Margaret Thatcher: The Autobiography. Margaret Thatcher
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