Losing My Virginity

by Richard Branson

  Eve Huntley-Flindt had picked up some of her dazzling energy from her mother Dorothy, who holds two British records: aged 89 Granny became the oldest person in Britain to pass the advanced Latin-American ballroom-dancing examination, and aged 90 she became the oldest person to hit a hole in one at golf.

  Granny was 99 when she died. Shortly before that, she had written to me to say that the previous ten years had been the best of her life. That same year, on her way round the world on a cruise ship, she had been left behind in Jamaica with only her swimming costume on. She had even read A Brief History of Time (something which I’ve never been able to manage!). She never stopped learning. Her attitude was, you’ve got one go in life, so make the most of it.

  Mum had inherited Granny’s love of sports and dancing, and aged twelve she appeared in a West End revue written by Marie Stopes, who later became famous for her work with women’s health education. Some time later Mum was almost obliged to strip for another stage job: dancing for The Cochran Show at Her Majesty’s Theatre in the West End. Sir Charles Cochran’s shows were notorious for having the most gorgeous girls in town, and they took their clothes off. It was wartime and work was scarce. Eve decided to take the job on the grounds that it was all a lot of harmless fun. Predictably, my grandfather violently objected and told her that he’d come storming up to Her Majesty’s and pull her out of the show. Eve relayed this to Sir Charles Cochran, who allowed her to dance without stripping. Then, as now, she was able to get away with pretty much anything.

  Eve started looking for other, daytime, work, and went out to Heston where a gliding club taught RAF recruits to glide before they became pilots. She asked for a job as a pilot, but was told that these jobs were available only to men. Undeterred, she chatted up one of the instructors, who relented and secretly gave her the job so long as she pretended to be a boy. So, wearing a leather jacket, a leather helmet to hide her hair, and adopting a deep voice, Eve learnt how to glide and then began to teach the new pilots. In the last year of the war she joined the Wrens as a signaller and was posted to the Black Isle in Scotland.

  After the war Eve became an air hostess, at the time a most glamorous job. The qualifications were challenging: you had to be very pretty and unmarried, aged between 23 and 27, speak Spanish, and be trained as a nurse. Undaunted that she couldn’t speak Spanish and wasn’t a nurse, Mum chatted up the night porter at the recruitment centre and found herself on the training course to be a hostess with British South American Airways, BSAA. BSAA operated two kinds of plane between London and South America: Lancasters, which carried 13 passengers; and Yorks, which carried 21. They had wonderful names, Star Stream and Star Dale, and the air hostesses were known as Star Girls. When the plane taxied down the runway, Mum’s first job was to offer round chewing gum, barley sugar, cotton wool and Penguin paperbacks, and explain to the passengers that they had to blow their noses before taking off and landing.

  The cabins were not pressurised, and the flights were marathons: five hours to Lisbon, eight hours to Dakar, and then fourteen hours across to Buenos Aires. For the Buenos Aires to Santiago leg the York aircraft was exchanged for the more robust Lancaster, and everyone had to wear oxygen masks over the Andes. After she had been with BSAA for a year, it was taken over by BOAC, British Overseas Airways Corporation, and Eve began working on Tudor aircraft. Star Tiger, the first plane to leave for Bermuda, exploded in midair. Her plane was next and arrived safely. But the plane after hers, Star Ariel, vanished without trace in the Bermuda Triangle and all Tudor aircraft were grounded. It was later discovered that their fuselages were too weak to withstand the recently installed pressurisation.

  By this time Ted probably thought that, if he didn’t marry Eve and so disqualify her from being an air hostess, she would be likely to disappear somewhere over the Atlantic. He proposed to her as they roared along on his motorbike, and she shouted, ‘Yes!’ at the top of her voice so that the wind wouldn’t blow the word away. They were married on 14 October 1949, and I was conceived on their honeymoon in Majorca.

  My parents always treated my two sisters, Lindi and Vanessa, and me as equals whose opinions were just as valid as theirs. When we were young, before Vanessa’s arrival, if my parents went out to dinner they took me and Lindi with them lying on blankets in the back of the car. We slept in the car while they had dinner, but we always woke up when they started the drive back home. Lindi and I kept quiet and looked up at the night sky, listening to my parents talk and joke about their evening. We grew up talking as friends to our parents. As children we discussed Dad’s legal cases, and argued about pornography and whether drugs should be legalised long before any of us knew what we were really talking about. My parents always encouraged us to have our own opinions and rarely gave us advice unless we asked for it.

  We lived in a village called Shamley Green in Surrey. Before Vanessa was born, Lindi and I grew up in Easteds, a cottage covered with ivy which had tiny white windows and a white wicket gate which led out on to the village green. I was three years older than Lindi, and nine years older than Vanessa. My parents had very little money during our childhood and, perhaps because Mum wasn’t greatly interested in cooking, or perhaps because she was saving money, I remember eating a good deal of bread and dripping. Even so, traditions were still upheld and we were not allowed to leave the table until we had finished all our food. We were also given onions which grew in the garden. I always hated them and used to hide them in a drawer in the table. This drawer was never cleaned out, and when we moved house ten years later it was opened and my pile of fossilised onions was discovered.

  Food was not as important at meals as company. The house was always full of people. In order to make ends meet, Mum invited German and French students over to learn English in a typical English household, and we had to entertain them. Mum always had us working in the garden, helping her prepare meals and then clearing up afterward. When I wanted to escape, I ran off across the village green to see my best friend Nik Powell.

  At first the best thing about Nik was that his mother made amazing custard, so after a meal spent stuffing onions into the table drawer I would slip away to Nik’s house, leaving the Germans trying to speak English with my family laughing and helping them out. If I timed it right, which I made sure I did, pudding and custard were already on the table. Nik was a quiet boy with straight black hair and black eyes. Soon we started doing everything together: climbing trees, riding bikes, shooting rabbits and hiding under Lindi’s bed to grab her ankle when she turned out the light.

  At home Mum had two obsessions: she always generated work for us, and she was always thinking of ways to make money. We never had a television and I don’t think my parents ever listened to the radio. Mum worked in a shed in the garden, making wooden tissue boxes and wastepaper bins which she sold to shops. Her shed smelt of paints and glue and was stacked with little piles of painted boxes ready to be sent off. Dad was inventive and very good with his hands, and he designed special pressing vices which held the boxes together while they were being glued. Eventually Mum began supplying Harrods with her tissue boxes, and it became a proper little cottage industry. As with everything she did, Mum worked in a whirlwind of energy which was difficult to resist.

  There was a great sense of teamwork within our family. Whenever we were within Mum’s orbit we had to be busy. If we tried to escape by saying that we had something else to do, we were firmly told we were selfish. As a result we grew up with a clear priority of putting other people first. Once a boy came for the weekend whom I didn’t particularly take to. During the church service on Sunday I slipped out of our pew and went across the aisle to sit with Nik. Mum was furious. When we got home she told Dad to beat me, and we duly went into his study and closed the door. Rather than towering over me in a rage, Dad just smiled.

  ‘Now make sure you cry convincingly,’ he said, and clapped his hands together six times to make great smacking noises.

  I ran out of the room, bawling loudly. Mum ado
pted a severe look to imply that this was in my best interests, and resolutely carried on chopping onions in the kitchen – my portion of which was duly stuffed into the table drawer during lunch.

  Great-uncle Jim wasn’t the only maverick in the family: irreverence for authority ran on both sides. I remember that we acquired an old gypsy caravan which we kept in the garden, and sometimes gypsies came by and rang the doorbell. Mum always gave them something silver and let them rummage around in the barn for anything they needed. One year we were all taken to the Surrey County Show at Guildford. It was thronging with gleaming show-jumpers and men in tweed coats and bowler hats. As we walked past one of the stalls Mum saw a group of gypsy children in tears and we went over to see what was the matter. They were all crowded around a magpie which was tied to a piece of string.

  ‘The RSPCA has ordered us to bring the bird in to be put down. They say it’s illegal to own wild birds,’ they said.

  Even as they told us what was happening, we saw an RSPCA official walking towards us.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Mum said. ‘I’ll save it.’

  She picked up the bird and wrapped it in her coat. Then we smuggled it out of the showground past the officials. The gypsy children met us outside and they told us to keep the magpie since they would only be stopped again. Mum was delighted, and we drove it home.

  The magpie loved Mum. It sat on her shoulder when she was in the kitchen or working in her shed, and would then swoop out to the paddock and tease the ponies by sitting on their backs. It dive-bombed Dad if he sat down to read The Times after lunch, flapping the pages so that they scattered over the floor.

  ‘Damned bird!’ Dad would roar, waving his arms at it to shoo it away.

  ‘Ted, get up and do something useful,’ Mum said. ‘That bird’s telling you to do some gardening. And, Ricky and Lindi, run along to the vicar and ask him if there’s anything you can do to help.’

  Apart from spending summer holidays with Dad’s family at Salcombe in Devon, we also went to Norfolk to stay with Mum’s sister, Clare Hoare. I decided that when I grew up I wanted to be like Aunt Clare. She was a close friend of Douglas Bader, the Second World War fighter ace who had lost both his legs in a plane crash. Aunt Clare and Douglas owned an old biplane which they flew together. Sometimes Aunt Clare would parachute out of the plane for fun. She smoked about twenty small cigars a day.

  When we stayed with her, we swam in the millpond at the bottom of her garden. Douglas Bader would unstrap his legs and haul himself into the water. I used to run off with these tin legs and hide them in the rushes by the water’s edge. Douglas would then pull himself out of the water and come lunging after me: his arms and shoulders were immensely powerful and he could walk on his hands. When he had been held a prisoner of war in Colditz, after two failed escapes the Nazis had confiscated his legs.

  ‘You’re as bad as the Nazis,’ he’d roar, swinging himself after me on his hands like an orang-utan.

  Aunt Clare was as much of an entrepreneur as Mum. She was obsessed with Welsh Mountain sheep, which were then an endangered species, and she bought a few of these black sheep in order to save them from extinction. She eventually bred up a large flock and managed to bring them off the endangered list. She then set up a business which she called The Black Sheep Marketing Company and started selling pottery decorated with pictures of black sheep. The mugs with the nursery rhyme ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’ written round the side began to sell rather well. Soon Aunt Clare had all the old ladies in the village knitting her black wool into shawls and sweaters. She worked very hard to build up Black Sheep as a trade name, and she succeeded: over forty years later it’s still going strong.

  Some years later, in the early days of Virgin Music, I received a call from Aunt Clare: ‘Ricky, you won’t believe this. One of my sheep has started singing.’

  Initially my mind reeled, but it was the sort of thing I had come to expect from her.

  ‘What does it sing?’ I asked, imagining a sheep singing, ‘Come on, baby, light my fire.’

  ‘“Baa Baa Black Sheep” of course,’ she snapped at me. ‘Now I want to make a recording. The sheep probably won’t do it in a studio so can you send some sound engineers out here? And they’d better hurry since it could stop at any time.’

  That afternoon a bunch of sound engineers headed up to Norfolk with a 24-track mobile studio and recorded Aunt Clare’s singing sheep. They also amassed an entire choir of sheep, ducks and hens for the chorus, and we released the single ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’. It reached number four in the charts.

  My friendship with Nik was based on affection but also on a strong element of competition. I was determined to do everything better than he did. One summer Nik was given a brand-new bike for his birthday. We immediately decided to take it down to do the River Run, a game in which you raced straight downhill, braked at the last moment and skidded to a halt as close to the edge of the riverbank as possible. This was a highly competitive game and I hated losing.

  Since it was his bike, Nik went first. He did a very creditable skid, curving round so that the back wheel came to within a foot of the water’s edge. Nik generally tried to spur me on to do even more outlandish things, but this time he tried to stop me.

  ‘You can’t do better than that skid,’ he said. ‘Mine was perfect.’

  I thought otherwise. I was determined to do a better skid than Nik. I took his bike up the hill and launched myself towards the river, pedalling madly. As I approached the bank it became apparent that I was out of control and had no chance of stopping. In a fast-moving blur I caught sight of Nik’s open mouth and horrified expression as I hurtled past him. I tried to brake, but it was too late. I somersaulted head over heels into the water, and the bike sank beneath me. I was swept downstream by the current, but finally managed to clamber back ashore. Nik was waiting for me, enraged.

  ‘You’ve lost my bike! That’s my birthday present!’

  He was so furious that he was sobbing with rage. He pushed me back in the water.

  ‘You’d damn well better find it,’ he shouted.

  ‘I’ll find it,’ I spluttered. ‘It’ll be OK. I’ll fish it out.’

  ‘You bloody well better had.’

  I spent the next two hours diving down to the bottom of the river and groping around the mud and weeds and stones trying to find his new bike. I couldn’t find it anywhere. Nik sat on the bank, hugging his knees up to his chin, glaring at me. Nik was epileptic, and I’d been with him on a couple of occasions in the past when he’d experienced fits. Now he was furious, and I hoped his anger would not spur another one. But eventually, when I was so cold that I could barely talk and my hands were white, numb and bleeding from bashing into rocks on the riverbed, Nik relented.

  ‘Let’s go home,’ he said. ‘You’ll never find it.’

  We walked back home and I tried to cheer him up: ‘We’ll buy you another one,’ I promised him.

  My parents must have groaned because the bike cost over £20, nearly a month’s supply of tissue boxes.

  When we were eight years old, Nik and I were separated when I was sent away to board at Scaitcliffe Preparatory School in Windsor Great Park.

  On my first night at Scaitcliffe, I lay awake in my bed, listening to the snorings and snufflings of the other boys in the dormitory, feeling utterly lonely, unhappy and frightened. At some point in the middle of that first night, I knew I was going to be sick. The feeling came on so fast that I didn’t have time to get out of bed and run to the bathroom; instead I vomited all over the bedclothes. The matron was called. Instead of being sympathetic, as my mother would have been, she scolded me and made me clear it up myself. I can still remember the humiliation I felt. Obviously, my parents thought they were doing the right thing in sending me there, but at that moment I could feel only confusion and resentment towards them, and a terrible fear of what lay in store for me. Within a couple of days, an older boy in my dormitory had taken a liking to me and got me into his bed to play ‘feel
ies’. On my first weekend home I matter of factly told my parents what had happened under the sheets. My dad calmly said, ‘It’s best not to do that sort of thing,’ and that was the first and last time such an incident happened.

  My father had been sent to boarding school at the same age, and his father before him. It was the traditional way for a boy from my background to be educated, to cultivate independence, self-reliance – to teach someone to stand on their own two feet. But I loathed being sent away from home at such an early age, and have always vowed to myself that I would never send my children to boarding school until they were of an age to make up their own minds about it.

  In my third week at Scaitcliffe I was summoned to the headmaster’s study and told that I had broken some rule; I think I had walked on to a patch of hallowed grass to retrieve a football. I had to bend down and I was caned across my bottom six times.

  ‘Branson,’ the headmaster intoned. ‘Say, “Thank you, sir.”’

  I couldn’t believe my ears. Thank him for what?

  ‘Branson.’ The headmaster lifted up his cane. ‘I’m warning you.’

  ‘Thank you … sir.’

  ‘You’re going to be trouble, Branson.’

  ‘Yes, sir. I mean, no, sir.’

  I was trouble – and always in trouble. Aged eight I still couldn’t read. In fact, I was dyslexic and short-sighted. Despite sitting at the front of the class, I couldn’t read the blackboard. Only after a couple of terms did anyone think to have my eyes tested. Even when I could see, the letters and numbers made no sense at all. Dyslexia wasn’t deemed a problem in those days, or, put more accurately, it was only a problem if you were dyslexic yourself. Since nobody had ever heard of dyslexia, being unable to read, write or spell just meant to the rest of the class and the teachers that you were either stupid or lazy. And at prep school you were beaten for both. I was soon being beaten once or twice a week for doing poor classwork or confusing the date of the Battle of Hastings.