Free David Waddington Memoirs by David Waddington Page B

In her journal she writes:
    I had already made up my mind on leaving school and viewing life’s cornucopia of opportunities that politics in any form was quite out of the question. It came very nearly bottom of the list just before cleaning out the sewers or managing a mink farm.
    I suppose we had our ups and downs like every married couple. Once, I threatened to go home to her mother. I knew I could not go home to mine. But we had some marvellous times and still do.
    We had a miniature poodle called Sydney. One day Gilly went down the garden to have lunch with her mother, leaving the house unlocked. She returned home to find a masked burglar coming down the stairs. Sydney shot under the dining room table, teeth a-chattering. Gilly locked herself in the cloak room. After a conversation through the keyhole the burglar left and the constabularywere summoned. The sergeant went upstairs and when he came down again he offered to make my wife a cup of tea and began to explain that some burglars had very beastly habits and she had to prepare herself for the possibility that something very nasty might have happened to her dog. At first Gilly could not think what the man was talking about but, on going upstairs herself and seeing a pile of black curls on the white bedroom carpet, remembered that before going to lunch she had given Sydney his monthly trim. This was the evidence that had so impressed the officer and convinced him that he was in pursuit of a pervert.
    While making a good living, I was not greatly enjoying life at the Bar. I seemed unable to lose a case and then forget all about it. Instead I always felt personally responsible if things did not go absolutely right. So when in 1960 my father-in-law suggested I should go off to America and see whether there was an opening for me in the Beloit Iron Works in Wisconsin. I leapt at the idea. Beloit manufactured paper-making machinery and had recently bought an interest in Walmsleys in Bury, a firm of which Gilly’s grandfather had been chairman and managing director.
    It was curious being in America at that time. Few there seemed to think world war and a nuclear holocaust could be avoided. Indeed, this dismal topic featured in almost every conversation and overshadowed my whole visit. Beloit as a town had nothing to commend it. It was built round a lake so polluted that anyone bathing in it would have been dead in minutes. I also saw an example of the dangers of keeping fit. The chairman of the company had a harness contraption rigged up in his private lavatory and, having performed his normal duties, used to haul himself up in the harness a few score times to strengthen his muscles. Shortly after I returned to England he was found dead in the loo.
    The countryside round Beloit was flat and uninteresting but a thirty-mile drive took one to a fairly pretty lake from which, I wastold, people thought nothing of commuting 100 miles to Chicago. One night we had dinner at a hotel called the Wagon Wheel. The manager said in jest: ‘If a guest is given a room with a high number, he is advised to take a packed lunch for the journey.’ And, indeed, it was about a mile from one end of the hotel to the other. The people in Beloit were immensely friendly and on my last night the lady with whom I was staying said: ‘Gee David, I just love your accent. I’d like to hide you in my closet and bring you out whenever we had people in for dinner.’ I came home sure that Beloit would not appeal to Gilly and resolved to settle down at the Bar.
    In October 1960 James, our eldest boy, was born. My father lived long enough to see him but died of a heart attack on 17 March the following year. He was sixty-seven. In August 1962 Matthew arrived on the scene and soon turned out to be a bundle of trouble and the life and soul of the party.
    We had a succession of girls to look after the children. One was a Danish girl called Kirsten, known as Puck to her family and friends. James went into Barclays