My four years at boarding school were generally happy, as Tanyards became a backdrop to my life rather than playing centre stage. Home was filled with law student lodgers, partying and laughter and I was always welcome, but I felt no obligation to appear and was free to come and go as I chose. In many ways, this benign neglect was the ideal way to grow up: I neither had to share teenage anguish with my parents nor hide issues from them, and I knew I was utterly loved and trusted. I remember admonishing my father on a couple of occasions for not celebrating some small triumphs of mine; he simply replied that he had complete faith in me and expected nothing else. Mum displayed no alarm if I told her I was staying with friends for the weekend or going to London for the day; on the contrary, she encouraged me to explore the world and to take pleasure in meeting new people.
I realise, as I write this book, just how much the Virgin story is interwoven through mine. It is impossible to tell my story without acknowledging how much it has enriched my life. Richard loved to share all his highs and lows and he surrounded himself with talented, energetic young people, who were excited about challenging the old world order. Sitting on the sidelines, I watched his often crazy antics evolve into the multinational business that is Virgin today.
The years 1970 to 1973 were especially busy for my brother, whose career was moving at a fearsome rate. Simon Draper, having arrived from South Africa in 1970, had knocked unannounced on Richard’s door, introduced himself as the nephew of Aunt Wendy, the aunt that my father had picked up on the cruise ship over forty years earlier, and asked for a job. Simon’s passion for, and encyclopaedic knowledge of, contemporary music gave Richard a new direction. Music was the cultural life force of the age and Virgin was going to be at its vanguard.
Student and its mail-order record business evolved into a chain of record shops, the first of which opened on Oxford Street and the next on Notting Hill Gate in west London. Richard bought a house nearby in Denbigh Terrace, just off the Portobello Road, from the comedian Peter Cook, who would later make a number of outrageous albums with Dudley Moore on the Virgin label.
Notting Hill Gate was a rather scuzzy area back then, the elegant, late-Georgian terraces having been broken up into flats that were run by slum landlords and filled with migrants, gangsters and struggling artists, including David Hockney and Jimi Hendrix. On Fridays and Saturdays, Portobello Road came to life as the market stalls fired up and the area pulsated with youth, creativity and music.
Virgin record shops were designed to be laid-back places, where music lovers could listen to records on headphones while slumping on bean bags. Virgin became the epitome of cool. Richard borrowed £35,000 from Auntie Joyce, who had cared for her parents her whole life and inherited the bulk of the family wealth after their death, and used it as a deposit on a mortgage for The Manor at Shipton-on-Cherwell, a sixteenth-century manor house, complete with walled gardens, a church and lawns that swept down to a lake.
One of the outbuildings at The Manor was converted into a state-of-the-art recording studio. Unlike the usual London recording studios, bands could stay in the cavernous bedrooms, hang out in the house and grounds in the daytime and record all night. One of the session musicians working with Kevin Ayers, the former frontman of Soft Machine, was Mike Oldfield. During the studio’s downtime, Mike had been patiently laying down a record, overdubbing instrument after instrument; the result, from its thin opening riffs to its fulsome orchestral finish, was fresh and enigmatic. He had sent a demo tape to record companies but his music, so out of tune with the rock and roll fashion of the time, was turned down by every label in the country. Simon Draper was convinced by Tubular Bells’ brilliance, and he and Richard decided to launch a record company to release it themselves. This was an audacious plan, as apart from the shops, neither of them had any experience of the music industry.
I remember Dad walking me across the village green to visit Judge Jellyneck, a retired high court judge who also played the violin. Dad wanted to ask his opinion of his son’s first release. We sat together on upright chairs while the old man slotted the record onto his turntable and listened first to side one – twenty-five minutes – and then to side two – twenty-four minutes – in silence. When the album came to Vivian Stanshall’s introductions of ‘grand piano’ and ‘glockenspiel’, and climaxed with the titular bells, the judge stood up to retrieve the record and replaced it in its sleeve, shaking his head.
Thankfully, the good judge wasn’t the arbiter of cool back then – the DJ John Peel was. Peel championed Tubular Bells by playing it in its entirety on his radio show, Top Gear; after a slow start, sales began to rocket.
***
Growing up at Box Hill School, I wasn’t aware of much supervision. Having witnessed my children going through boarding school at Marlborough College thirty years later, with electronic fobs monitoring their every movement and CCTV cameras watching their every encounter, I doubt that this level of scrutiny kept them out of mischief. In fact, being so closely monitored simply drove them crazy with frustration and made them want to fight the system.
In our day, by following a few rules (the most important being ‘don’t get caught’) we could evolve into responsible grown-ups in our own time, by experimenting with aspects of our identities without the interference of adults. At the age of twelve, hanging out in corridors in huddles was our chosen method. We spent hours just knocking around, taking the mickey out of each other. We scaled the school’s roof using our dressing-gown cords as safety ropes and explored the Victorian central-heating ducts, a network of pitch-black tunnels running under the main house. It was thrilling.
Occasionally a couple would start ‘going out’, which meant walking around the school hand in hand, and finding hidden corners for intimate conversation and some stroking and kissing. To my shame, I recall succumbing to the attentions of two boys in my year, one after the other. One took me into the woods and asked me, with youthful awkwardness, to stroke his enthusiastically erect but diminutive penis, and the other placed my hand on his bulging lap during Cinema Club. Neither encounter shocked me; I just presumed it was something boys did. I didn’t tell any of my girlfriends all the same, for these early fumblings felt shameful. From then on, I understood that, however much you resist, you can’t help but absorb a portion of the essence of every person with whom you share intimacy, and this remains with you for the rest of your life. So be discerning!
When I was almost fourteen, I began talking to a boy in the year above. I look now at the photograph of the striking young Iraqi boy and can clearly see why I fell so in love with him. And this was real love, by the way, no mere teenage crush. Nabeel was unlike any other boy in the school. He was born in Iraq to a British mother and an Iraqi father. The family had fled Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party, and their factories and homes had been confiscated. He told me that his uncle had been tortured, a fate beyond my understanding after my cosseted childhood at Shamley Green.
Nabeel had four brothers, all of them mature beyond years. I don’t know what bookish, quiet Nabeel, with his shy smile and slightly diffident manner, saw in me, the carefree joker laughing around with gangs of friends, but I firmly believe that love unearths qualities that sense doesn’t. Nabeel and I became inseparable. I went to stay with his family in Southampton and was struck by his gracious mother’s acceptance of her middle son’s young girlfriend; his father, I have to admit, was slightly speechless. Back at school, I took to sharing Nabeel’s study cubicle, a privilege reserved for those taking their O-levels.
With his encouragement, I began to read, making my way through tomes that I would previously have considered incomprehensible. We prided ourselves in only reading Penguin Classics: books by Henry James, George Orwell, E. M. Forster, Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Hardy, Jean-Paul Sartre and Émile Zola. We would lie on our backs under the dappled shade of the mighty beech at the far end of the playing field. With my head on his bare stomach, I was aware of his beating heart and rhythmic breathing. I revelled in his smell, his smooth brown skin and the downy hair that ran from his belly button down to the band of his boxer shorts, as his flat stomach sank beneath his hips. I would run my fingers over his chest, tracing a network of scars, the result of a childhood accident when making fireworks with his brothers in the basement of his house in Baghdad.
Is it any wonder that we wanted to explore every inch of the beautiful young bodies that we held so close? I trusted Nabeel entirely and am happy to carry his essence with me to this day. One day, during the dark winter term, we wordlessly went to the hidden, musty foot tunnel beyond the playing fields, the entrance of which was camouflaged by trails of vines and ivy. We laid our school blazers down on the compacted earth before wrapping our arms around each other, not losing eye contact for a moment. Nabeel lay on top of me and gently worked his beautiful being into mine. My God, it hurt. I held onto his back and cried out and laughed with joy, relieved that I would never have to go through that searing pain again.
Sex came instinctively to me, being the youngest of a liberal family, and I was excited about exploring this new part of life. Having never watched pornography, our generation slowly investigated and tasted the joys of skin on skin. All happened in its own good time, with each new coupling revealing fresh pleasures.
Nabeel transformed my school experience, stimulating an intellectual curiosity that otherwise may well have lain dormant. He also set me on the right track regarding drugs, denouncing anyone who was dabbling in them as idiots – he had seen the fallout from kids taking drugs in Baghdad. Over the years, his words of distain have echoed in my ears and, whenever possible, I’ve avoided those who are indulging, particularly those tiresome cocaine users who are forever on ‘transmit’ and never on ‘receive’.
How different the world was back then, without mobile phones and social media. I’m trying to remember what Nabeel and I did during the holidays. We certainly didn’t meet up – I think we simply clocked off for the holidays and clocked back on when term started again.
In a bid for more freedom, I made a home in one of the gypsy caravans at the far end of the garden at Tanyards, beyond the orchard. The brightly painted old caravan had a working wood-burning stove, double bunk beds, a table and a couple of chairs. I whitewashed the interior, put up some curtains, filched a saucepan and a few tins of beans from the house and spent many happy hours collecting firewood, reading and entertaining the occasional guest with beans on toast, which I’d cook on the open fire. Fiona Whitney would come down from London to stay, and we’d spend our days hacking through the woods on Snowy and Tommy and writing business plans for our future riding school.
From the caravan, I moved to the cellar of the main house. I didn’t fancy having to lift up the trapdoor in the kitchen floor every time I wanted to go to my room, so I sawed a hole through the coat cupboard and descended down an old stepladder. My parents were reluctant to risk the cupboard route, which meant I had the cellar to myself, though the only natural light in my underground cavern came from two glass bricks covering the old coal chute. I painted the walls a deep purple and divided the space into two: one side was my bedroom, with a mattress on the floor, and the other was a study area. While dividing the room with plasterboard, I also disguised the greasy oil-fired boiler, hacking through panels of asbestos without pausing to consider the risk. The ancient boiler fired up twice a day, which filled the room with toxic fumes that helpfully camouflaged the smoke from the numerous cigarettes I was chugging through. The days of self-destruction had begun . . .
I’d bobbed up the ladder to have breakfast one morning just as Mum was leaving for work as a magistrate in Guildford. As she went out through the front door, she shouted back to me, ‘Oh, by the way, Snowy’s dead. Can you call the knacker’s yard?’
The truth is, I had rather neglected Snowy, who had been living in contented retirement in his field. But the news was still somewhat shocking. I walked up the hill through the orchard. It was a crisp winter’s morning, the ground rock hard. There was Snowy, lying on his side with his legs straight out, as if he had simply toppled over. His black fur was dusted white with frost. I lay beside him, wrapping my arms around his neck and wailing into his stiff body.
What I was crying for? I didn’t know back then, but I now realise that my tears expressed a deep grief for the passing of my childhood. I wept for the days I’d spent making jumps out of painted poles and Snowcem drums. The long summer days spent hacking across the heath and up the one-mile gallop. The days of taking picnics to the woods and stopping under the shade of trees to eat our squashed sandwiches before finding our way home.
I was crying for my present, too, and for having no one to share my grief with. I returned to the house, and scoured the Yellow Pages for the phone number of the knacker’s yard, mistakenly looking under ‘N’. My eyes swimming, I eventually rang Directory Enquiries, gasping between words as I tried to tell the operator what I was looking for.
After I’d eventually found the number, a rough old traveller turned up and asked me to slip a rubber collar around Snowy’s rear legs. Then I watched as my shaggy old friend was winched into the back of the horsebox, his head bobbing up and down as it was dragged up the slatted wooden ramp.
What was in Mum’s mind when she so callously told me about Snowy’s death? Even now, I can’t quite get my head around her lack of compassion, though I realise she was in a rush to get to work, and I guess I might otherwise have sauntered up to the field and found the dead pony myself. The truth is that death doesn’t fit into a mind that’s as focused on the positive as my mother’s – she just wasn’t able to deal with the conversation.
Whatever her motives, I think her harshness ultimately did me a favour; I’ve faced a number of challenges since then when I’ve had to pull myself together and call the metaphorical knacker’s yard; every time, my mind returns to that winter morning and the knowledge that I can cope, because there is no other option.
In the summer of 1972, after audaciously courting the stunningly beautiful designer Kristen Tomassi, Richard convinced her to marry him. To my thirteen-year-old self, she seemed like a willowy, ethereal princess. Considering their youth and progressive beliefs in changing the status quo, the couple had a remarkably traditional wedding, in the church attached to The Manor – Simon Draper recently told me that Richard put on a good show in order to impress his bank manager from Coutts, who was guest of honour.
Lindy and I were bridesmaids, along with Kristen’s sisters, and we all gathered by the church porch, feeling a little self-conscious in our long, peach chiffon dresses, as we waited for the bride to arrive. Then Mum, who had reserved a seat for Granny Dock, came out of the church, wondering where on earth her mother was. Richard and Dad then came out, too. Everyone’s concern was palpable – Granny was driving up from the south coast to Oxfordshire and would surely have left in good time. She must have had an accident.
We all turned to see Kristen and her father appear in a garlanded Rolls-Royce at exactly the same time as a giant articulated lorry. Rolls and lorry pulled up outside the church gates simultaneously. Granny climbed down from the lorry’s cab with as much dignity as possible, as the lorry gave a giant air-brake fart. The driver blew her a kiss and gave her a cheery wave. Her wide-brimmed hat slightly askew, she was hustled into the church just as the organ fired up. It turned out that she had crashed into the lorry thirty miles away and the kind driver had driven her to the church at breakneck speed, leaving her mangled car by the roadside.
In my teens, the pleasure of visiting The Manor was tempered by my shyness. I would wander around rooms filled with Chesterfield sofas, log fires, faded rugs and sleeping Irish wolfhounds, quietly observing but never quite fitting in. There would always be musicians, technicians, girlfriends and boyfriends mooching around. When entering a room, I’d wonder: should I say hello or try and be as cool as them? On one visit, I joined in a five-a-side football match with the band Queen, who were recording there; on another, I was there for Van Morrison’s birthday dinner, a grumpy affair as he didn’t approve of the flavour of the cake that had been made for him by the cook’s ten-year-old daughter. An early insight into the complicated workings of the creative mind.
Happily back at Box Hill, I volunteered to direct the Eisteddfod (a talent show, for want of a better word) on behalf of my house. Box Hill was divided into four houses, and competition between us was intense, with points scored for all aspects of school life, from sport and academic work to social service and music. I was a Corinthian, and we were neck-and-neck with the Spartans – the house prize rested on the outcome of the show, and I was desperate to win.
During rehearsals I realised that I loved directing, and hit upon a cunning device to tie all the skits together. We placed a couch in the corner of the stage and had a psychiatrist talk to the empty couch, which raised the suggestion that he was also insane, as he plucked scenes from the contorted mind of his imaginary patient. By contrast, the Spartans’ production was good but didn’t entirely hang together. The judge gave us a glowing critique, and as I went to collect the cup at the end of the evening, with the whoops and cheers of the school ringing in my ears, I felt truly fulfilled for the first time in my life.
***
I’ve been rooting through my letters, diligently kept in box files over the years. There they are, my teenage years all laid out on the ping pong table. Letters from Mags, my ever-loyal friend who kept in touch from Bramley, along with short, morale-boosting notes from Mum with snippets of home news. There’s not one letter from Dad but there are three from Lindy, including one that rather ominously apologises for teasing me so badly during the drive to school that ‘she and Daddy cried all the way home’.
There are letters from friends, full of references to the LPs they were listening to – David Bowie, Marc Bolan, Bob Dylan and Cat Stevens – as well what they were getting up to during the holidays, including the odd foreign trip but otherwise a lot of listening to music and smoking in bedrooms. With the Vietnam War coming to its ghastly climax and the Irish Troubles rumbling, you’d have thought that the odd letter might have given them a passing mention but no, we focused on the close-at-hand.
A while ago, Fiona photocopied and bound our five years of school correspondence. It’s a thick volume that captures the language of co-educational boarding school life in the seventies and our excited observations of status systems, rules and friends, as well as the first bras, periods, boys and young flirtations that obsessed our twelve-year-old minds. By fourteen, our enthusiasm was tinged with cynicism, first cigarettes and quarter-bottles of vodka. Finally there are long, hysterical letters from Fiona filled with drunken Saturday nights, fallings-out with best friends, topless frolicking under the stars, incompetent teachers making passes and the drama of being caught meeting her boyfriend at 2 a.m., which led to her being expelled.
Here’s a taster – one of my last letters to Fiona, in which I was experimenting with a new-found intellectual pretention and highlighting the agony and ecstasy of those teenage years, as I switched from near-suicidal misery to romantic bliss on the spin of a bottle of Smirnoff…
Dear Fi
I was so happy to hear from you this morning. I thought you’d forgotten about me. It really has been getting depressing lately, both mentally and work-wise. There are just no working rooms here and no working atmosphere.
Last weekend was Nabs’ birthday and I got really drunk, and I mean really drunk, on about three quarters of a bottle of vodka, and for my head that was quite a bit. All I did all evening was cry and cry and make a real fool of myself. It’s funny, but I have a big hang-up. I’ve sort of grown a skin around myself against the whole system. All the people around me seem so involved in themselves – I just don’t know who to mix with.
Nabs is in the same situation as me, so we really depend on each other which is bad really.
All my morals and ideas of life have changed. I want to go to university now, to study philosophy. I thought about it last Saturday. I need some aim in life and me and Nabs talked for hours on the subject and came to that conclusion.
You know, Nabs is the most amazing person. I just don’t know how to explain it, but he has this real love for the countryside and beauty. Every afternoon we go for a walk and sit on this bench on the top of the hill looking across this valley and at the end there is the most exhilarating sunset. It’s all I really enjoy now. But deep down inside I have some content feeling, which makes me feel inwardly happy – silly, really.
Send me more news, Fi Fi.
Have you read The Fall by a man called Camus? It’s great, by the way.
Love ya
Nessa xx
Among the hoard of correspondence, I came upon a file entitled ‘Very Old Love Letters’ – now this was going to be interesting. I lit the fire, put the kettle on and settled down to savour the moment. There were a number of letters from boys I could hardly remember, one or two from boys I’d met in Menorca who went to different schools, and a couple from a neighbour of Fiona’s that we’d watch television with when I visited her in London.
At the bottom of the file, slightly damaged from a flood we suffered in the cellar, I came across four long letters from Nabeel. Three were written during the school summer holidays, which he’d spent in Tunisia, and the last was written after he’d left Box Hill. Reading his letters reminds me of the glory of coming of age: when you realise that the world doesn’t actually revolve around you; when hormones flood your body and empathy and yearning overwhelm you; when you see yourself reflected in the eyes of your lover and like what you see; when you first experience the wonder of looking at a sunset and its beauty moves you to tears.
I never had any confidence in my ability to write, though Nabeel’s letters are littered with pleas that I write back to him. I think we understood, when he left Box Hill to go to a sixth-form college in Southampton, that it was unlikely that we’d be able to sustain a relationship. As the summer term drew to a close, we clung onto each other, barely talking to anyone else. On the last day of term, the entire school climbed onto buses for a day-trip to Littlehampton. While the other kids spent their time at the fun fair, we walked up and down the windy beach. I nestled under his arm while we listened to Bob Dylan sing ‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’ over and over again on a tinny portable cassette player and when the batteries ran first slow, then out, and we just lay on the pebbles in silence.
Nabeel wrote to me the following term.
Dear Vanessa,
God, I don’t know how to start this. Basically I’m wrecking myself, I don’t know what the fuck is up, ‘but something is not right, it’s wrong’. You know today at college I lit a cigarette and with it I almost screamed, I turned around, I wanted you there, do you understand? You weren’t of course. But I suppose I’ll fade from you soon, but you know for the second time since I’ve known you, I’ve missed you like hell. The first time was in Tunisia and now. These are things I think about and never say, yeah I suppose I’ve said ‘I love you’ etc. And I did, I haven’t lied. But you are on my mind nearly all the time, do you know what I mean? I can’t love you in a letter because it’s impossible, but I miss you…
Please write back soon and say what you think, look here, don’t feel sorry, don’t be polite, be brutal if it’s like that. I just have to know. I want you. It is as simple as that. I just want to know. I could get a girl around here when I felt like it, but I don’t want them. I want you to sit next to me when I smoke a cigarette, to hold my hand and to kiss me and to talk to me…
One thing I want of you: be truthful for God’s sake, it doesn’t matter, you don’t have to be nice, when you don’t want something, say ‘no’. I mean this, I’m hoping for the best but that is immaterial as far as you’re concerned. I’d hate it if you felt sorry for me on this issue, say it like it is with no dilutions. I’ve loved you and I have to have your person as well as your body, one on its own won’t do, not without the other.
ANSWER VERY SOON, RIGHT? PLEASE WITHIN A FEW DAYS. You have the time and don’t fuck about.
I miss you with every cigarette.
Nabeel
Love is in this letter as far as it can go.
I never replied. Now, over forty years later, I wonder how I justified my youthful carelessness. I have no excuse other than the fickleness of youth – my childish emotional intelligence was ill-equipped to deal with such force of feeling. I fear that I simply thought there was a whole new world out there, waiting to be explored.
Nabeel sent me one more postcard, a reproduction of a Georges Braque from the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, a year or two later:
I just felt like saying hello to you. I hope you’re ok.
Love Nabeel.
I’m alright here in Southampton. I’m being made into a doctor.
I didn’t hear from him again until I tracked him down while writing this book, but that’s another story altogether.
***
Sussex, April 2017
An afternoon spent reading love letters, forty-four years after receiving them, had an extraordinary effect on my mood and I felt awash with love again. The birds sang, my lips tingled and my eyes smiled, as I walked across the fields to meet Mum for supper in the Ship at Itchenor. As I reached the pub, I noticed a man sitting outside, speaking softly in French on his mobile. I joined Mum at a corner table beyond the bar, bought her a whisky and myself a glass of dry white wine and started to tell her about my afternoon. She shuffled closer as I quoted from the letters. I’m not sure how much she takes in, but love still touches her soul.
‘Oh, Nessie, you are a little devil,’ said Mum, her eyes sparkling. The French man, although ‘boy’ would be a more apt description, came in and sat at the table next to us. The letters were playing magic tricks and I soon brought him into our conversation. He was quietly spoken and in his mid-twenties, with tightly curled red hair, thick-rimmed glasses and a cable-knit sweater. His name was Arthur. We asked him what he was doing in Itchenor and learned that he’d just abandoned his PhD and was embarking on a fresh challenge. He’d borrowed money from his sister to buy a creaking one-hundred-year-old wooden sailing boat, and he was about to sail along the south coast to Falmouth, with plans to learn about boat restoration while living aboard.
Arthur was a poet and a dreamer, and his ethereal presence caught me off-guard. I saw him looking at me, and after waving Mum off with her carer who had come to collect her, he and I walked along the towpath. We walked in silence, listening to the sound of the curlews as they drilled their long beaks into the mud. We could have been teenagers about to have our first kiss – the connection I felt with this young man, younger than my son, was confusing, powerful and deeply moving.
We stopped at his boat’s mooring and at a loss about what to do, we stood looking at each other. Where was this about to go? Without saying a word, we held each other in a long embrace, his cheek on my head and mine to his chest. I pulled away and looked him in the eye. ‘Have a wonderful adventure, Arthur. Bon voyage.’ And then, without looking back, I walked on down the towpath.