The test did not take long: the money was handed over, and Harold extended his break by watching the tennis. Within days, Harold was a member of the club, the owner of a racket, and walking out with his future wife.17 For a young man who had hitherto been diffident with girls, it was impressively decisive. Was it love at first sight? Harold was asked later. ‘It really was, you know,’ he replied. ‘She looked lovely in white.’18 Gladys (as she continued to be called, until the 1950s, when her preferred name became Mary) was not, however, immediately bowled over by her schoolboy admirer, and took her time.
Gladys Baldwin was a shorthand typist at Lever Brothers, whose employees were allowed to use the recreational facilities in the Brotherton complex. She had not been working long, though the fact that she was working at all distanced her at first from Harold, who was still at school. Her job placed her close to the bottom of the white-collar pecking order. She had started work at 24s. a week, from which she paid £1 for lodgings (her parents lived in Cumbria) and Is. 2d. insurance.19 The appearance of an enthusiastic young suitor was a welcome distraction in a routine and rather lonely life. They began by playing tennis together. ‘After that’, recalled Mary Wilson, ‘we used to walk a good deal in Wirral and chatter about everything under the sun.’20
Gladys’s strongest bond with Harold was her Nonconformist background – both attended the Congregationalist church at Rock ferry. In Gladys’s case, however, the religious element in her upbringing had been much stronger. Her father, whom she greatly admired, had started working in a mill near Burnley at twelve, and had driven himself up a ladder of home learning in order to become a Congregationalist minister – an ambition he achieved at the age of twenty-nine. That formidable accomplishment weighed heavily in the Baldwin family, and her childhood had been one of love, duty, and oppressive puritanism. As a small girl, she had been required to attend church five times on Sundays. Where religion in the Wilson household had meant a framework for civic involvement and secular activities, in the Baldwin household it reflected deep, moral heart-searching.
Gladys retained her religious faith, in an amorphous, non-doctrinal way but she half-consciously rebelled against the narrowness of her religious training. Some of her later attitudes might be called permissive. ‘I’ve never worried much about so-called sin in personal relationships,’ she told an interviewer after Harold became Prime Minister. ‘What I mean is that I don’t care for religious attitudes and ideas of morality which seem to depend on intolerance of one kind or another. Especially intolerance of personal weaknesses, in matters of sex, for instance …’21 That was in principle. In practice, her strict background left her with a strong sense of guilt, and of foreboding. Another legacy of her childhood was a desire to settle down and live securely in one place. Her early memories were of frequent, disruptive moves as her father’s ministry took him all over the country: she later complained that she had moved a dozen times before she got married.
Gladys was born in the village of Diss in Norfolk, and remembered ‘an old semi-detached house standing high’, which was her birthplace.22 She lived there until she was five. When Harold was Prime Minister and she consoled herself by writing poetry, she formed a friendship by correspondence with John Betjeman, who proposed a nostalgic trip to Diss. The visit produced two poems. ‘Yes it will be bliss / To go with you by train to Diss;’ his began. ‘Your walking shoes upon your feet, / We’ll meet, my sweet, at Liverpool Street.’ She responded after the event:
We find the house where I was born –
How small it seems! for memory
Has played its usual trick on me.
The chapel where my father preached
Can now, alas, only be reached
By plunging through the traffic’s roar;
We go in by the Gothic door
To meet, within the vestry dim,
An old man who remembers him.23
When she was five, the family moved to Fulbourn in Cambridgeshire, where they lived until she was ten.24 It was this home she was recalling when she wrote another poem (‘The Old Manse’) also evoking an image of her Victorian, powerful, profoundly religious father, whom she saw as the fount of domestic happiness, as well as of domestic duty:
O what a longing, a burning deep desire
Here in my father’s house, to be a child again; …
Within the study, where the sunlight never falls
My father writes his sermon, hooded eyes down-bent;
His books of reference wait round the walls –
He shapes each phrase, deploys each argument
And turns from time to time, instinctively
To the great Bible, open on his knee.
Flowers in the garden, her brother on a bicycle, her mother baking bread in the kitchen, the village school bell summoning her to lessons, are also in this poem, providing a backcloth.25
After Fulbourn the Baldwins left East Anglia and the Fens permanently and went to live in Nottinghamshire. The move upset Gladys and a little later she became ill. She began to write poems while she was convalescing, and the habit stayed with her. At first, it was a way of articulating what, in the heavily moral atmosphere of her father’s house, she felt unable to say. ‘All I know is that, [almost] as far back as I can remember, from time to time I would feel very deeply about something’, she later tried to explain, ‘and the feeling would be so strong that I had to express it, and the only way of doing this was to write a poem.’26 It is notable that scarcely any of her poems touch on politics.
After her illness, she was sent to a boarding-school for the daughters of Nonconformist ministers called Milton Mount College, at Crawley in Sussex. This became a substitute for a geographically stable home, and she was happy there. Later she wrote a cheerfully witty poem about a schoolgirl’s crush on the French mistress:
My mouth is dry as she goes by –
One curving line from foot to thigh –
And with unEnglish liberty
Her bosom bounces, full and free;
Pale skin, pink lips, a wide blue stare;
Her page-boy fall of silky hair
Swings on her shoulders like a bell;
O how I love Mamzelle!27
Unlike her older brother, Clifford Baldwin, who had taken an engineering degree at Cambridge and eventually became vice-chancellor of the University of Wales, she was not academically inclined. She read nineteenth-century English novels and poetry, and in later interviews mentioned her particular liking for the Brontes, Hardy, James, Keats and Tennyson. She admired scholarship in others, especially the men in her family, but had no desire to go to university herself. She left school at the age of sixteen in 1932, when her future husband was just entering Wirral Grammar School, and returned to live with her parents who by now had moved once again, to Penrith in Cumbria. Here she undertook the typical training of a girl of her age and station, for whom working life was likely to be a short interlude before marriage and the raising of a family. She attended a local establishment to learn shorthand and typing and, armed with this qualification, and with the independence which came from a boarding-school education, she left home to live in digs and take the job which brought her into contact with Harold.28
Gladys later described herself as ‘round-faced, snub-nosed and pear-shaped’.29 Most people who met her described her as pretty – prettier, indeed, than often appeared from photographs, in which she usually wore a blank and harassed expression. She did not yearn to make an impact upon the world, or draw attention to herself. ‘I had been brought up in