Expectations.
I learned that there is as much to be learned from durable, well-written bestsellers as from more serious offerings. For me, these books were more than mere entertainment. They became companions and tutors, cherished friends to be picked up again and again, the true furniture of the mind. I did try more heavyweight reading when I began studying in my late teens. I read Kafka and Voltaire, Spinoza on ethics and Aristotle on politics. I even read Nietzsche, to try to see why his writings had become textbooks of the Nazis. I dipped into Colette, Hardy and Voltaire, and added them to my collection. Most of these books remain on my shelves today.
I can remember none of my friends from primary school, but I cannot have been unpopular for I was elected captain of the football team. We won most of our games and were good enough to reach the final of a local schools’ knockout competition, but lost 2–1 after I gave away a silly goal. I was inconsolable. I also learned to play cricket. Once I was given out lbw first ball, when I knew I had hit the ball smack in the middle of the bat. ‘But I hit it,’ I protested, confident that my explanation would persuade the umpire to put right his mistaken decision. It didn’t. ‘You’re out,’ he said, waving his hand in dismissal. ‘Now off you go.’ It was the first time I realised that adults were fallible and that, if on shaky ground, they could become even more assertive than if they were right.
I had a few fights at school, mostly with boys who were throwing their weight around, and it led to trouble. I was winning one when a teacher dragged me away from the scrap, slapping me painfully around my head and shoulders and visibly losing his self-control. I was contemptuous of him from then on. I thought he was unjust. But I wasn’t a natural troublemaker. I worked quite hard and was as keen to please as most small boys. When we were asked to produce a painting for an exhibition I misunderstood and took in one that my elder sister, Pat, an excellent artist, had painted. I was mortified to overhear a teacher saying I had brought in a painting, but ‘his sister did it’. I felt like a cheat and slunk away.
At home I had pets. I bred mice and sold them to friends, with a slice of fruitcake thrown in as an inducement to buy. My white doe angora rabbit, Frisky, was given an assignation with a blue bevan buck rabbit owned by a friend. We watched and waited with interest, and were not disappointed. A litter was produced, though not all survived. We had a dog, too, a white bull terrier called Butch. He was a wonderful companion and curled up on my bed each night, before returning to the lounge as soon as he thought I was asleep.
I pause, writing this. Everyone must have such stories from childhood. But perhaps it is worth illustrating that prime ministers are no different. From the pages of some politicians’ memoirs the statesman seems to spring perfectly formed, almost from the cot, without all the trivial things that matter so much to a child. But some of the memories which writing this has brought back are every bit as strong and as moving to me as the headlines about my life which were to come.
Outside school my fun was largely self-created, apart from visits to Saturday-morning cinema, where the films always ended on a dramatic note to encourage you to return the following week. It was my sister Pat who encouraged my interest in cricket. She took me to the local sports club to see Worcester Park play. We studied books on how to bat and bowl, and I spent hours practising when I could find no one to play with me, chalking up stumps on the garage door to bowl at. In the winter I turned the garage into a goal against which I dribbled a football, shot and took penalties without number. If other boys were around I would play with them. When they were not, I was quite content to play alone.
I also ran. Longfellow Road abutted on to Green Lane, and formed a block about half a mile long. I ran around it for hour upon hour and raced against anyone and everyone – and always myself. I ran so much that an interfering neighbour told my mother I would injure myself, and for a while running was forbidden.
A brook ran along Green Lane and I used to jump across it to climb the trees on the far side. Once I fell out of one and returned home covered in blood – but I soon recovered. Worcester Park then was less built-up than it is now, and there were open hayfields and hedgerows full of birds’ nests behind Longfellow Road. I brought home eggs that didn’t hatch and ducklings that didn’t survive, and learned that nature was best left to her own devices.
At home we talked of many things, but never politics or religion. I know from my brother and sister that my father was much against the socialists, and Mr Attlee was never forgiven for defeating Mr Churchill in the 1945 general election. My parents were believers, I’m sure, and their values were more Christian than those of many people who call themselves such; but going to church in their Sunday best and looking pious was not for them.
‘She’s got religion,’ Mother would say disapprovingly of a neighbour, as though it were measles; and we kept clear for fear of catching it. So we never went to church on Sunday. Perhaps my parents had got out of the habit when they were travelling the country, though my mother, despite her open heart, had a puritanical side – probably, in part at least, because of my father’s earlier philandering. Yet her God was a forgiving God, and I imbibed her values, although I always had a yen to take church more seriously than my parents did. That yen was largely unfulfilled. The Church appealed to me, but it never reached out to me.
I learned Christian values by example, but in no other way. And though I was baptised into the Church of England I was never confirmed – and had I been in later life, when I had become a public figure, I worried that it would lead to comment about my motives. For my parents the Church was something rather quaint, an honoured but distant institution that other people attended but we did not – except, of course, for fêtes and jumble sales. Chance and circumstance left me a believer at a distance; but a believer nonetheless.
In the 1950s the eleven plus examinations determined whether or not you went to grammar school. The names of the successful candidates were announced by the teacher in class, and as he intoned ‘John’ I felt my back being patted by the boy behind me. But the teacher went on to say ‘John Hunt’. I thought I’d failed, and I remember the huge relief when my name was finally called out. So I left Cheam Common School in 1954 and went to Rutlish, a grammar school about three miles away in Merton. It was our first choice, and I looked forward to going. I liked the uniform, and the school played rugby, which I felt sure I would enjoy. They also played cricket, and set aside one term a year for athletics, which was unusual at the time.
Passing the examination to Rutlish led to furious rows with my parents. My birth certificate records me simply as ‘John Major’, although at the font my godmother, a librarian friend of my mother’s with the unlikely name of Miss Fink, slipped in a ‘Roy’, to my father’s fury. He hated the name, and wasn’t too fond of Miss Fink, an exotic lady who had painted fingernails and who smoked Passing Cloud cigarettes. But my father had used two names in his life. Although he was christened ‘Abraham Thomas Ball’, he used ‘Tom Major’ as his stage name and generally thereafter. My elder brother Terry had been registered with ‘Terry’ and ‘Major’ as his Christian names and ‘Ball’ as his surname. Pat was the only one of us to be both christened and registered as ‘Major-Ball’. Now, as I prepared to go to Rutlish, my parents decided to inflict this hybrid name on me. I bitterly objected. It was not my name, and, even worse, it was bound to cause trouble at school.
My mother and father thought it would put me more in tune with the school. I disagreed. My parents were usually kind and biddable, but on this occasion they were intransigent. In battles like this in the 1950s the adults won. And so – in the only cruel act of theirs I ever knew – I became John Major-Ball.
I have often wondered how much this decision affected my attitude to school. A great deal, I think. I got it all out of proportion. It meant I approached Rutlish with a wary unease. I believed I would have to excel at sport and be prepared to use my fists to earn the respect of my peers. Forty years later that may seem an odd judgement, but it was all too real for an eleven-year-old boy mortally embarrassed at sailing under false colours.
At
