My father was John Squire, and he married my mother, Bessie Jeffrey, and she came to Torquay. They were just ordinary Devon farmers, but also very keen Methodists. There was a Methodist line going back to 1799, when my great-great-Grandfather was in the early Methodists in Devon. He helped to build some of the tiny chapels they had at the very beginning. So I was brought up attending the Methodist church, and Methodism and Liberalism were very closely linked, and whenever there was an election my father went in to action: helping to canvass, chair meetings. He was also a councillor on what was then the Plympton District Rural Council, he didn’t stand as a Liberal because politics wasn’t involved then, he was an independent just like everyone else was, but everyone knew he was a Liberal. I think my first real commitment to the Liberal party came in the 1945 election, when were in the old Tavistock division, and the Liberal candidate was Isaac Foot, Michael Foot’s father. They were also Methodists of course, in fact Michael Foot’s grandfather was a great Methodist local preacher, and a friend of my Grandfather. He was a tremendous speaker. If you listened to him you just had to believe what he said, he was quite outstanding. Although I hadn’t got a vote – I wasn’t old enough – I knocked lots of doors for him and gave out leaflets, when to his meetings etc. Eventually I went on to the executive committee of the Tavistock Liberal Association. I suppose now my father might have been Labour, I don’t know, but it was Liberal/Conservative, certainly in that area. I didn’t know anybody who was in the Labour Party. I remember when I was a little girl my Grandfather sat me on his knee, and he said: “politics, now, let me tell you something. It’s better to lose your right hand than to vote Tory!” I can remember him saying that to me when I was about 8 years old. They believed that very strongly.