In yesterday's extract from his eye-popping memoirs, GYLES BRANDRETH recalled unforgettable encounters with the Duchess of Cornwall and a future head of MI5.
Today, in the third and final extract, he explains how his indulgent parents gave him boundless self-confidence...
There is a photograph in one of the family albums of me, aged ten, in my playroom on Christmas Day, 1959.
Beneath it my father has written: ‘A few of my presents.’ There are at least 60 presents on display. Yes, anything I wanted as a child, I was given. That I was the long-longed-for son — after three much older daughters — made all the difference to how I was treated.
I was the miracle child, the golden wonder. My wife says my father was still ‘banging on about it’ when she first met him, 20 years after I was born.
I was spoiled, of course — and there are moments of bad behaviour that have haunted me ever since.
For example, to this day I cannot take the Victoria Street exit from Victoria Tube station in London without reliving (and regretting) the afternoon in 1955 when we went on a family outing to see a new film called A Kid For Two Farthings.
GYLES BRANDRETH: To this day I cannot take the Victoria Street exit from Victoria Tube station in London without reliving (and regretting) the afternoon in 1955 when we went on a family outing to see a new film called A Kid For Two Farthings
I did not know much about the film, except that it starred Celia Johnson (one of Ma’s favourites) and was about animals (so my sisters were keen).
As we came out of the underground, we saw two cinemas facing us across the road: one was showing A Kid For Two Farthings; the other was showing Laurence Olivier’s new film of Shakespeare’s Richard III. ‘That’s the film I want to see,’ I announced.
I was seven years old. I don’t know if I threw a tantrum or just burst into tears. Either way, I got my way. We all went to see Richard III.
It’s a shaming story. So why did I behave like this? Because I was pampered and indulged and accustomed to getting my own way.
At Christmas in 1959, we went to see Ben-Hur which starred Charlton Heston, then the highest-paid, most sought-after movie actor in the world. Some years later, in the 1980s, I met Mr Heston on the sofa at TV-am.
We were about to go on air and I sat down next to him and put my cup of coffee on the table in front of me. As I put it down, Mr Heston picked it up and began to drink from it.
At a party late one night (at a funfair at the home of the publisher Robert Maxwell, of all places), he told me exactly what he thought of me, punched me in the face and knocked me to the ground
He meant no harm. He simply assumed that everything that came within his orbit was for him.
That’s how I was as a little boy. I hadn’t played Moses like Charlton Heston, but my parents had brought me up as one of God’s great gifts to the world — and I behaved accordingly. They treated me as ‘the special one’ and so my sense of entitlement knew no bounds.
Since, I have learnt that a boundless sense of entitlement can be dangerous. When I was 19, I took a fancy to a girl aged 22 and pursued her night and day — despite the fact that she was married to my friend.
I wanted her, so I felt I should have her — and she seemed quite keen at the time. Her husband, understandably, was not amused. At a party late one night (at a funfair at the home of the publisher Robert Maxwell, of all places), he told me exactly what he thought of me, punched me in the face and knocked me to the ground.
And yet, a boundless sense of entitlement can be advantageous, too. It means you aim for things you might not otherwise aim for, believing that everything you want will simply fall into your grasp.
In fact, I rather think that anything I have really wanted, I have had.
AT MY junior school, the Lycée Francais, in South Kensington, I had rather assumed I was the darling of the class. Not so. My energy and enthusiasm were welcomed, but my concentration was poor, my application a bit hit and miss, and my relentless, frenetic ‘showing-off’ detrimental to both my popularity and my potential.
I was the class clown who never stopped talking. It was a serious issue that I needed to address.
The teachers at the Lycée, the headmaster reported to my parents, had a nickname for me: ‘Le bavard’ [the chatterbox].
My parents did not share any of this with me at the time, or if they did I don’t remember it. I am quite distressed to discover it now.
The London mansion flats we rented — in and around South Kensington — were spacious, but never grand. The furniture was serviceable. If you can remember the television series Rumpole Of The Bailey, and can picture the flat the Rumpoles lived in, you will know exactly what my parents’ succession of flats was like.
I don’t think we had a cleaning lady. We had a carpet sweeper, I recall, that distributed more fluff than it collected, and a squeegee mop with a broken handle held together with one of Pa’s old pyjama cords.
All that I have been ever since, I started being at Bedales. My wife finds this a bit depressing. Gyles Brandreth at New College, Oxford, 1968
We didn’t have a washing machine. My sisters and I took the laundry to the launderette once a week (curiously, I enjoyed watching the washing go round and round: I studied my reflection in the porthole and pretended I was looking into a film camera and adjusting my features for my close-up).
I must have gone on playdates, but I don’t remember many. I don’t see my childhood in terms of my family and friends. I see it mostly in terms of me — me alone, and me busy.
So busy. What on earth was I doing? I was living in my own world in my vast playroom. Walking the streets of West London as though I owned them.
I have a distinct memory of riding my tricycle along the pavement, aged four and unaccompanied, all the way from the
