DAME MARGARET BECKETT

I was a very isolated teenager. My father had died some years before and my sisters were away at university, so there was only my mother and me at home. And that was the time my mother’s health began to deteriorate. She’d always been an absolute toughie, a bit like Barbara Castle – a small redhead, very fiery, totally indomitable. She rushed everywhere, you couldn’t keep up with her and she was the person everybody could rely on. She went on working full time – she was a very good teacher.

I was born at the tail end of the war. My father couldn’t go into the armed forces, to his great fury, because his heart had been damaged by rheumatic fever. So he was assigned to bomb damage repair. Towards the end of the war, he got