Margaret Thatcher 3

Perhaps the biggest excitement of my early years was a visit to London when I was twelve years old. I came down by train in the charge of a friend of my mother's. Arriving at Kings' cross where I was met by Reverend Skinner and his wife, family friends, who were going to look after me. The first impact of London was overwhelming. King's Cross itself was a giant bustling cavern. The rest of the city had all the dazzle of a commercial and imperial capital. For the first time in my life I saw people from foreign countries. Some in the traditional native dress of India and Africa. The sheer volume of traffic and of pedestrians was exhilarating. They seemed to generate a sort of electricity. London's buildings were impressive for another reason; begrimed with soot, they had a dark imposing magnificence which constantly reminded me that I was at the centre of the world. I was taken by the Skinner's to all the usual sites. I fed the pigeons in Trafalgar Square. I rode the Underground, a slightly forbidding experience for a child. I visited the zoo where I rode on an elephant and recoiled from the reptiles: an early portent of my relations with Fleet street. And I went to look at Downing Street. But unlike the young Harold Wilson, I did not have the prescience to have my photogragh taken outside No.10."