Free Thatcher by Clare Beckett Page A

becomes competitive. Margaret Roberts describes finding out that another family saved and re-used their tacking cotton while dressmaking: from that point on she and her mother did the same.
    The spirit of self-reliance and independence was very strong in even the poorest people of the East Midlands towns.
--THATCHER
    Grantham, then as now, was a quiet, self-contained backwater. A small town rather than a city, it was neither flourishing nor depressed. But in the inter-war years the spectre of poverty was never very far away. Even people like Alfred Roberts, who had pulled himself up by his bootstraps and acquired a nest-egg, lived in fear that some accident or disaster would hit his family. These were the years before the welfare state, where even calling in the doctor was an expensive decision, so small provincial towns developed their own networks of support. The Roberts’ shops made up to 150 parcels for the old and sick, bought by the local Rotarian Society. The Roberts’ daughters attended and helped at town functions, and raised money for needy children. As grocers, the family knew something of the circumstances of their customers and community. Help was given to those who helped themselves. Later, Margaret Roberts described passing the long queue outside the dole office during the Great Depression. None of their close friends lost their jobs, but they knew people among the unemployed. She was later to write: And I have never forgotten – how neatly turned out the children of those unemployed families were. Their parents were determined to make the sacrifices that were necessary for them. The spirit of self-reliance and independence was very strong in even the poorest people of the East Midlands towns. It meant that they never dropped out of the community and, because others quietly gave what they could, the community remained together . 3 My parents lived through these years in East London, and their lasting memories are less positive. Children were hungry, adults were hopeless, and homelessness was a constant threat. It is easy to see how Margaret Roberts’ early view of poverty and the poor informed her attitude to welfare later on in her life.
    Forced to give up his own formal education at 13, Alfred Roberts took a keen interest in his daughters’ schooling. Margaret went to Huntingtower Road Primary School, close to home but with a good reputation. She had learned to read at home, as many of her generation had, and tells about an incident at the age of five when she was asked to pronounce ‘w-r-a-p’. She got it right, but was aware that she was always asked the ‘hard ones’. She describes herself as being mystified by proverbs – her literal mind had real difficulty with such ideas as ‘look before you leap’ – why not look before you cross, a much more understandable idea, given the busy roads outside the school? And how can you have both that proverb, and ‘he who hesitates is lost’?
    Both girls attended Kesteven and Grantham Girls’ School. This was small, only 350 pupils, in a different part of town. It was a grant-aided grammar school. Parents would normally have paid part of the fees, but Margaret secured a county scholarship. The trip to school and back, home for lunch, and back in the afternoon meant that young Margaret was walking up to four miles a day: public transport, or staying for lunch, would have been unacceptable expenses. The school had a good reputation, and was already sending a few girls each year to Oxford. The ‘girls in blue’ were a familiar sight in the streets of Grantham. The intake came from a wide area, and Margaret’s best friend lived some distance away in a more rural area. Margaret Roberts would stay overnight on visits there, and walk in the country. During the war, the Camden Girls’ School was evacuated to Grantham, and their ‘girls in green’ shared classrooms. This meant altering the