John Major: The Autobiography. John Major
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 the time my parents were under great strain. My father’s health was poor and his eyesight was failing. I remember him falling off a stool in the kitchen when I came into the room as he was putting in a lightbulb, and from that day on I watched him deteriorate. Irrationally, but in the way a small boy can, I felt personally responsible for this. My mother’s health was also worsening, with asthma and bronchitis her constant companions.
My father’s garden-ornaments business was in difficulties, too. In 1950 or 1951 he made plans to sell it, pay off his debts and emigrate with us to Canada. His failing eyesight, spotted by a wary doctor at his second medical interview for Canada, put paid to this scheme. In urgent need of capital, he entered into a business deal with a widowed lady. She wanted a job for her sister’s boyfriend and invested £3,000 to install him as my father’s partner. The boyfriend began to learn the business, but disliked it. Soon he began to dislike the widow’s sister too, and they fell out and parted company.
The widow demanded her money back. In his typical my-word-is-my-bond manner, my father hadn’t bothered to legally formalise the deal. Nor did he have the money. He’d spent it. And he was unable to take the matter to court. He was not fit enough, financially or physically, and his case was weak. Why had an experienced man of the world like my father not legalised the deal? He was advised that the episode could be presented as one of a designing businessman out to fleece an innocent widow.
My sister, then only twenty-four, took over, negotiating with the widow and agreeing to repay the money over time, in a vain effort to save our father from having to sell the house. But the debt was many times my sister’s annual salary, and my parents were faced with the loss of all they had. This must have been shattering for them and, I am sure now, explains my parents’ impatience with my protests about changing my name. A few months after I went to Rutlish my father sold our bungalow in Worcester Park for £2,150. My parents seemed to age before my eyes.
We moved to a new home in Brixton in May 1955, when I was twelve. It was a sad comedown, part of the top floor of a four-storey Victorian building in Coldharbour Lane. We had two rooms for the five of us, plus Butch and a pet budgerigar. Dad, Terry and I slept in one room, and Mum and Pat in the other. This second room was used as a dining room and lounge during the day. We shared a cooker on the landing with the other top-floor tenant, a middle-aged bachelor. The lavatory, two floors below, was used by all the tenants. There was no bathroom. We washed at the sink or in a tub.
The house was home over the years to a rich collection of characters. The floor below us was occupied from time to time by three Irish boys who returned home to Ireland whenever taxes were due to be paid. They were huge fun. They played football with me in the street, and one of them, Christie, suggested Pat should run away with him. Another, Michael, actually proposed to her one morning as she left for work, but she wasn’t really listening – a most convenient gift she has always had. Only later did she realise what he had