Her heart belongs to Daddy
John Wells
BELOW THE PARAPET: THE BIOGRAPHY OF DENIS THATCHER by Carol Thatcher HarperCollins, £16.99, pp.303 The best anecdote in Carol Thatcher's appreciation of her father is about Denis boarding a train at Paddington in which the only empty compartment was reserved for Rosewood Psychiatric Hospital. Denis travelled alone and in comfort as far as Reading when 'all these chaps piled in', accompanied by a male nurse, who count- ed them before the train moved off. 'One, two, three, four ... who are you?' I'm the Prime Minister's husband."Six, seven, eight, nine...'
Whether or not the story is true it hits the nail on the head. Denis only appears to have had one serious nervous breakdown, but the strain of living with Queen Kong is evident in every line of the book, and Below the Parapet is the story of Den and Carol, two brave but badly damaged sur- vivors. Carol's mum, referred to through- out as 'Margaret', never looks up at the nursery window on her way to work, has violent tantrums, addresses her daughter by the names of all her secretaries before she remembers she's called Carol, feeds them, on the rare occasions she is there with frozen lasagne, and ignores them so fiercely that even the television turned up to a deafening level fails to rouse her.
Carol's tape recorder is not always reli- able. When she asked me about the kind of language Richard Ingrams and I used as a basis for the Dear Bill Letters I quoted a remark I had overheard after a memorial service for one of 'the Few' in Alderney at which one old boozer had said he would probably be next and his friend said "Oh' no, old boy, I'd be very sorry to see you trickle down the sink!'
This comes out as 'I'd be very sorry to see you crippled under.' Bill Deedes has admitted in print that he knocked the book into shape in exchange for a couple of cases of Beefeater, and his pencil is notice- able in phrases like 'a shade under six feet tall', but there are still passages where nei- ther author nor subject seems to be entire- ly all there.
Historians may be grateful to Denis for reporting that Margaret's cry of 'What a terrible waste' about a battlefield in the Falklands was provoked by the sight out of the car window of an unused ammunition box. Baroness Thatcher may not. The same is true of Carol's description of 'charging after' Margaret at a photocall in a super- market, cramming rolls of lavatory paper and 'really useful things' into the Prime Minister's cosmetically draped basket. As with some of the crueller glimpses of the boy Mark — Denis sitting with his head in his hands saying he never thought he'd see his family name on the front page of a Sun- day paper in connection with a fraud there are moments when a naive garrulous- ness does even more damage than under- standable malice and the desire for revenge.
Denis's story begins in Wanganui, New Zealand, where the Thatcher fortune was founded on a substance Carol herself is too delicate to mention, called `arsenite', which proved invaluable for dipping sheep and Ah, here it is!' cleansing railway lines. It was invented by a Mr. W.T. Owen and patented as Owen's Sheep Dip. The fact that his partner, Denis's grandfather Thomas, brought it to England as the mainstay of his own compa- ny, Atlas Preservatives, makes one wonder if the enterprising spirit jumped a couple of generations before alighting on the boy Mark.
There is, then, a good deal of Pooter life, with Tom Thatcher actually living in a house called 'The Laurels', keen involve- ment in freemasonry, a wife who ran a boarding house in Earl's Court and drank tea in a toque, and a son — Denis's father — who married a rackety girl from Cam- berwell who liked a flutter and whose father sold horses. Tom died insane.
From Mill Hill Denis went straight into the family business, flogging Atlas Ruskilla Triplecote. In the war he rose to the rank of major, exposed to danger only once when making gin in the bath in Marseilles, his best friend the song writer Jimmy Kennedy, who wrote April in Portugal and The Teddy Bear's Picnic. He thought Mont- gomery was a first-class — . On leave he had a long erotic entanglement at the Grosvenor House Hotel with a blonde called Margot Kempson, and was briefly married to her. Carol found her irresistible, and notes that her father became strangely wistful at the mention of her name.
Denis then caught the eye of the future Leader, who as a young politician, in Carol's words, 'needed a husband and chil- dren'. He described their honeymoon as `quite pleasant'. There is nothing new or very surprising about his life as consort, and apart from a habit of saying 'sure as hell' he talks very much as we imagined him talking in the Letters. The Falklands were 'miles and miles of bugger all', the accommodation provided at a Common- wealth Heads of Government Meeting in Goa — CHOGM, the real Denis said, stood for Coons Holidaying On Govern- ment Money — was 'very high on the bug- geration factor'. He hated the unions, worshipped South Africa, consoled himself in his solitude with Old Mill Hillians, once tried to stuff a banana up the trunk of a sacred elephant in India, and shared a table with Billy Graham at the Reagans' farewell dinner. He has never read his wife's memoirs, but then it is possible that she hasn't either.
Denis Thatcher is a rum bird. He was, Carol says, 'no mean catch' as a husband. He had a family firm, a flat off the Kings Road in Chelsea, a car he referred to as his `tart trap', and a winning simplicity of spir- it. Whether, had he not been snapped up by the ambitious and impoverished Mar- garet Hilda Roberts, he would have merit- ed our cruel satires or HarperCollins' generous outlay remains a topic for debate.
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