Free Speaking for Myself by Cherie Blair

you?”
    For once in my life I was speechless. I was about to say something when he was called in.

Chapter 6
    Brief Encounter
    I n order to boost my limited income I had taken a part-time post teaching law at the Polytechnic of Central London. In the spring and summer of 1976, I spent most of my nonteaching hours in the Lincoln’s Inn library. While everyone else took a break at lunchtime, I stayed: reading, making notes, and eating my sandwich. Even with the money I got from teaching, I had to eke things out. Every week I would buy a loaf of bread and a little round box with six triangles of processed cheese wrapped in silver foil. I would keep them out on the windowsill and make up one sandwich every day, the cheese getting softer and softer as the summer built up to a heat wave. It was all I could afford.
    Although I didn’t know it at the time, my lunchtime eating habits were being watched.
    “You know, Tony Blair quite fancies you,” an odd but clever chap called Charles Harpum told me one evening as we were dining in the Great Hall — one of the obligatory twelve dinners, an old tradition dating back to the sixteenth century — the only times I would have what my grandma would call a proper meal.
    “How could he? I don’t even know him.”
    “Well, he thinks he knows you.”
    A few days later I heard the same thing from Bruce Roe, one of my regular Great Hall dining companions.
    I wasn’t interested. I already had a boyfriend. In fact, I had two: David in Liverpool and John in London. John was another Lincoln’s Inn habitué. John knew about David, but David had no idea about John. It might seem odd that a girl with my Catholic upbringing was being so flighty. But fornication is a bit like contraception: most Catholics do it as much as anyone else; you can always go to confession. (To be frank, however, I have never confessed to fornication. Perhaps one day in my old age I will: “Father, forgive me. I am trying to be sorry for it, but I still find it quite difficult!”) Nor did it seem that terrible then. We were living in different times, post-Pill and pre-AIDS.
    The summer after Bar Finals, John and I managed to go away on holiday. We had a week in Corfu, which in those days was totally unspoiled. When it was over, I went back to Liverpool and had another holiday, this time with David and my mum. Mum had become very fond of David, and there was an assumption by both families, his mother included, that he and I would marry.
    During the autumn of 1975, I gave this possibility some long, hard thought. David had always planned to be a solicitor and was expecting me to go back to Liverpool once I’d done my Bar Finals. If I did, that would be the end of a London-based career, and my instincts told me that if I really wanted to do employment law, I wasn’t going to be able to do that in Liverpool.
    I finished my exams at the end of June, and the following Monday I started work with Derry. Most people didn’t begin their pupilage till the results were out and they’d officially been called to the Bar, but there seemed little point in my going back to Liverpool. Why look for a job up there when I could be getting on with it down here?
    Derry’s chambers were in 2 Crown Office Row, a Georgian terrace in the area of London known as the Temple, between Fleet Street and the Thames. The building had been bombed during the Second World War and had been rebuilt in an approximation of the original style, but with the addition of an elevator. There were no computers, no typewriters even, except in the clerks’ rooms. In the squares outside, bat-winged barristers flitted round and gathered in corners, carrying piles of paper tied with pink tape like parcels. Only the occasional ringing of a telephone would remind me that I was living in the twentieth century. Barristers were referred to as Mr. or Miss by the clerks, while we called them by their Christian names, even if they had been in the job all their lives and