The birth of the Johnson dynasty had a dreamlike quality. Amid the breathtaking beauty of Oxford, the citadel of Britain’s self-confidence, the fellows of All Souls College hosted in summer 1962 a celebratory dinner. Among the guests was Charlotte Fawcett, an undergraduate studying English at Lady Margaret Hall. Seated next to her was Stanley Johnson, nearly two years older and studying English at Exeter College. Charming and amusing, Stanley instantly captured Charlotte’s affection. In Stanley’s opinion, it was not by chance that Sir James Fawcett, the college bursar and an outstanding international lawyer, had placed him next to his daughter. Well liked across the university, Stanley was also the winner of that year’s Newdigate Prize for poetry. Winning the prize – an award he would still proudly mention nearly sixty years later – was a blessing for Stanley. Not only was it a passport to his career after Oxford, but it also introduced him to a remarkable woman.
One of five children, Charlotte was educated at Cheltenham Ladies’ College and had enjoyed a happy, social childhood in a large house in St John’s Wood, an affluent area in north-west London. The Fawcetts were politically active liberals and outspoken campaigners for human rights, women’s equality and against racism. Beatrice Lowe, her mother, was the Jewish daughter of two distinguished academics. Financially and emotionally secure, Charlotte had been in love with another student, a left-wing president of the students’ union, before meeting Stanley, but she quickly embraced her new boyfriend.
Stanley was exceptional. Dynamic, intelligent and intensely social, he had a wide range of friends in Oxford, had already travelled across the world and was sufficiently impressive to be identified as a recruit for MI6, the foreign intelligence service. He had, however, already discovered his intellectual limitations. He had entered Oxford to study Greats but had switched to English, an easier subject. The wisdom of his decision was not only the Newdigate Prize but also the award of a Harkness Fellowship which would finance a study trip to the USA after graduation.
Bowled over by Stanley’s energy, Charlotte agreed in 1963 to delay her final year’s study and exams and join him for one year in America. Before leaving, they married in Marylebone registry office and, with little money, spent their honeymoon at a friend’s farm. Some years later, she realised that instead of a loving and deep friendship, she had become infatuated with a man who deliberately minimised the seriousness of anything and ridiculed intimacy. The intellectual and emotional values championed by the Fawcetts were scorned by her new husband. In the whirlwind of their romance, too headstrong to care for her family’s reservations, she had also failed to notice that bluster and bonhomie camouflaged the scars of his own childhood.
Stanley was understandably intrigued by his family’s history. In the nineteenth century in Anatolia, Turkey, his grandfather, Ali Kemal, a fearless Turkish journalist, became a famous opponent of the corrupt Ottoman Empire. After the empire’s collapse in 1918, Kemal was appointed Turkey’s interior minister. Vigorously but forlornly he campaigned against Kemal Ataturk, the ardent nationalist, to align Turkey with Britain, and was abruptly forced to resign. Returning to journalism in a febrile atmosphere, he continued as a newspaper editor to oppose Ataturk until, in November 1922, he was kidnapped by his enemies and lynched by a mob. His corpse was hung from a tree.
By then, his thirteen-year-old son Osman Ali was living in Britain. For her safety, Ali Kemal’s first wife, half-British and half-Swiss, had given birth to her son in Bournemouth. She had died soon after his birth and her mother, Margaret Brun (née Johnson), adopted her grandson who was renamed Wilfred ‘Johnny’ Johnson.
After a truncated education, Johnny farmed in Canada, visited Switzerland and headed to Egypt to manage an estate. Standing in a Cairo bar in 1932, he spotted Irene Williams, a twenty-five-year-old Anglo-French Oxford graduate being accosted by a British serviceman. To everyone’s surprise, Irene walloped the serviceman. As he hit the floor, Johnny walked across to offer his congratulations and Irene, instantly attracted to the cool Englishman, introduced herself as ‘Buster’.
Johnny had struck lucky. Irene’s father was a Lloyd’s insurance investor whose wealth and status were inherited from his grandfather, Sir George Williams, the founder of the YMCA and a successful businessman, and her mother was a descendant of Baron de Pfeffel, a rich Alsatian family living in a grand Versailles house. Surrounded by maids, nannies and seemingly unlimited wealth to fund an exciting social life filled with music, Irene was educated at Cheltenham Ladies’ College followed by Oxford. Uncertain about her future, the amusing dilettante was sent by her father to Cairo to escape some unsuitable relationships. After three years tutoring in Cairo, she returned to England in 1935. Johnny followed. Once he was employed by a City timber broker in 1936, they married.
Financed by Irene’s family, Johnny had a comfortable life, commuting daily from Bromley to Cannon Street and returning with pleasure from London’s smog to the luxury of domestic staff and his first two children. Soon after the war broke out, Johnny volunteered to fly for RAF Coastal Command and was absent when in 1940, in the midst of the Battle of Britain, Stanley was born. To escape the Blitz, Irene moved with her three children to live first with her parents in Cornwall and then in Devon. Her idyllic life snapped towards the end of the war. Standing on a hill to watch Johnny fly past and tip his wing in salute, Irene stood thrilled until she watched the plane crash. Burnt and permanently lame, Johnny left the RAF in 1947 poor, unemployed and dissatisfied. His good fortune was Irene’s devotion and her family’s money. Convinced that his best fate was to escape suburbia and return to farming, he bought West Nethercote, an isolated 250-acre sheep farm in a high but shady valley near Winsford on Exmoor by the River Exe. Without reliable electricity, proper sanitation or adequate heating, the rapidly expanding family of four children shared their rambling, cold, stone house with cows, sheep, poultry, dogs, mice and the occasional horse. Seemingly, Buster’s love for Johnny smothered any regret for the comforts she had abandoned.
Hard physical graft dominated Stanley’s childhood. Daily, during his holidays from his boarding prep school, he helped his father with the sheep, collected hay, picked fruit and learned to survive on the hillside. There was no washing machine or fridge. Newborn lambs were kept warm by the kitchen wood-burning stove. The idyllic setting belied the truth that Nethercote was not a happy home. As well as being an unsuccessful farmer, Johnny was a silent alcoholic who never read books and ignored sickness. The sullen hangdog regularly whacked Stanley and his other children. And in front of his children, he often beat Irene. Stanley would tell Charlotte how he resented his father’s behaviour, especially hitting Irene. In hindsight, Stanley’s feelings were ignored by his parents and he in turn had little affection for his brothers and sister. ‘He didn’t think they were good enough,’ observed Allegra Mostyn-Owen. In particular, Mostyn-Owen was struck by Stanley’s poor relations with his brother Peter, whom she assumed was ruined by their father’s cruelty.1 In contrast, Stanley found Irene’s eccentricity endearing. Whenever cake crumbs fell onto the floor, Stanley watched her lie on the floor and blow the crumbs under a chair. ‘I protested,’ he recalled and she replied, ‘I’ll do what I want.’ Seventy years later he reminisced, ‘I learned from my mother that exaggeration with a purpose is a price well worth paying.2 She was always ready to do things, even if it looked ridiculous. Being contrary was what she taught me.’
In 1953, aged thirteen and with what would become the trademark mop of blond hair, Stanley was sent to Sherborne, a public school in Dorset. Irene’s family paid the fees for this blimpish, third-rate teaching establishment, big on flogging and games, and mentally and sexually truncating. Adapting himself to the school’s frenzied competitiveness, Stanley drilled in the army cadets in preparation for service in the empire, played sport every day but had enjoyed no artistic activities. Despite being regularly flogged, he won prizes and was appointed head boy. ‘Whenever I walked through the school,’ he would remember, ‘660 boys stood to attention and took their hands out of their pockets.’3 The result, he would admit, was a ‘swollen head’.4
Before going to Oxford, he set off in 1958 to Greece and Turkey, to trace his family roots, and then on an adventurous trip to Brazil and across South America. He returned to Nethercote with a taste for endless travel.
With that self-confidence, Stanley arrived in Oxford in 1959 eager to win what were called at the time ‘the glittering prizes’. On graduating in 1963 and having secured the Harkness Fellowship, he sailed in August from Southampton with his new bride. On the New York quayside he was given a new Chevrolet and directions to drive to Iowa College to start a creative writing course.
Stanley is the first to admit that he wasted his opportunity to learn the craft of writing which undermined his lifelong ambition to become a bestselling author. With a short attention span and not able to master the detail of the course, he abandoned Iowa and headed for New York to study economics at Columbia. Their new home was a single-room loft near the Chelsea Hotel in mid-Manhattan. By then, Charlotte was pregnant and Stanley, always impatient to travel, suggested they head to Mexico for a holiday. Since their car was not licensed across the border, it was abandoned in Texas and they headed for Mexico City in a twenty-hour bus ride. Resisting Stanley’s domineering enthusiasm was impossible for his amenable wife. Soon after arriving in the city, they introduced themselves to Boris Litwin, the generous parent of an Oxford friend. Stanley, as his family would discover, was a professional guest, always searching for a free bed. By then, Charlotte was suffering morning sickness. To save Charlotte the long return bus journey, Litwin bought the couple airline tickets back to Texas. ‘If it’s a boy,’ said Charlotte with relief, ‘we’ll call him Boris.’ On 19 June 1964, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, weighing just over nine pounds, was born in a New York hospital used mostly by Puerto Ricans. His father missed the birth while out buying a pizza. ‘De Pfeffel’ was added as a marker of Boris’s mother’s aristocratic background. To the family, he was always known as ‘Al’ or Alexander.
As had happened at Oxford, Stanley once again failed to follow the meticulous study course at Columbia. He wanted to resume travelling but Charlotte persuaded him that they return to Oxford with Boris so that she could complete her degree. By autumn 1964, Charlotte was once again studying English at Lady Margaret Hall. Baby Boris often slept in a drawer in her room. Occasionally, he was fed boiled eggs, creating a lifetime aversion.5 After Christmas, Charlotte was again pregnant and her relationship with Stanley changed.
The return to Oxford and fatherhood did not suit Stanley, nor did his lifestyle. Unable to focus on establishing a career, twenty-four-year-old Stanley had started teaching in a state school. Dissatisfied, he switched to an Oxford graduate course in agricultural economics and earned a small amount as an editor of a technical quarterly. Although he relied on the Fawcetts’ money to survive, he mocked them. ‘They’re champagne socialists,’ he told Charlotte. He derided their thoughtful, socially responsible intellectualism and their affection for the Guardian. ‘He was rude to them and made fun of them,’ said Charlotte. ‘He didn’t like their Catholicism or their support for Labour but without them, we would never have had enough money.’ But there was worse. During a series of bitter arguments, Stanley accused Charlotte of seeing too much of her friends. ‘He resented that I cared about my friends,’ she recalls, ‘and that’s when he first hit me.’ Boris was asleep in the same room. Charlotte blamed herself for Stanley’s anger and continued her studies.6
The incident was buried after Stanley was approached to join MI6 and began an intensive training course which separated him and Charlotte during the week. In June, she passed her degree and celebrated that Boris had walked in the kitchen at eleven months. By the time Rachel was born in September, the fifteen-month-old boy understood exactly that he would need to share his mother’s attention. Boris’s expression on seeing his sister for the first time was not joyous: ‘When Boris arrived at the hospital to see Rachel in my arms,’ Charlotte recalls, ‘his look was shock, disbelief and fear.’
By then, the Johnsons had moved to north London and Stanley was once again edgy. The anonymous spy world did not suit a man ambitious for fame. He successfully applied for a job at the World Bank in Washington. At twenty-five, he would finally be able to support his family.
The four Johnsons flew to Washington in February 1966. Boris was proving to be a temperate, smiling baby, keen to sleep even when his cot collapsed. Eighteen months after arriving in Washington, Leo, their third child, was born. Despite being a mother to three young children, Charlotte went to art classes and encouraged her children to paint. Boris seemed particularly keen on drawing and painting buses in oils. His mother would keep his sketchbooks in a box together with other momentos of his early life including his hair and milk teeth. Even before he was two years old, Boris told his mother colourful stories about bad children at nursery school. ‘And then he would answer my questions in an amusing and creative way.’ Aged three, Boris had begun to read, in particular he enjoyed a ‘Look and Learn’ comic strip depicting the science-fiction story of the Trigan Empire, based on Ancient Greece. ‘He was gripped by that,’ said Charlotte, ‘and that gave him an idea. He said to me, “I want to be world king.”’
Stanley missed those milestones. He was flying around the world seeking to improve the condition of poverty-stricken countries. But within two years he was bored once again. After pulling a prank on his boss, he quickly moved on in 1968 to research global overpopulation for the Rockefeller Foundation in New York. While Charlotte and their three children lived by the sea in Connecticut, Stanley flew thousands of miles across the world to produce Life Without Birth, a polemic denouncing the lack of birth control and the dangers of the Pope’s ban on contraception. Bursting with indignation and pride, he would claim that his book paved the way for a UN agency to control the world’s population.
He returned to Connecticut and a troubled relationship with Charlotte. Although in their hectic social life, Stanley was adept at placing himself at the centre of attention as the life and soul of any gathering, Charlotte noticed his impatience with those who were neither intellectual nor rich. Status was important for Stanley and he was unusually selective of whom he liked. For those he favoured, he speedily spotted the moment to break the ice and start conversations with a joke. But back at home, the humour disappeared. ‘He was always hitting me,’ says Charlotte, ‘and Boris saw it.’ Ignoring the unhappiness caused by his violence, Stanley has described that American period of his life as ‘wonderful’, not least because he also wrote Presidential Plot, a novel about the assassination of Lyndon B. Johnson. Although published, it was not successful.7
In 1969 Charlotte demanded that the family return to London. After a series of violent arguments, he relented to her ultimatum that she would travel without him. Renting a house near her parents’ London home in Little Venice, Stanley used his friendships to find a temporary and unpaid job at Conservative Central Office to produce the party’s 1970 election programme on the environment. Since his only income was a grant from the Ford Foundation for a programme about population, the family could not afford to send the children to a nursery. Happily, Charlotte taught Boris and Rachel English, history and maths at home. At five years old, Boris had started to read the Daily Telegraph’s editorial column. Although the Fawcetts were again helping financially, Stanley grudgingly admitted that his income was insufficient to support his family. The solution, he decided, was that his family should live with his parents at Nethercote. To fulfil his Ford Fellowship, he would travel for one year around the world, leaving Charlotte to bring up the three children. On the eve of his departure from Exmoor, there was another violent argument in front of Boris.
‘You’re selfish,’ Charlotte told Stanley. ‘You only do what you want.’
‘No, you’re selfish,’ replied Stanley, ‘not wanting me to do what I want.’
‘Stanley was very bad-tempered,’ says Charlotte. ‘He was always shouting, angry and then he hit me.’ Without apologies, Stanley drove off from Nethercote for his next adventure. As Rachel Johnson would write nearly fifty years later, ‘He is never happier than setting off to live with some remote tribe many thousands of miles from his loved ones … He cares far more about other animals than even his own family.’8
Being left behind at Nethercote, in those days an eight-hour drive from London, was a punishment for his wife and, as Charlotte believed, an opportunity for serial adultery. Asked many years later if he was, as Charlotte believed, ‘completely unfaithful’ and ‘an amazing womaniser’, Stanley replied, ‘Total garbage. Honestly.’9 In his self-deprecating way, Stanley has also said that ‘Human relations remain a mystery to me.’10 His ebullient personality always winning new friends, he loved to travel and, despite any discomfort, seemed unaware of anyone else’s feelings. Selfishness was a criticism Stanley could not understand.
*
Life at Nethercote was chaotic. As Boris approached the start of school, the family moved into a dilapidated, unheated house next to his grandparents, Johnny and ‘Granny Butters’ as ‘Buster’ became known. With little money, Charlotte was marooned. ‘Stanley left me there for a year without a car,’ she recalls. Once a month, Buster drove Charlotte in a battered Volkswagen to the cash-and-carry in Minehead to stock up on food. Long before she returned to Minehead four weeks later, their remaining food was stale, damp and mouldy. ‘There was no point saying to Stanley, “Give me a car”,’ Charlotte explains. ‘He wouldn’t.’ In that isolation, she taught her children friendship and loyalty to each other. While they played or read, she painted dark, troubled and remarkable images in oils that reflected her anguish. Nearby, Boris would sit on the unswept floor enthusiastically painting and fluently replying to Charlotte’s questions. When asked to play, he would reply: ‘Let’s play reading,’ or ’Let’s see who can be quietest for longest.’11 Untidiness became a way of life. Rubbish was strewn around the home and in later life, either thrown into the back of his car or out of the window. Their domesticity was frequently interrupted by sickness. While Stanley was saving the rainforests, his family were sick because Nethercote’s water was contaminated by iron pipes. ‘We were all lying ill on the floor,’ says Charlotte. Compounding that sickness, Boris often screamed with pain from agonising earaches caused by grommets. If camphorated vapours and aspirin failed to work, the ever stoical Buster agreed as a last resort to drive through the night to a hospital for antibiotics.12 The consequence for Boris was periods of deafness.
Getting three children to Winsford’s village school every day was a problem, especially in winter. Without a car, Charlotte walked with them nearly two miles to the main road to wait for a lift from Phil, owner of a local garage, who regularly passed in his Land Rover. Charlotte returned home and repeated the walk in the afternoon to collect the children. There was no chance that Johnny would allow Charlotte to use his Land Rover. It had smashed headlights, severely dented bumpers, its roof squashed after a cow pushed it over into a ditch and a piece of twisted metal as replacement for the ignition key. Johnny did not trust her to preserve the wreck. Moreover, he needed the vehicle. Most evenings, he left his wife alone and drove down to the village pub and, after closing time, went to see his girlfriend Kate nearby. His affair had lasted twelve years and, as Charlotte knew, he had simultaneous relationships with other women. Throughout their marriage, Stanley’s mother tolerated Johnny’s serial adultery – and his miserliness. She was allowed just one new dress every year which he chose and bought without her being present. Similarly, Stanley refused to conform. To adultery and violence, his family could add deserter. Charlotte’s only relief were the visits by her parents, James and Beatrice Fawcett.
During those days and over the following years, James Fawcett, a classicist who had won a double first at Oxford, introduced ancient Greece and Rome to his grandson. From the books they read together, Boris learned to admire their civilisation and literature. He became fascinated by the ceaseless competition between macho males driven by self-belief. He learned to adore Rome’s heroes, worshipped by the crowds in the Forum and on the battlefield, and was intrigued by the Greeks’ exaltation of their gods. ‘It was a world,’ he would write, ‘that believed above all in winners and losers, in death and glory.’ While other boys imagined themselves as football players, rock stars or doctors, Boris’s introduction to the classics conjured a dream of victory and the spotlight shining on the leader. ‘As the oldest,’ he later wrote, ‘I’ve always known that my position is unchallengeable. It is the fixed point about which my cosmos is organised. I smile indulgently on everybody else’s attempts to compete with me. Bring it on, I say.’13
In that isolation, the only constant male influence was Johnny, the grandfather. Unaware of his misconduct, his grandchildren loved him, all proudly bearing the special names he gave them. Boris was Beetle, Rachel was Spider, Leo was Fly. Jo, born later, was Fleas. Unlike Stanley, Johnny did not smack his grandchildren nor criticise their appearance.
In summer 1970, Stanley returned to Nethercote. He remained frustrated that he had found neither fame nor fortune. In their shambolic world, Boris saw his father write a book about his recent trip and occasionally emerge from his study to teach his children to love the beauty and natural harshness of country life – animals being born and slaughtered and stags hunted to their death. He also told gripping tales about his family’s remarkable background – his Muslim father and Boris baptised as a Catholic. Still to come was the discovery that Buster’s grandmother, Karoline von Rothenburg, was the illegitimate daughter of a nineteenth-century German prince directly related to Britain’s Hanoverian king, George II.14 For Stanley, an impoverished writer and humanitarian campaigner dependent on his in-laws, the exotic family tree partly satisfied his aspiration for status in a class-conscious society which frowned on foreigners.
Success, Stanley believed, was generated by competition. Instinctively, he pitted his three children against each other – at snooker, reading, maths and table tennis. After Rachel beat Boris at table tennis, she watched his fury: ‘he kicked the garage door so hard he broke his toe’. Once, after Rachel got onto a table to make a speech, Boris, with uncontrolled anger, pushed her off to make his own speech. There was even Stanley’s film to prove Boris’s defiance. Sitting calmly alone in a yellow inflatable boat, his six-year-old son was recorded being swept down the river Exe and dropping over a weir. The celluloid does not reveal a glimmer of fear.
The coloured images of a small boy’s determination concealed the family’s suffering. Charlotte had openly confronted Stanley about his affairs and he denied it. ‘Stanley wanted to be loved,’ she recalls, ‘and wanted sex and he wanted power. And when I contradicted him, it threatened his power.’ Charlotte never thought of leaving: ‘I stayed because I loved him, despite the abuse.’ She sympathised with the frustrations in his life, especially his inability to become a famous writer. ‘He wanted to be as famous and successful as his hero, P. G. Wodehouse,’ says Charlotte. Stanley found anonymity intolerable. His family understood he would go to the ends of the earth to find fame and new relationships.
Boris agonised over his mother’s fate. Not only had he watched his mother suffer from being regularly hit, but he also saw his father blatantly deny the truth. Unwilling to confide in others about his father’s violence, he became a loner. In his solitariness, his competitiveness was off-set by self-doubt. To mask the misery and hurt, he demanded attention. Just as his father wilfully amused friends and strangers to conceal the wretched chaos at Nethercote, Boris adopted his father’s performance. Rachel, his only confidante, did the same. The beauty of rural life at Nethercote, plus their grandparents’ love, inspired their overwhelming resilience. Their survival was assured. Their parents’ secret was protected. After many more arguments, Stanley bowed to Charlotte’s demand that the family should return to London for the children’s education.
With the Fawcetts’ financial help, Stanley bought a house in Primrose Hill and Boris went to Princess Road Primary, the local state school. To earn a living, Stanley accepted a job with the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) to encourage birth control. The natural attraction was endless global travel at his employer’s expense. The irony was that Jo, Charlotte’s fourth child, had just been born. The IPPF was yet another temporary job while Stanley pursued his latest ambition, to be elected to Parliament. Joke Aarnink, the Johnsons’ Dutch au pair, was the eyewitness to that ambition. One evening, she opened Stanley’s front door to Ted Heath, the Tory leader, and Alec Douglas-Home, the former prime minister, for dinner. The evening failed to secure a safe Commons seat for Stanley. But Aarnink’s brief employment did seal her memory of Boris as ‘insecure and very sensitive’. His lack of self-confidence was well concealed. Any display of vulnerability, Boris learned from his father, was unacceptable.
Finally, in 1972 there was good news. Aged thirty-two, Stanley was offered a well-paid job. Britain had just joined the Common Market (the EEC) and Stanley, as a passionate environmentalist, was asked to be the head of the Prevention of Pollution and Nuisance Division at the EEC’s headquarters in Brussels. At public expense, the Johnsons moved in 1973 to Belgium and rented a splendid house. With a good income, Stanley had status, Charlotte was painting and the four children were healthier than previously. In the prestigious social world which the Johnsons now enjoyed, they were reunited with Charles Wheeler, an outstanding BBC broadcast journalist. The families had previously met in Washington. In the small British community, the Johnsons and Wheelers became further united by their children at the European School. Boris (aged nine) and Rachel (eight) met Charles’s daughter Marina, although Marina would later say that she was not impressed by Boris’s flamboyant showmanship. He would roll around on the ground and throw hard balls at children. Her disapproval was echoed by Mary Kidd, a Norland nanny employed by the family. Some families in Brussels, she said, banned their children from playing with the ‘too rough’ Johnsons.15 Nevertheless, after ten years of marriage, the Johnsons appeared a picture of stability. Few guessed from his performance that Stanley revelled in any opportunity to be an unconventional rule-breaker. At parties, Stanley’s bonhomie delivered a stream of opinions, occasionally suffocating any chance of a reply. No speech, Stanley believed, was worthy without a succession of jokes. Across the international community, his charm and comic act were appreciated – although Stanley, they learnt, was always about Stanley. ‘I can count the seconds,’ Rachel would write in 2017 about meeting her father for lunch, ‘until he says, “So what I’ve been up to … ”.’16 Only a few registered the unfortunate impression that beyond his generosity and good-natured friendship, he seemed to lack sympathy and judicious contemplation. Imitating Stanley, Boris assumed that his life was always going to be about Boris. Like his father, he would entertain to get the laughs and become the leader.
Visitors to the Johnsons’ home in Brussels marked out Boris as extraordinary. Aged ten, he read The Times, The Economist and an eclectic range of novels, not least by P. G. Wodehouse. During that year’s holiday in Greece, Boris asked a group of visiting classicists if he could join their game of Scrabble. They agreed, only to be beaten. Believing their defeat to be an aberration, they agreed to a second game only to be beaten again.
The boy’s excitement masked deep unhappiness. His parents’ marriage had become irredeemably fractured. Charlotte was convinced that Stanley was rampantly unfaithful and a serial womaniser.17 Images of scantily clad au pair girls were mentioned. Charlotte found the pressure of his neglect and philandering overwhelming. He was inaccessible, neither a friend nor a confidant. ‘He hit me,’ she says. ‘And hit me.’ Boris aged ten and nine-year-old Rachel became the guardians of the secret. His family was safer if outsiders did not know.
That year, 1974, the dam broke. Overwhelmed by severe depression, Charlotte suffered a nervous breakdown. She was rushed from Brussels to the Maudsley Hospital in south London. Isolated from her children, she felt wretched. For her four children, the circumstances were unusually difficult.
On an overcast day forty-five years later, in autumn 2019, handicapped by Parkinson’s and other illnesses, the accomplished artist who lives with a carer in a small but comfortable Notting Hill Gate flat, disclosed that their marriage ‘was ghastly, terrible’. In particular, Charlotte describes the ‘difficult times’ at the Maudsley. ‘I want the truth told,’ she said.
Over the years, Stanley has professed ignorance about the causes of his wife’s depression. ‘I never got to the bottom of it,’ he said in 2019. ‘It was too complicated for me and a mystery. Charlotte also never understood the causes. Freud and the mind is a particular mystery.’18 Strangely, Stanley also feigned ignorance about Charlotte’s paintings completed at the hospital. One shows her at the top of a tree, her small children below, arms outstretched while Stanley, standing apart, looks on, completely uninterested.
Charlotte corrects Stanley’s recollection: ‘The doctors at the Maudsley spoke to Stanley about his abuse of me. He had hit me. He hit me many times, over many years.’ On one occasion, Stanley had hit Charlotte especially hard. ‘He beat me up and broke my nose,’ she recalls. After that attack, Charlotte was treated in the St John & St Elizabeth Hospital in north-west London. The children were told that a car door had hit their mother’s face. Boris, however, knew the truth.
‘Although Stanley hit me, he made me feel I deserved it,’ she explains. Her parents, who lived near the hospital, visited their daughter daily. ‘My parents confronted Stanley about it,’ she continued, ‘but he denied it.’ Although Boris was just ten years old, Charlotte forensically discussed her marriage and condition with her eldest son. On the one hand, she realised, her son ‘admired his father’s humour and dash’. With some sadness, she recalled that Boris had witnessed her being hit by Stanley. ‘That was terrible for the children,’ Charlotte admitted. ‘Unfortunately,’ she told Boris, ‘I’m driving your father mad.’ Her stoic bravery and silence taught Boris never to reveal vindictiveness or bear grudges. He learned to act without revealing his motives. Most important, Boris has never revealed how those events permanently influenced his life, character and personality. Psychologists agree that the children of battered women are worried, frightened, confused and vulnerable. Without sufficient stability, security and protection, they are exposed to substantial risk.
While Charlotte was in hospital, Stanley was responsible for his children. But he was absent from their home in Brussels for much of the time, leaving an au pair in charge. The young children were often expected to look after themselves, even making the arrangements to travel from Brussels to London to visit their mother. Neither then nor later did Stanley voice any sympathy for Charlotte’s illness.19 ‘Depression wasn’t allowed in Stanley’s book,’ Allegra Mostyn-Owen would discover. Even now, Rachel refuses to blame Stanley. ‘It was difficult for my dad too,’ she wrote. ‘I can’t pretend it wasn’t bleak, but he did brilliantly to keep it all going. He very much kept the show on the road. And my mother is a brilliant, brilliant mother … I feel fiercely protective towards my parents.’20 Boris understood the cause of his mother’s condition. ‘I have often thought,’ Charlotte would later say, ‘that his being “world king” was a wish to make himself unhurtable, invincible, somehow safe from the pains of your mother disappearing for eight months.’21 Her stoic acceptance of her fate during Boris’s visits to the Maudsley imbued in him an absence of malice. If his mother was not angry, then Boris could not be angry. After all, Stanley had promised him that he would never leave his beloved mother.22 The lesson he did draw from witnessing the violence was to avoid overt confrontation.
On Charlotte’s return to Brussels, Boris assumed that she was cured. Among her first paintings was a self-portrait. Sitting in a chair surrounded by her family, Charlotte’s head is thrown back and her mouth is wide open, screaming. She called her painting Hasn’t Worked.
During those weeks, Stanley decided that his children needed a better education than was available in Brussels. His ambition was they should all follow him to Oxford. Based on his own upbringing, it was quite natural to send very young children to boarding school and, in his words, leave their upbringing to the school. Charlotte had no alternative but to agree. He chose Ashdown House in East Sussex, a prep school renowned for teaching classics and coaching its best pupils to win a place at Eton.
Aged eleven, Boris arrived with Rachel, the school’s first girl. Stanley cannot remember whether he delivered his children on their first day.23 He assumes that Boris and Rachel travelled alone from Brussels. In the pre-Channel Tunnel era that meant a train to Ostend, a boat to Dover and then a train to the school – carrying luggage from train to boat to train. ‘It was tough,’ wrote Rachel. ‘We were in the throes of my parents’ ice-stormesque open marriage and that was the end of family life. We learnt very quickly, very early, not to have emotional needs.’24 Boris has never spoken publicly about his feelings at that time. Charlotte is certain that her suffering played on him. He was happy reading, going alone to museums or painting. The untidiness of his childhood was deeply embedded. Unlike his siblings, he could never shed Nethercote’s chaos. At Ashdown House, denied his mother’s embrace and the absence of any home warmth, there was a vast emotional hole. Some called the result, the ‘frozen child’. Stanley however dismissed the notion that his children were abandoned or suffered pain: ‘It’s a strange idea that parents should talk to their children at home. I didn’t have much influence on my children. I never read to them or asked about their homework. I relied on the schools.’25
The introduction into Boris’s life of Clive Williams, Ashdown’s classics teacher, was fortunate. Sitting at the back of the class for the first days, Boris remained unnoticed until an English teacher brought his first essay – a laugh-aloud piece – into the common room. The teachers agreed that their new pupil was exceptionally well read and a potential scholar. After the first Latin and Greek lessons, Williams declared that his new pupil could master the classics from scratch and could, with hard work, be sufficiently proficient within two years to get a place at Eton. ‘He was better and faster than anyone else I had taught,’ Williams would report – not only in the tests, but Boris also quickly learnt the lines of the king in the Greek play Rhesus, for example, and acted with ‘a sense of drama and understanding of the language’. His personal qualities also emerged – warm hearted and competitive to perform at the centre of the stage, unable like his father, to bear anonymity.
At the heart of his performance was an adaptation of Bertie Wooster, P. G. Wodehouse’s buffoonish upper-class character. Wooster is repeatedly saved from disaster by Jeeves, his erudite manservant. There is good reason to adore Wodehouse, one of the finest and funniest prose writers of his time. His plots and dialogue are remarkable. Imitating Wooster, however, is to confess to being a bit of a life’s clown oneself. Wooster makes light of everything and gets away with everything. Absolution is always at hand. The question raised in later years was whether Boris was really an unserious, spontaneous Wooster-like buffoon or rather was presenting himself as a clown in a calculated act to conceal that at his core, his serious life was best approached with invincible optimism and indefatigable hope. He played it both ways by adopting Wodehouse’s mantra that those who are principled and clever should wear their learning lightly.
The summer of 1976 in Nethercote was memorable for the extraordinary heat and nudity. For years, Stanley and Charlotte walked around the farm and their homes without clothes. That summer, Stanley told the two au pairs that since there was a water shortage – the river had run dry – they would be unable to wash their clothes so they should just as well not wear any. Both complied and walked around in the nude. Stanley insisted on two au pairs in case one resigned. In the event, both stayed for the summer not least because Stanley, in the knowledge of his children, embarked on an affair with one of the girls.26
At the end of two years at Ashdown, Boris’s mastery of classics was acknowledged by his entry into Eton as a King’s Scholar, a remarkable achievement which classed him among Eton’s elite. He left Ashdown House with a glowing testimonial praising his optimism, gamesmanship, debating skills, and with no criticism about his character or morals. Charlotte credited the school for instilling his ferocious ambition. His critics would later say that feeding that ambition damaged his character. His own only criticism of Ashdown was corporal punishment. ‘I remember being so enraged at being whacked for talking at the wrong moment,’ he wrote, ‘that it has probably given me a lifelong distrust of authority.’27 His other legacy was to arrive at Eton in 1977 with a perfected Wodehousean performance.