Kitabı oku: «John Major: The Autobiography», sayfa 4

CHAPTER TWO From Brixton to Westminster

THE WORLD OF WORK was a new experience, but I soon realised that insurance broking was not life-enhancing. The rudiments of the profession, however, were simple enough, and I was prepared to accept the boredom of the routine, if there were opportunities to claw my way up the ladder to some serious responsibilities.

It was not to be. Several incidents pointed the way to a new career. When I overhead a senior manager extravagantly praise a thoroughly idle colleague because ‘he comes from a good family’, I wondered whether Price Forbes promoted on merit. If not, I had no chance. That day I was put under the tutelage of a man with a face like a fish and brilliantined blond hair. This was another mark against the company. Finally, on a day when I’d risen at 5 a.m. to study, far from being given worthwhile work to do, I was despatched to the store room to search for files, because ‘You can climb like a monkey, I’m sure!’ It was time to move on, and in any case a new opportunity beckoned, at the mouth-watering salary of £8 a week.

Terry was still making garden ornaments, but he needed capital. When one of his customers, a retired naval officer, Commander David, offered to buy the business, Terry accepted. Commander David wanted a second member of staff, and I joined Terry. I knew very little about garden ornaments, but Terry soon taught me.

In August 1959 we moved from Coldharbour Lane to a flat in a house on the Minet Estate at 80 Burton Road, Brixton. The only other tenants in the house, Bob and Enid, were a newly-married couple in their thirties. We had the basement, the ground floor and a bathroom on the first-floor landing. There was even a small front garden, and life was much improved. As ever, my mother attracted friends with the speed of light.

Working with Terry was fun. We left home early in the morning and cycled to Caldew Street, near Walworth Road, where we had a small workshop. After two hours building up an appetite, a local transport café provided the best breakfasts I’ve ever had. I was the labourer and Terry the craftsman. Years later he wrote a book and, with tongue in cheek, described how garden ornaments were made. It amused the sneering classes no end that a future prime minister had made gnomes, but it was honest, manual work, and I have never been ashamed of it or regretted it.

In 1959 I joined the Young Conservatives after a plump young man named Neville Wallace knocked on my door one evening canvassing for members. My mother had already met Marion Standing, the Brixton Conservative agent, and was all in favour of my joining – but, as politics fascinated me, I needed no urging. It’s entirely probable that my mother asked Marion Standing to send Neville around – but she never admitted it.

The Brixton YCs were then a merry and growing band, and as I had a few friends, I began to bring them in as new members. We took our politics seriously, and worked hard – but we played harder. One of the side effects of enjoying ourselves so much was that we found we had attracted to our number two members of the Dulwich Young Socialists. When this was discovered they admitted their (not very strong) allegiance to socialism, but charmed us by saying our social life was better. As one of them could drive and the other played the guitar quite well, no one cared very much.

We were a very mixed bunch. Tim Bidmead, who was addicted to Nat ‘King’ Cole’s music; Maria, whose father spent the weekends fortifying himself for slating roofs throughout the week; Maureen the artist, who went to Liverpool Art College and married there; Sonia and Ann, two cousins; red-haired Jean, who married her boss; Derek Stone, Clive Jones, the two Alans, Penny, Malcolm, Delphine, Carol, Geoffrey, Margaret – and so many more. At the end of most evenings we adjourned to local pubs and plotted how to change the world. We didn’t fancy being spoon-fed by the state and having our lives directed for us; we wanted doors to be opened so that we could make our own future. We were natural Conservatives.

It was Derek Stone who encouraged me to stand on a soapbox and speak to the passing public outside our association offices and in Brixton marketplace. Derek was married, a little older, and rather more worldly-wise than the rest of us. Engaging and fun, he played the devil’s advocate. ‘Go on, do it. Why not?’ was his creed, and he lived it as well as preached it. He turned up one day with a microphone and a soapbox, and we were off and running. It was fun. No one paid much attention, but no one complained either. It was good training, and taught me a lot about the tolerance of the British.

We canvassed, enrolled new members, helped in political campaigns, held dances and tennis mornings, went on outings, published our own magazine, heckled local Labour MPs and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. An elderly association member was scandalised when she found one of our members straining printers’ ink through her stockings. Girls took off their stockings for one reason only, she thought. She was right: we needed the ink strained.

Meanwhile, in early 1960 Terry married his girlfriend Shirley – a marriage still going strong thirty-nine years later – and moved a few miles south to Thornton Heath; but we continued to work together. My mother’s health was still poor, but she battled on. The YCs were wonderful to her. She loved them all, especially Derek Stone and Clive Jones, later to be my best man, and made our house an open house.

But my father’s body was wearing out and he rarely left his bed, though his mind was clear and active to the very end. He died at home in bed at Burton Road, early in the morning of 27 March 1962. I was eighteen and he was eighty-three, and the bond between youth and age was very strong. He went as the sun rose. I was with him when he died. We knew he was dying and the family had been sitting up, in rota, overnight. I was sitting by his bed holding his hand. It was very peaceful. He was drowsy, half asleep and, I think, his mind had gone on ahead of his body. I did not know the exact moment he died. He was breathing so shallowly I wasn’t sure. I felt the warmth leave his hand. For a man of the theatre, who loved the dramatic, it was a peaceful end. There was no collapse. No last words.

My father, the man who had given me life and love, was dead.

There were family tears and comforting words for my mother, who sat there with her cheeks wet, reliving a lifetime of memories. When I held her she clung on to me as though she would never let go. Then the dreadful rituals began. The doctor came to sign the death certificate. The vicar, J. Franklin Cheyne, a lovely old boy who had interviewed Dad for the parish magazine as ‘one of the characters of the parish’ only days earlier, came to offer solace. Neighbours came and went, the kettle boiled, tea was offered and the surreal atmosphere that follows death settled on the house.

I went for a walk, and to this day I do not know where I went. Life would not be the same, but there was much to do.

I found it hard to come to terms with the finality of death. Dad’s death was the first time in my life that something had happened which I didn’t believe I could put right in the future. It made a reality of what he had often said to me: make of life what you can, and take your chances, because they may never come again.

So far, I had not made much of my life. School – a failure; career – I had none; sport – not good enough; politics – I was only playing at it. I needed a career and qualifications.

I began studying more ‘O’ levels by correspondence course, and left my brother and Commander David to seek out something more promising to do. No sooner had I done so than Mother fell quite ill and, as Terry and Pat were earning more than I would be able to, it was economically sensible for me to be the one to stay at home and care for her.

This I did, but when she was well enough to be left, I found I couldn’t get a job. I was unemployed – unemployable, I feared – from July to December 1963. Years later, when I was prime minister, some Labour Members of Parliament mistakenly claimed that I had never been unemployed. I think it was the Daily Mail which found corroborative evidence to prove that in fact I had. I was young and single, and had a brother and sister who were both in work, but I did get a glimpse of what it must be like as an adult with family responsibilities, unable to find a job. The Labour Party’s intention was to suggest that Conservatives had no experience of unemployment, and didn’t care about the unemployed. I should have taken more note of their tactics; Labour were to do this kind of thing again later, on a much wider front.

I found my situation degrading. I had ambition, but no prospects. I applied for jobs, signed on at the employment exchange, collected the dole, but could find nothing worthwhile. I was willing to lower my sights until I’d passed more examinations, but even that failed: I was turned down as a bus conductor because I was too tall. Eventually, just before Christmas 1963, I gratefully accepted a job offer from the London Electricity Board, and went to work at their offices at the Elephant and Castle.

It was a cheerful, happy place, with a cosmopolitan staff, but the routine was mind-numbing, and I was only to remain there for eighteen months. I asked if I could work four days a week and study on the fifth (with an appropriate pay reduction), but this was refused. The LEB did not provide me with a career, but it was an important staging post in building up my self-belief that I could do better.

Politics continued to fascinate me, and in the spring of 1964, when I had just turned twenty-one, I contested my first election for Lambeth Council. Larkhall was a hopeless ward for the Conservatives, but I fought it as if it were a marginal, canvassing for support at every spare moment. I lost heavily – they might as well have counted my votes and weighed the Labour votes – but the experience whetted my appetite. The count at Lambeth Town Hall was hugely exciting, crammed with joyful people in red rosettes and resigned good losers in blue. Labour seemed impregnable in Lambeth in 1964, but that was soon to change. Not, however, at the general election in October that year, when Harold Wilson narrowly defeated Sir Alec Douglas-Home and Labour squeaked back into government after thirteen years in opposition. In Brixton, Marcus Lipton, the sitting Labour Member, comfortably saw off Ken Payne, the Conservative candidate. I worked hard for Ken, who warmly encouraged my own ambitions and offered to help me find a better job, but the result was never in doubt. Ken would have made a good Member of Parliament, but sadly he was never to get there, and comforted himself with a distinguished career in local government.

After my own diversion into local elections, I thought long and hard about my future. Politics beckoned more each day, but I knew that if I were to have a good chance of being selected as a Conservative candidate for Parliament, I had to obtain a professional qualification as well as a political profile. The profile was coming along quite nicely, but the career not at all. I could not now go to university, since I had no entry qualifications and no means of support even if I got there. I could not become articled to the law or chartered accountancy, since neither would provide any income for years.

It was going to have to be evening classes – which would wreck political activities – or a correspondence course which would wreck my sleep. That choice was easy. I could not give up politics. But what to study? Accountancy? Possibly. Insurance? No. Banking? Yes. I settled for banking, because it offered more choices of employment, the chance of travel, promotion (I hoped) on merit, and I could study at home.

I joined District Bank in May 1965, at the magnificent salary of £790 a year. I began studying immediately, rising each morning at 4.30 or 5 a.m., when the mind is uncluttered and the brain fresh. To this day I follow that pattern if I have something taxing to get through. For the first time in my life I enjoyed the process of learning, and I widened my reading as well. I studied in the morning, worked at the bank by day, enjoyed my politics in the evening, and read late into the night. Within sixteen months I comfortably passed the five papers of Part One of the Banking Diploma. It was tremendously exhilarating to feel I was getting somewhere.

I began to receive invitations to speak at Conservative meetings in and around London, and accepted every one I could. The audience was often small, but the experience was invaluable. The Young Conservatives in Lambeth used to play a game, challenging each other to speak for a minute on a subject suggested at random. I acquired habits then which remain with me still. I would go to the Minet Library in Brixton and research the subject, then scribble the facts I wanted to use on a piece of paper, jumbling them up in little circles until an argument developed in my mind.

I have always been able to soak up a lot of detail and recall it without difficulty – show me a page of figures and I can remember them. While I have never found it easy to win an unexpected argument, I discovered very early on that when I was buttressed by knowledge I didn’t lose. I operate by knowing the facts better than the other person, so that I am confident in what I say. I felt uneasy with flowery froth and idle oratory. I couldn’t deliver a speech that, when looked at in the cold light of early morning, meant nothing. I needed to have my feet on firmer ground. I can overcome this instinctive caution if I have direct contact with an audience, such as I got speaking on the soapbox or – on occasion – in the House of Commons. But often I needed to be provoked, to have my back against the wall, to give my best performances.

The hardest parts of a speech are the first and last paragraphs. When writing a speech you can start anywhere – even with the conclusion. I used to turn over the points I wanted to make until they formed a pattern, and then the rest would fall into place. That’s why I find it hard to read speeches written by others. As those who have worked with me know, I could be hell to be with before a big speech, marching around and overreacting – mental preparation for the event. When I was prime minister my staff would often be in despair because they had produced a beautifully written speech that I would move all around because they weren’t my words.

In the mid-1960s my sister Pat, her husband Peter and my mother left Burton Road and moved to Thornton Heath, within a few streets of where Terry and Shirley lived. I did not go with them. Some time earlier, at a church fête, I had met Jean Kierans, a teacher who lived opposite us in Burton Road. Jean was dark-haired, attractive and fun, and we had taken to one another immediately. My mother liked her – it was impossible not to – until it registered with her that Jean, despite her youthful looks, was twelve years older than me, was divorced, and had two young children, Siobhan and Kevin. My mother did not approve. Nevertheless, I moved in with Jean, who did all she could to earn my mother’s approval, although it was a doomed enterprise from the start. She thought our age gap too wide, and never shifted her view. Jean encouraged my studying, and shared my politics.

In early 1966 I noticed an advertisement from the Standard Bank Group offering the chance of banking abroad, with large overseas allowances to supplement the salary. I applied, was accepted, and joined their home staff with the intention of applying for overseas service as soon as possible. I had not given up my political ambitions, but I saw the chance to travel, broaden my experience, save some money, improve my CV – and I had itchy feet. I was bored.

My chance to travel soon came. The Standard Bank of West Africa was one of the largest banks in Nigeria, and when fighting broke out in Biafra – a bitter and cruel conflict that was to become a full-scale war – they invited single men to volunteer for service there on a temporary basis. It was perfect. I applied immediately, and flew on secondment to Nigeria in December 1966.

I was lucky in my posting. I was sent to Jos, a plateau in the north of Nigeria, the scene of hard fighting some months earlier, but by then well away from the real privations of the war. Jos was thousands of feet above sea level, and had a glorious climate. I shared a flat with a Liverpudlian about my own age, Richard Cockeram, a member of the bank’s permanent overseas staff. A young Hausa, Moses, was employed as steward/cook/valet and general factotum.

The Jos branch of the bank was managed by another Liverpudlian, Burt Butler, although much of the office revolved around a Ghanaian accountant, who reputedly had several wives. Certainly the wife who attended bank cocktail parties was not the same lady we met elsewhere. He helped me settle in, knew the routine of the office backwards, and let me master the extra responsibilities I was given.

Nigeria was a world away from all my previous experience. The glorious dawns, the high sky, the feeling of immense space, the remoteness, were all new to me. It was easy to see how Africa gained such a hold over people. The centre of social activity for the expatriate community was the Jos Club. It introduced me to curry (served with a vast array of side-plates of nuts and fruits), to outdoor film-shows beamed against white walls, to snooker, to lazy Sundays by the swimming pool, to a calmer, more comfortable and more reflective way of life than I had known. I enjoyed the privacy and peace, but perversely missed the bustle and speed of London life. Nigeria was an enjoyable interlude, but I was homesick within weeks.

Cameo memories of my time there are very strong. Reading Papillon and Michael Foot’s biography of Nye Bevan, listening to the few records I could buy in Jos (most memorably Elvis Presley’s Blue Hawaii), travelling to outlying branches of the bank in the cash wagon, getting to know the grave and respectful Nigerians and exchanging banter with the expatriate miners, bankers and administrators.

At Christmas, when I had been in Nigeria for less than three weeks, Richard asked Moses to buy a chicken from the market for our lunch. That morning we sat on the balcony of our flat like lords of the universe. But Moses didn’t appear, and neither did the chicken.

We were not concerned. The power supply was unreliable and the stewards often shared kitchens – obviously Moses was working elsewhere. When lunchtime arrived, lunch did not. Richard, several Christmas drinks to the good, went to investigate. Moses appeared.

‘Where’s the chicken?’ demanded Richard rather snappily.

‘Downstairs, sah.’

‘Downstairs? It must be ready by now. Bring it up.’

Moses looked doubtful. But off he went, and returned with a chicken which was far from oven-ready, chirpily looking around as Moses led it into the flat attached to a piece of string. It pecked around the tiled floor looking for seeds.

‘Moses,’ said an exasperated Richard, ‘we wanted to eat it, not take it for walks.’

Moses protested: ‘Sah, you did not tell me to kill it.’ He picked the chicken up and reached for its neck as he tucked it under his arm: ‘Shall I do it now?’

Richard blanched. Christmas lunch was very late that year, but we ate well on Boxing Day.

I disliked the institutional racism of colonial life, the lack of respect for the Nigerians, their low pay and poor prospects compared to the inflated pay of the expatriates. So much of the racism was just unthinking. The expatriates were not hostile to the Nigerians but they were careless of their feelings. It did not seem to occur to many of them that their Nigerian employees, whether bank staff or messengers or stewards, had their own responsibilities to their own families and, if they were listened to rather than talked at, they had their own ambitions as well.

My father, brought up in America in the latter part of the nineteenth century, often displayed the same attitude, whereas my mother, believing no one superior or inferior, had a wholly different view. She would go out of her way to befriend someone in a less fortunate position than herself. I sided with my mother, and it was one of the few subjects about which I ever argued with my father.

If the local staff were resentful of the incomers, as they occasionally were, it was unsurprising. I was saving £120 a month, a vast sum to me then, but more than a year’s salary to most of the Nigerians. The expatriates were fiercely patriotic to the country they chose not to work in, and the greatest celebration during my time there was an impromptu party thrown by Scots working for the mining companies after Scotland beat England 3–2 at Wembley. Everyone got horribly drunk, including me, and it was not until I tried to stand up and kept hitting my head on the ceiling that I realised I had gone to sleep under a table. I was not alone – but then, I suppose, Scotland do not often beat England at Wembley.

I had hoped to stay in Nigeria for about a year and a half, but fate intervened after only five months when I was involved in a serious car accident. I cannot recall the prelude to the crash. I vaguely remember watching a film at the Jos Club while Richard was playing snooker. Other accounts – notably in Anthony Seldon’s comprehensive and well-researched biography – suggest that I had attended a roving party for departing expatriates. What is certain is that Richard drove me home in his brand new Cortina, rather erratically – expatriates did not need driving tests in Nigeria at the time, he told me. I sat beside him, tired and sleepy, but certainly aware that he was not fully in control of the car.

I remember no more until I regained consciousness at the side of a road. We had crashed, and I could not move. Richard was sitting beside me on the grass, his head held in his hands, weeping and shocked. I tried to sit up – and couldn’t. There was blood on my face and arms and spilled down the front of my shirt. My trousers were ripped to shreds and my left leg was grotesquely twisted. Even half-conscious, I realised my kneecap was smashed and my leg badly broken. ‘I’ve done it this time,’ I thought, and then lost consciousness. I don’t know now long Richard and I were by the roadside, but he never spoke, and seemed to be in shock. I was in great pain.

Eventually a passing car stopped – hours later, I was told – and I was lifted gently into the back of a station wagon. My next memory is of lying on my back in an operating theatre, full of doctors and nurses in gowns and caps, with a blazing light shining in my face and my leg held aloft while plaster bandages were wrapped around it from toe to thigh.

I woke next morning in the Jos mission hospital, staffed by Nigerian Catholic nurses, to be told that my leg was broken in several places, the kneecap crushed beyond repair. ‘Our X-ray equipment is very old, so we’re not sure how bad the damage is,’ they said. ‘But we can’t treat your knee. As soon as you’re well enough to travel you must go home to England.’ I was too ill to object, and the idea of home seemed very welcome.

But I could not leave immediately, for I was too ill to travel. Jos treated me as well as they could, but no one was sure how badly injured I was. I asked when I would be back on my feet, but there was no reassurance that I would ever walk normally again. When I called out in pain one night, a nurse who spoke no English brought me fresh, cool water and folded back the mosquito net, believing I was too hot. The mosquitoes fed well, but it was a small irritation compared to my other injuries.

When I was fit enough to fly home I travelled by light plane from Jos to Kano – my plastered leg propped up against bulging post-bags for comfort – and then onward to Heathrow sprawled over several seats and accompanied by a Barclays expatriate who was kind enough to travel with me. Mercifully I remember very little of the journey, but I was met by an ambulance, my mother, my sister and Jean.

I was taken to Mayday Hospital in Croydon. When I arrived I was very sick. I lay in bed in a corner, with pop music blaring as chattering nurses cleaned up the ward and changed the beds. Suddenly, the whole atmosphere changed. The Sister had arrived on the shift and seen what a poor state I was in. The noise ended, peace and silence reigned. I was washed, given painkillers and sleeping tablets, the bed was plumped up and thankful oblivion carried me off.

I have never forgotten that Sister, or the relief her discipline brought to the ward. While I was very ill she seemed always to be there; as I recovered, her attention moved on to more deserving cases. She was small, neat, utterly dispassionate, a thoroughgoing martinet, and if every sick person had her to hand they would be very lucky indeed.

My leg did not heal easily. I needed several more operations, without any real knowledge of my prospects of recovery. At times I lay in bed, dispirited, wondering if I would be a cripple for life. The reluctance of the nurses to talk about my injuries made me fear the worst. I realised that my rugby, soccer and cricket days were now over, but I accepted that cheerfully enough, hoping only that I would not lose my leg, and that I would be able to walk normally one day.

Standard Bank were wonderful. Members of their personnel department visited me regularly. I received increases in pay and bonuses; my job was kept open for the many months of my treatment and convalescence, and I could not have been better treated. I shall always be grateful to them.

As I began to feel better I returned to reading. I read everything Agatha Christie wrote – some good, some bad, some indifferent, all inventive – and became proficient at picking out her villains (years later when I saw The Mousetrap I soon guessed the guilty party). I read history, politics, Churchill on the Second World War, Neville Cardus on cricket, R.F. Delderfield, Howard Spring, books on banking – anything I could lay my hands on. My long months of convalescence were not wasted.