The Path to Power

Picture. These ran the gamut from imperialistic adventures like The Four Feathers and Drum, to sophisticated comedies like The Women (with every female star in the business), to the four-handkerchief weepies like Barbara Stanwyck in Stella Dallas or Ingrid Bergman in anything. Nor was I entirely neglecting my political education ‘at the pictures’. My views on the French Revolution were gloriously confirmed by Leslie Howard and lovely Merle Oberon in The Scarlet Pimpernel. I saw my father’s emphasis on the importance of standing up for your principles embodied by James Stewart in Mr Smith Goes to Washington. I rejoiced to see Soviet communism laughed out of court when Garbo, a stern Commissar, was seduced by a lady’s hat in Ninotchka. And my grasp of history was not made more difficult by the fact that William Pitt the Younger was played by Robert Donat and, in Marie Walewska, Napoleon was played by the great French charmer Charles Boyer.

I often reflect how fortunate I was to have been born in 1925 and not twenty years earlier. Until the 1930s, there was no way that a young girl living in a small English provincial town could have had access to this extraordinary range of talent, dramatic form, human emotion, sex appeal, spectacle and style. To a girl born twenty years later these offerings were commonplace and, inevitably, taken much more for granted. Grantham was a small town, but on my visits to the cinema I roamed to the most fabulous realms of the imagination. It gave me the determination to roam in reality one day.

For my parents the reality which mattered was here and now, not that of romance. Yet it was not really a dislike of pleasure which shaped their attitude. They made a very important distinction between mass-and self- made entertainment, which is just as valid in the age of constant soap operas and game shows — perhaps more so. They felt that entertainment that demanded something of you was preferable to being a passive spectator. At times I found this irksome, but I also understood the essential point.

When my mother, sister and I went on holiday together, usually to Skegness, there was always the same emphasis on being active, rather than sitting around day-dreaming. We would stay in a self-catering guesthouse, much better value than a hotel, and first thing in the morning I went out with the other children for PT exercises arranged in the public gardens. There was plenty to keep us occupied and, of course, there were buckets and spades and the beach. In the evening we would go to the variety shows and reviews, very innocent entertainments by today’s standards, with comedians, jugglers, acrobats, ‘old tyme’ singers, ventriloquists and lots of audience participation when we joined in singing the latest hit from Henry Hall’s Guest Night. My parents considered that such shows were perfectly acceptable, which in itself showed how attitudes changed: we would never have gone to the variety while Grandmother Stephenson, who lived with us till I was ten, was still alive.

That may make my grandmother sound rather forbidding. Again, not at all. She was a warm presence in the life of myself and my sister. Dressed in the grandmotherly style of those days — long black sateen beaded dress — she would come up to our bedrooms on warm summer evenings and tell us stories of her life as a young girl. She would also make our flesh creep with old wives’ tales of how earwigs would crawl under your skin and form carbuncles. With time on her hands, she had plenty to spare for us. Her death at the age of eighty-six was the first time I had ever encountered death. As was the custom in those days, I was sent to stay with friends until the funeral was over and my grandmother’s belongings had all been packed away. In fact, life is very much a day- to-day experience for a child, and I recovered reasonably quickly. But Mother and I went to tend her grave on half-day closing days. I never knew either of my grandfathers, who died before I was born, and I saw Grandmother Roberts only twice, on holidays down to Ringstead in Northamptonshire. Less stately than Grandmother Stephenson, she was a bustling, active little old lady who kept a fine garden. I remember particularly that she kept a store of Cox’s orange pippins in an upstairs room from which my sister and I were invited to select the best.

My father was a great bowls player, and he smoked (which was very bad for him because of his weak chest). Otherwise, his leisure and entertainment always seemed to merge into duty. We had no alcohol in the house until he became mayor at the end of the war, and then only sherry and cherry brandy, which for some mysterious reason was considered more respectable than straight brandy, to entertain visitors. (Years of electioneering also later taught me that cherry brandy is very good for the throat.)

Like the other leading businessmen in Grantham, my father was a Rotarian. The Rotary motto, ‘Service Above Self’, was engraved on his heart. He spoke frequently and eloquently at Rotary functions, and we could read his speeches reported at length in the local paper. The Rotary Club was constantly engaged in fund raising for the town’s different charities. My father would be involved in similar activity, not just through the church but as a councillor and in a private capacity. One such event which I used to enjoy was the League of Pity (now NSPCC) Children’s Christmas party, which I would go to in one of the party dresses beautifully made by my mother, to raise money for children who needed help.

Apart from home and church, the other centre of my life was, naturally enough, school. Here too I was very lucky. Huntingtower Road Primary School had a good reputation in the town. It had quite new buildings and excellent teachers. By the time I went there I had already been taught simple reading by my parents, and even when I was very young I enjoyed learning. Like all children, I suspect, these days remain vividly immediate for me. I remember a heart-stopping moment at the age of five when I was asked how to pronounce W-R-A-P; I got it right, but I thought ‘They always give me the difficult ones.’ Later, in General Knowledge, I first came across the mystery of ‘proverbs’. I already had a logical and indeed somewhat literal mind — perhaps I have not changed much in this regard — and I was perplexed by the metaphorical element of phrases like ‘Look before you leap’. I thought it would be far better to say ‘Look before you cross’ — a highly practical point given the dangerous road I must traverse on my way to school. And like other children before and after I triumphantly pointed out the contradiction between that proverb and ‘He who hesitates is lost’.

It was in the top class at primary school that I first came across the work of Kipling, who died that January of 1936. I immediately became fascinated by his poems and stories and often asked my parents for a Kipling book at Christmas. His poems, themselves wonderfully accessible, gave a child access to a wider world — indeed wider worlds — of the Empire, work, English history and the animal kingdom. Like the Hollywood films later, Kipling offered glimpses into the romantic possibilities of life outside Grantham. By now I was probably reading more widely than most of my classmates, doubtless through my father’s influence, and it showed on occasion. I can still recall writing an essay about Kipling and burning with childish indignation at being accused of having copied down the word ‘nostalgia’ from some book, whereas I had used it quite naturally and easily.

From Huntingtower Road I went on to Kesteven and Grantham Girls’ School. It was in a different part of town, but what with coming home for lunch, which was more economical than the school lunch, I still walked four miles a day back and forth. Our uniform was saxe-blue and navy and so we were called ‘the girls in blue’. (When Camden Girls’ School from London was evacuated to Grantham for part of the war they were referred to as ‘the girls in green’.) The headmistress was Miss Williams, a petite, upright, grey-haired lady, who had started the school as headmistress in 1910, inaugurated certain traditions such as that all girls however academic had to take domestic science for four years, and whose quiet authority by now dominated everything. I greatly admired the special outfits Miss Williams used to wear on important days, such as at the annual school fete or prize-giving, when she appeared in beautiful silk, softly tailored, looking supremely elegant. But she was very practical. The advice to us was never to buy a low-quality silk when the same amount of money would purchase a very good- quality cotton. ‘Never aspire to a cheap fur coat when a well-tailored wool coat would be a better buy.’ The rule was always to go for quality within your own income.

My teachers had a genuine sense of vocation and were highly respected by the whole community. The school was small enough — about 350 girls — for us to get to know them and one another, within limits. The girls were generally from middle-class backgrounds; but that covered a fairly wide range of occupations from town and country. My closest friend, indeed, came in daily from a rural village about ten miles distant, where her father was a builder. I used to stay with her family from time to time. Her parents, no less keen than mine to add to a daughter’s education, would take us out for rural walks, identifying the wild flowers and the species of birds and birdsongs.

I had a particularly inspiring History teacher, Miss Harding, who gave me a taste for the subject which, unfortunately, I never fully developed. I found myself with absolute recall remembering her account of the Dardanelles campaign so many years later when, as Prime Minister, I walked over the tragic battlegrounds of Gallipoli.