My dyslexia was a problem throughout my school life. Now, although my spelling is still sometimes poor, I have managed to overcome the worst of my difficulties through training myself to concentrate. Perhaps my early problems with dyslexia made me more intuitive: when someone sends me a written proposal, rather than dwelling on detailed facts and figures I find that my imagination grasps and expands on what I read.
However, my saving grace was outside the classroom: I was good at sports. It is difficult to overestimate how important sport is at English public schools. If you are good at sports, you are a school hero: the older boys won’t bully you and the masters won’t mind you failing all your exams. I was intensely keen to succeed at sports, possibly because it was my only opportunity to excel. I became captain of the football, rugby and cricket teams. Every sports day I won a series of cups for sprinting and hurdling. Just before my eleventh birthday, in 1961, I won all the races. I even decided to go in for the long jump. I had never done a good long jump before, but this time I decided to just have a go. I sprinted down the track, took off from the wooden plank and soared through the air. After I landed in the sand the master came up to me and shook me by the hand: it was a new Scaitcliffe School record. That summer day I couldn’t put a foot wrong, and my parents and Lindi sat and clapped in the white marquee afterward as I went up to collect every cup. I won the Victor Ludorum. Who cared if I couldn’t spell? Not me.
The next autumn term I was playing in a football match against another local school. I was running rings round the defender and had already scored one goal. I put my hand up and yelled for the ball, which was booted upfield and bounced over both of us. I turned and sprinted after it, controlled it and was bearing down on the goal when the defender caught up with me and floored me with a sliding tackle. My leg was caught beneath him as he fell across me. I heard a ghastly scream and for a split second I thought that he was hurt until I realised that it was me. He rolled off me and I saw my knee twisted at a horrible angle. My parents had always told us to laugh when we were in pain, so half laughing but mainly screaming I was carried off the field to the school matron, who drove me to hospital. My agony stopped only after they gave me an injection. I had badly torn the cartilage in my right knee and they were going to have to operate.
I was given a general anaesthetic and fell unconscious. I awoke to find myself out in the street. I was still in my hospital bed, and a nurse was holding a drip above my head, but my bed, together with several others, was parked outside. I thought I was dreaming, but the nurse explained that there had been a fire in the hospital during my operation and all the patients had been evacuated on to the street outside.
I went home for a few days to recover. Lying in bed, I looked at my silver cups on the mantelpiece. The doctor told me that I would not play sports again for a very long time.
‘Don’t worry, Ricky,’ my mother said as she swept into the room after the doctor had gone. ‘Just think of Douglas Bader. He hasn’t got any legs at all. He’s playing golf and flying planes and everything. You don’t want to be lying there in bed doing nothing all day, do you?’
The worst aspect of this injury was that it immediately showed up how bad I was in the classroom. I was bottom in every subject and would clearly not pass the Common Entrance exam.
I was sent to another school, a crammer on the Sussex coast called Cliff View House. It had no sports to distract boys from the grim and usually hopeless task of preparing for Common Entrance. If you couldn’t spell, or couldn’t add up, or couldn’t remember that the area of a circle is ‘Pi’ R squared, then the solution was simple: you were beaten until you did. I learnt my facts in the face of unflinching discipline and with a black and blue backside. I may have been dyslexic, but I had no excuse. I just couldn’t get it right. When I gave the inevitable wrong answer it was either more lines or a beating. I grew almost to prefer the beatings since at least they were quick.
There were no games apart from an early-morning run, and, as well as for any faults in class, we were also beaten for almost anything else, such as not making our beds properly, running when we should be walking, talking when we should be quiet, or having dirty shoes. There were so many possible things to do wrong that, although we learnt most of them, we accepted that we would be beaten for some obscure misdemeanour almost every single week.
My only consolation was the headmaster’s eighteen-year-old daughter, Charlotte. She seemed to take a fancy to me and I was delighted that I, out of all the boys, should have caught her attention. We soon established a routine of nocturnal visits. Every night I would climb out of my dormitory window and creep over to her bedroom in the headmaster’s house. One night, as I climbed back through the window, I was horrified to see one of my teachers watching my progress.
The next morning I was summoned to the headmaster’s study.
‘What were you doing, Branson?’ he asked.
The only answer I could think of was the worst one I could possibly have given: ‘I was on my way back from your daughter’s room, sir.’
Not surprisingly, I was promptly expelled and my parents were told to come and collect me the following day.
That evening, unable to think of any other way to escape the wrath of my parents, I wrote a suicide note saying that I was unable to cope with the shame of my expulsion. I wrote on the envelope that it was not to be opened until the following day but then gave it to a boy who I knew was far too nosy not to open it immediately.
Very, very slowly, I left the building and walked through the school grounds towards the cliffs. When I saw a crowd of teachers and boys beginning to run after me, I slowed down enough for them to catch me up. They managed to drag me back from the cliff and the expulsion was overturned.
My parents were surprisingly relaxed about the whole episode. My father even seemed quite impressed that Charlotte was ‘a very pretty girl’.
2 ‘You will either go to prison or become a millionaire.’
1963–1967
AFTER THE CRAMMER HAD served its purpose by beating me into shape, I moved to Stowe, a big public school in Buckinghamshire for over 800 boys. There I faced a daunting prospect. Fagging was still in place: this was an archaic practice in which the younger boys were expected to run errands and do minor chores for the older ones; in effect, to be their servants. Bullying was rife. Your reputation – and ability to avoid being picked on – was helped enormously by being able to score a goal or hit a six. But I couldn’t play any games as my knee buckled whenever I tried to run. Since I was also unable to cope with the academic work, I was very quickly sidelined. Being out of the sports teams and bottom of the class was an unenviable position. It seemed as if all the challenges my parents had set me were now irrelevant.
I found refuge in the library, where I went every afternoon and started writing a novel. I sat in the most wonderful splendour, surrounded by leather-bound books and two globes, overlooking the ornamental lake into which the last head boy had dived and never surfaced. I wrote the most lurid sexual fantasies I could conjure up, amazing erotic stories all about a young boy who couldn’t play sports due to a knee injury, but who was befriended and then gloriously and expertly seduced by the young Scandinavian school matron. In my mind’s eye she used to creep up behind him when he was working in the library … But, sadly for me, no matter what incredible sexual encounters I dreamt up, there wasn’t a girl, let alone a Scandinavian, within miles of Stowe, and matron was sixty years old.
As I sat in the library panting at my own prose and scribbling faster and faster, I became aware of another regular visitor to the library: Jonathan Holland-Gems. In comparison with most of the boys at Stowe, Jonny was extremely worldly and sophisticated, widely read and staggeringly knowledgeable about the arts. He came from London, where his parents knew journalists and writers: when Jonny read Private Eye he knew half the people mentioned in it. His mother was a successful playwright. It was through Jonny that my interest in the world of newspapers began to grow, and
I began to think that I would like to be a journalist.
Halfway through the term I read a school announcement about an essay competition called the Junior Gavin Maxwell Prize which had been set up by the author, an old boy from Stowe. I momentarily put aside my pulsating pornography and wrote a short story which won the prize. The complete absence of competition must have helped.
Gavin Maxwell, the author of Ring of Bright Water, came to present the prize at Stowe. He arrived with Gavin Young, the Observer’s war correspondent and later the author of Slow Boat to China. After the ceremony they drove back to Surrey and dropped me off at Shamley Green. I stayed in touch with them. They were very supportive of me, partly, I think, because they fancied me. But once they realised I wasn’t that way inclined they still remained good and helpful friends. After winning the prize, my English began to improve and I soared up the class to third out of twenty-one. I was still eighteenth in Latin, and bottom in maths, physics and chemistry. ‘He tries hard but has very great difficulty in understanding even the simplest mathematical process and in retaining any new topic covered,’ read one end-of-term report.
One Easter holiday, I decided to follow my mother’s example and make some money. Undeterred by the school’s lack of faith in my ability with numbers, I saw an opportunity to grow Christmas trees. We had just moved house from one side of Shamley Green to the other, from Easteds Cottage to Tanyards Farm, which was a rambling building with many barns and sheds and some land. I went round to talk Nik into the plan. He was also on holiday from his school, which was at Ampleforth in Yorkshire. We would plant 400 Christmas trees in the field at Tanyards Farm. By the Christmas after next, they would have grown to at least four feet and we would be able to sell them. Nik and I agreed to do the work together, and share the profits equally.
That Easter we furrowed the ground and planted the 400 seedlings in the field above Tanyards Farm. We worked out that, if they all grew to six feet, we would make £2 a tree, creating a grand total of £800, compared with our initial investment of just £5 for the seedlings. In the following summer holiday, we went to investigate the trees. There were one or two tiny sprigs above ground, but the rest had been eaten by rabbits. We exacted dire revenge and shot and skinned a lot of rabbits. We sold them to the local butcher for a shilling each, but it wasn’t quite the £800 we had planned.
The following Christmas Nik’s brother was given a budgerigar as a present. This gave me the idea for another great business opportunity: breeding budgies! For a start, I reasoned, I could sell them all year round rather than just during the fortnight before Christmas. I worked out the prices and made some calculations about how fast they could breed and how cheap their food was, and persuaded my father to build a huge aviary. In my last week at school I wrote to Dad and explained the financial implications:
So few days now until the holidays. Have you ordered any material we might want for our giant budgerigar cage? I thought our best bet to get the budgerigars at reduced rate would be from Julian Carlyon. I feel that if the shops sold them for 30sh., he would get say 17sh. and we could buy them off him for 18 or 19sh. which would give him a profit and save us the odd 10sh. per bird. How about it?
My father reluctantly built the aviary and the birds bred rapidly. However, I had overestimated the local demand for budgies. Even after everyone in Shamley Green had bought at least two, we were still left with an aviary full of them. One day at school I got a letter from my mother breaking the bad news that the aviary had been invaded by rats which had eaten the budgies. It was only many years later that she confessed she had been fed up with cleaning out the aviary so one day had left the cage door open and they all escaped. She didn’t try too hard to recapture them.
But, while neither of these schemes had the effect of making money, they did teach me something about maths. I found that it was only when I was using real numbers to solve real problems that maths made any sense to me. If I was calculating how much a Christmas tree would grow, or how many budgies would breed, the numbers then became real and I enjoyed using them. Inside the classroom I was still a complete dunce at maths. I once did an IQ test in which the questions just seemed absurd. I couldn’t focus on any of the mathematical problems, and I think that I scored about zero. I worry about all the people who have been classified as stupid by these kinds of tests. Little do they know that often these IQ tests have been dreamt up by academics who are absolutely useless at dealing with the practicalities of the outside world. I loved doing real business plans – even if the rabbits did get the better of me.
I think my parents must have instilled a rebellious streak in me. I have always thought rules were there to be broken, and Stowe had as many rules and regulations as the army – many of them, it seemed to Jonny Gems and me, completely anachronistic and pointless. There was the outmoded practice of fagging, for one thing. Then there was the CCF (Combined Cadet Force), in which boys dressed up as soldiers and paraded around with antiquated rifles; and compulsory church attendance on Sundays. I managed to dodge the latter by skipping the first service of the new term: my name was left off the register, and I was never missed from then on.
During January and February 1966, Jonny and I began to talk about how to change the school rules. We were fifteen years old, but we believed that we could make a difference. My parents had brought me up to think that we could all change the world, so when I looked at how Stowe was run I felt sure that I could do it better. Stowe was actually reasonably liberal in encouraging boys of all ages to contribute to the running of the school.
Jonny and I were particularly incensed by the rule that anyone who wasn’t playing games had to go and watch the school team when they were playing another school. Although we were able to go to the library during weekday afternoons, we were still forced to watch the school teams play most Saturdays. I knew that if I hadn’t been ruled out by my weak knee I would be in the teams, so I felt doubly frustrated. I wrote to the headmaster:
I am against the utter waste of time that is spent in compulsory watching of matches. If one is unable to play for the First XI one should be able to spend one’s time in better ways than that. I know this sounds a frightful break against tradition etc., but I feel very strongly about this. If 450-odd people watching matches spent that time in Buckingham cleaning windows, for instance, they would gain at least something more than ‘watching others achieving something’.
I also tried to reorganise the system of school meals:
I feel that to improve Stowe one has first got to do it socially, even before religiously. There are many boys who are thirsting for knowledge through interesting conversations. One of the best times to talk is at meals, but at Stowe this is practically impossible. One goes into hall, sits down at one’s allotted table next to the same boys every day. A canteen must be constructed in one of the dining rooms. Then boys could choose their own food; they would be free to sit down where they wish; and they could put their forks and plates in a box when they go out. The food waste at the moment is fantastic, and with a canteen system you could cut down on at least half the Italian and Spanish waiters.
I would be very interested in your views on this, and any money saved could possibly be put towards my next plan …
And I went on to explore the idea of a sixth-form bar.
The headmaster suggested that I air my views in the school magazine, but Jonny and I wanted to set up an alternative magazine with a fresh attitude. We wanted to campaign against fagging, corporal punishment, and compulsory chapel, games and Latin. All these ideas were far too ‘revolutionary’ to be aired in the school magazine, The Stoic, a name which seemed only too apt to its long-suffering readers. We then thought about linking up with other schools that had similar rules. Gradually the idea of an interschool magazine was hatched. We would link up with other schools and swap ideas. I jotted down a few titles in a school notebook: Today, 1966, Focus!, Modern Britain, and Interview. Then I wrote out what I wanted to publish and did some more sums in
which, once again, I enjoyed thinking about the implications of the maths:
I wrote out a list of 250 MPs whom I found in Who’s Who, and a list of possible advertisers whom I found by going through the telephone book. I also wrote to WH Smith asking whether they would be prepared to stock the magazine. Thus, with contributors, advertisers, distributors and costs all in place – at least on paper – I had written my first business plan.
The numbers looked too small to work, so Jonny and I decided to involve more schools, and technical colleges and universities: it would open up the magazine to more people, and encourage advertisers. We thought that if we aimed the magazine at university students then sixth-formers would buy it; but if we published a magazine for sixth-formers then students wouldn’t be interested.
We settled on the name Student, which seemed a good one since at the time there was a great deal of talk about ‘student power’. This was the period of student sit-ins, occupations and demos at universities and polytechnics. It was an exciting time to be young. My mother lent me £4 as a float against the cost of telephone calls and letters, and Jonny’s father arranged for headed notepaper with STUDENT – THE MAGAZINE FOR BRITAIN’S YOUTH printed across the top with the symbol of a rising sun. We set to work writing to all the contributors and possible advertisers.
Student was a perfect vehicle: it gave us a new lease of life. There was so much to organise. I began to set up an office in my study at school and asked the headmaster for a telephone in my room – he unsurprisingly refused. As a result I had to make telephone calls from a call box, but I quickly discovered a useful trick: if I called up the operator and told her that the machine had taken my money but my call had been disconnected, I was able to get a free call. As well as a free call, I was able to avoid the telltale ‘pip – pip – pip’ as the coins went in. Better still, the operator sounded like a secretary: ‘I have Mr Branson for you.’
Losing My Virginity Page 4