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I know little about my family’s time across the Atlantic. No photographs or records survive. If they wrote or received letters, they are lost. But Abraham apparently prospered, and my father had a happy and comfortable American upbringing. Perhaps something of his classless, independent background was to rub off on me.
My father often spoke of living in Fall Hollow, in the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains in Pennsylvania. He used to tell me he had found Indian arrowheads in the woods behind his house. I could find no place named ‘Fall Hollow’. Panic. Was his – and my – story true? Terry, with the aid of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette came to the rescue. Fall Hollow, near Braddock, did once exist, just as my father said.
I would know more if I still had the dented travelling trunk in which he kept old documents and cuttings about his time in America and his work as a trapeze artist. The trunk ended up in a dusty alcove in the cellar at 80 Burton Road, Brixton, my parents’ last home, and was left there when my sister Pat and her husband Peter moved out. I remember investigating it as a child. I saw the oversize evening suit and top hat my father wore in his publicity postcards, photographs (including one of him wearing his trapeze costume), and scores for a music-hall band.
The new owners of the bungalow in Worcester Park, Surrey, where I lived as a boy, found a number of remarkable items from my father’s life in their loft: a make-up box, a clown suit, shoes, wigs and scores of sheets of old music-hall songs, many signed by the composers. It was the residue of a music-hall life on the move.
My father began his career as a performer in America. He used to say that as a child he joined a local fife-and-drum band in Pennsylvania, became skilled at twirling a baton, and twice performed as a young drum major in front of President Grover Cleveland. I cannot prove this, but I do remember my mother swinging a baton of her own on our lawn at home (to the astonishment of our neighbours – it was not the sort of thing one did in Worcester Park) and telling me Father had taught her, so there is some circumstantial support for the story.
Soon my father was performing in the circus ring. He taught himself acrobatics in the cellar of his father’s building workshop, and by the age of eight, he claimed, he was the top man in a four-man pyramid. As a teenager, he said, he performed on the flying trapeze without a safety net – to attract a larger crowd and earn a bigger fee.
I can’t be certain exactly when or why my grandparents returned to England but by 1896, when Tom was seventeen, he and Alfred and their father were back in the West Midlands. The two young men were active members of the Walsall Swimming Club, and in the late 1890s their names appear repeatedly in local newspaper reports of swimming galas, taking part in an odd array of events, from canoe races in comic costume and aquatic ‘Derbys’ (with the swimmer as a horse carrying a ‘jockey’), to life-saving exhibitions, swimming races in fancy dress (Tom winning a prize as a ‘new woman’ in bloomers) and water-polo matches.
By the turn of the century, press mentions of my father cease. He may have moved away from Walsall; certainly less-newsworthy things now occupied his time. One of them became a family secret, unmentioned, something which again I did not discover until I was researching this book. As well as an adopted uncle, I had another brother.
In July 1901 a young dancer, Mary Moss, married to a musician named James Moss, gave birth to a son in Wigan. They called him Tom and registered his birth on 25 July, but the details they gave were untrue: the baby’s father was not James Moss but my father, Tom – then a twenty-two-year-old bachelor. James Moss brought the boy up as his own; indeed he may never have known he was not the father. But Tom Major did not lose touch with his son, and the child – my half-brother – was to enter my life many years later in Brixton, in circumstances no one could have imagined.
It is not hard to guess how my father met Mary and James Moss, for he was now a professional stage performer. The first of his variety shows that I can trace was ‘The Encore’, put on at the Grand Theatre, Stockton-on-Tees, in August 1902. Tom Major appeared on the bill as part of a double act, ‘Drum and Major’, with his future wife, Kitty.
Five years my father’s senior, Kitty was already married to a masseur, David Grant, when they met. The appeal of a life with a masseur must have worn off, for she soon formed a permanent professional partnership with my father which took her away from her husband, and she married Tom after Grant’s death, in 1910.
Kitty and Tom – ‘Drum and Major’ – were in regular work. September 1902 saw them on stage in Portsmouth; December took them to Hastings; and in the first half of 1903 they appeared in turn at Camberwell, Birmingham, Middlesbrough, Bolton, Manchester, Birkenhead, Plymouth, Stockton and Wolverhampton. Only political party leaders perform in a more bewildering succession of venues.
It was a peripatetic existence, but they must have loved travelling because they did not stay long in Britain. In July 1903 the pair sailed from Southampton, and did not return for almost a year. An advertisement in the Stage announced that they were ‘Touring in South America’; which was brave of them, since neither spoke Spanish. While they were there, I learned from my father, they spent time on a cattle ranch in Argentina. He used to tell me tales of the gauchos and their way of life. He also claimed that in Buenos Aires he had worked in a millionaires’ club, looking out for card-sharpers and winning back their gains. As an old man he was still an avid card-player.
And he crossed the River Plate – at least according to family legend – stumbling into a civil war in Uruguay, and was forced to enlist briefly in a local militia. Perhaps the name ‘Major’ confused someone. Tom used to recount how he had a white band pinned to his arm and had been ordered to march a group of undesirables out of town. He claimed that the white band denoted his status as an officer, but in fact, as my brother has subsequently discovered, at the time of his visit Uruguay was hotly divided between two political clans, the Blancos and the Colorados – the Whites and the Reds. Even a small piece of clothing of either colour committed you to one side or the other. Probably inadvertently, my father had joined the rebellious Blancos in their failed challenge to the Colorado party.
Their revolutionary phase behind them, Tom and Kitty returned to England in April 1904 to a thriving career. A fortnight after docking they were on stage in Blackpool, and they toured the country continually until the outbreak of war in 1914. They must have appeared in almost every big theatre in Britain, but life was not easy for music-hall performers. Contracts were cancelled without notice; shows were moved from theatre to theatre without compensation; and some theatres demanded that artistes play daily matinees but take payment only for evening shows. Individually, most performers were at the mercy of management. Collectively they believed they could protect themselves, and decided to do so.
A conference was called of leading stage figures, which Tom and Kitty attended, and on 18 February 1906 the Variety Artistes Federation was formed at the Vaudeville Club in London. Everyone present joined that same evening, and queued to pay the subscription of two shillings and sixpence. Tom and Kitty were Founder Members Numbers 97 and 98; my sister Pat still has our father’s white-and-green membership badge. I cannot recall, however, mentioning to the Huntingdonshire Conservative selection committee that my father was a pioneer trade unionist.
By 1914 Tom and Kitty were running a successful touring company. Tom had developed a heart condition which disqualified him from active service in the First World War, but they continued to appear on stage, their entertainments doubling as recruiting drives. My family still has an autograph book in which Tom collected the signatures of soldiers in the audience who had been decorated for their valour.
The end of the war saw the music-hall business return to normal. Throughout 1920 and 1921 Tom and Kitty travelled Britain, never stopping anywhere for more than a month, performing sketches and revues such as ‘Stop Press’, ‘Ginger’, ‘Fantasy’ and ‘After the Overture’.
And now, as I found out to my astonishment while researching this book, a surprise half-sister joins the family troupe. At about this time my father had an affair with one Alice Maude Frankland. She became pregnant, and a daughter, Kathleen, my father’s second child, was born in October 1923. Alice soon disappeared from the scene, but Tom and Kitty adopted Kathleen just a month after her birth. While they criss-crossed the country with their shows, the baby was boarded with a foster-couple. In about 1927 or 1928, they decided to bring her home. ‘The Majors want to take Kath away,’ her foster-parents were told – a heartbreaking moment. Sense prevailed, and Kathleen stayed where she was, though my father continued to provide financial support.
I have yet to reach 1930 in my family’s story, and already we have stumbled across an unrelated ‘uncle’, a wayward father, illiteracy, adultery, remarriage and two previously unknown half-siblings. Childhood memories have left me with a rock-solid respect for the traditional basics of family life and family duty; but if, unlike some Conservative colleagues and supporters, I have always taken with a pinch of salt the myth of a past golden age of conventional families, splendid education and national virtue, then I, and millions of my compatriots, have reason to. Life in Britain has never been simple, and never will be.
Kathleen was not to enter my life until after I had left Downing Street. Although she always knew of my family, I was not aware of her, and she was startled when in 1990 her half-brother became prime minister. She could have sold her story to the press for a small fortune. Instead, she kept the secret. Only after the 1997 general election did I learn that I had a half-sister, alive, well and living in England.
It was lucky for young Kathleen that she stayed with her foster-family, for a catastrophe would soon cost Kitty her life. While she was rehearsing on stage, a steel girder from the safety curtain came loose, fell, and struck her on the head. She was terribly injured, and though she lingered on for months with her mind impaired, she died in June 1928, perhaps mercifully for so vibrant a woman, and was buried at Prees Cemetery in Shropshire. Kitty and my father had been together for over twenty-five years. When she died my father was deluged with sympathetic letters, from everyone from theatre managers to call-boys. She was much loved.
After the accident Kitty had been comforted and nursed by a young dancer who had joined my father’s show six years earlier, at the age of seventeen. She was one half of ‘Glade and Glen’, a speciality act – and a cheeky, teasing, self-willed girl, often in trouble for misbehaviour and pranks. But she charmed her way out of every scrape, and had been a favourite of Kitty’s. A year after Kitty’s death, she married her boss, Tom, twenty-six years her senior, and cared for him for the rest of his life. Her name was Gwen, and she was my mother.
Gwen’s past held surprises for me, too. In 1991, one of my constituents with an interest in family history wrote a letter to me in which he suggested that I might have shared more than my job with Margaret Thatcher. My mother’s family had roots in the Boston district of Lincolnshire, not far from Margaret Thatcher’s home town of Grantham, and research suggests that it is likely – though not certain – that through my mother Margaret Thatcher and I have common ancestors in eighteenth-century Lincolnshire.
As the 1920s ended and music halls gave way to cinemas, my father left show business. It was the right decision, for his profession was dying, but it must have hurt. His 1929 marriage certificate shows his occupation as ‘builder’, but I have no reason to believe he ever was one – though he may have financed the building of bungalows. Certainly he was soon in a different trade, modelling animals and garden ornaments. My parents moved from Shropshire to a bungalow in Worcester Park, and children soon came along. A son, Thomas Aston, was born in 1929, but sadly lived only a few days. Then came Pat, born in 1930, and Terry, in 1932.
In the course of his life, my father once told me, he had made and lost fortunes several times over. What he meant by a fortune I don’t know, but for him the 1930s were good times. He became the first car-owner in the area; Pat and Terry were sent to fee-paying schools; and my mother had domestic help while she worked to build up my father’s business. All this changed with the outbreak of the Second World War. My father was sixty. His workforce joined the services and, as he had foreseen, the market for his ornaments collapsed. The car went. Pat and Terry were withdrawn from their private schools. Pat, the more academic of the two, won a scholarship to Nonsuch Grammar School for Girls, but Terry went to the local state school. My father became a Senior Air Raid Warden, and my mother began work in the local library, supplementing the family income by giving dancing lessons at home.
She had hoped for another child, but did not expect one. In late 1942 she began to suffer persistent heartburn and went to her doctor, a salty-tongued medic with a sharp bedside manner. ‘Don’t be bloody silly, woman,’ he boomed at her. ‘You’re pregnant.’ It was not an easy pregnancy, and my birth was dramatic. My mother collapsed in the kitchen with double pneumonia and pleurisy, and was rushed to St Helier Hospital, Carshalton, where she nearly died. I was born a few hours later, on 29 March 1943. Within days I, too, was perilously ill with a virulent infection. I only just survived, and to this day bear scarred ankles from the many blood transfusions.
My mother returned to her job in the library, taking me with her in my pram. When a German flying bomb landed in a nearby street, it killed ten people and shattered hundreds of windows. Glass splinters fell into my cot which, mercifully, was empty. Forty-seven years later I was to hear the sound of breaking glass when the IRA launched a mortar at Downing Street. For my mother, the flying bomb was too much. The family moved to Saham Toney in Norfolk for the rest of the war, returning to Worcester Park in 1945.
My first memories are of a small bungalow with four rooms, a bathroom and a kitchen. Our garden was long and narrow, dotted with sheds in which my father worked. We had a lawn just large enough for ball games, and two ponds: one shallow with a few goldfish, the other a deep iron tank sunk into the ground. There were rockeries, fruit trees to plunder and larger trees to climb.
Money, though, was an irregular commodity. Mostly we were comfortable but not well-off. Our neighbours were friendly and we were relaxed and at ease in our community, but I soon realised my parents were more exotic than those of my friends. For a start they were much older – when I was born my father was nearly sixty-four and my mother a few weeks short of thirty-eight. Gwen, clad in straight-up-and-down 1930s sports garb, raised eyebrows even from friendly neighbours by exercising and throwing her Indian clubs in the garden. My father, in the early days, could be spotted with his batons, as could Pat, doing acrobatics. When I think of this scene, I’m reminded of the families of circus performers described by Dickens in Hard Times:
The father of one of the families was in the habit of balancing the father of another of the families on the top of a great pole; the father of a third family often made a pyramid of both those fathers … all the fathers could dance upon rolling casks, stand upon bottles, catch knives and balls, twirl hand-basins, ride upon anything, jump over everything, and stick at nothing. All the mothers could (and did) dance, upon the slack wire and the tight rope, and perform rapid acts on barebacked steeds; none of them were at all particular in respect of showing their legs …
They all assumed to be mighty rakish and knowing, they were not very tidy in their private dresses, they were not at all orderly in their domestic arrangements, and the combined literature of the whole company would have produced but a poor letter on any subject. Yet there was a remarkable gentleness and childishness about these people, a special inaptitude for any kind of sharp practice, and an untiring readiness to help and pity one another, deserving, often of as much respect, and always as much generous construction, as the everyday virtues of any class of people in the world.
I remember my father as a stern old man, but kind. My mother idolised him and cared for him in every way. She must have known of his earlier dalliances, but nothing was ever said, at least not in our hearing. Our father’s word was law, and he never had to raise his voice to keep order. In his prime he had been a truly striking figure, ‘a great and stylish Edwardian actor,’ one biographer of mine has written, ‘over six feet tall, athletic in build and expansive in his gestures.’ Now ill and prematurely aged, he was still master in his house.
But it was my mother who brought up the family and ran the home. My father made the decisions. She carried them out. She was a Peter Pan figure who never quite grew up. The sprite of mischief was always with her. Loving and beloved, she was a magnet for lame ducks. I remember sitting at the table about to eat my lunch when a cold and hungry gypsy knocked at the door. He was invited in and my mother served him my meal, leaving me hungry. She did not ask me to do the washing up – she would not have considered that fair. But neither did she ask the gypsy to do it.
Gwen had a straightforward philosophy. Share what you’ve got. Be polite to others. Think of their feelings. Make allowances for them. Stand up for yourself but don’t cause unnecessary offence. Don’t show your own feelings. It was a simple code. She believed it and she lived it.
At the age of five I went to Cheam Common Infants’ School, which was around half a mile from our home in Longfellow Road, graduating to the Junior School in the autumn of 1950. I was taken to school at first, but it was an easy journey, and I was soon walking there and back on my own.
Sometimes I was given small amounts of pocket money on a rather haphazard basis – or earned it by doing small tasks. With this I often bought presents for my mother. My father did not approve. ‘That is not why we give him the money,’ I overheard him say to my mother. ‘Why does he do it?’ He was angry and I didn’t understand why. His view was that they had given me some of the little they had, and he did not think I should spend it on them. But I often did. I liked giving presents and my mother loved receiving them.
I liked receiving presents too, and except for one occasion when there was no money, Christmas and birthdays always brought something. Footballs, Meccano sets, pens and pencils for school, and classic books: Ivanhoe, Quentin Durward, The Black Arrow, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Knights of the Round Table, the Greyfriars stories – all of these and many more were favourites. Thus began my lifelong love affair with books.
Books introduced me to a world I’d never known, and people I would never meet. My parents encouraged me to read, although my father was too active and physical a man to be a great reader himself. He had too much else to do. But later, after he began to lose his sight, he derived great pleasure from the ‘talking books’ sent to him by the Nuffield Centre for the Blind, which came in large pouches and were fragile records like the old 78s of the time. They kept introspection at bay when his dreams crumbled. I would sit with him and listen to them for hour upon hour. We often talked of books. The authors he remembered from his youth were Rider Haggard, Jack London and Arthur Conan Doyle – and not only, he said, for the Sherlock Holmes stories.
‘Have you ever read The White Company?’ he asked. I hadn’t, and nor did I until the 1990s, when Stephen Wall, my Private Secretary at the Foreign Office and later at Number 10, and subsequently our Ambassador to the European Union, gave me his own precious copy.
My mother didn’t read much. She was too busy running the family, cosseting my father and helping lame ducks. I don’t think my brother Terry was much of a reader either, but I could be wrong, because he has surprised me all my life. I’m never quite sure what he’ll do next – and neither, I suspect, is he. He seems to enjoy allowing the world to underestimate him while he chuckles at it.
My sister Pat did read – a lot. Academically, she was the clever one of the family, and an astute judge of character. After I became prime minister she would phone me up and say, ‘Don’t trust him. He’s up to no good.’ She was almost always right.
For me, books were an escape and an education. Some became lifelong friends. Fame is the Spur, A Horseman Riding By, How Green was my Valley, Trollope – Phineas Finn and Phineas Redux were never far from hand. Biographies and histories joined Agatha Christie, Neville Cardus, Thomas Costain and many more, not forgetting Mrs Henry Wood’s East Lynne. I loved Jane Austen and Dickens – especially The Pickwick Papers, A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations.
I learned that there is as much to be learned from durable, well-written bestsellers as from more serious offerings. For me, these books were more than mere entertainment. They became companions and tutors, cherished friends to be picked up again and again, the true furniture of the mind. I did try more heavyweight reading when I began studying in my late teens. I read Kafka and Voltaire, Spinoza on ethics and Aristotle on politics. I even read Nietzsche, to try to see why his writings had become textbooks of the Nazis. I dipped into Colette, Hardy and Voltaire, and added them to my collection. Most of these books remain on my shelves today.
I can remember none of my friends from primary school, but I cannot have been unpopular for I was elected captain of the football team. We won most of our games and were good enough to reach the final of a local schools’ knockout competition, but lost 2–1 after I gave away a silly goal. I was inconsolable. I also learned to play cricket. Once I was given out lbw first ball, when I knew I had hit the ball smack in the middle of the bat. ‘But I hit it,’ I protested, confident that my explanation would persuade the umpire to put right his mistaken decision. It didn’t. ‘You’re out,’ he said, waving his hand in dismissal. ‘Now off you go.’ It was the first time I realised that adults were fallible and that, if on shaky ground, they could become even more assertive than if they were right.
I had a few fights at school, mostly with boys who were throwing their weight around, and it led to trouble. I was winning one when a teacher dragged me away from the scrap, slapping me painfully around my head and shoulders and visibly losing his self-control. I was contemptuous of him from then on. I thought he was unjust. But I wasn’t a natural troublemaker. I worked quite hard and was as keen to please as most small boys. When we were asked to produce a painting for an exhibition I misunderstood and took in one that my elder sister, Pat, an excellent artist, had painted. I was mortified to overhear a teacher saying I had brought in a painting, but ‘his sister did it’. I felt like a cheat and slunk away.
At home I had pets. I bred mice and sold them to friends, with a slice of fruitcake thrown in as an inducement to buy. My white doe angora rabbit, Frisky, was given an assignation with a blue bevan buck rabbit owned by a friend. We watched and waited with interest, and were not disappointed. A litter was produced, though not all survived. We had a dog, too, a white bull terrier called Butch. He was a wonderful companion and curled up on my bed each night, before returning to the lounge as soon as he thought I was asleep.
I pause, writing this. Everyone must have such stories from childhood. But perhaps it is worth illustrating that prime ministers are no different. From the pages of some politicians’ memoirs the statesman seems to spring perfectly formed, almost from the cot, without all the trivial things that matter so much to a child. But some of the memories which writing this has brought back are every bit as strong and as moving to me as the headlines about my life which were to come.
Outside school my fun was largely self-created, apart from visits to Saturday-morning cinema, where the films always ended on a dramatic note to encourage you to return the following week. It was my sister Pat who encouraged my interest in cricket. She took me to the local sports club to see Worcester Park play. We studied books on how to bat and bowl, and I spent hours practising when I could find no one to play with me, chalking up stumps on the garage door to bowl at. In the winter I turned the garage into a goal against which I dribbled a football, shot and took penalties without number. If other boys were around I would play with them. When they were not, I was quite content to play alone.
I also ran. Longfellow Road abutted on to Green Lane, and formed a block about half a mile long. I ran around it for hour upon hour and raced against anyone and everyone – and always myself. I ran so much that an interfering neighbour told my mother I would injure myself, and for a while running was forbidden.
A brook ran along Green Lane and I used to jump across it to climb the trees on the far side. Once I fell out of one and returned home covered in blood – but I soon recovered. Worcester Park then was less built-up than it is now, and there were open hayfields and hedgerows full of birds’ nests behind Longfellow Road. I brought home eggs that didn’t hatch and ducklings that didn’t survive, and learned that nature was best left to her own devices.
At home we talked of many things, but never politics or religion. I know from my brother and sister that my father was much against the socialists, and Mr Attlee was never forgiven for defeating Mr Churchill in the 1945 general election. My parents were believers, I’m sure, and their values were more Christian than those of many people who call themselves such; but going to church in their Sunday best and looking pious was not for them.
‘She’s got religion,’ Mother would say disapprovingly of a neighbour, as though it were measles; and we kept clear for fear of catching it. So we never went to church on Sunday. Perhaps my parents had got out of the habit when they were travelling the country, though my mother, despite her open heart, had a puritanical side – probably, in part at least, because of my father’s earlier philandering. Yet her God was a forgiving God, and I imbibed her values, although I always had a yen to take church more seriously than my parents did. That yen was largely unfulfilled. The Church appealed to me, but it never reached out to me.
I learned Christian values by example, but in no other way. And though I was baptised into the Church of England I was never confirmed – and had I been in later life, when I had become a public figure, I worried that it would lead to comment about my motives. For my parents the Church was something rather quaint, an honoured but distant institution that other people attended but we did not – except, of course, for fêtes and jumble sales. Chance and circumstance left me a believer at a distance; but a believer nonetheless.
In the 1950s the eleven plus examinations determined whether or not you went to grammar school. The names of the successful candidates were announced by the teacher in class, and as he intoned ‘John’ I felt my back being patted by the boy behind me. But the teacher went on to say ‘John Hunt’. I thought I’d failed, and I remember the huge relief when my name was finally called out. So I left Cheam Common School in 1954 and went to Rutlish, a grammar school about three miles away in Merton. It was our first choice, and I looked forward to going. I liked the uniform, and the school played rugby, which I felt sure I would enjoy. They also played cricket, and set aside one term a year for athletics, which was unusual at the time.
Passing the examination to Rutlish led to furious rows with my parents. My birth certificate records me simply as ‘John Major’, although at the font my godmother, a librarian friend of my mother’s with the unlikely name of Miss Fink, slipped in a ‘Roy’, to my father’s fury. He hated the name, and wasn’t too fond of Miss Fink, an exotic lady who had painted fingernails and who smoked Passing Cloud cigarettes. But my father had used two names in his life. Although he was christened ‘Abraham Thomas Ball’, he used ‘Tom Major’ as his stage name and generally thereafter. My elder brother Terry had been registered with ‘Terry’ and ‘Major’ as his Christian names and ‘Ball’ as his surname. Pat was the only one of us to be both christened and registered as ‘Major-Ball’. Now, as I prepared to go to Rutlish, my parents decided to inflict this hybrid name on me. I bitterly objected. It was not my name, and, even worse, it was bound to cause trouble at school.
My mother and father thought it would put me more in tune with the school. I disagreed. My parents were usually kind and biddable, but on this occasion they were intransigent. In battles like this in the 1950s the adults won. And so – in the only cruel act of theirs I ever knew – I became John Major-Ball.
I have often wondered how much this decision affected my attitude to school. A great deal, I think. I got it all out of proportion. It meant I approached Rutlish with a wary unease. I believed I would have to excel at sport and be prepared to use my fists to earn the respect of my peers. Forty years later that may seem an odd judgement, but it was all too real for an eleven-year-old boy mortally embarrassed at sailing under false colours.
At the time my parents were under great strain. My father’s health was poor and his eyesight was failing. I remember him falling off a stool in the kitchen when I came into the room as he was putting in a lightbulb, and from that day on I watched him deteriorate. Irrationally, but in the way a small boy can, I felt personally responsible for this. My mother’s health was also worsening, with asthma and bronchitis her constant companions.
My father’s garden-ornaments business was in difficulties, too. In 1950 or 1951 he made plans to sell it, pay off his debts and emigrate with us to Canada. His failing eyesight, spotted by a wary doctor at his second medical interview for Canada, put paid to this scheme. In urgent need of capital, he entered into a business deal with a widowed lady. She wanted a job for her sister’s boyfriend and invested £3,000 to install him as my father’s partner. The boyfriend began to learn the business, but disliked it. Soon he began to dislike the widow’s sister too, and they fell out and parted company.
The widow demanded her money back. In his typical my-word-is-my-bond manner, my father hadn’t bothered to legally formalise the deal. Nor did he have the money. He’d spent it. And he was unable to take the matter to court. He was not fit enough, financially or physically, and his case was weak. Why had an experienced man of the world like my father not legalised the deal? He was advised that the episode could be presented as one of a designing businessman out to fleece an innocent widow.
My sister, then only twenty-four, took over, negotiating with the widow and agreeing to repay the money over time, in a vain effort to save our father from having to sell the house. But the debt was many times my sister’s annual salary, and my parents were faced with the loss of all they had. This must have been shattering for them and, I am sure now, explains my parents’ impatience with my protests about changing my name. A few months after I went to Rutlish my father sold our bungalow in Worcester Park for £2,150. My parents seemed to age before my eyes.
We moved to a new home in Brixton in May 1955, when I was twelve. It was a sad comedown, part of the top floor of a four-storey Victorian building in Coldharbour Lane. We had two rooms for the five of us, plus Butch and a pet budgerigar. Dad, Terry and I slept in one room, and Mum and Pat in the other. This second room was used as a dining room and lounge during the day. We shared a cooker on the landing with the other top-floor tenant, a middle-aged bachelor. The lavatory, two floors below, was used by all the tenants. There was no bathroom. We washed at the sink or in a tub.
The house was home over the years to a rich collection of characters. The floor below us was occupied from time to time by three Irish boys who returned home to Ireland whenever taxes were due to be paid. They were huge fun. They played football with me in the street, and one of them, Christie, suggested Pat should run away with him. Another, Michael, actually proposed to her one morning as she left for work, but she wasn’t really listening – a most convenient gift she has always had. Only later did she realise what he had said. It hardly mattered. She was convinced that they would end up with eleven children each. And anyway, she was determined to marry her long-term boyfriend Peter, which she eventually did.
Other tenants included a middle-aged cat-burglar. He was charming and lived with a beautiful girl of about nineteen, who disappeared when he was sent to jail. She used to walk around in her underwear, which was something of a novelty in the 1950s but added pleasurably to my education. The cat-burglar gave me his bets to place on racehorses with a local bookie who operated illegally in the tunnel at Loughborough Junction station. Once he offered me half a crown to see if there were any policemen around before he went out of the house, since he was anxious not to meet any. I agreed to scout for him, but high-mindedly refused to take the money. It probably wasn’t his anyway.
Two other tenants were a Jamaican and his white girlfriend, an unusual liaison for the era, even though there was already heavy West Indian immigration into Brixton by then. He, too, was eventually jailed – for stabbing a policeman.
Life in the flat was very cramped. My father distrusted electricity, and would turn off the radio if there was lightning, or if water was dripping in the room from the ceiling. On wet weekends there was not much to do. I played Subbuteo for hours, running my own imaginary football leagues. Sometimes I would walk down the road to a large bakery and buy bread direct from the ovens. The smell was heaven and the bread warm and tasty.
Very occasionally I would stride up Denmark Hill to Dulwich Village and walk around, looking at smart houses with a warm glow through their curtains. I still remember looking through one window at the comfort inside, and seeing two young children playing board games with their mother. Such a life seemed very different from mine.
One winter evening on such a prowl, when I was thirteen, I was set upon by a gang of boys, and the word ‘Mark’ was cut into my thigh with a razor-blade. I told only my sister, who tended the wound with iodine, and kept my secret. I did not want my parents to know about the incident, and they never did. The branding has long since gone.
I was mystified by our relationship with our landlords. The house was owned by Tom, a man about twenty years younger than my father, and his wife Ann, always known as Nan, a tall, handsome woman with long blonde hair who had three children, Carole, Tom Junior and Nicholas. It was clear that they were not strangers to my parents, and they had offered us a roof when we needed it. When I asked my mother about Tom and Nan she became evasive. It was clear that my questions were unwelcome. She never answered them properly.
Tom was ‘Uncle’ Tom and Nan was ‘Auntie’, a common way for children to address adults those days. They occupied the ground floor and the basement. Their daughter Carole moved out soon after we arrived, and Nicholas was much younger than me, but Tom Junior was my age, and we became firm friends. Later in life he went to work in America, and for years we lost touch, but during the 1992 election he reappeared, unannounced and unexpected, and worked for me throughout the campaign.
Like my parents, Uncle Tom had been on the stage. He was a singer with a magnificent voice and the portly build of the classic tenor. For years he appeared with his sister, Jill Summers, who in her later years achieved fame as Phyllis Pease in Coronation Street. He had toured the halls – sometimes under the stage name of Signor Bassani – and had rarely been short of work.
Tom’s last job in the theatre was to understudy Harry Secombe as Mr Pickwick in the West End. Alas, not for the first time, he drank too much, fell down some stairs and was sacked. He never sang professionally again, although he did sing at home, his voice beautiful and effortlessly wide-ranging. These were unforgettable evenings in Brixton.
It dawned on me that it was not chance that had brought our family to Brixton, but blood ties. Tom’s surname was ‘Moss’, and though that meant nothing to me at the time, I had a hunch about his background. Now I have been able to confirm it. ‘Uncle’ Tom was the baby registered by the musician James Moss and his young wife Mary back in 1901.He was my half-brother. I would have thought it indelicate to put any such suspicion to my parents, and they would certainly have thought the enquiry unpardonable. I was sure I was right, and so were Pat and Terry. The reason we were living there was no longer such a mystery.
My memories of our six years or so at Coldharbour Lane are patchy. Certainly there was never much money in the household. Often the larder was bare until Terry received payment in advance from one of my father’s most regular customers, the marvellous Mr Spiers of Margate, for garden ornaments he had not yet made. And, although I did not know it at the time, Aunt Nan often came to the rescue with loans.
For a while Terry lived in the garage he was working in, because there was so little room at home and he did not wish to spend hard-earned money on lodgings. That stopped as soon as my mother found out. Pat repeatedly put off her marriage to Peter as she and Terry worked to support the family, keep me at school and repay my father’s debts. They were determined that my father should not go bankrupt.
The indignity of our situation affected my parents deeply, although they lived through setback and disaster without ever referring to their distress or ill-health. Not for nothing had they spent years in the theatre. They could act. But my mother was ageing fast, and my father retreated ever more into the past. They were never crabby or miserable, but fought adversity in their own way, laughing joyfully at minor triumphs, apparently certain that things would get better; outwardly optimistic and forever hoping for a future that for them, alas, would never come.
They were stoical in the face of all adversity. As my father became more blind, I became his eyes. I would take his arm when he went to collect his pension. In Coldharbour Lane that meant negotiating several flights of stairs, some steep outside stone steps from the door to the pavement and 150 yards of road to the post office. I learned to watch out for uneven paving stones, unleashed dogs, traffic turning into side roads and all the hazards whose avoidance is routine to the fully-sighted. It was good training for a future Minister for the Disabled.
Too stiff and proud to acknowledge ill-fortune, my father saw his troubles, his health, his blindness, as temporary setbacks from which he would somehow emerge triumphant. My mother, seemingly impervious to every blow, brushed them away as of no consequence, defended and cared for my father and was always unvanquished before a sea of troubles. If I found her with wet eyes often enough, I never found her without hope. If the rain came through the ceiling, as it did – well, the water could be mopped up and the ceiling repaired. If the bills piled up, they’d be paid eventually – no one could doubt that. If their health worsened, it would surely improve. There was always tomorrow, full of wonderful possibilities.
Especially, they thought, for me. I was to achieve what they had not. I was to put right what was wrong. My mother was confident of that. And since I had stayed at Rutlish after we moved to Coldharbour Lane, they were sure I had the best possible start. I knew that this confidence, too, was ill-founded, but I never told them.
Living in Brixton meant I had one and a half hours’ travelling each way six days a week, since Rutlish had Saturday-morning school. I travelled by train from Loughborough Junction, first to Merton South and later, when I moved to the third year, which had different classrooms, to Wimbledon Chase. It was on these journeys that I picked up an addiction to morning newspapers – the Daily Express in those days – which I would not break until halfway through my tenure of Downing Street.
I would turn first to the sports pages – it was the time of Surrey’s great run of seven County Cricket championships in a row, from 1952 to 1958 – and then to the news. I still remember my incredulity at the trial and execution for murder in July 1955 of Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain. I could not believe her death penalty would not be commuted, and the experience turned me into a lifelong opponent of capital punishment. I remember, too, the dreadful Munich air disaster of February 1958, in which so many wonderful Manchester United footballers died, and the long saga of whether their manager Matt Busby would recover from his injuries. I remember them better than I remember Rutlish.
Our school uniform was expensive and could only be bought from one shop, Ely’s in Wimbledon. My first blazer and cap were new, but as I grew, later uniforms were second-hand. Fortunately Rutlish jumble sales were a source of larger blazers, with the embossed buttons from the outgrown blazer carefully preserved and saved, since they cost two shillings and sixpence each from Ely’s. Whenever my mother bought a jumble-sale blazer she ordered me to stay out of sight – she didn’t want anyone to know for whom it was intended. She always bought them too large for me, in the belief that they would last longer as I grew. She must have thought nobody would notice.
She was wrong. Once, when I had lost two buttons from my sleeve, Mr Winsor, the school secretary, called me to see him, and offered me five shillings from the school fund to replace them. It was a sensitive and kind act, and I thanked him for it. But I couldn’t accept, and my parents would have been horrified had I done so. They would have made me take the money back, which would have been even more shaming. In any event I felt abashed at the well-intended gesture and humiliated at the need for it.
Rutlish and I were not getting on. Some masters, like Bobby Oulton, the deputy head, and Harry Hathaway, who taught maths, remain clear memories, but most have long since been pushed from my mind; although we were not mortal enemies, we were certainly not good friends. I avoided after-school activities because it took too long to travel home. The Combined Cadet Force did not appeal to me – even apart from the cost of the uniform. And the lure of wearing a boater in the upper forms was certainly resistible. It all seemed rather pretentious to me.
My name did lead to squalls at school, though fewer than I had feared. A scrap or two and an early aptitude for rugby soon enabled me to settle well enough among my fellow pupils, and in my first year I was even appointed captain of rugby and told to pick teams for trial games. This was such a welcome task that it took precedence over all academic work. Mr Blenkinsop, the headmaster, was unimpressed when I ignored his valuable Latin tuition to concentrate on rugby trials, but he was too wise to take the responsibility away from me. Anyway, he had probably given up trying to teach me Latin.
Rutlish introduced me to foreign languages and the sciences (all draughty laboratories and odd smells), but the acquaintance was only casual. History and English were more bearable. Such homework as was necessary I did on the train, where an empty carriage provided a better opportunity than two crowded rooms in Brixton.
At school I did as little work as possible. I thought of the place as a penance to be endured. I kept myself to myself and cooperated only so as to keep out of trouble. I just didn’t engage. I never took school interests home or bothered my parents with talk of extra-curricular outings or holidays; I knew they could not afford them.
At about this time, I discovered I was short-sighted. I could read comfortably and play games without difficulty, but – sitting at the back of the class to keep out of harm’s way – I could not easily see the blackboard. In the days of blackboard teaching this was a real problem. No one noticed.
It has been said that I was bullied at school. That is not true: I was too good at sport to be a likely candidate for bullying. I was a member of the cricket and rugby teams for my house, and enjoyed my happiest hours playing those games. It was the best part of school. I even won a certificate from the Evening Standard for taking seven wickets for nine runs against Royal Masonic – including a hat trick. I once won a bet with my team-mate, Tony Weymouth, by hitting a cricket ball through a school window. It wasn’t the window I was aiming for, but it was thought good enough.
Sport was a large part of my out-of-school life as well, and I formed a lasting attachment to Surrey County Cricket Club and Chelsea Football Club. I saw Chelsea play for the first time in 1955, the year they won the championship. They beat Wolves 1–0 with a Peter Sillett penalty, and I was hooked for life. I have spent many happy afternoons at Stamford Bridge, and many frustrating ones as well, as Chelsea demonstrated their legendary unpredictability. I can still smell the cheroot smoke and roasted peanuts of a sunny Easter afternoon in the sixties when they beat Everton 6–2, and Jimmy Greaves scored five goals. Such a result had rarity value, quite apart from the odours of the day. Supporting Chelsea over the years has been a rollercoaster ride, but it has been a great aid in developing a philosophical view of life.
Individual sports have never had the appeal for me of team games – except for athletics. I still remember the wonderful evening Chris Chataway, the great English middle-distance runner, beat Vladimir Kutz, the seemingly invincible Russian champion. ‘Chataway went thataway!’ chanted the delirious crowd, and so he had.
But cricket is my first love. Clement Attlee once referred to cricket as ‘a religion and W.G. [Grace] next to a deity’. He put an old fashioned tickertape machine into Downing Street so he could keep up to date with the cricket scores, and it was still there in my time.
Playing cricket gave me some of the happiest moments of my life – not that I was ever very good, but then many of those who love the game are indifferent performers. I had my moments, though they were pitifully few. My seven for nine at school was my zenith, although seventy-seven not out (against poor bowling and fielding in Nigeria) is another cherished memory.
Our home in Brixton was less than a mile from The Oval, home of Surrey. The great Surrey team of the fifties that won the County Championship for seven successive years was equipped for all conditions. They bowled Lock and Laker if the wicket took spin, Bedser if the ball would swing, and Loader if the wicket was quick. May, and later Barrington and Stewart, scored the runs, with Fletcher, Clark and Constable in support. Their fielding was superb. Lock was like a cheetah sighting prey in the leg trap, and Surridge took amazing catches with his telescopic arms – I used to believe he was the only man alive who could scratch his ankles while standing upright. It was a wonderful team of all the talents, and I never expect to see its equal.
I almost lived at The Oval during the school holidays. Armed with sandwiches and a soft drink I sat on the popular side in perfect contentment. If the weather was fine and the crowd large (as it often was) I would sit on the grass just outside the boundary rope, a delight long since forbidden by nannyish safety regulations. I suppose I was spoilt by the wonderful cricket I saw then, but those early days provided imperishable memories. The mind does play tricks, of course, but what I recall is that Surrey always seemed to win, and that in the early evening The Oval was always bathed in sunshine and shadow.
I was enraptured by the literature of cricket, which has a treasure trove no other game can match. For me Neville Cardus, C.L.R. James and E.W. Swanton stand before all other writers on the game. Cardus was the poet of cricket; his prose had a romance to it that swept the mundane aside. The first piece by Cardus I ever read was a pen-portrait of Denis Compton, in which he wrote of the infamous knee: ‘the gods treated him churlishly. They crippled him almost beyond repair.’ I never saw Compton again without that thought coming to mind.
I did suspect that Cardus stretched the truth a little as he fleshed out his affectionate portraits. Were cricketers really such characters, or was their charm enhanced in the poetic eye of a besotted beholder? Even if it was, it didn’t diminish my enjoyment. Cardus, again on Compton, illustrated the point. He once asked two boys why they were not watching the cricket. ‘Because there are no more Denis Comptons,’ he reports them as saying. It is a marvellous tribute to the unique charm of Compton’s batting, but would a small boy really have said that? I doubt it, but when I read it I loved it. And it may have been true.
C.L.R. James’s masterpiece Beyond a Boundary sets out better than anyone before or since how cricket affects character and illustrates the better virtues; it undermined all my prejudices that such a lyrical love of the game should flow from the pen of a committed Marxist
Jim Swanton is the doyen of modern writers although, for reporting the game, he would give the palm to his good friend John Woodcock. Both men have seen much of the greatest cricket played in the last three-quarters of a century. Jonathan Aitken, a great admirer of Swanton, once gave me a set of all the Swanton books I did not already possess, and they are a prized part of my collection.
