Читать книгу Margaret Thatcher: The Autobiography - Margaret Thatcher - Страница 6

Grantham 1925–1943

MY FIRST DISTINCT MEMORY IS OF TRAFFIC. I was being pushed in a pram through the town to the park on a sunny day, and I must have encountered the bustle of Grantham on the way. The occasion stays in my mind as an exciting mixture of colour, vehicles, people and thunderous noise – yet, perhaps paradoxically, the memory is a pleasant one. I must have liked this first conscious plunge into the outside world.

As for indistinct memories, most of us probably recall our earliest years as a sort of blur. Mine was an idyllic blur in which the sun was always shining through the leaves of the lime tree into our living room and someone – my mother, my sister, one of the people working in the shop – was always nearby to cuddle me or pacify me with a sweet. Family tradition has it that I was a very quiet baby, which my political opponents might have some difficulty in believing. But I had not been born into a quiet family.

Four generations of the Roberts family had been shoemakers in Northamptonshire, at that time a great centre of the shoe industry. My father, who had wanted to be a teacher, had to leave school at thirteen because the family could not afford for him to stay on. He went instead to work at Oundle, one of the better public (i.e. private) schools. Years later, when I was answering questions in the House of Commons, Eric Heffer, a left-wing Labour MP and regular sparring partner of mine, tried to pull working-class rank by mentioning that his father had been a carpenter at Oundle. He was floored when I was able to retort that mine had worked in the tuck shop there.

My father had a number of jobs, most of them in the grocery trade, until in 1913 he was offered the post of manager of a grocery store in Grantham. In later years he would say that of the fourteen shillings a week he received, twelve shillings paid for his board and lodging, one shilling he saved, and only then did he spend the remaining shilling. The First World War broke out a year later. My father, a deeply patriotic man, tried to enlist no fewer than six times, but was rejected on each occasion on medical grounds. His younger brother, Edward, did enlist, and died on active service in Salonika in 1917. Few British families escaped such a bereavement, and Remembrance Day after the war was observed throughout the country both strictly and intensely.

Four years after arriving in Grantham my father met my mother, Beatrice Ethel Stephenson, through the local Methodist church. She had her own business as a dressmaker. They were married in that church in May 1917 and my sister, Muriel, was born in 1921.

My mother was quite a saver too, and by 1919 they were able to take out a mortgage to buy their own shop in North Parade. Our home was over this shop. In 1923 my father opened a second shop in Huntingtower Road – opposite the primary school which I would later attend. On 13 October 1925 I was born over the shop at North Parade.

That same year, my father expanded his business further, taking in two adjoining buildings in North Parade. Our shop and house were situated at a busy crossroads and the main railway line – Grantham was an important junction – was just a hundred yards away. We could set our clocks by the ‘Flying Scotsman’ as it thundered through. What I most regretted was that we did not have a garden. Not until the end of the Second World War did my father buy a house with a long garden further along North Parade, on which the family had set our hearts some years previously.

Life ‘over the shop’ is much more than a phrase. It is something which those who have lived it know to be quite distinctive. For one thing, you are always on duty. People would knock on the door at almost any hour of the night or weekend if they ran out of bacon, sugar, butter or eggs. Everyone knew that we lived by serving the customer; it was pointless to complain – and so nobody did. These orders were, of course, on top of the regular ones. My father or his staff – we had three at North Parade and someone else at Huntingtower – would generally go out and collect these. But sometimes my mother would do so, and then she might take Muriel and me along too. My sister and I knew a lot of people in the town as a result.

There was, of course, no question of closing down the shop for long family holidays. We used to go to the local seaside resort, Skegness. But my father and mother had to take their holidays at different times, with my father taking a week off every year to play his favourite game, competing in the bowls tournament at Skegness. Living over the shop, children see far more of their parents than in most other walks of life. I saw my father at breakfast, lunch, high tea and supper. We had much more time to talk than some other families, for which I have always been grateful.

My father was a specialist grocer. He always aimed to supply the best-quality produce, and the shop itself suggested this. Behind the counter there were three rows of splendid mahogany spice drawers with sparkling brass handles, and on top of these stood large, black, lacquered tea canisters. One of the tasks I sometimes shared was the weighing out of tea, sugar and biscuits from the sacks and boxes in which they arrived into 1lb and 2lb bags. In a cool back room we called ‘the old bake house’ hung sides of bacon which had to be boned and cut up for slicing. Wonderful aromas of spices, coffee and smoked hams would waft through the house.

I was born into a home which was practical, serious and intensely religious. My father and mother were both staunch Methodists; indeed, my father was much in demand as a lay preacher in and around Grantham. He was a powerful preacher whose sermons contained a good deal of intellectual substance. But he was taken aback when I asked him why he put on a ‘sermon voice’ on these occasions. I don’t think he realized that he did this. It was an unconscious homage to the biblical message, and quite different from the more prosaic tones in which he dispatched council business and current affairs.

Our lives revolved around Methodism. The family went to Sunday Morning Service at 11 o’clock, but before that I would have gone to morning Sunday School. There was Sunday School again in the afternoon; later, from about the age of twelve, I played the piano for the smaller children to sing the hymns. Then my parents would usually go out again to Sunday Evening Service.

On a few occasions I remember trying to get out of going. But when I said to my father that my friends were able to go out for a walk instead and I would like to join them, he would reply: ‘Never do things just because other people do them.’ This was one of his favourite expressions – used when I wanted to learn dancing, or sometimes when I wanted to go to the cinema. Whatever I felt at the time, the sentiment stood me in good stead, as it did my father.

My father’s sense of duty, however, always had its gentler side. This was not true of everyone. Life for poor people in the years before the Second World War was very difficult; and it was not much easier for those who had worked hard, accumulated a nest egg, and achieved a precarious respectability. They lived on a knife-edge and feared that if some accident hit them, or if they relaxed their standards of thrift and diligence, they might be plunged into debt and poverty. This precariousness often made otherwise good people hard and unforgiving. I remember a discussion between my father and a church-goer about the ‘prodigal son’ of a friend who, after running through his parents’ savings, had turned up penniless and with a young family on their doorstep. The church-goer was clear: the boy was no good, would never be any good, and should be shown the door. My father’s reply is vivid in my mind. No, he said. A son remained a son, and he must be greeted with all the love and warmth of his family when he turned to them. Whatever happens, you must always be able to come home.

As this suggests, my father was a man of firm principles – ‘Your father always sticks to his principles,’ my mother would say – but he did not believe in applying these principles in a way which made life wretched for everyone else. He showed this in his dealings as a local councillor and later alderman with the vexed question of what could be done on the Sabbath. In those days in Grantham and in most places cinemas were closed on Sundays, but during the war – adopting a utilitarian rather than a dogmatic approach – he supported Sunday opening because it gave the servicemen stationed near the town somewhere to go, without disturbing others who wanted a quieter, more contemplative Sabbath. At the same time he strongly (though in the end unsuccessfully) opposed the opening of the parks for the playing of games, which he felt would ruin other people’s peace and quiet. He wanted to keep Sunday a special day, but he was flexible about how it should be done. For my own part, I was unpersuaded, even as a girl, of the need for these restrictions: but I can now appreciate how much this highly principled man was prepared to bend on the matter when circumstances made it sensible.

These upright qualities, which entailed a refusal to alter your convictions just because others disagreed or because you became unpopular, were instilled into me from the earliest days. In 1936, when I was eleven, I was given a special edition of Bibby’s Annual. Joseph Bibby was a Liverpool food manufacturer who used part of his considerable self-made fortune to edit a religious magazine which was an odd combination of character building, homespun philosophy and religion; it also contained beautiful reproductions of great pictures. I was too young to know that the underlying approach was Theosophist* but the Annual was one of my most treasured possessions. Above all, it taught me some verses which I still use in off-the-cuff speeches because they came to embody for me so much of what I was brought up to feel.

One ship drives East, and another drives West,

By the self-same gale that blows;

’Tis the set of the sail, and not the gale,

That determines the way she goes.

ELLA WHEELER WILCOX

Or again:

The heights by great men reached and kept

Were not attained by sudden flight,

But they, while their companions slept,

Were toiling upward in the night.

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

Whether it was that early exposure to Bibby’s Annual or just a natural bent, I was soon fascinated by poetry. Aged ten, I was the proud winner of a prize at the Grantham Eisteddfod for reciting poetry. (I read John Drinkwater’s ‘Moonlit Apples’ and Walter de la Mare’s ‘The Travellers’.) One day soon afterwards, when I called at a door to collect an order for groceries, I was given an edition of Milton by someone who knew how much poetry meant to me: I have treasured the book ever since. In the first years of the war I would go out as part of a concert party to the surrounding villages and recite from my Oxford Book of English Verse – another book which even now is never far from reach. Methodism itself, of course, has, in the form of the Wesley hymns, some really fine religious poetry.

Religious life in Grantham was very active and, in the days before Christian ecumenism, competitive. There were three Methodist chapels, St Wulfram’s Anglican church – the sixth-highest steeple in England, according to local legend – and a Roman Catholic church just opposite our house. From a child’s standpoint, the Catholics seemed to have the most light-hearted time of all. I used to envy the young Catholic girls making their first communion, dressed in white, ribboned party dresses, and carrying baskets of flowers. The Methodist style was much plainer, and if you wore a ribboned dress an older chapel-goer would shake his head and warn against ‘the first step to Rome’.

Even without ribbons, however, Methodism was far from dour. It placed great emphasis on the social side of religion and on music, both of which gave me plenty of opportunities to enjoy life, even if it was in what might seem a rather solemn way. Our friends from church would often come in to cold supper on Sunday evenings, or we would go to them. I always enjoyed the adults’ conversation, which ranged far wider than religion or happenings in Grantham to include national and international politics. And one of the unintended consequences of the temperance side of Methodism was that Methodists tended to devote more time and attention to eating. ‘Keeping a good table’ was a common phrase, and many of the social occasions were built around tea parties and suppers. There was also a constant round of church events.

It was, I confess, the musical side of Methodism which I liked best. We sang special hymns on the occasion of Sunday School anniversaries. The Kesteven and Grantham Girls’ School (KGGS) carol service – and the weeks of practice which preceded it – was something I always looked forward to. Our church had an exceptionally good choir. Every other year we would perform an oratorio: Handel’s Messiah, Haydn’s Creation or Mendelssohn’s Elijah. We would have professionals from London to sing the more difficult solo parts. But what made an impression on me was the latent richness of musical talent which serious training and practice could develop. My family also belonged to a music society and three or four times a year there would be a chamber music concert.

We were a musical family. From the age of five my parents had me learn the piano: my mother played too. In fact, I turned out to be quite good, and I was fortunate enough to have excellent teachers and won several prizes at local music festivals. The piano on which I was taught was made by my great uncle, John Roberts, in Northampton. He also made church organs. When I was ten I visited him and was thrilled to be allowed to play one of the two he had built in a cavernous barn-like building in his garden. Sadly, at sixteen I found it necessary to stop music lessons when I was cramming for my university entrance, and I still regret that I never took the piano up again. At this time, however, it was I who played the piano at home, while my father (who had a good bass voice) and mother (a contralto) and sometimes friends sang the old favourites of an evening – ‘The Holy City’, ‘The Lost Chord’, Gilbert and Sullivan, etc.

Perhaps the biggest excitement of my early years was a visit to London when I was twelve years old. I came down by train in the charge of a friend of my mother’s, arriving at King’s Cross, where I was met by the Rev. Skinner and his wife, family friends who were going to look after me. The first impact of London was overwhelming: King’s Cross itself was a giant bustling cavern; the rest of the city had all the dazzle of a commercial and imperial capital. For the first time in my life I saw people from foreign countries, some in the traditional native dress of India and Africa. The sheer volume of traffic and of pedestrians was exhilarating; they seemed to generate a sort of electricity. London’s buildings were impressive for another reason; begrimed with soot, they had a dark imposing magnificence which constantly reminded me that I was at the centre of the world.

I was taken by the Skinners to all the usual sites. I fed the pigeons in Trafalgar Square; I rode the Underground – a slightly forbidding experience for a child; I visited the Zoo, where I rode on an elephant and recoiled from the reptiles – an early portent of my relations with Fleet Street; I was disappointed by Oxford Street, which was much narrower than the boulevard of my imagination; made a pilgrimage to St Paul’s, where John Wesley had prayed on the morning of his conversion; and of course, to the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben, which did not disappoint at all; and I went to look at Downing Street, but unlike the young Harold Wilson did not have the prescience to have my photograph taken outside No. 10.

All this was enjoyable beyond measure. But the high point was my first visit to the Catford Theatre in Lewisham where we saw Sigmund Romberg’s famous musical The Desert Song. For three hours I lived in another world, swept away as was the heroine by the daring Red Shadow – so much so that I bought the score and played it at home, perhaps too often.

I could hardly drag myself away from London or from the Skinners, who had been such indulgent hosts. Their kindness had given me a glimpse of, in Talleyrand’s words, ‘la douceur de la vie’ – how sweet life could be.

Our religion was not only musical and sociable – it was also intellectually stimulating. The ministers were powerful characters with strong views. The general political tendency among Methodists and other Nonconformists in our town was somewhat to the left wing and even pacifist. Methodists in Grantham were prominent in organizing the ‘Peace Ballot’ of 1935, circulating a loaded questionnaire to the electorate, which was then declared overwhelmingly to have ‘voted for peace’. It is not recorded how far Hitler and Mussolini were moved by this result; we had our own views about that in the Roberts household. The Peace Ballot was a foolish idea which must take some of the blame nationally for delaying the rearmament necessary to deter and ultimately defeat the dictators. On this question and others, being staunchly Conservative, we were the odd family out. Our friend the Rev. Skinner was an enthusiast for the Peace Ballot. He was the kindest and holiest man, and he married Denis and me at Wesley’s Chapel in London many years later. But personal virtue is no substitute for political hard-headedness.

The sermons we heard every Sunday made a great impact on me. It was an invited Congregationalist minister, the Rev. Childe, who brought home to me the somewhat advanced notion for those days that whatever the sins of the fathers (and mothers) they must never be visited on the children. I still recall his denunciation of the Pharisaical tendency to brand children born outside marriage as ‘illegitimate’. All the town knew of some children without fathers; listening to the Rev. Childe, we felt very guilty about thinking of them as different. Times have changed. We have since removed the stigma of illegitimacy not only from the child but also from the parent – and perhaps increased the number of disadvantaged children thereby. We still have to find some way of combining Christian charity with sensible social policy.

When war broke out and death seemed closer to everybody, the sermons became more telling. In one, just after the Battle of Britain, the preacher told us that it is ‘always the few who save the many’: so it was with Christ and the apostles. I was also inspired by the theme of another sermon: history showed how it was those who were born at the depths of one great crisis who would be able to cope with the next. This was proof of God’s benevolent providence and a foundation for optimism about the future, however dark things now looked. The values instilled in church were faithfully reflected in my home.

So was the emphasis on hard work. In my family we were never idle – partly because idleness was a sin, partly because there was so much work to be done, and partly, no doubt, because we were just that sort of people. As I have mentioned, I would help whenever necessary in the shop. But I also learned from my mother just what it meant to cope with a household so that everything worked like clockwork, even though she had to spend so many hours serving behind the counter. Although we had a maid before the war – and later a cleaning lady a couple of days a week – my mother did much of the work herself, and there was a great deal more than in a modern home. She showed me how to iron a man’s shirt in the correct way and to press embroidery without damaging it. Large flatirons were heated over the fire and I was let in on the secret of how to give a special finish to linen by putting just enough candle wax to cover a sixpenny piece on the iron. Most unusually for those times, at my secondary school we had to study domestic science – everything from how to do laundry properly to the management of the household budget. So I was doubly equipped to lend a hand with the domestic chores. The whole house at North Parade was not just cleaned daily and weekly: a great annual spring clean was intended to get to all those parts which other cleaning could not reach. Carpets were taken up and beaten. The mahogany furniture – always good quality, which my mother had bought in auction sales – was washed down with a mixture of warm water and vinegar before being repolished. Since this was also the time of the annual stocktaking in the shop, there was hardly time to draw breath.

Nothing in our house was wasted, and we always lived within our means. The worst you could say about another family was that they ‘lived up to the hilt’. Because we had always been used to a careful regime, we could cope with wartime rationing, though we used to note down the hints on the radio about the preparation of such stodgy treats as ‘Lord Woolton’s potato pie’, an economy dish named after the wartime Minister for Food. My mother was an excellent cook and a highly organized one. Twice a week she had her big bake – bread, pastry, cakes and pies. Her home-made bread was famous, as were her Grantham gingerbreads. Before the war there were roasts on Sunday, which became cold cuts on Monday and disappeared into rissoles on Tuesday. With wartime, however, the Sunday roast became almost meatless stew or macaroni cheese.

Small provincial towns in those days had their own networks of private charity. In the run-up to Christmas as many as 150 parcels were made up in our shop, containing tinned meat, Christmas cake and pudding, jam and tea – all purchased for poorer families by one of the strongest social and charitable institutions in Grantham, the Rotary Club. There was always something from those Thursday or Sunday bakes which was sent out to elderly folk living alone or who were sick. As grocers, we knew something about the circumstances of our customers.

Clothes were never a problem for us. My mother had been a professional seamstress and made most of what we wore. In those days there were two very good pattern services, Vogue and Butterick’s, and in the sales we could get the best-quality fabrics at reduced prices. So we got excellent value for money and were, by Grantham standards, rather fashionable. For my father’s mayoral year, my mother made both her daughters new dresses – a blue velvet for my sister and a dark green velvet for me – and herself a black moiré silk gown. But in wartime the ethos of frugality was almost an obsession. Even my mother and I were taken aback by one of our friends, who told us that she never threw away her tacking cottons but re-used them: ‘I consider it my duty to do so,’ she said. After that, so did we. We were not Methodists for nothing.

I had less leisure time than other children. But I used to enjoy going for long walks, often on my own. Grantham lies in a little hollow surrounded by hills, unlike most of Lincolnshire which is very flat. I loved the beauty of the countryside and being alone with my thoughts in those surroundings. Sometimes I used to walk out of the town by Manthorpe Road and cut across on the north side to return down the Great North Road. I would also walk up Hall’s Hill, where in wartime we were given a week off school to go and gather rose hips and blackberries. There was tobogganing there when it snowed.

I did not play much sport, though I learned to swim, and at school I was a somewhat erratic hockey player. At home we played the usual games, like Monopoly and Pit – a noisy game based on the Chicago Commodities Exchange. In a later visit to America I visited the Exchange; but my dabbling in commodities ended there.

It was, however, the coming of the cinema to Grantham which really brightened my life. We were fortunate in having among our customers the Campbell family who owned three cinemas in Grantham. They would sometimes invite me around to their house to play the gramophone, and I got to know their daughter Judy, later to be a successful actress who partnered Noël Coward in his wartime comedy Present Laughter and made famous the song ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’. Because we knew the Campbells, the cinema was more acceptable to my parents than it might otherwise have been. They were content that I should go to ‘good’ films, a classification which fortunately included Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals, and the films of Alexander Korda. They rarely went with me – though on a Bank Holiday we would go together to the repertory theatre in Nottingham or to one of the big cinemas there – so usually I would be accompanied by friends of my own age. Even then, however, there were limits. Ordinarily there was a new film each week; but since some of these did not sustain enough interest to last six days, another one was shown from Thursday. Some people would go along to the second film, but that was greatly frowned on in our household.

Perhaps that was a fortunate restraint; for I was entranced with the romantic world of Hollywood. For 9d you had a comfortable seat in the darkness while the screen showed first the trailer for forthcoming attractions, then the British Movietone News with its chirpy optimistic commentary, after that a short public service film on a theme like Crime Does Not Pay, and finally the Big 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 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. 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, 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. 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-today 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. 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 and by the time I went there I had already been taught simple reading by my parents. 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 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 asked my parents for a Kipling book at Christmas. His poems 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 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, and what with coming home for lunch, which was more economical than the school lunch, I 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 at the annual school fête 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 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 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.

But the main academic influence on me was undoubtedly Miss Kay, who taught Chemistry, in which I decided to specialize. It was not unusual – in an all-girls’ school, at least – for a girl to concentrate on science, even before the war. My natural enthusiasm for the sciences was whetted by reports of breakthroughs in the splitting of the atom and the development of plastics. It was clear that a whole new scientific world was opening up. I wanted to be part of it. Moreover, as I knew that I would have to earn my own living, this seemed an exciting way to do so.

As my father had left school at the age of thirteen, he was determined to make up for this and to see that I took advantage of every educational opportunity. We would both go to hear ‘Extension Lectures’ from the University of Nottingham about current and international affairs, which were given in Grantham regularly. After the talk would come a lively question time in which I and many others would take part: I remember, in particular, questions from a local RAF man, Wing-Commander Millington, who later captured Chelmsford for Common Wealth – a left-wing party of middle-class protest – from the Churchill coalition in a by-election towards the end of the war.

My parents took a close interest in my schooling. Homework always had to be completed – even if that meant doing it on Sunday evening. During the war, when the Camden girls were evacuated to Grantham and a shift system was used for teaching at our school, it was necessary to put in extra hours at the weekend. My father, in particular, who was an all the more avid reader for being a self-taught scholar, would discuss what we read at school. On one occasion he found that I did not know Walt Whitman’s poetry; this was quickly remedied, and Whitman is still a favourite author of mine. I was also encouraged to read the classics – the Brontës, Jane Austen and, of course, Dickens: it was the latter’s A Tale of Two Cities, with its strong political flavour, that I liked best. My father also used to subscribe to the Hibbert Journal – a philosophical journal. But this I found heavy going.

Beyond home, church and school lay the community which was Grantham itself. We were immensely proud of our town; we knew its history and traditions; we were glad to be part of its life. Grantham was established in Saxon times, though it was the Danes who made it an important regional centre. During the twelfth century the Great North Road was re-routed to run through the town, literally putting Grantham on the map. Communications were always the town’s lifeblood. In the eighteenth century the canal was cut to carry coke, coal and gravel into Grantham and corn, malt, flour and wool out of it. But the real expansion had come with the arrival of the railways in 1850.

Our town’s most imposing structure I have already mentioned – the spire of St Wulfram’s Church, which could be seen from all directions. But most characteristic and significant for us was the splendid Victorian Guildhall and, in front of it, the statue of Grantham’s most famous son, Sir Isaac Newton. It was from here, on St Peter’s Hill, that the Remembrance Day parades began to process en route to St Wulfram’s. I would watch from the windows of the Guildhall Ballroom as (preceded by the Salvation Army band and the band from Ruston and Hornsby’s locomotive works) the mayor, aldermen and councillors with robes and regalia, followed by Brownies, Cubs, Boys’ Brigade, Boy Scouts, Girl Guides, Freemasons, Rotary, Chamber of Commerce, Working Men’s Clubs, trade unions, British Legion, soldiers, airmen, the Red Cross, the St John’s Ambulance and representatives of every organization which made up our rich civic life filed past. It was also on the green at St Peter’s Hill that every Boxing Day we gathered to watch the pink coats of the Belvoir Hunt hold their meet (followed by the traditional tipple) and cheered them as they set off.

Nineteen thirty-five was a quite exceptional and memorable year for the town. We celebrated King George V’s Silver Jubilee along with Grantham’s Centenary as a borough. Lord Brownlow, whose family (the Custs) with the Manners family (the Dukes of Rutland) were the most distinguished aristocratic patrons of the town, became mayor. The town itself was heavily decorated with blue and gold waxed streamers – our local colours – across the main streets. Different streets vied to outdo one another in the show they put on. I recall that it was the street with some of the poorest families in the worst housing, Vere Court, which was most attractively turned out. Everyone made an effort. The brass bands played throughout the day, and Grantham’s own ‘Carnival Band’ – a rather daring innovation borrowed from the United States and called ‘The Grantham Gingerbreads’ – added to the gaiety of the proceedings. The schools took part in a great open-air programme and we marched in perfect formation under the watchful eye of the wife of the headmaster of the boys’ grammar school to form the letters ‘G-R-A-N-T-H-A-M’. Appropriately enough, I was part of the ‘M’.

My father’s position as a councillor, Chairman of the Borough Finance Committee, then alderman* and finally, in 1945–46, mayor meant that I heard a great deal about the town’s business and knew those involved in it. Politics was a matter of civic duty and party was of secondary importance. The Labour councillors we knew were respected and, whatever the battles in the council chamber or at election time, they came to our shop and there was no partisan bitterness. My father understood that politics has limits – an insight which is all too rare among politicians. His politics would perhaps be best described as ‘old-fashioned liberal’. Individual responsibility was his watchword and sound finance his passion. He was an admirer of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. Like many other business people he had, as it were, been left behind by the Liberal Party’s acceptance of collectivism. He stood for the council as a ratepayer’s candidate. In those days, before comprehensive schools became an issue and before the general advance of Labour politics into local government, local council work was considered as properly non-partisan. But I never remember him as anything other than a staunch Conservative.

I still recall with great sorrow the day in 1952 when Labour, having won the council elections, voted my father out as an alderman. This was roundly condemned at the time for putting party above community. Nor can I forget the dignity with which he behaved. After the vote in the council chamber was taken, he rose to speak: ‘It is now almost nine years since I took up these robes in honour, and now I trust in honour they are laid down.’ And later, after receiving hundreds of messages from friends, allies and even old opponents, he issued a statement which said: ‘Although I have toppled over I have fallen on my feet. My own feeling is that I was content to be in and I am content to be out.’ Years later, when something not too dissimilar happened to me, after my father was long dead, I tried to take as an example the way he left public life.

But this is to anticipate. Perhaps the main interest which my father and I shared while I was a girl was a thirst for knowledge about politics and public affairs. We read the Daily Telegraph every day, The Methodist Recorder, Picture Post and John O’London’s Weekly every week, and when we were small we took The Children’s Newspaper. Occasionally we read The Times.

And then came the day my father bought our first wireless – a Philips of the kind you sometimes now see in the less pretentious antique shops. I knew what he was planning and ran much of the way home from school in my excitement. I was not disappointed. It changed our lives. From then on it was not just Rotary, church and shop which provided the rhythm of our day: it was the radio news. And not just the news. During the war after the 9 o’clock news on Sundays there was Postscript, a short talk on a topical subject, often by J.B. Priestley, who had a unique gift of cloaking left-wing views as solid, down-to-earth, Northern homespun philosophy, and sometimes an American journalist called Quentin Reynolds who derisively referred to Hitler by one of his family names, ‘Mr Schicklgruber’. There was The Brains Trust, an hour-long discussion of current affairs by four intellectuals, of whom the most famous was Professor C.E.M. Joad, whose answer to any question always began ‘It all depends what you mean by …’ On Friday evenings there were commentaries by people like Norman Birkett in the series called Encounter. I loved the comedy ITMA with its still serviceable catchphrases and its cast of characters like the gloomy charlady ‘Mona Lott’ and her signature line ‘It’s being so cheerful as keeps me going.’

As for so many families, the unprecedented immediacy of radio broadcasts gave special poignancy to great events – particularly those of wartime. I recall sitting by our radio with my family at Christmas dinner and listening to the King’s broadcast in 1939. We knew how he struggled to overcome his speech impediment and we knew that the broadcast was live. I found myself thinking just how miserable he must have felt, not able to enjoy his own Christmas dinner, knowing that he would have to broadcast. I remember his slow voice reciting those famous lines:

And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year: ‘Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.’

And he replied: ‘Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.’*

I was almost fourteen by the time war broke out, and already informed enough to understand the background to it and to follow closely the great events of the next six years. My grasp of what was happening in the political world during the thirties was less sure. But certain things I did take in. The years of the Depression – the first but not the last economic catastrophe resulting from misguided monetary policy – had less effect on Grantham itself than on the surrounding agricultural communities, and of course much less than on Northern towns dependent on heavy industry. Most of the town’s factories kept going – the largest, Ruston and Hornsby, making locomotives and steam engines. We even attracted new investment, partly through my father’s efforts: Aveling-Barford built a factory to make steamrollers and tractors. Our family business was also secure: people always have to eat, and our shops were well run. The real distinction in the town was between those who drew salaries for what today would be called ‘white collar’ employment and those who did not, with the latter being in a far more precarious position as jobs became harder to get. On my way to school I would pass a long queue waiting at the Labour Exchange, seeking work or claiming the dole. We were lucky in that none of our closest friends was unemployed, but we knew people who were. We also knew – and I have never forgotten – how neatly turned out the children of those unemployed families were. Their parents were determined to make the sacrifices that were necessary for them. The spirit of self-reliance and independence was very strong in even the poorest people of the East Midlands towns and, because others quietly gave what they could, the community remained together. Looking back, I realize just what a decent place Grantham was.

So I did not grow up with the sense of division and conflict between classes. Even in the Depression there were many things which bound us all together. The monarchy was certainly one. And my family like most others was immensely proud of the Empire. We felt that it had brought law, good administration and order to lands which would never otherwise have known them. I had a romantic fascination for out-of-the-way countries and continents and what benefits we British could bring to them. As a child, I heard with wonder a Methodist missionary describing his work in Central America with a tribe so primitive that they had never written down their language until he did it for them. Later, I seriously considered going into the Indian Civil Service, for to me the Indian Empire represented one of Britain’s greatest achievements. (I had no interest in being a civil servant in Britain.) But my father said, all too perceptively as it turned out, that by the time I was ready to join it the Indian Civil Service would probably not exist.

As for the international scene, I recall when I was very young my parents expressing unease about the weakness of the League of Nations and its failure to come to the aid of Abyssinia when Italy invaded it in 1935. We had a deep distrust of the dictators.

We did not know much about the ideology of communism and fascism at this time. But, unlike many conservative-minded people, my father was fierce in rejecting the argument that fascist regimes had to be backed as the only way to defeat communists. He believed that the free society was the better alternative to both. This too was a conviction I quickly made my own. Well before war was declared, we knew just what we thought of Hitler. On the cinema newsreels I would watch with distaste and incomprehension the rallies of strutting brownshirts, so different from the gentle self-regulation of our own civic life. We also read a good deal about the barbarities and absurdities of the Nazi regime.

But none of this meant, of course, that we viewed war with the dictators as anything other than an appalling prospect, which should be avoided if possible. In our attic there was a trunk full of magazines showing, among other things, the famous picture from the Great War of a line of British soldiers blinded by mustard gas walking to the dressing station, each with a hand on the shoulder of the one in front to guide him. Hoping for the best, we prepared for the worst. As early as September 1938 – the time of Munich – my mother and I went out to buy yards of blackout material. My father was heavily involved in organizing the town’s air raid precautions. As he would later say, ‘ARP’ stood for ‘Alf Roberts’ Purgatory’, because it was taking up so much time that he had none to spare for other things.

The most pervasive myth about the thirties is perhaps that it was the Right rather than the Left which most enthusiastically favoured appeasement. Not just from my own experience in a highly political right-wing family, but from my recollection of how Labour actually voted against conscription even after the Germans marched into Prague, I have never been prepared to swallow this. But it is important to remember that the atmosphere of the time was so strongly pacifist that the practical political options were limited.

The scale of the problem was demonstrated in the general election of 1935 – the contest in which I cut my teeth politically, at the age of ten. It will already be clear that we were a highly political family. And for all the serious sense of duty which underlay it, politics was fun. I was too young to canvass for my father during council elections, but I was put to work folding the bright red election leaflets extolling the merits of the Conservative candidate, Sir Victor Warrender. The red came off on my sticky fingers and someone said, ‘There’s Lady Warrender’s lipstick.’ I had no doubt at all about the importance of seeing Sir Victor returned. On election day itself, I was charged with the responsible task of running back and forth between the Conservative committee room and the polling station (our school) with information about who had voted. Our candidate won, though with a majority down from 16,000 to 6,000.

I did not grasp at the time the arguments about rearmament and the League of Nations, but this was a very tough election, fought in the teeth of opposition from the enthusiasts of the Peace Ballot and with the Abyssinian war in the background. Later, in my teens, I used to have fierce arguments with other Conservatives about whether Baldwin had culpably misled the electorate during the campaign in not telling them the dangers the country faced. In fact, had the National Government not been returned at that election there is no possibility that rearmament would have happened faster, and it is very likely that Labour would have done less. Nor could the League have ever prevented a major war.

We had mixed feelings about the Munich Agreement of September 1938, as did many people. At the time, it was impossible not to be pulled in two directions. We knew by now a good deal about Hitler’s regime and probable intentions – something brought home to my family by the fact that Hitler had crushed Rotary in Germany, which my father always considered one of the greatest tributes Rotary could ever be paid. Dictators, we learned, could no more tolerate Burke’s ‘little platoons’ – the voluntary bodies which help make up civil society – than they could individual rights under the law. Dr Jauch, of German extraction and probably the town’s best doctor, received a lot of information from Germany which he passed on to my father, and he in turn discussed it with me.

I knew just what I thought of Hitler. Near our house was a fish and chip shop where I was sent to buy our Friday evening meal. Fish and chip queues were always a good forum for debate. On one occasion the topic was Hitler. Someone suggested that at least he had given Germany some self-respect and made the trains run on time. I vigorously argued the opposite, to the astonishment and doubtless irritation of my elders. The woman who ran the shop laughed and said: ‘Oh, she’s always debating.’

My family understood clearly Hitler’s brutal treatment of the Jews. At school we were encouraged to have foreign penfriends. Mine was a French girl called Colette: alas, I did not keep up contact with her. But my sister, Muriel, had an Austrian Jewish penfriend called Edith. After the Anschluss in March 1938, when Hitler annexed Austria, Edith’s father, a banker, wrote to mine asking whether we could take his daughter, since he very clearly foresaw the way events were leading. We had neither the time nor the money to accept such a responsibility alone; but my father won the support of the Grantham Rotarians, and Edith came to stay with each of our families in turn until she went to live with relatives in South America. She was seventeen, tall, beautiful, well-dressed, and spoke good English. She told us what it was like to live as a Jew under an anti-semitic regime. One thing Edith reported particularly stuck in my mind: the Jews, she said, were being made to scrub the streets.

We wanted to see Hitler’s wickedness ended, even by war if that proved necessary. From that point of view Munich was nothing to be proud of. We knew too that by the Munich Agreement Britain had complicity in the great wrong that had been done to Czechoslovakia. When fifty years later as Prime Minister I visited Czechoslovakia I addressed the Federal Assembly in Prague and told them: ‘We failed you in 1938 when a disastrous policy of appeasement allowed Hitler to extinguish your independence. Churchill was quick to repudiate the Munich Agreement, but we still remember it with shame.’ British foreign policy is at its worst when it is engaged in giving away other people’s territory.

But equally we all understood the lamentable state of unpreparedness in Britain and France to fight a major war. Also, unfortunately, some were taken in by the German propaganda and actually believed that Hitler was acting to defend the Sudeten Germans from Czech oppression. If we had gone to war at that point, moreover, we would not have been supported by all of the Dominions. It was the Germans’ subsequent dismemberment of what remained of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 that finally convinced almost everyone that war would soon be necessary to defeat Hitler’s ambitions. Even then, as I have pointed out, Labour voted against conscription the following month. There was strong anti-war feeling in Grantham too: many Methodists opposed the official recruiting campaign of May 1939, and right up to the outbreak of war and beyond pacifists were addressing meetings in the town.

In any case, the conflict was soon upon us. Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939. When Hitler refused to withdraw by 11 a.m. on Sunday 3 September in accordance with Britain’s ultimatum we were waiting by the radio, desperate for the news. It was the only Sunday in my youth when I can remember not attending church. Neville Chamberlain’s fateful words, relayed live from the Cabinet Room at No. 10, told us that we were at war.

It was natural at such times to ask oneself how we had come to such a pass. Each week my father would take two books out of the library, a ‘serious’ book for himself (and me) and a novel for my mother. As a result, I found myself reading books which girls of my age would not generally read. I soon knew what I liked – anything about politics and international affairs. I read, for instance, John Strachey’s The Coming Struggle for Power, which had first appeared in 1932. The contents of this fashionable communist analysis, which predicted that capitalism was shortly to be superseded by socialism, seemed to many of my generation exciting and new.

But both by instinct and upbringing I was always a ‘true blue’ Conservative. No matter how many left-wing books I read or left-wing commentaries I heard, I never doubted where my political loyalties lay. Such an admission is probably unfashionable. But though I had great friends in politics who suffered from attacks of doubt about where they stood and why, and though of course it would take many years before I came to understand the philosophical background to what I believed, I always knew my mind. I can see now that I was probably unusual. For the Left were setting the political agenda throughout the thirties and forties, even though the leadership of Churchill concealed it during the years of the war itself. This was evident from many of the books which were published at about this time. The Left had been highly successful in tarring the Right with appeasement, most notably in Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club, the so-called ‘yellow books’. One in particular had enormous impact: Guilty Men, co-authored by Michael Foot, which appeared under the pseudonym ‘Cato’ after Dunkirk in 1940.

Robert Bruce Lockhart’s best-selling Guns or Butter? appeared in the autumn of 1938, after Munich. Lockhart’s travels through Europe led him to Austria (now Nazi-controlled) and then to Germany itself at the height of Hitler’s triumph. There the editor of a German national newspaper is reported as telling him that ‘Germany wanted peace, but she wanted it on her own terms.’ The book ends with Lockhart, woken by ‘the tramp of two thousand feet in unison’, looking out of his window onto a misty dawn, where ‘Nazi Germany was already at work’.

A more original variation on the same theme was Douglas Reed’s Insanity Fair. This made a deep impression on me. Reed witnessed the persecution of the Jews which accompanied the advance of Nazi influence. He described the character and mentality – alternately perverted, unbalanced and calculating – of the Nazi leaders. He analysed and blisteringly denounced that policy of appeasement by Britain and France which paved the way for Hitler’s successes. Written on the eve of the Anschluss, it was powerfully prophetic.

Out of the Night by Jan Valtin – pen name for the German communist Richard Krebs – was lent to my father by our future MP Denis Kendall. It was such strong meat that my father forbade me to read it – but when he went out to meetings I would take it down and read its spine-chilling account of totalitarianism in action. It is full of scenes of sadistic violence whose authenticity makes them still more horrifying. The appalling treatment by the Nazis of their victims is undoubtedly the most powerful theme. But underlying it is another, just as significant. For it describes how the communists set out in cynical alliance with the Nazis to subvert the fragile democracy of Germany by violence in the late twenties and early thirties. That same alliance against democracy would, of course, be replicated in the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 to 1941 which destroyed Poland, the Baltic States and Finland and plunged the world into war. The book undoubtedly contributed to my growing belief that Nazism (national socialism) and communism (international socialism) were but two sides of the same coin.

A book which had a particular influence on me was the American Herbert Agar’s A Time for Greatness, which appeared in 1944. This was a powerful analysis of how the West’s moral failure allowed the rise of Hitler and the war which had followed. It urged a return to western liberal democratic values and – though I liked this less – a fair amount of left-wing social engineering. For me the important message of Agar’s book was that the fight against Hitler had a significance for human destiny which exceeded the clash of national interests or spheres of influence or access to resources or any of the other – doubtless important – stuff of power politics.

Agar also wrote of the need, as part of the moral regeneration which must flow from fighting the war, to solve what he called ‘the Negro problem’. I had never heard of this ‘problem’ at all. Although I had seen some coloured people on my visit to London, there were almost none living in Grantham. Friends of ours once invited two American servicemen – one black, one white – stationed in Grantham back to tea and had been astonished to detect tension and even hostility between them. We were equally taken aback when our friends told us about it afterwards. This sort of prejudice was simply outside our experience or imagination.

Like many other young girls in wartime, I read Barbara Cartland’s Ronald Cartland, the life of her brother, a young, idealistic Conservative MP, who had fought appeasement all the way and who was killed at Dunkirk in 1940. It was a striking testament to someone who had no doubt that the war was not only necessary but right, and whose thinking throughout his short life was ‘all of a piece’, something which I always admired. But the sense that the war had a moral significance which underlay the fear and suffering – or in our family’s case in Grantham the material dreariness and mild deprivation – which accompanied it, was perhaps most memorably conveyed by Richard Hillary’s The Last Enemy. The author – a young pilot – portrays the struggle which had claimed the lives of so many of his friends, and which would claim his own less than a year later, as one which was also being fought out in the human heart. It was a struggle for a better life in the sense of simple decency.

A generation which, unlike Richard Hillary, survived the war felt this kind of desire to put things right with themselves, their country and the world. As I would come to learn when dealing with my older political colleagues, no one who fought came out of it quite the same person as went in. Less frequently understood, perhaps, is that war affected deeply people like me who, while old enough to understand what was happening in the conflict, were not themselves in the services. But we all see these great calamities with different eyes, and so their impact upon us is different. It never seemed to me, for example, as it apparently did to many others, that the ‘lesson’ of wartime was that the state must take the foremost position in our national life and summon up a spirit of collective endeavour in peace as in war.

The ‘lessons’ I drew were quite different. The first was that the kind of life that the people of Grantham had lived before the war was a decent and wholesome one, and its values were shaped by the community rather than by the government. Second, since even a cultured, developed, Christian country like Germany had fallen under Hitler’s sway, civilization had constantly to be nurtured, which meant that good people had to stand up for the things they believed in. Third, I drew the obvious political conclusion that it was appeasement of dictators which had led to the war, and that had grown out of wrong-headed but decent impulses, like the pacifism of Methodists in Grantham, as well as out of corrupt ones. And, finally, I had the patriotic conviction that, given great leadership of the sort I heard from Winston Churchill in the radio broadcasts to which we listened, there was almost nothing that the British people could not do.

Our life in wartime Grantham – until I went up to Oxford in 1943 – must have been very similar to that of countless other families. There was always voluntary work to do of one kind or another in the Service canteens and elsewhere. Our thoughts were at the front; we devoured voraciously every item of available news; and we ourselves, though grateful for being more or less safe, knew that we were effectively sidelined. But there were twenty-one German air raids on the town, and seventy-eight people were killed. The town munitions factory – the British Manufacturing and Research Company (BMAR Co., or ‘British Marcs’ as we called it) – was an obvious target, as was the junction of the Great North Road and the Northern Railway Line – the latter within a few hundred yards of our house. My father was frequently out in the evenings on air raid duty. During air raids we would crawl under the table for shelter – we had no outside shelter for we had no garden – until the ‘all clear’ sounded. After bombs fell on the town in January 1941 I asked my father if I could walk down to see the damage. He would not let me go. Twenty-two people died in that raid. We were also concerned for my sister Muriel, who was working in the Orthopaedic Hospital in Birmingham: Birmingham was, of course, very badly bombed.

In fact, Grantham itself was playing a more dramatic role than I knew at the time. Bomber Command’s 5 Group was based in Grantham, and it was from a large house off Harrowby Road that much of the planning was done of the bombing raids on Germany. The Dambusters flew from near Grantham – my father met their commander, Squadron Leader Guy Gibson. I always felt that Bomber Harris – himself based in Grantham in the early part of the war – had not been sufficiently honoured. I would remember what Winston Churchill wrote to him at the end of the war:

For over two years Bomber Command alone carried the war to the heart of Germany, bringing hope to the peoples of Occupied Europe and to the enemy a foretaste of the mighty power which was rising against him …

All your operations were planned with great care and skill. They were executed in the face of desperate opposition and appalling hazards. They made a decisive contribution to Germany’s final defeat. The conduct of these operations demonstrated the fiery gallant spirit which animated your air crews and the high sense of duty of all ranks under your command. I believe that the massive achievements of Bomber Command will long be remembered as an example of duty nobly done.

WINSTON S. CHURCHILL

In Grantham, at least, politics did not stand still in the war years. Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 sharply altered the attitudes of the Left to the war. Pacifist voices suddenly became silent. Anglo-Soviet friendship groups sprouted. We attended, not without some unease, Anglo-Soviet evenings held at the town hall. It was the accounts of the suffering and bravery of the Russians at Stalingrad in 1942–43 which had most impact on us.

Although it can now be seen that 1941 – with Hitler’s attack on Russia in June and the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor which brought America into the war in December – sowed the seeds of Germany’s ultimate defeat, the news was generally bad, especially so in early 1942. This almost certainly contributed to the outcome of the by-election held in Grantham on 27 February 1942, after Victor Warrender was elevated to the Lords as Lord Bruntisfield, to become an Admiralty spokesman. Denis Kendall stood as an Independent against our Conservative candidate, Sir Arthur Longmore. Kendall fought an effective populist campaign in which he skilfully used his role as General Manager of British Marcs to stress the theme of an all-out drive for production for the war effort and the need for ‘practical’ men to promote it. To our great surprise, he won by 367 votes. Then and later the Conservative Party was inclined to complacency. A closer analysis of the limited number of by-elections should have alerted us to the likelihood of the Socialist landslide which materialized in 1945.

Unusually, I took little part in the campaign because I was preparing for examinations which I hoped would get me into Somerville College, Oxford. In particular, my evenings were spent cramming the Latin which was required for the entrance exam. Our school did not teach Latin. Fortunately, our new headmistress, Miss Gillies, was able to arrange Latin lessons for me from a teacher at the boys’ grammar school, and to lend me her own books, including a textbook written by her father. The hard work helped keep my mind off the ever more dismal news about the war. In particular, there was a series of blows in the Far East – the loss of Malaya, the sinking of the Prince of Wales and Repulse, the fall of Hong Kong and then Singapore, the retreat through Burma and the Japanese threat to Australia. One evening in the spring of 1942 when I had gone for a walk with my father I turned and asked him when – and how – it would all end. He replied very calmly: ‘We don’t know how, we don’t know when; but we have no doubt that we shall win.’

In spite of my efforts to get into Somerville, I failed to win the scholarship I wanted. It was not too surprising, for I was only seventeen, but it was a blow. If I was not able to go up in 1943 I would not be allowed to do more than a two-year ‘wartime degree’ before I was called up for national service at the age of twenty. But there was nothing I could do about it, and so at the end of August 1943 I entered the third-year sixth and became Joint Head of School. Then a telegram arrived offering me a place at Somerville in October. Someone else had dropped out. And so it was that I suddenly found myself faced with the exciting but daunting prospect of leaving home, almost for the first time, for a totally different world.

* Theosophy was a mixture of mysticism, Christianity and the ‘wisdom of the East’, sense and nonsense.

* Aldermen were indirectly elected council members – elected to serve a fixed term by the directly elected element in the council; a highly honoured position which has since been abolished.

* From God Knows, by Minnie Louise Haskins.