Part of the Pattern: Memoirs of a Wife at Westminster |
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Edna Healey
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Pages: 320 (Paperback)
ISBN: 0747262497
Pub: Headline Book Publishing
Pub date: 2007-02-05
Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 139324
Reader Reviews:
Labour Life Memoirs (0/0 people found this helpful)
Edna Healey is the wife of Denis Healey, the ex Labour Party Cabinet Minister more respected than liked and, arguably, more feared than respected. This lady was born in the rather wild and somewhat inbred confines of the Forest of Dean and, save for the odd trip to Gloucester, did not leave it until she went to Oxford University in or about 1936. There, spurred on by the experience of having seen her father suffer unemployment, she joined the Labour Party and like students. Her political views seem frankly naive even by the knowledge of the day (she thought never since was evil and right so clearly defined as then, with Franco and Hitler as evil and the Republic and the Popular Front as good...VERY naive indeed...even at the time the atrocities of the Republicans were known). One gets the impression she knew really very little about what was really going on in Europe and that there might be some good in the systems of Hitler, Mussolini or Franco for that matter (ended the Civil War with reconciliation and above all kept Spain out of the coming war). Her boyfriend there was, apparently, a Jewish student who became, later, a Treasury knight in the Wilson years. He was eventually swapped for Denis Healey, like her, briefly a card-carrying youthful Communist for a few years before WW2.
Like so many of her generation, particularly those of the "striving" classes, she does seem to have an exagerrated respect for people who, like the Foots and Croslands of this world, get firstclass Oxbridge degrees, even if their influence on the society they presume to rule is largely negative. She herself got a "worthy second"...
Likewise, she seems not to know that the Italian partisans with whom she and her husband drink and laugh in the late 1940's were often murderers and perpetrators of terrible revenge or plain atrocities against such "traitors" as Italian village girls who either had German boyfriends or simply said no to some "partisan" riffraff. There is a rose-tinted aspect to her perception, as in China and the Soviet Union, which she visited when her husband became Foreign Secretary for a while in the 1960's.
There are also personal reminiscences, as when her family camp at Treyarnon Bay, north Cornwall in the early 1960's. Strange to think that these people might have been in the next tent or tents to those of my own family, at the same time!
Overall, worth reading, but very light on both insight and ideology.
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