Free Speaking for Myself by Cherie Blair Page B

meant doing your pupil master’s work for him. He would check it and sign it, and from then on it was his.
    Chris Carr, Derry’s pupil immediately before me and one of my tutors at the LSE, deviled all Derry’s commercial stuff. I did the rest. He started me out on some minor things, but once he realized that I knew my employment law, he had me write his opinions for him, then he would sign them off. With Derry, you wrote in longhand, double-spaced, leaving big margins. He would correct the text before sending it off to be typed.
    For all his faults, Derry was an extremely good teacher. When it came to an affidavit, for example, he taught me to tell the story. He was obsessive about style and about details such as not splitting infinitives. He kept telling me he thought I was probably dyslexic. The reason I hadn’t been diagnosed, he decided, was that my handwriting was so bad that nobody had noticed how atrocious my spelling was.
    Although Derry’s writing style would serve me well, he was distinctly aggressive as an advocate — hardly the ideal template for a twenty-two-year-old lady barrister. But how, as a woman, do you develop a style in a man’s world when what works for a man is regarded as inappropriate for a woman? It was difficult to find female role models. Most chambers still had a “women need not apply” attitude, and during the time I was a pupil of Derry, I never once saw a female advocate. Even after I began practicing on my own, I rarely came up against other women, except in the occasional family case. Those I did meet tended to be beginners like me.
    One of my friends at the LSE had been Veena Russell. She had originally trained as a ballet dancer at the Royal Ballet School, but having grown too tall, she had moved to the LSE to do law. She was extraordinarily beautiful. Her parents were South African Asians, and they still lived in Durban. They were quite well-off and had managed to buy a flat north of London, in St. John’s Wood, where Veena lived. As she had managed to get pupilage in Cardiff, the flat at Abercorn Place would be empty from September on. Her parents came over from time to time, so it couldn’t be rented out. She needed somebody to house-sit. Would I be interested?
    Overnight my life changed. Good-bye, bed-sit; hello, luxury — certainly by my standards: my own bathroom, a fridge. All I had to do, she said, was pay the bills. There was a double and a single bedroom, the former to be kept for Veena or her parents when they visited. I moved in that September.
    At one point Veena’s dad came over on business on his own. One evening he suggested that he take me out to dinner. I remember sitting on the bus with this kind, intelligent, cultured man and then realizing that everyone was giving me dirty looks. Here I was, a white girl, with a handsome, older Indian guy. I could feel the hatred blazing from the passengers’ eyes like sparks from a ray gun in a children’s comic. It was the first time I felt just an inkling of what it must be like to be discriminated against on the basis of skin color.
    To some degree, as a Catholic and a Scouser, I was used to feeling like an outsider. But my sense of apartness didn’t cause people on a bus to stare at me. In working-class London, race prejudice was still rife. It hadn’t been that long since there’d been signs in boarding- houses saying “No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs.” Just a month or so before I was called to the Bar, there had been riots at the Notting Hill Carnival, an annual event put on by locals of West Indian descent.
    As befitted his heavy workload, Derry’s room on the first floor was larger than most and dominated by a huge partners desk, at which he sat with the window behind him. My much smaller desk was facing his, and the wall between us, opposite the door, was lined with books. Behind the door was a table stacked high with briefs. Above my head was a large oil painting that Derry would stare at when he was