treatments. Three years earlier, while she and Uncle Bill were in America visiting old friends Gerry and Shirley Quilling, Auntie Audrey told Shirley that she had a lump but didn’t want to go to the doctor about it. Shirley took charge at once and arranged for her to see her own doctor. As soon as he saw it, he said, “That’s got to come off.” She had the operation there and then. She called me at work and told me she had breast cancer. She wanted me to tell her mum, my mum, and Lyndsey.

“But, Cherie, whatever you do, don’t say anything to my kids,” she said. Catherine was then about twenty, Christopher a year younger, and Robert only fifteen. It seems incredible now that there was still such a taboo against talking about breast cancer. It was as if by not talking about it, you could deny its existence. When I eventually became a patron of Breast Cancer Care and other related charities, talking about it became very important to me, not least because I am convinced that had Auntie Audrey seen someone earlier, the outcome might have been different.

Even though I was one of the only people who knew how ill she was, she never talked about the cancer with me. Sometimes it was obvious that she was having the chemo and that things weren’t all that great, which was why it was nice that she was there when Nicholas was born, but it was never clear how she was faring. She’d be ill, and then she’d be well. She took such pleasure in Euan and Nicky, coming to stay with us whenever she could and boasting that she was the one who fed Euan his first solid food. It was as if she knew she wouldn’t live long enough to see her own grandchildren, and the boys were the nearest she would have.

In addition to our Christmas gatherings at Myrobella, the family would always spend Easter with us. In the spring of 1987, Auntie came over on Maundy Thursday, three days earlier than usual, in order to spend time with the boys, and it was obvious that she was very ill. She helped put Euan and Nicky to bed and read them a story, but that night she was in a really bad way. By this time the cancer had spread to her lungs, and they filled up with fluid and needed to be drained. She couldn’t breathe and was in pain, so the next morning Uncle Bill took her home. As I held Nicky up to wave her off, I knew this would be the last time I would see her. It was only then that I realized that whereas I thought she had come to spend Easter with us, she had really come to say good-bye.

The following Tuesday they rang to say she had died at home. She was fifty-two, no age at all.

A week or so later, I was driving back from a court case outside London when the dam burst. I pulled over, and as cars swished past me in the rain, I just sobbed and sobbed. When I was a newborn baby, it was Audrey who rushed home from her job as a telephonist to play with me. It was Audrey who took me in at lunch when I was at Seafield. It was Audrey who showed me that politics wasn’t just for men. It was Audrey and her husband and children who showed me how a normal family life could be. She was a friend to my mum when my dad left us. She was a vibrant, outgoing person, who always had time for everyone. And now she was gone, and the world was a bleaker place without her.

Easter was late that year, so her funeral was at the end of April, coming up to May, and we sang the May Day procession hymn that is sung when Mary is crowned. It wasn’t a funeral hymn — quite the opposite — but we chose it because we knew it was one of her favorites.

In 1987 we also said good-bye to Angela, who had become much more than a nanny. She and I had discovered a shared interest in athletics, and we would regularly go to the National Sports Centre at Crystal Palace in south London together. She was a very good cook, and what she really wanted to do was run a sandwich business. That spring a friend of hers heard that British Rail was starting a hospitality suite for first-class passengers and suggested she contact the company. The idea was that she could learn about running a catering business while being paid for it at the same time. So that was what she did. She is still a family friend.

Having had such success with Angela, I once again advertised in the
Northern Echo
. With no baby to look after and Euan now at St. Joan of Arc nursery school every morning, I decided that a trained nursery nurse wasn’t really necessary and took an eighteen-year-old straight from school. She had never been to London, though she did drive. In retrospect I realize it was asking too much. At the interview I was pleased when she told me she was religious. It was only after she came down that I realized she was quite fundamentalist, and she was soon involved with a local sect. One day I got home to find Euan in a terrible state. He was then just over four, and it seemed he had come out with a swearword, and she had squirted liquid soap into his mouth.

I was shocked, and it showed, but beyond telling her that this was unacceptable behavior, I decided to do nothing before discussing it with Tony. That weekend we went up to the constituency, where we talked about sacking her, but by the time we got back on Sunday, she had already left. A note told us that her future lay with her new friends at church and she had decided to join them. So it was back to the
Northern Echo
for the second time in three months.

Luckily we then found Gillian, who came from near Richmond, in Yorkshire. She was a fantastic young woman who stayed for three years, when she left to get married.

I had never yearned for a large family. Once I had Euan and Nicholas, I decided that was quite enough. Yet in those weeks after Audrey died, I found myself thinking,
I want another baby
. What I really wanted — though I never voiced it, even to myself — was a daughter. I was able to tell my grandma that I was pregnant shortly before she died the following August.

Grandma never knew that her own daughter, Audrey, had died. For some time she had been increasingly confused, so in many ways she had already left us. After my mum moved out of Ferndale Road, Uncle Bob moved back in to keep an eye on Grandma. Eventually he couldn’t cope, so she went to a retirement home. I wasn’t very happy about that, but as she could no longer look after herself, there was no alternative. Realistically, I couldn’t bring her down to London.

Grandma wasn’t at the retirement home long, perhaps a year, before she passed away. Until I was two years old, these two women, Grandma and Audrey, had been everything to me — one a surrogate mother, one a surrogate sister — and losing both of them within six months marked a watershed in my life.