For the Record. David Cameron

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СКАЧАТЬ he wanted us to take on too.

      Us? When my parents were married they were told that they might not be able to have any children at all. The doctors didn’t know if my father’s condition was genetic, and Mum had been given warnings that she might not be able to conceive. But in the end there were four of us children. And that was a big part of the happiness: the large, argumentative but loving family. My brother Alex, three years older than me; then an eighteen-month gap to my sister Tania; then another eighteen-month gap to me; and a five-year break before my sister Clare. We were always a tight-knit set of siblings, sharing in each other’s triumphs and disasters, and we remain so today.

      Dad kept us entertained with his great sense of humour and his eccentricities. He really did believe in fairies at the end of the garden. In later life he commissioned small statues of Oberon and Titania. I have a clear picture in my mind’s eye of him tottering off down the garden, even after he had lost both his legs, armed with a whisky and soda so he could spend quality time chatting to them and to any others that might turn up.

      He also loved to impose obscure but apparently immovable rules, some based on his own experience, others seeming to come from nowhere. He forbade us, for instance, from becoming accountants, because he had found his own training so boring. Others were more obscure. ‘Never sleep with a virgin.’ ‘Don’t get married till you’re twenty-six.’ ‘Never eat baked beans for breakfast.’ ‘Always travel in a suit.’ And the perennial – and probably essential, in a large family – ‘Nothing in life is fair.’ They tripped off his tongue and made us all laugh, and most of us obeyed most of them, most of the time.

      Politics? He followed it, and was an avid consumer of the news, but he was far from being politically active. I still remember being told to get down from the dinner table to go and ‘warm up the television’ for the 9 or 10 o’clock news. He was one of those who thought in the 1970s that Britain was so close to going to the dogs and collapsing that he started to stockpile emergency supplies in the cellar. It sounds mad now, but there were real fears of a military coup.

In the early 1980s, fears of military takeover were superseded by potential nuclear apocalypse, brought into sharper focus for us by the fact that home was pretty close to both Aldermaston, with its atomic weapons research establishment, and Greenham Common and its soon-to-arrive Cruise missiles. Dad had a theory that when the bomb went off, if you were drunk you would survive the blast and the radiation that followed, but would remain drunk in perpetuity. He loved this theory, and there were endless debates about how many people we could fit in the cellar, and what we would drink first.

      I well remember watching films like Threads, a Barry Hines docudrama about the effects of a nuclear bomb being dropped on Sheffield, or When the Wind Blows, the animation of Raymond Briggs’s book about the aftermath of nuclear war. But no one in our family – me included – was ever in much doubt: the Soviet Union were the bad guys; they had a bomb, so we needed one too.

      My mother inherited her love of the countryside, and her belief in looking after others and putting back in, from her parents. She combined them with a great brain and a huge sense of fun. Very few women of her generation got the education they deserved, and had the chance to go to university and make the most of their intellectual talents. Mum wasn’t one of them. Typically, she has never complained about this. After leaving school she worked at the Courtauld Institute under Anthony Blunt, whom she adored. When he was revealed as a communist spy in 1979, she was so shocked she couldn’t sleep at night, and had to resort to sleeping pills. We teased Dad about ‘reds’ in his bed, not just underneath.

      She served as a magistrate in Newbury for over thirty years, coping first with the Greenham Common women and then the Newbury Bypass protesters, including the briefly notorious ‘Swampy’. On one occasion her younger sister Clare turned up in court for taking part in the anti-Cruise missile protests and Mum had to step down temporarily. The ethos of public service was something that mattered greatly to her, and I think it rubbed off on all of us. My older brother became a criminal barrister, and my younger sister has worked as a drug counsellor.

There was another key adult in our upbringing, the woman I spoke to on my way to Buckingham Palace that day in May 2010: Gwen Hoare. Yes, just to complete the picture of the old-fashioned, privileged set-up, I had a nanny. She was with our family for over seven decades. Indeed, she was still living in a small cottage in the grounds of the Old Rectory, Peasemore, when sadly she passed away in June 2019, aged ninety-eight.

      To say we loved Gwen as if she was part of the family would miss the point: she was part of the family. As well as the love and devotion she had always shown us – as children we would often bump into each other as we crawled into her bed at night – Gwen was a woman of strong values. In later years I used to wind her up by saying she could write Daily Mail editorials in her sleep, and that she made Queen Victoria look like a hippy.

      Looking back over what I’ve written, it all sounds slightly old-fashioned and formal, even stiff. It wasn’t like that. Unlike many fathers of his age, Dad was very physical – a hugger and kisser. He loved to talk and argue, always with a great sense of fun. The same with Mum. But they were both products of their age: born before the war, growing up during the austerity of the 1940s and 50s, and getting married at the start of the 1960s, before the sexual revolution was in full swing. Manners mattered, waste or excess were thoroughly frowned upon, and ‘doing the right thing’ was always important. These are values I still admire, and they undoubtedly shaped my politics.

      When I tell my children today about the schools I went to, and some of the things that happened in them, it all seems incredibly old-fashioned. For starters, going away to boarding school aged just seven now seems brutal and bizarre. Of course I was homesick at first. I remember having one of those plastic cubes with pictures of my family on that I would look at in bed at night with tears welling up in my eyes.

      Dad, as ever, was pretty phlegmatic, but Mum was torn, and later admitted that she only coped after waving me goodbye on the first day by taking a large dose of Valium. Dad would have approved – he was a famous self-medicator, and always had a squash bag full of various pills and potions. He even gave Samantha two Valium the night before our wedding, and advised her to ‘Wash one down with a large gin and tonic – and if you don’t pass out, have the other one tomorrow.’ She happily followed his advice, and sailed serenely through the whole thing.

To say that Heatherdown was antiquated would be underplaying it. At bath time we had to line up naked in front of a row of Victorian metal baths and wait for the headmaster, James Edwards, to blow a whistle before we got in. Another whistle would indicate that it was time to get out. In between we would have to cope with clouds of smoke from the omnipresent foul-smelling pipe clenched between his teeth.

      The school was tiny – fewer than a hundred boys – and the gene pool of those attending was even smaller. One contemporary of mine recalls that his ‘dorm captains’ (yes, we had those too) were the Duke of Bedford and Prince Edward.

      The food was spartan. I lost a stone in weight during a single term. There was one meal that consisted of curry, rice – and maggots. In the school grounds were woods and a lake where we could play unsupervised in green boilersuits – it is something of a miracle that no one drowned.

      Punishments were also old-fashioned. They included frequent beatings with the smooth side of an ebony clothes brush. If I shut my eyes I can see myself standing outside the headmaster’s study, hearing the ticking of the grandfather clock and the thwack of the clothes brush on the backside of the boy in front of me, and feeling the dread of what was to follow.

      Prince Edward was an exact contemporary of my brother, and I overlapped with both of them. Alex and Edward became friends, and Alex went to stay at Windsor Castle, even having breakfast once on the Queen’s bed. I was madly jealous.

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