Margaret Thatcher: The Autobiography (3 page)

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.