One Hundred Summers

by Vanessa Branson

  Menorca in the sixties and seventies was bliss. I could run free, playing with the local children in the village, buying Spanish sweets from the local shop and swimming in the clear waters, or we would all jump in Margareta and chug along to the beach at Binibeca and eat paella under the shade of the beach bar. We messed about on the sea, towing each other behind the boat or using the ‘aquanaut’, a compressor that floated in a rubber ring on the surface and pumped air down thirty-foot tubes to us, as we explored the seabed wearing weight belts. While Lindy attracted every hot-blooded male into her curvaceous, sensual orbit, I joined families with children my age on the beach. It was here that I met Fiona Whitney.

  Fiona’s mother Roma, a former ballet-dancer, was doing handstands on the sand, and I couldn’t resist showing off that I could do them too – rather bizarrely, nor could Jeffrey Archer, who happened also to be on the beach.

  Fiona came up to me. ‘Are you a boy or a girl?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m a girl,’ I replied. ‘What are you?’ By the end of the day, we had become firm friends and I’d invited her to Casa Candy for a sleepover.

  Fiona lived in London, and her parents dazzled me with their sense of humour. Her father John had a dandyish manner and was the first truly creative man who talked to me person-to-person, encouraging me to share inventions I’d come up with.

  ‘They could work,’ he said, ‘but you must never forget one thing, Vanessa. Ideas are two a penny – it’s putting them into action that matters.’

  John had a strange little-boy manner that was evident in his relationship with Roma. She played the strict mother figure to his naughty boy and they called each other ‘Tiny’. To me it was a strange game, but theirs was to be an enduring marriage and as I write this, over fifty years later, they’re still acting out these roles in Dorset. John was then developing the TV series Upstairs Downstairs and would go on to be the founding director of Capital Radio, the radio station whose goal was ‘to turn the capital into a village’, and which provided the soundtrack to our early adult days in London. Fiona, six months my senior and an academic year ahead of me, dazzled me with tales of London and her Quaker boarding school, the Friends’ School in Saffron Walden. On that very first sleepover we pledged to write to each other from our respective boarding schools, and five years of hilarious correspondence were to follow.

  Meeting Fiona marked another turning point for me – I’d never come upon such an extreme personality before and was excited to walk on the wild side with someone who seemed to be, by turns, fearless and cautious. Life with Fiona was never going to be dull, but even my wildest ten-year-old imagination couldn’t possibly guess just how interesting it would be.

  ***

  My memories of home life from that time are blurred. I still suffered from moments of loneliness but, on the whole, the house was filled with energy and people. Mum had transformed an old grain shed under one of the barns into a cottage, which was rented to yet more law students. Richard was working and sleeping in the crypt of a London church, kindly offered to him by a vicar who was impressed with his youthful enthusiasm. He would come home at weekends, along with his band of young journalists, to have a hot bath and get fed. Lindy also came home for weekends; she was by now at Lucie Clayton, a secretarial college and finishing school, and would astonish me with tales of her lessons there, of how a lady twiddles her pearls in an alluring manner and how she steps out of a car without showing her panties.

  Richard had tried to knock out a few of the crypt’s arches, before discovering that they were made up of stacks of occupied coffins. As it became too claustrophobic, he managed to secure, under Mum and Dad’s name, a lease from the Church Commissioners on a town house on Albion Street, just off Connaught Square. It was a residential-only lease, and on more than one occasion Mum and Dad received a panicked call from Richard, saying that the commissioners were coming for an inspection and we had to make a mad dash to London. We would sit in the drawing room, Mum sewing, Dad reading a paper and me playing on the floor – the perfect family tableau to distract the inspector from the chaos in the basement, where the office staff were hiding silently until he’d left.

  It was on one of these occasions that Richard asked me if I would model for him. I must have been twelve and Virgin Records was about to be launched. The artist Roger Dean had been commissioned to design its logo, and I was to go to his studio. I entered with some trepidation, but Roger was perfectly nice and offered me a cup of tea, before casually asking if I’d go behind the screen to take my clothes off.

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand,’ I stuttered.

  ‘Over there – the screen in the corner. It won’t take a minute or two – I just need to take a few shots before working on them.’

  I hesitated and seeing my utter bewilderment, Roger said, ‘I think there must be some sort of misunderstanding. Richard said you wouldn’t mind taking your clothes off.’

  I apologised, barely looking him in the eye, and made hastily for the door. Nowadays, the image of a naked set of Siamese twins, the old Virgin Records logo, could be regarded as rather creepy, but back in 1971 it had a Garden of Eden innocence. I rather regret my prudishness now – it would have been wonderful to have my youth immortalised. For that sweet youth was about to pass.

  5

  DUSK OVER FIELDS

  My four years at boarding school were generally happy, as Tanyards became a backdrop to my life rather than playing centre stage. Home was filled with law student lodgers, partying and laughter and I was always welcome, but I felt no obligation to appear and was free to come and go as I chose. In many ways, this benign neglect was the ideal way to grow up: I neither had to share teenage anguish with my parents nor hide issues from them, and I knew I was utterly loved and trusted. I remember admonishing my father on a couple of occasions for not celebrating some small triumphs of mine; he simply replied that he had complete faith in me and expected nothing else. Mum displayed no alarm if I told her I was staying with friends for the weekend or going to London for the day; on the contrary, she encouraged me to explore the world and to take pleasure in meeting new people.

  I realise, as I write this book, just how much the Virgin story is interwoven through mine. It is impossible to tell my story without acknowledging how much it has enriched my life. Richard loved to share all his highs and lows and he surrounded himself with talented, energetic young people, who were excited about challenging the old world order. Sitting on the sidelines, I watched his often crazy antics evolve into the multinational business that is Virgin today.

  The years 1970 to 1973 were especially busy for my brother, whose career was moving at a fearsome rate. Simon Draper, having arrived from South Africa in 1970, had knocked unannounced on Richard’s door, introduced himself as the nephew of Aunt Wendy, the aunt that my father had picked up on the cruise ship over forty years earlier, and asked for a job. Simon’s passion for, and encyclopaedic knowledge of, contemporary music gave Richard a new direction. Music was the cultural life force of the age and Virgin was going to be at its vanguard.

  Student and its mail-order record business evolved into a chain of record shops, the first of which opened on Oxford Street and the next on Notting Hill Gate in west London. Richard bought a house nearby in Denbigh Terrace, just off the Portobello Road, from the comedian Peter Cook, who would later make a number of outrageous albums with Dudley Moore on the Virgin label.

  Notting Hill Gate was a rather scuzzy area back then, the elegant, late-Georgian terraces having been broken up into flats that were run by slum landlords and filled with migrants, gangsters and struggling artists, including David Hockney and Jimi Hendrix. On Fridays and Saturdays, Portobello Road came to life as the market stalls fired up and the area pulsated with youth, creativity and music.

  Virgin record shops were designed to be laid-back places, where music lovers could listen to records on headphones while slumping on bean bags. Virgin became the epitome of cool. Richard borrowed £35,000 from Aun
tie Joyce, who had cared for her parents her whole life and inherited the bulk of the family wealth after their death, and used it as a deposit on a mortgage for The Manor at Shipton-on-Cherwell, a sixteenth-century manor house, complete with walled gardens, a church and lawns that swept down to a lake.

  One of the outbuildings at The Manor was converted into a state-of-the-art recording studio. Unlike the usual London recording studios, bands could stay in the cavernous bedrooms, hang out in the house and grounds in the daytime and record all night. One of the session musicians working with Kevin Ayers, the former frontman of Soft Machine, was Mike Oldfield. During the studio’s downtime, Mike had been patiently laying down a record, overdubbing instrument after instrument; the result, from its thin opening riffs to its fulsome orchestral finish, was fresh and enigmatic. He had sent a demo tape to record companies but his music, so out of tune with the rock and roll fashion of the time, was turned down by every label in the country. Simon Draper was convinced by Tubular Bells’ brilliance, and he and Richard decided to launch a record company to release it themselves. This was an audacious plan, as apart from the shops, neither of them had any experience of the music industry.

  I remember Dad walking me across the village green to visit Judge Jellyneck, a retired high court judge who also played the violin. Dad wanted to ask his opinion of his son’s first release. We sat together on upright chairs while the old man slotted the record onto his turntable and listened first to side one – twenty-five minutes – and then to side two – twenty-four minutes – in silence. When the album came to Vivian Stanshall’s introductions of ‘grand piano’ and ‘glockenspiel’, and climaxed with the titular bells, the judge stood up to retrieve the record and replaced it in its sleeve, shaking his head.

  Thankfully, the good judge wasn’t the arbiter of cool back then – the DJ John Peel was. Peel championed Tubular Bells by playing it in its entirety on his radio show, Top Gear; after a slow start, sales began to rocket.

  ***

  Growing up at Box Hill School, I wasn’t aware of much supervision. Having witnessed my children going through boarding school at Marlborough College thirty years later, with electronic fobs monitoring their every movement and CCTV cameras watching their every encounter, I doubt that this level of scrutiny kept them out of mischief. In fact, being so closely monitored simply drove them crazy with frustration and made them want to fight the system.

  In our day, by following a few rules (the most important being ‘don’t get caught’) we could evolve into responsible grown-ups in our own time, by experimenting with aspects of our identities without the interference of adults. At the age of twelve, hanging out in corridors in huddles was our chosen method. We spent hours just knocking around, taking the mickey out of each other. We scaled the school’s roof using our dressing-gown cords as safety ropes and explored the Victorian central-heating ducts, a network of pitch-black tunnels running under the main house. It was thrilling.

  Occasionally a couple would start ‘going out’, which meant walking around the school hand in hand, and finding hidden corners for intimate conversation and some stroking and kissing. To my shame, I recall succumbing to the attentions of two boys in my year, one after the other. One took me into the woods and asked me, with youthful awkwardness, to stroke his enthusiastically erect but diminutive penis, and the other placed my hand on his bulging lap during Cinema Club. Neither encounter shocked me; I just presumed it was something boys did. I didn’t tell any of my girlfriends all the same, for these early fumblings felt shameful. From then on, I understood that, however much you resist, you can’t help but absorb a portion of the essence of every person with whom you share intimacy, and this remains with you for the rest of your life. So be discerning!

  When I was almost fourteen, I began talking to a boy in the year above. I look now at the photograph of the striking young Iraqi boy and can clearly see why I fell so in love with him. And this was real love, by the way, no mere teenage crush. Nabeel was unlike any other boy in the school. He was born in Iraq to a British mother and an Iraqi father. The family had fled Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party, and their factories and homes had been confiscated. He told me that his uncle had been tortured, a fate beyond my understanding after my cosseted childhood at Shamley Green.

  Nabeel had four brothers, all of them mature beyond years. I don’t know what bookish, quiet Nabeel, with his shy smile and slightly diffident manner, saw in me, the carefree joker laughing around with gangs of friends, but I firmly believe that love unearths qualities that sense doesn’t. Nabeel and I became inseparable. I went to stay with his family in Southampton and was struck by his gracious mother’s acceptance of her middle son’s young girlfriend; his father, I have to admit, was slightly speechless. Back at school, I took to sharing Nabeel’s study cubicle, a privilege reserved for those taking their O-levels.

  With his encouragement, I began to read, making my way through tomes that I would previously have considered incomprehensible. We prided ourselves in only reading Penguin Classics: books by Henry James, George Orwell, E. M. Forster, Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Hardy, Jean-Paul Sartre and Émile Zola. We would lie on our backs under the dappled shade of the mighty beech at the far end of the playing field. With my head on his bare stomach, I was aware of his beating heart and rhythmic breathing. I revelled in his smell, his smooth brown skin and the downy hair that ran from his belly button down to the band of his boxer shorts, as his flat stomach sank beneath his hips. I would run my fingers over his chest, tracing a network of scars, the result of a childhood accident when making fireworks with his brothers in the basement of his house in Baghdad.

  Is it any wonder that we wanted to explore every inch of the beautiful young bodies that we held so close? I trusted Nabeel entirely and am happy to carry his essence with me to this day. One day, during the dark winter term, we wordlessly went to the hidden, musty foot tunnel beyond the playing fields, the entrance of which was camouflaged by trails of vines and ivy. We laid our school blazers down on the compacted earth before wrapping our arms around each other, not losing eye contact for a moment. Nabeel lay on top of me and gently worked his beautiful being into mine. My God, it hurt. I held onto his back and cried out and laughed with joy, relieved that I would never have to go through that searing pain again.

  Sex came instinctively to me, being the youngest of a liberal family, and I was excited about exploring this new part of life. Having never watched pornography, our generation slowly investigated and tasted the joys of skin on skin. All happened in its own good time, with each new coupling revealing fresh pleasures.

  Nabeel transformed my school experience, stimulating an intellectual curiosity that otherwise may well have lain dormant. He also set me on the right track regarding drugs, denouncing anyone who was dabbling in them as idiots – he had seen the fallout from kids taking drugs in Baghdad. Over the years, his words of distain have echoed in my ears and, whenever possible, I’ve avoided those who are indulging, particularly those tiresome cocaine users who are forever on ‘transmit’ and never on ‘receive’.

  How different the world was back then, without mobile phones and social media. I’m trying to remember what Nabeel and I did during the holidays. We certainly didn’t meet up – I think we simply clocked off for the holidays and clocked back on when term started again.

  In a bid for more freedom, I made a home in one of the gypsy caravans at the far end of the garden at Tanyards, beyond the orchard. The brightly painted old caravan had a working wood-burning stove, double bunk beds, a table and a couple of chairs. I whitewashed the interior, put up some curtains, filched a saucepan and a few tins of beans from the house and spent many happy hours collecting firewood, reading and entertaining the occasional guest with beans on toast, which I’d cook on the open fire. Fiona Whitney would come down from London to stay, and we’d spend our days hacking through the woods on Snowy and Tommy and writing business plans for our future riding school.

  From the caravan, I mov
ed to the cellar of the main house. I didn’t fancy having to lift up the trapdoor in the kitchen floor every time I wanted to go to my room, so I sawed a hole through the coat cupboard and descended down an old stepladder. My parents were reluctant to risk the cupboard route, which meant I had the cellar to myself, though the only natural light in my underground cavern came from two glass bricks covering the old coal chute. I painted the walls a deep purple and divided the space into two: one side was my bedroom, with a mattress on the floor, and the other was a study area. While dividing the room with plasterboard, I also disguised the greasy oil-fired boiler, hacking through panels of asbestos without pausing to consider the risk. The ancient boiler fired up twice a day, which filled the room with toxic fumes that helpfully camouflaged the smoke from the numerous cigarettes I was chugging through. The days of self-destruction had begun . . .

  I’d bobbed up the ladder to have breakfast one morning just as Mum was leaving for work as a magistrate in Guildford. As she went out through the front door, she shouted back to me, ‘Oh, by the way, Snowy’s dead. Can you call the knacker’s yard?’

  The truth is, I had rather neglected Snowy, who had been living in contented retirement in his field. But the news was still somewhat shocking. I walked up the hill through the orchard. It was a crisp winter’s morning, the ground rock hard. There was Snowy, lying on his side with his legs straight out, as if he had simply toppled over. His black fur was dusted white with frost. I lay beside him, wrapping my arms around his neck and wailing into his stiff body.

  What I was crying for? I didn’t know back then, but I now realise that my tears expressed a deep grief for the passing of my childhood. I wept for the days I’d spent making jumps out of painted poles and Snowcem drums. The long summer days spent hacking across the heath and up the one-mile gallop. The days of taking picnics to the woods and stopping under the shade of trees to eat our squashed sandwiches before finding our way home.