Losing My Virginity: How I Survived, Had Fun, and Made a Fortune Doing Business My Way
Page 9
I promised to myself that, whatever happened, I would repay that money to her, with interest on top.
I had only dealt with the estate agent over the telephone, but after the money was transferred and I had bought the Manor I went to pick up the key. I wandered into his office.
‘Can I help you?’ he said, no doubt wondering what a scruff like me could possibly want in a smart estate agent’s office.
‘I’ve come to pick up the key to the Manor,’ I said. ‘I’m Richard Branson.’
He looked astonished.
‘Yes, Mr Branson.’ He pulled out a large iron key. ‘Here you are. The key to the Manor. Please sign here.’
And, with a flourish on his paper, I picked up the key and drove off to take possession of the Manor.
Tom Newman together with his friend Phil Newell immediately set about converting the Manor outhouse into a recording studio. He wanted to install a state-of-the-art sixteen-track Ampex tape machine together with the best of everything else he could think of: a twenty-channel desk, quadraphonic monitoring, phasing and echo facilities, and a grand piano. We both wanted to ensure that everything was as good as the best studio in London. The Manor gradually took shape. Every weekend I drove up with Nik and we would camp on the floor and knock out the partitions which had been put across the fireplaces, strip off the lino to get down to the original flagstone floors, and paint the walls. Lindi also came up and helped, as did most of the people involved in Virgin Records. Mum arrived one day with a grandfather clock she had just bought at Phillips.
‘You’ll need this,’ she said.
We put it in the hallway and kept our money in the casement. It’s now standing in the Virgin Upper Class lounge at Heathrow, but without the money stuffed inside.
When the lease on Albion Street expired I moved in with some friends around Notting Hill for a while, as we carried on working in the crypt. Soon we were too crowded to stay in the crypt, and we found an old warehouse in South Wharf Road, near Paddington Station, which became the base for Virgin Mail Order.
One day I found myself driving beneath the Westway and into Maida Vale. As I drove over a humpback bridge I saw a line of houseboats moored along the canal. With the water, lines of trees, boats brightly painted in reds and blues with flowerpots on their rooftops, and various ducks and swans nosing around, it felt as if I was suddenly in the countryside.
Since I was brought up running wild in the country, I didn’t really like living in London and often felt that I never saw the sunshine or breathed any fresh air. Ever since our summer holidays in Salcombe I had always loved the water and the smells of boats: oil, tar and ropes. I drove round to the local council office. They told me to go to the Water Board, which was responsible for allocating houseboats. They warned me that there was a long waiting list. If I applied now, I might eventually be allocated one in about five years’ time. I didn’t bother to apply, but drove back to Little Venice, hoping to find somebody on a houseboat who could tell me how to rent one. I felt sure that there must be a way round the system.
As I drove down Blomfield Road along the canal, my car broke down. This was not unusual. I got out and stared hopelessly at the bonnet.
‘Do you want a hand with that?’ someone called out in an Irish accent.
I turned round and saw an old man on top of a houseboat fiddling with the stovepipe chimney.
‘It’ll be all right,’ I said, wandering towards him. ‘What I’d really like a hand with is how to live on one of these boats.’
Brendan Fowley straightened up.
‘Well now,’ he said. ‘There’s a thing.’
He took out a pipe and lit it, obviously delighted to have an excuse to stop work.
‘You should go along to that boat over there,’ he said. ‘I’ve just sold it to someone, and that young lady has moved in. Now I don’t know, but there are two bedrooms and she might be looking for a lodger. You’ll have to go through a little wooden gate and along the towpath. She’s the last boat before the bridge, and she’s called Alberta.’
I walked along the road, pushed open the leaning wooden door and walked along the narrow towpath. At the last boat, I peered into a round porthole and saw a fair-haired girl bent over in the kitchen.
‘Hello,’ I said. ‘You must be Alberta.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ she said, turning round. ‘That’s the name of the boat. I’m called Mundy.’
‘Can I come in?’ I asked. ‘My car’s just broken down and I’m looking for somewhere to live.’
Mundy was beautiful. Not only was she beautiful but she had just moved a bed on board. We sat down and had some lunch, and before we knew what we were doing we were lying on the bed making love. Her name was Mundy Ellis and I stayed the night with her that night, and moved my suitcase on board the next morning. She had a Labrador called Friday, so with Mundy and Friday I had the week pretty well sewn up. We had the most romantic affair on Alberta, having dinner out on the roof in the summer nights, watching the ducks and other boats slip up and down the canal.
Mundy and I lived together for almost a year. She helped out with the Student Advisory Centre, and then with the Manor. At that time nearly everyone was taking drugs, and soon Mundy had taken a couple of LSD trips up at the Manor with Tom Newman. She brought some LSD back to London for me to try, and one evening we and two other friends, Rob and Caroline Gold, settled down on Alberta to have a trip. Rob decided that he wouldn’t take any in case anything went wrong. I lived by the dangerous (and sometimes rather foolish) maxim that I was prepared to try anything once, and I took the little paper square. After a while my mind began to race. At first everything was fine. We listened to some music and went outside to watch the evening sky. But when we went back inside everything started to go wrong: my vision began to tilt and Mundy loomed in and out looking like a tiny eight-year-old child. I looked at the others smiling and chatting and laughing. But whenever I caught sight of Mundy all I saw was a wizened creature rather like the red-coated dwarfish murderer in Don’t Look Now.
I hate being out of control, and I had no idea what to do. Although nearly everyone else at Student and then later at Virgin took lots of drugs, I never really joined them. I prefer to have a great time and keep my wits about me. I know that I’ve got to get up early the next morning and so I’ve rarely been able to get smashed the night before. Utterly unused to this kind of thing and with the LSD charging through my system, I couldn’t think straight. I finally went back outside and lay looking up at the sky. Mundy came out and hauled me into bed. When we started making love, I kept my eyes tightly closed, dreading what I would see if I opened them.
By the time the LSD trip was over, it became clear that my relationship with Mundy was also over. Even though she stopped looking like a murderous dwarf the next morning, I was never able to look at her in the same way again. Soon afterward Mundy left Alberta and went up to the Manor to move in with Tom Newman.
5 Learning a lesson
1971
THROUGHOUT THE SPRING OF 1971, Virgin Mail Order attracted many more customers. But, although the company was growing, we were losing money. We offered large discounts on all records and, by the time we had spent money on the telephone calls to order them, paid for the postage, and accounted for the staff and the shops, we weren’t keeping up. Sometimes our customers pretended that they hadn’t received the records so we would have to send out a second copy, and often a third and a fourth and so on. All in all we were gradually losing money, and before long we were £15,000 overdrawn.
In the spring I received an order from Belgium for a large number of records. I went to the record companies that published those records and bought them without paying the purchase tax which we had to pay on records sold in the UK. I then borrowed a van and drove down to Dover to take the ferry across to France and then drive on to Belgium. Some papers were stamped at Dover to confirm that so many records had been exported, but when I arrived at Calais I was asked for another document, a car
net which proved I wasn’t going to sell them en route in France. The British and the French authorities both charged purchase tax on records, while Belgium charged nothing, so the records in my van were effectively bonded stock. I did not have this carnet, and to my disappointment was forced to go back to Dover on the ferry, with the records still in my van.
However, as I drove back to London, it dawned on me that I was now carrying a vanload of records that had apparently been exported. I even had the customs stamp to prove it. The fact that the French customs had not allowed me through France was unknown. I had paid no purchase tax on these records, so I could sell them either by mail order or at the Virgin shop and make about £5,000 more profit than I could have done by the legal route. Two or three more trips like this and we would be out of debt.
As well as the £15,000 debt of Virgin Records, I had taken on the £20,000 mortgage on the Manor, and the cost of converting the outbuildings into a recording studio. It seemed like the perfect way out. It was a criminal plan, and I was breaking the law. But I had always got away with breaking rules before. In those days I felt that I could do no wrong and that, even if I did, I wouldn’t be caught. I had not yet reached my 21st birthday, and somehow the normal everyday rules of life didn’t seem to apply. On top of all this exuberance, I was about to fall head over heels in love with a beautiful American girl called Kristen Tomassi.
One day at the Manor I was looking for Bootleg, our Irish wolfhound. I couldn’t find her anywhere, and went upstairs and along one of the corridors, opening all the bedroom doors and calling out, ‘Bootleg! Bootleg!’ I flung open the door of one tiny bedroom and found a lovely, tall girl getting changed. Not only was she considerably more attractive than Bootleg, with a rather quizzical, naughty face, but she was by herself and wearing just an old pair of skintight jeans and a black bra.
‘You look great just as you are,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t bother with any more clothes.’
‘Whatever are you shouting out about bootlegs for?’ she asked.
‘Bootleg’s my dog. She’s an Irish wolfhound.’
Sadly, Kristen did put on a shirt, but I managed to keep her chatting for almost an hour before someone started shouting for me. She had come to England for a summer holiday and met a musician who was doing some backing work at the Manor. She had come along with him for the ride.
We drove back to London in different cars. Kristen was with her musician boyfriend; I was by myself. As I followed her along the road I wondered if we would ever see each other again. I followed them all the way up to London, and finally decided to write a note to her. As I drove along I scrawled a note on a scrap of paper asking her to call me at seven o’clock. I waited until we reached the traffic lights at Acton, then jumped out of my car and ran up to theirs. I tapped on Kristen’s window and she rolled it down.
‘I just wanted to say goodbye,’ I said, leaning in to give her a kiss on the cheek. ‘Have a good trip back to the States.’
As I said this I secretly slipped my hand inside the car, reached down, and pushed my note into her left hand. As Kristen’s fingers closed round mine, I let go of the note. I smiled across at the boyfriend.
‘Hope the recording went well,’ I said to him.
I hopped back into my car and drove back to Alberta.
I sat by the telephone refusing to make any calls, which was most unlike me, until seven o’clock. Then the phone rang. It was Kristen.
‘I’m calling from a payphone,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want John to overhear.’
‘Can you step out of the phone box and catch a taxi?’ I asked. ‘Come on round and see me. I live on a boat called Alberta. Ask the taxi driver to take you to Blomfield Road in Little Venice. There’s a little wooden door in the fence which leads to the towpath.’
There was a measured pause.
‘It sounds like Alice in Wonderland,’ Kristen said. ‘I’ll see you in ten minutes.’
And with that Kristen came round and I began my second whirlwind romance on Alberta.
The next morning I was due to make what I hoped would be my final trip down to Dover, pretending to export records. By this time I had made three trips and £12,000 profit. This last trip would provide enough money to pay off our overdraft. I could then give up the scam and concentrate on the business. It is impossible to know whether we really would have stopped since making such easy money is addictive, but that was our intention. That morning I loaded up the van with records once again and set off for Dover. This time I was even more casual than normal and after my papers were stamped I didn’t even bother going on the ferry but simply drove around the dock and headed back for London. I was anxious to get back to Alberta to reassure myself that Kristen was still there. At Little Venice I walked along the towpath to the boat. It was the last week of May 1971, and the apple trees along the towpath were all in blossom.
Kristen had gone. In a panic I called her at her boyfriend’s flat and put on an American accent when he answered the telephone.
‘I’m looking for a Miss Kristen Tomassi,’ I said. ‘This is American Airlines.’
‘I’ll just get her.’
‘Kristen,’ I hissed, ‘it’s Richard. Pretend you’re talking to a travel agent. And then call me back as soon as you can. Go to a payphone.’
‘Thank you very much. I’ll do that,’ Kristen said, and rang off.
Fifteen minutes later the telephone rang. It was Kristen.
‘Just hold the line a minute,’ I told her.
‘OK, Eddy,’ I said, holding my hand over the receiver. ‘Time to go.’
Eddy was the Virgin driver who picked up all our record deliveries. He set off for the boyfriend’s flat.
‘Kristen,’ I said. ‘What’s your number there? This is going to take some time.’
I called her back, and we had a long chat about what we were doing. I spun every yarn I could think of. Twenty minutes later Eddy arrived back from the flat. He had all Kristen’s clothes in a suitcase. He had told the boyfriend that Kristen was moving in with me.
‘Kristen,’ I said. ‘You’d better come round here. I’ve got something to show you. It belongs to you.’
I refused to reveal what it was. Her curiosity kindled, Kristen came round to Alberta. She was set upon saying goodbye to me and returning to America.
When she arrived I held up her suitcase. She tried to grab it from me, but I opened it and threw her clothes all around the boat. Then I picked her up and carried her to the bedroom.
While Kristen and I spent the rest of the day in bed, the Customs and Excise officials were planning to raid Virgin. It had never occurred to me that I wasn’t the only person who had stumbled across this tax-evasion scam. Many much larger record shops were doing it, and they were being much more sophisticated than I was. I was simply putting the records that should be exported in our Virgin Records shop on Oxford Street, and stocking up the new shop in Liverpool, which was due to open the next week. The big operators were distributing their illegally ‘exported’ records right across the country.
The telephone rang at around midnight. The caller refused to give his name, but what he had to say was terrifying. He warned me that my bogus trips to the Continent had been noticed and that I was about to be raided by the Customs and Excise office. He said that, if I bought an ultraviolet sun lamp from a chemist’s shop and shone it on the records that I had bought from EMI, I would notice a fluorescent ‘E’ stamped on the vinyl of all the ones that were meant to have been exported to Belgium. He told me that I would be raided first thing tomorrow morning. When I thanked him, he told me he was helping me because I had once stayed up late talking to a suicidal friend of his who had called the Student Advisory Centre. I suspected that he was a customs officer.
I called Nik and Tony and rushed out to buy two sun lamps from a late-night chemist on Westbourne Grove. We met at South Wharf Road and started pulling records out of their sleeves. The ghastly truth was revealed: an ‘E’ shone up at us from all the records
we had bought from EMI for export. We began to run in and out of the warehouse carrying piles of records into the van. We then made a terrible mistake: we assumed that the Customs and Excise officers would just raid the South Wharf warehouse. We therefore drove all the records round to the Oxford Street shop and put them in the racks to be sold. We had no idea that Customs and Excise officers have greater powers of immediate search than the police. I had a similar attitude to when the Church Commissioners used to come to Albion Street: it was all some great game and I found it difficult to take very seriously. By the early hours of the morning we had taken all the ‘E’-stamped records to the Oxford Street shop, and substituted some bona fide records for the warehouse stock.
Kristen and I set off early the next morning and walked from Alberta along the Grand Union Canal to South Wharf Road. I wondered when the raid would be. We crossed over the footbridge beside St Mary’s Hospital and walked along the path. As we walked by the hospital there was a scream above us. A body fell out of the sky and hit the railings beside us. I caught a glimpse of an old man’s grey, unshaven face as he hit the railings. It was horrific. His body seemed to explode and a huge amount of entrails fell on to the ground or hung dripping in red and white shiny rings from the railing. He was naked apart from his white dressing gown, which quickly began to soak up the blood. Kristen and I were too shocked to do anything other than stop and stare. He was clearly dead on impact. His neck hung off from his body and his back seemed to be broken in half. As we stared at the corpse, a hospital nurse came running over from the side door. There was nothing she could do. Someone else came rushing out with a white sheet and covered the body and the bits in the street. Kristen and I stood there, enveloped by silence, until we became aware of the noises of everyday life: traffic, horns blowing, and birdsong.
‘Are you all right?’ the nurse asked us. ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’
We shook our heads and walked on, deeply shaken. It was another surreal twist to the start of our relationship. Two days ago we had met for the first time and I had slipped a clandestine note into her hand. We had enjoyed a fabulous night together on the boat. I had then driven to Dover and back, and arranged for her suitcase to be stolen. I’d spent all last night scrabbling about with the records. Now somebody had killed himself right in front of us. Like me, I think Kristen must have simply suspended her disbelief about what was going on. We were living off adrenaline and bewilderment.