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On 13 October 1925 I was born over the shop at North Parade. In 1923 my father opened a second shop in Huntingtower Road - opposite the primary school which I would later attend. My mother was quite a saver too, and by 1919 they were able to take out a mortgage to buy their own shop in North Parade. They were married in that church in May 1917 and my sister, Muriel, was born in 1921. She had her own business as a dressmaker. Few British families escaped such a bereavement, and Remembrance Day after the war was observed throughout the country both strictly and intensely.įour years after arriving in Grantham my father met my mother, Beatrice Ethel Stephenson, through the local Methodist church. His younger brother, Edward, did enlist, and died on active service in Salonika in 1917. My father, a deeply patriotic man, tried to enlist in the army no fewer than six times, but was rejected on each occasion on medical grounds. The First World War broke out a year later. In later years he would say that of the fourteen shillings a week he received, twelve shillings paid for his board and lodging, one shilling he saved, and only then did he spend the remaining shilling. My father had a number of jobs, I think most of them in the grocery trade, until in 1913 he was offered the post of manager of a grocery store in Grantham.

He was floored when I was able to retort that mine had worked in the tuck shop there. Years later, when I was answering questions in the House of Commons, Eric Heffer, a left-wing Labour MP and regular sparring partner of mine, tried to pull working-class rank by mentioning that his father had been a carpenter at Oundle. He went instead to work at Oundle, one of the better public (i.e.

My father, who had wanted to be a teacher, had to leave school at thirteen because the family could not afford for him to stay on. But I had not been born into a quiet family.įour generations of the Roberts family had been shoemakers in Northamptonshire, at that time a great centre of the shoe industry. Family tradition has it that I was a very quiet baby, which my political opponents might have some difficulty in believing. Mine was an idyllic blur in which the sun was always shining through the leaves of the lime tree into our living room and someone - my mother, my sister, one of the people working in the shop - was always nearby to cuddle me or pacify me with a sweet. I must have liked this first conscious plunge into the outside world.Īs for indistinct memories, most of us probably recall our earliest years as a sort of blur.

The occasion stays in my mind as an exciting mixture of colour, vehicles, people and thunderous noise - yet, perhaps paradoxically, the memory is a pleasant one. I was being pushed in a pram through the town to the park on a sunny day, and I must have encountered the bustle of Grantham on the way.

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