Blackpool Liberal Democrats

The Shirley Williams story - Climbing the Bookshelves

The rebel 'Gang of Four' politician, reveals her maverick streak was rooted in a free-spirited childhood. Shirley William's memoirs, Climbing the Bookshelves, is published on 24th September, and you can order it from Amazon http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1844084760/theliberaldemocr

(and earn the party some commission). Today's Sunday Times serialises the book: "the rebel 'Gang of Four' politician, reveals her maverick streak was rooted in a free-spirited childhood". Here's an excerpt:

For reasons a psychoanalyst would understand better than I ever have, I felt the need as a girl to prove myself by doing whatever frightened me. In wartime London, one of my favourite pursuits was to climb over the edge of the new Bailey bridge across the Thames, halfway between Chelsea Bridge and the elegant Albert Bridge, and to clamber down to the steel joists above the indifferent brown river.

Climbing under the bridge I found only mildly scary. The much greater test was to overcome the fear of strange men, a residuary consequence of an attempted gang rape at sea when, aged 13, I was coming home from three years as an evacuee in America.

At school, I had been inculcated with the law of silence. So telling my parents about my experiences and my fears was unthinkable. First, they were still strangers after my absence in the United States. Second, I was my own person. Seeking their help would have been, in my eyes, contemptibly feeble. I would have to find my own way to cope.

The way I chose was provocative: long lonely walks near our home in Chelsea. I persuaded my parents to let me have a dog. A resilient mongrel collie called Treve became the companion of my next three years. He accompanied me on my late-night walks along the Embankment to Chelsea Bridge and back.

Often on these walks I would pass lonely men, leaning on the river wall and smoking a cigarette. As I approached them, sometimes in the thick dark of a night blended with fog, I would identify a house close enough to run to, its lights glimmering at the edges of the blackout curtains on the ground floor. That never happened, although on several occasions I was followed and once or twice quietly propositioned.

I was a competitive child. I liked risk, matching myself against challenges. Climbing my father's bookshelves to the very top was one such challenge. So later was amateurishly climbing mountains, breaking fingernails as I clung on to wet rock. Risk was one of several things that attracted me to politics when I was young, though I was also drawn to some obvious causes - poverty and inequality, lives limited by the accident of birth.

The earliest event I can remember is falling on my head from a swing onto the worn grass of the Chelsea Babies' Club playground sometime in 1933. I was three years old. I must have been an irritating infant. Apart from falling off swings and trying to climb perilous objects, according to one member of staff, I talked incessantly. Since my family were all given to talking, nursery school was probably my best chance of being heard.

My parents named me Shirley, not after the celebrated child film star of the time, Shirley Temple, but after Charlotte Brontë's "gallant little cavalier" in her novel of that name, a champion of social justice. I never cared for the name, nor for the book, which I have never managed to read all through. Perhaps that was why my father called me "Poppy", and Poppy became my childhood name.

My brother, John Edward, 2½ years older than me, closely resembled my mother's beloved younger brother Edward, killed in the first world war. He was protective and loving, and together we invented a private language and a virtual family, called the Dears, around whom we wove stories.

George Catlin, my father, was a slim, handsome, scholarly man, a university lecturer. He gave me the single greatest gift with which a child can be endowed: self-confidence. He and I conspired together. I climbed his bookshelves, right up to the ceiling, clinging grubbily to the dusty ledges. He never tried to stop me, and both of us knew he wouldn't tell my mother, who would immediately anticipate cracked skulls and broken arms.

That I was a girl was irrelevant to his ambitions for me. I could be anything I wanted to be. He saw no reason to think that women were lesser beings than men. Until I was 16 or so, it never occurred to me that this was a rare attitude for a man born in the 19th century to take.

Intelligent, ambitious and shy, my father longed to be a politician, a career he was in no way cut out for. He had no great respect for his own considerable academic achievements, and he slipped into sycophancy when encountering notable public figures. When I was old enough to notice, I wept inwardly for him, but could never persuade him to see these men for what many of them were - pompous, pushy or self-obsessed.

My mother, Vera Brittain, was a conscientious but rather remote parent. She was small, dark-haired, intense, serious and single-minded. My brother and I were brought up to respect her work; she was the family's main breadwinner. She enjoyed a period of fame as a bestselling writer. Her most renowned book, Testament of Youth, was an autobiography of her wartime experience as a nurse and her personal agony in losing all the young men she most loved.

As a child, I realised that her deepest commitment was to writing, then to my brother and only after them, to me. I don't recall resenting this at all, but it taught me to be independent. Her memories of the first world war were never far away, and were haunted by the men she had lost, men she was determined to make immortal by her writing. By my teens, I had a rounded image of Roland Leighton, the fiancé killed in France just before Christmas 1915, and of Edward, the sensitive, music-loving brother who survived until June 1918.

My mother was not widely liked. Her candour, which she did little to modify, left behind a trail of offended acquaintances. The legacy of the war cast a permanent shadow over her life, but she did allow herself some moments of frivolity. She loved clothes, and used to take me with her while she tried on the elegant polka-dotted silk dresses and emphatic hats of the 1930s. A new hat or pair of gloves could lift her spirits for days. It was a pleasure I did not share. After 10 minutes with a supercilious sales lady, I began to think about ponies and tricycles, and to resent the waste of my time. These early experiences immunised me against both shopping and fashion. For years I bought the first thing I saw that looked even vaguely as if it might suit me, though often it didn't.

My parents, my brother and I, and my mother's dear friend Winifred Holtby lived in a long, thin house at 19 Glebe Place, Chelsea, a street much favoured by artists, actors and other Chelsea characters. John and I loved Auntie Winifred. Tall and blonde, she radiated a gaiety that helped to dispel the sadness in my mother's life. They had met at Somerville College, Oxford, and had shared flats in London. Both were regarded as progressive writers, addressing topics like feminism and equal rights not much discussed in conventional society.

Some critics and commentators have suggested that their relationship must have been a lesbian one. My mother deeply resented this. She felt that it was inspired by a subtle anti-feminism to the effect that women could never be real friends unless there was a sexual motivation, while the friendships of men had been celebrated in literature from classical times. My mother was instinctively heterosexual. But as a famous woman author holding progressive opinions, she became an icon to feminists and in particular to lesbian feminists. She sometimes took me with her when she met lesbian women who were besotted with her, to indicate her own commitment to marriage and family.

My father adored meeting the great, and the great poseurs, of the political world, and could rarely distinguish between them. He was the instigator of the cocktail parties that brought all kinds of visitors to our house, though my mother's fame was the reason they came. Dressed in our nightclothes, my brother and I used to watch the arrivals through the banisters. After the last guest had gone we would slip into the drawing room to finish off the dregs in the bottoms of the glasses, returning to bed in a warm and muzzy haze.

Despite the visitors and the occasional parties, ours was a highly disciplined household. My mother was a methodical, tidy person. Her manuscripts were always well organised, her correspondence carefully filed. (My father and I were both untidy. He had piles of newspapers, articles and books in his study, waiting to be read; I had toys and clothes scattered about the nursery.) Determinedly professional, my mother was at work in her study by 10am, after reading the newspapers and the morning's letters, sorting out the shopping lists and paying the bills. Her study was a sacred place, of blotters and pens in black-and-gold stands, of carefully ranged notepaper and envelopes, and of manuscripts composed in her neat, rounded script. Only death, war or a serious accident would justify interrupting her there.

My parents spent the mornings in their separate studies, but meals were sociable occasions. Politics invaded our conversations. Mussolini stalked through our soup and Franco smirked in our puddings.

Hitler's relentless ascent to power became an ever-darkening shadow over our ordered lives. I, of course, understood little of all this. What I did understand was that no one would pay me any attention unless I engaged in political conversation too. "You're only interested in Hitler, not me," I informed them at the age of five.

When our family moved from Glebe Place in 1937 to the grander surroundings of Cheyne Walk, nearly two years after Aunt Winifred's early death from Bright's disease, I pleaded with my parents to let me attend the local school, Christ Church Elementary. Many of my fellow pupils were pasty-faced and skinny; some had the bowed legs of rickets. At Christmas, the London county council gave every child a bag of sweets and either a paper doll or a set of crayons. For many it was all they ever received. I had a set of farm animals and a tricycle from my parents. I didn't understand why I had done so much better than my friends. But I did understand that social divisions were abysses it was dangerous to cross. Fearful of having my head banged on the tarmac of the school playground, I quickly learnt to speak in a cockney accent and to leave and enter my house by the basement. My classmates assumed I was the cook's daughter. And I nearly was, for I adored our young cook-housekeeper Amy and her warm-hearted husband, Charles Burnett. They were my other parents, in some ways closer to me than my own. I felt I was their daughter too.

In the spring of 1939, my mother, conscious that war might be coming, decided to buy a cottage near Lyndhurst in the New Forest, where she could write and we children would be reasonably safe. It became a treasured haven. She would sit in the little wooden shed, with her papers and her typewriter, protected from the wind but open to her garden of hollyhocks, bright-blue delphiniums and forget-me-nots.

My mother was a worrier, a condition with which I failed to sympathise. Indeed, some streak of insensitivity led me, as a child and adolescent alike, to exacerbate her anxiety. I would go out walking in the forest and get lost.

The late summer of 1939 was a golden, tranquil season. One buzzing warm morning that September we children were summoned to listen to the wireless. In a broken voice, Neville Chamberlain told us that we were at war with Germany. My mother, my disciplined, professional mother, wept.

For me, war was heroism, adventure, excitement. I had just been moved to a boarding school at Swanage on the Dorset coast, where I was absorbed into the culture of bullying. Every night in our dormitories we played fearsome games of "truth or dare". Children my friends and I disliked, because they were homesick or cried easily, were asked horrendous questions about their families or themselves. If they jibbed at replying, insistence on truth gave way to the relentless command of the dare. Dare to knock on matron's door at midnight. Dare to carry a full potty of urine from bed to bed around the dormitory without once setting foot on the floor. Dare to perch on the window ledge for one whole minute until we haul you in.

The speed of France's collapse brought the prospect of a German invasion of Britain frighteningly close. My parents feared for our safety. They had reason to believe - later justified by their names on the Gestapo blacklist - that if the Germans conquered Britain they would be eliminated. Testament of Youth was anathema to the Nazis because of its message of peace.

A Minnesota couple, Ruth and Woodard Colby, whom my mother had met on a lecture tour of the United States, sent her a telegram saying simply: "Send us your children." On June 26, 1940, my brother and I, aged 12 and nearly 10, travelled by train to Liverpool. The ship that was to take us, painted grey to baffle German submarines, was hidden by a huge tarpaulin screen. Leaving our parents on the quayside, we walked through a slit in the screen and into another world.

We experienced a completely new culture in the United States, and we watched the country change from being strongly against the war to being strongly in favour of it. By 1943, however, my parents, and particularly my mother, were anxious to reunite the family. They feared I might be lost to an American future if I failed to put down roots in wartime England.

It was difficult to get back in the middle of the war unless the traveller was approaching 16 and capable of National Service. My brother returned first in a naval convoy. For me, my parents discovered that the Serpa Pinto, a liner from neutral Portugal, was about to leave the US for Lisbon with a shipload of returning evacuees.

In August 1943, I set off on what should have been an eight-day crossing from Philadelphia. I spent almost all my time with the only other unaccompanied girl of my own age, 13, a lively doctor's daughter from Cambridge called Rosemary Roughton.

Four days out of Philadelphia, the Serpa Pinto ran into the worst cyclone its captain had encountered in 25 years at sea. Clinging to our bunks, Rosemary and I were overcome with wrenching seasickness.

Desperate to escape the cyclone, the captain turned south and headed to Madeira for urgent repairs. We spent three days there, long enough to try out the wooden sleds on which people careered down the cobblestone streets and to discover the honeyed delights of the local wine.

Back on the ship, Rosemary and I now faced a new hazard. One day out of Madeira, our door was forced open by half a dozen sailors, who announced that they had come to cure our seasickness, a cure supposed to start with massaging bare stomachs.

Words, whether pleading or shouted, failed to persuade them that we wanted no such cure. So we fought, kicking and scratching our way to the cabin door and fled along the companionway, looking for a bolthole. Mercifully, one appeared - the gentlemen's lavatory. As we hid together in one of the stalls, we heard the sailors go thundering by. Bound by the child's law of silence, we told none of the adults what had happened, and what - much worse - might yet happen. We recognised that the chances of a vengeful return visit were high. For two nights we hid in one of the lifeboats on the deck, under the canvas awning, sometimes soaked with salt water, always cold.

Arrived safely in Lisbon, we found ourselves stranded. All British transport planes had been diverted to the allied offensive in Italy. The Serpa Pinto's returning evacuees were interned. We were confined to the Palace hotel in Estoril.

Rosemary and I comforted ourselves by sharing a daily bottle of madeira. After a week or so, our state of muzzy cheeriness began to pall. Even climbing onto the hotel's roofs and balconies ceased to divert us, though we managed spectacular crawls along the fourth-floor ledges.

So we ran away. At the local railway station, we hid in the luggage van of a train and then climbed into a third-class carriage, mingling with passengers carrying fruit, vegetables and live hens. Lisbon was just as we had supposed from the spy films we had seen. There were well-dressed, sinister-looking men with umbrellas, even monocles. We could hear fragments of German. A group of students left us on the doorstep of a newspaper editor whose address my parents had sent me.

Irritated by our escapades, the Portuguese authorities informed their British counterparts that we had to be removed immediately. So a couple of days later, I found myself at a rainy RAF airfield near Bristol, having been brought back by a military plane. My father met me there.

Although he was a man of deep emotions, his upbringing as an only child in a country vicarage, with an irritable father, had instilled in him a very English reserve. So on the slow train journey to London we talked about the war, the United States and my voyage home, but not about our feelings at this reunion.

For me this was a relief. I knew I was supposed to be ecstatic at being home again, but I didn't actually know how I felt. I was excited to be back in England. I wanted to feel personally the experience of the war. But I had not yet committed myself to this drab, class-bound, crowded island.

On our arrival in Cheyne Walk, my father hid me behind a velvet curtain when he heard my mother's key in the front door. She had been speaking at a meeting in the Midlands, unaware of my return.

My father knew the intense strain on my mother of the years of her children's absence and her fear that we might never reconnect with her after the heady excitement of the United States. None of that did I understand, nor, at 13, sympathise with. I had learnt to be independent, in charge of myself. I didn't want to be fussed over or protected. I revelled in my freedom. So I was wary of my mother's love for me.

My father called her into the living room and I emerged from behind the curtain and twirled around in the firelight. My mother, only half-believing I was really there, held me close to her. She was soaked by rain and I could not distinguish the raindrops from her tears. She must have felt the resistance in me. It was to take several years for me to learn to love her, and then it was to love her as an adult, a beloved friend, rather than as a child loves its mother.

The biggest cultural shock I encountered after my return was not the shabbiness but the strictness of the schools compared with those in Minnesota. My determination to be autonomous and free collided with the English system. For several weeks I felt that I did not belong to my rather formal, preoccupied household, nor to the school to which my parents had consigned me.

Academically, St Paul's girls' school in Hammersmith was outstanding. It encouraged its pupils to engage in discussion with the teachers and with one another, not a common phenomenon in girls' schools 60 years ago. School discipline, however, was strict. My private adventures were curtailed, my tendency to show off disapproved of. Routine and order reasserted themselves - above all, authority in the shape of the dreaded high mistress, Miss Ethel Strudwick.

Miss Strudwick was a statuesque lady with a formidable bosom. She listed mountain climbing as one of her hobbies in reference books. I used to find this puzzling, because I could not imagine her ascending a rockface. But she was unquestionably a person of authority. She measured the success of her rebukes by whether a girl was reduced to tears. I used to sit in her study, refusing to cry. In consequence, our interviews lasted a long time.

I was undoubtedly badly behaved. I was also a slob, covering my gymslip with a large jersey and rarely brushing my hair. At one history lesson the brilliant but peppery teacher, Miss Patrick, presented me with a cheap hairbrush in front of the class.

I dreamt up ways of breaking school rules and shocking my teachers, not least to impress my schoolfellows. I shinned up the lead pipes that clung to the side of the science block to the third storey. I recall staring into the window of the chemistry class, only to confront the appalled expression of the teacher. On one particularly offensive occasion, I climbed up the long curtains across the front of the big assembly hall, invisible from the platform but visible to the girls, contorting my face into grimaces. Those on the platform could not comprehend the gales of laughter from the hall.

Miss Strudwick sent a letter to my parents, who spoke to me sternly. It made little difference. So this time I was threatened with expulsion, and only my mother's pleas to the school authorities gave me a second chance. I was in revolt against what it was to be young in 1940s England, though not against England itself.

My parents allowed me far more freedom than most children of my age enjoyed. If my mother asked me where I was going when I mounted my bicycle, I would reply with the one word "Out!". Then I would cycle off to see the effects of the latest air raid.

They were unaware of my lonely walks in the fogbound darkness along the Embankment with Treve. When I began to slip out of the basement door late at night without my parents knowing, I felt sick with fear. But after a month or two I began to feel that I could handle whatever situation I might find myself in.

After my school was damaged by bombing in the spring of 1944, my mother took me for a year to the New Forest. I attended a school in Bournemouth in the week, and on Friday afternoons I mounted my bicycle and hurtled back to the cottage 20 miles away through the great oaks and beeches - which was not without its hazards. Lonely soldiers, camped in the forest, exposed themselves as I cycled by. I would increase my pace and wonder how they could imagine this to be an enticing approach.

My mother had recently been reviled by political and church leaders as a kind of collaborator, someone soft on the Nazis, for publishing a pamphlet condemning saturation bombing of German cities. She had found that old friends wanted nothing to do with her. But the cottage in the forest was a place of healing for her.

She and I would go for long walks. She knew the names of the different butterflies. She could tell thrush from warbler, blackbird from fieldfare, by listening to their song. It was here that, at last, the barriers I had built against any intimacy crumbled. The forest brought everything into the perspective of eternity. My relationship with my mother became an easy, loving friendship.

Shirley and her gang helped change the face of politics

Shirley Williams was one of the "Gang of Four" rebels who founded the breakaway Social Democratic party (SDP) in 1981 after concluding that the Labour party had been irrevocably taken over by leftwingers.

She entered parliament in 1964 as Labour MP for Hitchin and rose quickly to a junior ministerial position. In 1974 she was made secretary of state for prices and consumer protection by Harold Wilson, and in 1976 education secretary by James Callaghan.

After the 1979 general election defeat by Margaret Thatcher's Conservatives, Williams was distressed by the rise of the left in the Labour party. The 1980 party conference, she writes in her memoirs, "opened with an amazing speech by Tony Benn, a rave about what the left would do with power when it got it . . . Many of those listening, including some on the left, recognised that this programme would need not victory in an election, but a revolution".

She was billed to speak at a fringe meeting where "the atmosphere was not just electric, it was incendiary. I had to fight my way through crowds of delegates, some intoxicated by Tony Benn's vision, to get to the hall. Some shouted at me, one or two even spat, while others, keeping their voices down, whispered encouragement. I hadn't written down what I was going to say, but I was buoyed up by a ferocious indignation. 'I wonder why Tony was so unambitious?' I asked. 'After all, it took God only six days to make the world'."

Within months, she and three other former leading Labour figures - David Owen, Bill Rodgers and Roy Jenkins - had formed the Social Democrats. The new party made a tactical alliance with the Liberals and later merged with them to form the Liberal Democrats.

After failing to be elected to parliament in 1987, Williams gave up full-time politics and became a professor at Harvard, marrying Dick Neustadt, a widowed American friend.

© Shirley Williams 2009 Extracted from Climbing the Bookshelves by Shirley Williams, to be published by Little, Brown on September 24 at £20. or Amazon at £12 http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1844084760/theliberaldemocr