Excerpt: "Speaking for Myself"

Oct. 15, 2008 — -- Cherie Blair, wife of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, shares her life from her childhood on into the courtship with and marriage to one of the most influential men in British politics.

Read an excerpt of Cherie Blair's autobiography below and check out "Good Morning America's" Library by clicking here.

Chapter 1: The Beginning

The story starts in the early 1950s, when two young actors meeton tour in the provinces. As happens in such stories, they fall inlove and are soon in the family way. When a daughter is born, theyare overjoyed and overwhelmed at the same time. Sadly, the strainof living in shabby digs, short of money and work, and with a smallbaby in tow, proves too much. Thus, when their baby is six weeksold, they leave her in the care of the father's parents in Liverpooland go off to the big city to seek their fortune.

The year was 1954, the baby was me, and I never grew tired ofhearing how my parents met, of their respective childhoods, and, ofcourse, of how I got my unusual name.

My father, Tony Booth, fell into acting largely by accident. Whiledoing his national service, he conducted a prolonged flirtation witha colonel's wife. As she was heavily into amateur dramatics, hedecided that this was the way in. And so the stage was set for therest of his life. Although he regularly complained that the theaterwas dominated by gay men, this state of affairs presented him withplenty of opportunities in terms of the ladies.

My mum took her profession a good deal more seriously. Oneyear younger than my father, Joyce Smith had been born andbrought up in Ilkeston, a mining village west of Nottingham.Her mother, born Hannah Meer, remains something of anenigma. Beyond her unusual maiden name and the fact that she wasa local beauty with lustrous blue-black hair, I know nothing abouther. My mum's father, however, was an extraordinary man, totallyself-educated. Jack Smith first went down the pit at the age of fourteenas an ordinary miner, but he was soon promoted to shotfirer— first into the mine at the beginning of a shift, armed solelywith a miner's lamp. His job was to test for gas. By the end of hiscareer, Jack had made mine manager.

From time to time we would go over to Ilkeston to visit mygrandfather, who was still living in the house where my mother hadgrown up. I remember being terrified of the huge blue scar on hisface. If you had an accident down in the pit, he later explained, thewound could never be adequately cleaned of coal dust, whichturned the scar tissue blue. Another thing that intrigued me was thehuge amount of water he used to wash himself. He no longerworked underground by then, so he had no need to douse himself inthis excessive manner, but old habits die hard. The bathroom whereHannah would have scrubbed his back was still downstairs, and thetoilet paper was still squares of newspaper on a hook.

Grandad Jack had always wanted to be a doctor, but for the eldestof eleven children, this was impossible. The nearest he got to itwas joining the St. John's Ambulance Brigade and becominginvolved with pit rescue. Later he gave lessons in first aid, using myreluctant mother as a guinea pig. He was a man of prodigiousenergy, active in the Labour Party and Salvation Army. He alsowrote poetry and toward the end of his life obtained a degree fromthe Open University, Britain's state-run distance-learning universityfor mature students. He worked until he was eighty, becoming anight watchman after he retired from the mines.

As if that wasn't enough, he was also a soccer referee and ransports clubs for young people. My mother would be obliged to joinin thought she always hated these activities. What she enjoyed morewas the youth club that he ran during World War II. He was a considerablemusician — there wasn't a brass instrument he couldn'tplay — and having trained the boys and girls in the club, he wouldvisit old people's homes and hospitals and put on little shows. Mymum played the piano, flute, and violin.

Mum had an unusual education for the time, attending one of thefirst Rudolf Steiner schools, Michael House. Everything about itwas avant-garde. She began school in 1936, at the age of three and ahalf. Music and movement, known as Eurythmy, was central tosteiner's ethos. Michael House even boasted its own theatre, andfrom the beginning, my mum was involved in school plays.

But then tragedy struck. Shortly after the war ended, the grandmotherI never met died at the age of forty-two. Although Hannahwas a local girl, the Meer family wasn't close, and no help wasforthcoming from her sisters after her death. So on top of going toschool, fourteen-year-old Joyce now had the house, her ten-year-oldbrother, and her father to look after. Before leaving home early inthe morning, my grandfather would ensure that the fire was lit, butthat was the extent of his involvement in household chores. It fell tomy mother to do everything else: shopping, cooking, washing, ironing,and cleaning, not to mention scrubbing her father's back whenhe got home from the pit. Being a clever girl, she planned to stay inschool until she was eighteen and do her "Matric," the exams thatwere then the passport to university and beyond. But after a year ofattempt to marry schooling and housekeeping, she was asked toleave Michael House.

Meanwhile she had met a woman called Beryl John, whose careeron the stage had been cut short by illness but who ran an amateurdramatic society and gave private lessons. How my grandfathercould pay for these lessons, I have no idea, but he did. All went welluntil, out of the blue, he announced he was marrying a womannamed label, whom my mother had never met and knew nothingabout beyond her name. Not unreasonably, perhaps, my mum tookcomplete umbrage at this interloper, and the day her father married,she packed her suitcase and left. She never lived under their roofagain.

Encouraged by my auntie Beryl (as I later called her). Mum appliedto and was accepted by the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, betterknown as RADA, as prestigious then as it is now Her father paid thetuition not because he thought it was a sensible thing to do, shebelieves, but out of guilt.At the end of her first year at RADA, she jumped at a summer jobwith the Earl Armstrong Repertory Company. Run by a husbandand-wife team the company, was based in Yorkshire. After one weekof rehearsals, the company set out for Wales, and the newly namedGale Howard (Beryl John had planned to use Gay Howard for herown thwarted career) was soon playing romantic leads oppositeTony Booth, a young actor from Liverpool with no training butcharisma to burn. It proved a real baptism of fire. At one time, mymum recalls, the actors had thirty shows under their belts and stillhad to do everything themselves: sew costumes, sell tickets, makeand paint the scenery, and change the sets. Performing was just theicing on the cake. If a larger cast was called for, there would be anynumber of keen amateurs, wherever they went, at no cost.

September arrived all too quickly, and a new term at RADA wasbeckoning. Drama schools are all very well, but as any professionalactor will tell you, there is nothing like the real thing, and GaleHoward never went back. More Welsh towns followed, and in oneof them — possibly in Rhayader — I was conceived. Next to theonly local theater was a café the company used to frequent, run bythe mother and grandmother of an eight-year-old girl so taken withthe theater that every night she would climb out of her bedroomwindow on the ground floor and persuade somebody at the stagedoor to let her in. After the show Tony and Gale — at twenty-oneand twenty, barely more than kids themselves — would escort thelittle imp home, with no one any the wiser. That Christmas foundthem back in Rhayader, where the run comprised three pantomimesand one Christmas play. The name of the play is now lost, but thecast included two dogs called Schmozzle and Kerfuffle. In the pantomimesmy mother played Cinderella, the princess in The Princessand the Swineherd, and one of the babes in The Babes in the Wood.

The other babe was played by the ecstatic café owner's daughter,achieving her dream of appearing onstage, albeit with no lines.By the end of the season my parents knew that my mother waspregnant, and when the Armstrongs refused to increase their wages,they had no option but to head back to London. The café owner'sdaughter was devastated that she was about to lose her newfoundfriends. Mum promised that she would never forget her, and if theirbaby turned out to be a girl, she said, they would name it after her.And they did: Cherie.

Tony Booth and Gale Howard were married in Marylebone RegistryOffice in London, a decent six months before I was born. In theend it was all a bit of a rush: a job had come up at Castleford Rep,and they were due to start rehearsals the next day. Their witnesseswere the brother of the landlady my mother had had when she wasa student at RADA and the registrar's assistant, a Mr. Christmas.

Afterward the landlady's brother took the newlyweds to the topfloor of Lyons Corner House, then a landmark restaurant, cheerfulbut cheap, on the corner of Piccadilly Circus. There, to the strains ofa string quartet, they celebrated with tea and cakes in preparationfor the four-hour train journey to Yorkshire.

They were still in the north the following autumn, my father nowwith the Frank H. Fortescue Famous Players. According to my birthcertificate, Cherie Booth was born on September 23, 1954, in FairfieldHospital, in the town of Bury, Lancashire — an event my fatherannounced from the stage that evening to a rather bemused audience.His request for two weeks off to help with the new arrival, wasturned down, so in true Tony Booth fashion, he gave his employerthe finger. With no work forthcoming and rent still needing to bepaid, the young couple tucked their daughter into a basket paddedwith nappies and smelling of greasepaint, and boarded the train forLiverpool.

Crosby lies at the northern end of Liverpool, the Catholic end,where thousands, if not millions, of Irish families disembarked fromships that brought them from their homeland, convinced theywouldn't be staying longer than a few weeks — months at theworst — until they'd be sailing across the Atlantic toward a new lifein America. For some the dream came true, but for many it didn't.Instead of Manhattan's skyline, they had to make do with the LiverBuilding and the cranes and derricks of the Liverpool docks.Crosby itself had aspirations. My paternal grandparents, Veraand George Booth, lived in a terraced house in Waterloo, the poorerpart of Crosby. Upstairs were two and a half bedrooms (the halfwas a boxroom above the front door with barely enough roomfor a single bed); downstairs were a front room (the parlor), a backroom (the sitting room), and the kitchen and scullery. It was fullyplumbed, if basic. It was by no means a house to be ashamed of;indeed they owned it — an uncommon occurrence in those parts.Working-class people such as my grandparents rarely owned housesin those days. At the end of our road was a park with swings and aroundabout. This marked the demarcation line between Waterloo(terraced) and Great Crosby (semidetached). Our street, FerndaleRoad, was the last of a grid of other "dales", — Thorndale, Oakdale,and so on — that all abutted St. John's Road. This bustlingshopping street, with its butcher, pawnbroker, grocers, barbers, andsecondhand shops, seemed to me then to be the center of the universe.

Like all the other houses in our street, Number 15 had a bay window,a small garden at the front, and a slightly larger garden at therear, made smaller by the presence of an air-raid shelter left overfrom the war. Unlike the other yellow-brick houses in FerndaleRoad, ours was painted cream and green, from the time when, solegend has it, my great-grandfather decided to show where his politicalallegiances lay — the green a nod to his Irish nationalism — inas ostentatious a manner as possible.

With the largest Catholic population in England, Liverpool hasalways been a highly politicized city. It prided itself on having noindustry — that was left to lesser places like Manchester — no idleboast when the industrial north was shrouded in smoke and washinghung out only when the wind was blowing in the right direction.

First and last, Liverpool was a port, and Merseyside (for the riverMersey, which ran through the city) was thus built on transientlabor. Unemployment was the baseline. You helped your neighborout today because God help you tomorrow. In the years before theLabour Party's general election victory in 1945 and the coming ofthe National Health System and the British welfare state, Liverpool'scommunities survived through networks of voluntary effort,and that habit never died. Lending a hand to those in trouble wasnot an option in our house; it was simply what you did, even if indoing so you went a few schillings short yourself.

Fifteen Ferndale Road was a very Catholic household. My grandmother,born Vera Thompson, was an Irish matriarch of the oldschool, though Liverpool-born and with a rich Scouse accent. Shehad two brothers, Edgar and William, and by the time I arrived,Uncle Bill was the proud owner of three small grocer's shops, anempire started by selling tea off a bike with a box strapped on theback. Vera's mother — my great-grandma Matilda, known as Tilly,the youngest of seventeen — came over with her family from countyMayo (or Cork, depending on whom you believe) on their way toAmerica. But like so many others, the McNamaras got no fartherthan the Liverpool docks. At some point she met my greatgrandfather,and that was that.

Her husband Robert Thompson's roots have been the subject ofmuch family debate. The version my grandma told was that he wasfrom Yorkshire, a young man from a family called Tankard. Afterdeserting in the First World War, the hightailed it to Ireland, wherehe changed his name to Thompson to escape detection. Another versionis that he was simply another Irish immigrant who failed to geta passage to the promised land.

What is not in dispute is that he was a fiery character with a talentfor drinking, going to horse races and losing money. He was also aradical. He had been a local leader of the nationwide general strikethat crippled the country for nine days in 1926. From then on, heearned his money as a barber, sitting on an orange box outside thedock gates, shaving sailors and cutting their hair when they returnedfrom months at sea with money in their pockets and an urge tospend it. (Not everyone was willing to part with his cash, and mygreat-grandma would tell stories of how he'd end up accepting thestrangest things in lieu, including a parrot that lived with them foryears and a monkey she wouldn't let inside the front door.) Eventuallyhe opened his own barber's shop on the corner of DenmarkStreet in the area known as Little Scandinavia, whose narrow, cobbledstreets — back-to-back houses with outside toilets — were tobecome my route to primary school.

Sadly, I never met him. Robert Thompson died in 1946, and mydad, who adored his grandfather, said the streets of Waterloo werelined with mourners from Ferndale Road as far as St. Edmund'sChurch when his coffin passed by.

On her husband's death, Matilda moved in with her daughter.The little bedroom above the front door became her private domain.She remained there until she died, when I was seven. She was theonly person in the household who had a room to herself, and yet inthe years she lived with us, I don't remember ever seeing her lift afinger to help, although occasionally you might catch sight of herflicking a feather duster to show she was willing. Her major preoccupationwas watching the comings and goings in the street belowfrom behind her lace curtains. She was tiny, like a bird, and grayhaired,but with a hint of the fiery redhead she had once been. Herlegendary temper, however, was still firmly in place. Nevertheless,she was remarkably tolerant when, dressed in my nurse's uniform, Iwould "inject" her arm with a plastic syringe, and she was always agood source of a sixpence.

From the perspective of an imaginative young girl, my grandfather'sancestors had led far less exciting lives. They were resolutelyEnglish, with no unresolved mysteries — or so I thought then. Mygreat-grandmother's family ran a small fishing fleet out of Formby,about thirty miles north of Liverpool up the Lancashire coast, whilemy great-grandfather's family were hill farmers from Westmorland,the English Lake District, just south of the border with Scotland.Nothing in our family is that straightforward, however, and aftermy grandad's death I discovered that in the First World War, hisfather — my great-grandfather Booth — had been a pacifist and hadgone to prison for it. He later served as a stretcher-bearer in thetrenches in Flanders, where he was severely gassed. My greatgrandmother'sfather turned out to be a famous smuggler who ran aprotection racket on the side.

In contrast to the Irish branch of the family, George Booth, mygrandfather, was never a great talker, though it didn't help that he wasabsent more often than he was at home. By the time I was living in FerndaleRoad, this translated into ten days on shore for every six weeksaway at sea. He was then the chief steward's writer on the MV Auriel,which sailed from Liverpool to Nigeria, and his tales of the sights andsounds of Lagos brought Africa vividly to life. He only truly came intohis own when playing the piano, which he did at every opportunity.

My father claims that he'd had to turn down a scholarship to theRoyal Academy of Music in London when he was a boy and that laterhe had been offered a job with a famous bandleader. It may be true,but Grandad never mentioned it to me. He was much more than just apub pianist, however. The piano stool was full of sheet music that he'dbought in New York on his sailings with Cunard, and it's thanks tohim that I can still sing most of the show songs of the 1950s and 1960s(though whether this is a good thing is another matter).

My grandfather was a gentle and sensitive man, with the mostbeautiful, but tiny, copperplate handwriting. He hadn't been mygrandmother's first choice for a husband. Grandma would tell mehow she'd married him on the rebound after the love of her life — aProtestant — refused to convert. It was only then that piano-playingGeorge made his move. He was a friend of her brother's, and itturned out he'd been nursing this secret passion for years. Althoughthe proposed marriage was frowned on by both families, time wasrunning out for the twenty-nine-year-old Vera, who probably realized that the love of a good man was worth any amount of familytut-tutting.

Love her he clearly did, though whenever he tried to kissher in front of us, she'd push him away with a fond "Don't be sodaft." Only years later did it emerge that he wasn't a Catholic either.On paper, yes: he had converted — my grandmother would neverhave married him otherwise — but religion was nothing to him. Hehardly ever went to church, but as he was away so much, it didn'tseem that strange, and the family had plenty of priests to smooth itsway into heaven. (I can still remember the mystique that surroundedmy cousin Paul — Father Paul to be precise — when he visited fromthe seminary and how Grandma would insist that we girls keep ourdistance, to avoid corrupting him with our presence!)

My own relationship with the Catholic Church, though veryimportant to me, has never been entirely conventional. It began withmy baptism. Even though my parents had registered my birth inBury, to a Catholic like my grandma, an unbaptized child was tantamountto a mortal sin. Luckily she knew that her cousin FatherBernard Harvey would quickly rectify the situation, and withinhours of my arrival in Ferndale Road, she had been to see him.

"So what would the little one's name be then, Vera?"

"Cherie."

"What was that?"

"Cherie."

"Is that it?"

"That's it."

"Now, Vera, I don't have to tell you, of all people, that the HolyChurch . . ."

He didn't. This was 1954, ten years before the Second VaticanCouncil. Services were still in Latin. Nuns were still fully veiled inhabits that reached down to the ground. And Vera Booth knew onlytoo well that a Catholic child could be baptized only with the nameof a Catholic saint. Although there are more than seven thousand ofthem, no amount of scanning unusual saints' names (and there aremany) would have revealed a Saint Cherie.

A compromise was eventually reached, and I was baptizedTheresa Cara: Theresa being a bona fide saint, and Cara being Latinfor Cherie, which was probably Father Bernard's attempt at keepingthe peace. At the same time, my grandma opened a savings accountfor me in the name of T. C. Booth, which I used right up until 1997.

My mother, needless to say, had no voice in these decisions.Although she came from a religious background herself — herfather was in the Salvation Army, and she'd gone to Sunday schoolas a child — she claims that she was quite happy for me to be baptizeda Catholic, having no strong feelings one way or the other.There may have been another reason for her acquiescence, however.Locking horns with one of the most formidable women on the planetwas not something anyone would do voluntarily — particularlyif they were now living under the same roof. Nobody messed withVera Booth.

People who lived through the depression have never entirely forgottenit. Make do and mend wasn't some green-friendly exercisefor my grandmother; it was the result of years of draconian economy.For the decade preceding the war, my grandad had virtually nowork. Trade between England and America was at a standstill — noships, empty docks, work only for those who knew somebody whoknew somebody else. In those circumstances the women became thebreadwinners. My grandma did anything she could, cleaning thehouses of the well-to-do who lived in nearby Blundellsands — onlya short distance away geographically but light-years from Crosby interms of money and horizons. Her world was divided between therich and the poor — and the Booths were definitely the poor. Beforeshe married, she had worked in a draper's in Blundellsands, and shewould tell the story of how one day a young woman came in with anew baby. My grandma could never resist a baby, and after chuckinghim under the chin, she asked what he was called.

"Anthony" came the answer, pronounced with a soft "th," ratherthan a "t."

"Oh," she said. "I love that name. If I have a little boy, I think I'llcall him Anthony."

She said she would never forget the expression on the woman'sface — a "people like you don't have Anthonys like my Anthony"expression.

My grandma remained class-conscious all her life and continuedto believe that there was one law for the rich and one law for thepoor. When my dad was about ten, he came down with scarlet feverand, as happened in those days, was sent to an isolation hospital,where his mother could only look at him through a window. When he was eventually allowed home, he asked her why she had neverbeen to visit his bedside. "Because it wasn't allowed," she said. Thenhe told her how the boy in the next bed had had regular visits fromhis parents: a boy who came from Blundellsands. I don't know howlong my dad was in there, weeks certainly, if not months, and itundoubtedly affected him. I also think it affected my grandmother'sattitude toward him, as she felt so guilty that she had simplyaccepted what she'd been told and hadn't insisted on seeing him.

When I was growing up, my source of stories about my father'searly life was my grandmother, because by the time I was oldenough to savor and enjoy them, he had disappeared from our lives.He was born in 1931 and named, of course, after that superior babyin Blundellsands. Then came my auntie Audrey in 1935, and finallymy uncle Bob, who was born during the first Luftwaffe bombingraid on Liverpool in May 1940.

With the outbreak of the war, everything changed. For a start,suddenly the docks were alive again. The merchant navy was desperatefor men to work the Atlantic convoys, and so that's whatGrandad did. Dangerous though it was — more merchant seamendied than members of the Royal Navy — it was work, and it waspatriotic. In fact, it was no safer to stay in Liverpool, where thedocks were a prime target of the Luftwaffe. The attacks reachedtheir peak in May 1941 with a week long blitz, when 4,000 peoplewere killed, 10,000 homes were destroyed, and 70,000 people weremade homeless.

War or no war, my dad was growing up. In 1943 he got a scholarshipto St. Mary's College, a Catholic grammar school run by theChristian Brothers, about half a mile along the Liverpool Road intoCrosby proper. He was clearly destined for great things. St. Mary'sboys were famous for going into the church and higher education.An academic future was not to be his, however. Shortly after mygrandad returned from the war in 1946, he was hit by a crane andplunged eighty feet into the hold of a ship, breaking his pelvis. Hewas lucky not to have been killed. His pay was stopped immediately,and he was off work for nearly two years. Through the union hewas eventually awarded compensation, but as soon as he was fitenough to go back, Cunard's response was to lay him off.

In the days following the accident, my grandma did everything she could to find a job herself, but nothing would pay enough. TheBooth family now had five mouths to feed, including a seven-yearold(Bob) and a twelve-year-old (Audrey), and no money to do itwith. Eventually my grandma had to accept the inevitable, and myfather left St. Mary's. At fifteen he began working on the Cunardtransatlantic route.

I remained with my grandparents for about two years following myarrival as a babe in arms, my parents coming and going as workallowed. At one point they did a summer season in Blackpool, closeenough for them to come down to see me on weekends (whichmeant Sunday to Monday). Sometimes my mother stayed with mein Crosby, but usually not, and I certainly never traveled with them.I was left with my grandma, my mum now says, because she wantedme to have continuity, "a steady place," though I suspect shealready knew that to keep my dad, she'd have to stick to him likeglue. And of course she wanted to be with him: he was witty andhandsome, and she was in her early twenties and in love.

By late 1956 my father found the beginnings of fame, if not offortune, with the play No Time for Sergeants, based on a best-sellingnovel. The play ran for eighteen months in the West End, and by thetime my sister Lyndsey was born, he and Gale (as my mother isalways called) were living in a settled way in a large Victorian housein Stoke Newington, north London. When Lyndsey was about threemonths old, my grandparents took me down to meet her.

On arrival, my grandma went straight to the nearest Catholicchurch and arranged to have the baby baptized the following day.The only Catholic my mother knew, another actress, was roped into be Lyndsey's godmother. This duty done, my grandparents left,at which point I discovered the hideous truth: I wasn't going withthem. According to my mother, my grandma's last words to me asshe and Grandad left the house were, "You're going to live withyour mother now. You'll probably never see me again."

I was inconsolable: kicking and screaming and generally expressingmy anger and distress in the only way I could. The woman Icalled "Mama" had gone for good. What it must have been like formy poor mother, I can scarcely imagine, overcome as she was, nodoubt, with guilt and remorse, and possibly even jealousy. As for mygrandmother, traumatic as it was, she had clearly fueled my dependence on her and so exacerbated my sense of abandonment. Later, when we were all happily (from my perspective) back in Crosby, shewould repeatedly tell me how she could never listen to "I CouldHave Danced All Night," the Julie Andrews classic from My FairLady, without crying, because it had been playing on the radiowhen her "baby" had been taken from her.

I stayed in Stoke Newington long enough for photographs to betaken, including one of the toddler Cherie looking bemused, herbaby sister propped up in her carriage beside her. The photo is ofpoor quality, but the general impression is not a happy one, and Ithink that was probably an accurate reflection of the circumstances.

It couldn't have helped that my parents were living in what wasessentially a student house with rented rooms and no real structuredfamily life. My dad would come home from the theater late at night,and inevitably I'd be woken up. I have a vague memory of the sporadicpresence of another flamboyant actor couple, blessed with anequally cavalier attitude toward children and their needs. Apart frommy mother — whom at this juncture I barely knew — the moststable presence in the house was my auntie Diane. Not a real auntbut my mum's friend, Diane lived in the basement with another girl,both of whom were studying design at the North London Poly, as itwas then known. To make ends meet, my mum spent hours packingsherbet fountains — an English concoction of sherbet powder andlicorice sticks — during the day. In later years I could never bringmyself to eat them; the smell alone was enough to bring backtwinges of anxiety.

Christmas passed. (The only Christmas I ever missed having withmy grandma until she died.) Then spring. I imagine they'd been hopingI'd settle down, but I didn't. For the previous two years I hadbeen the apple of my grandma's eye, and now I was just one of twolittle girls competing for affection. There is no doubt that, for all mygrandmother's iron will, I had been horribly spoiled. Shortly beforeChristmas my dad's show closed, and having no means of payingthe rent in Stoke Newington, our little family returned to FerndaleRoad. Even now I can remember the joy of finding myself once againsharing my grandma's bed.

It is only once I returned to Ferndale Road that my own memoriesreally begin, starting with the smells: my grandad's SeniorService cigarettes; the condensed milk he used to sweeten his tea;coal burning in the grate. In addition to the various humans in thehouse, we once had a cat and always had dogs — Alsatians, allcalled Sheba; Quin, a poodle — plus sundry white mice and tortoises.(In those days nobody connected the pets with my frequentasthma attacks.) There are fragments of other memories: A circularashtray where the cigarette stubs disappeared when you pusheddown the plunger. Linoleum that curled up at the edges. The gasmeter behind the front door which we fed with shillings. (As a treat,I'd drop them in, and Grandad would turn the knob.) Except whenGrandad was at home, I slept in my grandma's bed, while Lyndseyslept in our mum's. In fact, they slept in the same saggy double bedright up until Lyndsey left home.

For a long time I had an ambivalent relationship with mygrandad. Of course I loved him, but whenever he came back fromsea, I'd be ousted from my place, obliged to sleep on a camp bed inmy mother's room. My resentment was always short-lived. Whocould resist someone who played all your favorite songs? The firstSunday he was back on shore, our front room would be filled withaunts, uncles, and cousins for a sing-along. Grandad would alwaysstart with "Thank Heaven for Little Girls," dedicated to Lyndseyand me. Then one tune would flow into another, and we'd all joinin, with people asking for their favorites, Broadway musicalsmainly: My Fair Lady, South Pacific, West Side Story, and, best ofall, The Sound of Music. There was a time when I knew every singleword.

Grandad was not without vices. The first was horses: he wasalways trying different "systems," but he never seemed to win. Thesecond was smoking: cigarettes were cheap at sea, and he would getthrough forty untipped Senior Services a day. He coughed his gutsout the last few years before he died. As a result, I have nevertouched a cigarette in my life. His third vice was drinking: not alcohol,but very strong tea sweetened with lashings of condensed milk,which also came in handy for sticking tiles on the wall in the bathroomwhenever they fell off, a regular occurrence.

For the next eighteen months, my father worked in various theatersaround the north, based with us but in reality visiting only on weekends.The only time he actually lived with us was when he did aseason at Liverpool Playhouse, but when that came to an end, heheaded back to London. Realistically it was the only place he couldforge a career. Once he'd found somewhere to live, he told my mum,we'd join him. It never happened. It was during this time that he firstplayed opposite Pat Phoenix, then an unknown actress called PatriciaDean, who would later become an important person in his life —and in mine.

School was naturally St. Edmund's Catholic Primary, where myfather, Auntie Audrey and Uncle Bob had all gone before me. Theschool was attached to St. Edmund's Church, where Father BernardHarvey, my grandma's cousin — the one who had baptized me —was the parish priest.

I suppose that for the first day or two, I must have been taken toschool, but from then on I would go on my own and later took Lyndseywith me. Hand in hand we would walk or skip down St. John'sRoad, past Ronnie the cobbler, who had been at school with my dadand who always said hello. Farther along there was the pawnbroker'son the corner, with the window made entirely of black glassthat came down to the pavement. If you pressed your nose to theglass and raised an arm and a leg, you looked as if you were flying.

Then we'd continue up over the railway. If a train was coming, wewould stand on the footbridge and shriek as the steam billowedround us, lifting our skirts and warming our bare legs in winter. Onthe far side lay Little Scandinavia, a shortcut to school. The streetshere were still cobbled, making the game of never stepping on thecracks far more challenging than on the hopscotch pavements ofFerndale Road. In the middle of this labyrinth, the rag-and-boneman kept his horse. In Crosby we had had miles and miles of dunesyou could even see the sea from my classroom window — but thiswas the nearest we got to the country. So whenever the old man...