Flying Free (5 page)

Major Tony Salter plainly had no medical knowledge whatever. Our explanations did not impress him. He was crimson with anger. He was about to send us to the headmaster, which would have resulted in suspension or even expulsion, but I remembered the lesson learned two years ago.

‘Oh, hell. I’m sorry, sir,’ I said. ‘But it was infernally boring up there, and having the pub right next door… Well, it was too much. We blundered badly. I’m sorry.’

It did the trick. Salter’s lips twisted for a while like caterpillars racing. He frowned very sternly. His medal-ribbons continued to rise and fall, but their motion seemed to slow. Then I glimpsed the ghost of a smile at the corner of his lips. ‘Farage, Pipkin, you are loathsome and lowly specimens of a very low life-form…’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And you have let the side down not only badly but, which is worse, conspicuously badly.’

‘Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.’

‘Nonetheless, I grant that the temptation placed in your way was considerable and it was improvident and discourteous of us not to have foreseen it. Whilst I MIGHT…’ – he raised his voice above another snakepit susurration of ‘sorry, sir’s – ‘Whilst I might have excused a visit, albeit illegal, to the pub, the inability to hold your drink and your
consequent releasing of it all over our vehicle and kit is inexcusable. Do I make myself clear?’

‘Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.’

‘Drink providently, boys, and do not run before you can walk, or, in your case, stagger before you can march.’

Our punishment, fittingly enough, I suppose, consisted in a great deal of mind-numbing square-bashing after school.

I seriously considered the army as a career after that. I even went for an interview with a view to taking a short-service commission. Although I was eager to leave school, which seemed to me to have given me all that it could, I suppose that what I really wanted was merely to continue it in another form – the unchallenging camaraderie, the duties performed with undeserved ease, the travel, the jaunty social life. I was directionless. I merely wanted amusement and challenges to overcome.

Two things dissuaded me, thank God, from entering a peacetime army.

One was my total inability to obey orders without question.

The other was that the City, that Emerald City which had inspired my dreams since infancy, was now booming and glittering as never before.

And it wanted me.

I was of course replicating my father’s initial disastrous career, though, thumb in bum, mind in neutral, like most adolescent boys, this did not cross my mind.

The City had always been for me a fairy-tale playground, an Oz in which vast sums were won and lost and somewhat smaller but in scale equally impressive sums were spent on good times. The City was anything but domestic; it was, by definition, anything but suburban. It was the heart of things, and the richest, best oxygenated blood bubbled there.

Just as, in early childhood, I had rejected the comforts of the hearth to go acquisitively rummaging about the countryside, so the army and the City represented repudiations of a mother’s concerns, of the siren songs of women in general. (Playful girls were somehow not included in this
category. I could respond to their song, moor overnight and weigh anchor the next morning.)

And my mother duly played her part. She made my replication of my dad’s career a certainty by expressing her concern. She wanted me to stay on at school and go to university, acquire specific expertise in specific subjects, develop sensitivity, become someone. She thought that I would make a good barrister, which, as she pointed out, was a service, still earned lots of money and left the door open should I wish to change direction and go, for example, into politics.

I laughed.

I was not concerned to perform a service. I had no desire to enter politics. I did not want to take instructions from anyone. I did not see the future as a small steam train on which I might play a useful part as stoker or steward. It was a giant, thundering, brightly lit express and it was pulling away from the station right now. Maggie was taking care of the driving. All I had to do was jump on and open the champagne.

It would bear me to – well, where? I did not really consider. Boxes at Royal Ascot came into it, and long days at Lord’s catching glimpses through mint-leaves and ice of Viv Richards, smiting like the Old Testament God.

The idea of spending three years at university, ‘faffing around’ as I called it, whilst the train raced on was quite ridiculous.

A similar argument weighed against that short-service commission. By the time that I emerged from army or university, my contemporaries would be driving Porsches and would be on Roederer Cristal drip-feeds. I knew the rate of attrition in the City. I expected to be burned out by the time I was thirty – burned out, but very, very rich.

So, as I polished off my O-levels with accustomed ease, I was nipping up to town to eye up the terrain. My father and my seniors at school who had gone on before welcomed me. They took me to Gows in Old Broad Street where I ate dozens of oysters, drank champagne cocktails and relaxed amidst brays, barks, guffaws and good yarns.

I paid visits to the Stock Exchange, Lloyds, discount houses, looking for my niche. I knew just one thing. I did not want to be known as ‘someone’s boy’, and my father was a well-known character on the Exchange… 

The solution was found, as so many solutions are, on the golf course and on the doorstep.

West Kent Golf Club undulates between our house and Downe village. I was playing off a handicap of four at the time, and one snowy afternoon shortly before Christmas I found myself pitted against Bob McPhie. I barely knew him. I had no idea what he did beyond the usual ‘something in the City’. He was just ‘something in the City’ and a familiar face on the golf course. As we played, I outlined my ambitions to him on clouds of vapour.

We stomped back into the clubhouse rubbing our hands and shedding balls of ice. We ordered pints of Shepherd Neame, knocked back the first round in a single draught, then settled down in armchairs to thaw out and drink at leisure.

‘Tell you what,’ said Bob (though at this stage I still called him ‘sir’ like any well brought up boy), ‘I happen to be managing director of a little concern called Maclaine Watson on the London Metal Exchange. I think it might suit you. Why don’t you come up and take a look in a couple of weeks?’

I went home. I researched the Metal Exchange. I grew more and more excited. Christmas seemed interminable. I was grumpy and impatient. I really could not see why goodwill to all men, glockenspiels and filthy mulled wine could not be put in cold storage until my important business was done.

They say in the country that, if snow remains beneath the hedgerows, more will come to pick it up. The snow melted, but lacy tatters remained beneath the hawthorn and holly bushes well into January. I discounted the old country wisdom.

The evening before I was to head up to London, I polished my black brogues. I starched and pressed my sharpest shirt. I hung a dark suit and a neutral silk tie on the door. I set my alarm. I have never slept much, but the prospect of tomorrow’s adventure meant that I grabbed just four restless hours before I got up. Perhaps I could catch an early train and stroll around the City a bit before keeping my appointment.

The air tasted of batteries. I groaned. I looked out on blackness, but through the swirling strobe lighting of a blizzard. 

The garden was already fat with snow. I switched on the radio. ‘… blizzard … only essential journeys…’ said the man cheerily. ‘The following roads are impassable … cars reported stuck overnight … and here’s the Pretenders’ latest, “Brass…”’

I dressed hurriedly. I had difficulty with the cufflinks because my hands were shaking so much. I went downstairs and opened the front door. Snow swirled in and pattered on the flags. I looked out at the lane.

There was no lane. Drifts had turned a sunken lane into a sporadically broken ramp to the sagging, surprise-by-death-mid-dribble hawthorns and willows.

It all depends on your point of view, I suppose. We now see the young Farage at his most determined or, as it now seems to me, his most demented.

It had surely been possible to call Bob McPhie, explain the situation of which no doubt he was already well aware, and postpone my visit until another day.

Not I.

I pulled on a tweed cap and a Barbour. I placed my shoes in a carrier-bag.

And I walked six miles in the darkness to Orpington station.

No. That is a euphemism. I staggered, plunged and slithered six miles to Orpington station. I ingested a great deal of snow en route. I spat out still more. My trousers and socks became drenched, my eyelashes became beaded, but I made it to my train in time.

And oh, it was worth it.

The Metal Exchange is the last remaining market to retain Open Outcry Trading – deals shouted out on the floor. I loved the hubbub, the urgency, the sudden ripples that spread through the crowd in response to tremors thousands of miles away. It was the purest theatre, filled at once with high drama and with comedy.

I was shown around the offices. They were old-fashioned, collegiate, informal and friendly. I must have been glassy-eyed when at last I sat down opposite Bob at the Paris Grill on London Wall. He pointed out to me the neckties which decorate the walls, all cut from customers by waiters on special occasions. We ordered smoked salmon and chargrilled fillet steak béarnaise with chips and two bottles of Beaune. I was in the leafy suburbs of heaven, following the signs to the City Centre.

‘Well, old chap,’ said Bob as we reverted to port. ‘If, after you leave school, you should want a job, there’ll be one waiting for you at Maclaine Watson.’

Suddenly, I was full of peace, merriness and goodwill to men. My future was assured. All my Christmases had come at once.

I was sixteen then. I considered that I had outgrown school.

I sat my A-levels and acquired undistinguished grades in history, geography and economics.

I was unconcerned. I knew where I was going.

One or two teachers deserved better reward for their faith in me. In particular there was my inspiring history teacher, David Gregory, who awoke a passion for history which has remained with me to this day, and my headmaster – ‘The Master’, as he was called – David Emms, who, to the astonishment of my peers and the outrage of many in the staff commonroom who particularly deplored my spirited defence of Enoch Powell, made me a prefect in that last year.

In my leaving report, David Emms wrote: ‘Life at the school will not be the same without him,’ which could be read as a tactful statement of the obvious but which I hoped and believed to be approving and just mildly regretful at my departure. It was. I spoke to him at the Founder’s Day lunch in 2009. He told me that he had voted for me in the European election. I felt really rather proud at that.

For now, I just wanted to get cracking. Almost all my contemporaries were going on to university. Many were taking a year off in which to travel and learn languages. I could not believe that they could be so profligate with their youth.

I nearly attained glory for the school through golf. I was captain of the school team. Throughout a busy fixture-list in the Lent and summer terms, we did well. One of the principal events was the national schools’ championship, sponsored by Aer Lingus. We won our way through to the regional finals at Foxhills in Surrey and had good reason to expect that we would acquit ourselves well here too.

The course was waterlogged. A stiff, rain-speckled gale buffeted us from every direction. We waited in hope that the weather would ease. If anything, it got worse.

At last, it was resolved that the event would be reduced to a nine-hole strokeplay contest. The brief day was drawing to a close as I came off the eighth green to be informed by Giles Jackson, the master in charge, that I only needed a par four on the last hole to take what was almost certainly an unassailable lead.

I drove. The contact was sweet. The ball soared and sped towards the green. Then the wind woofed and pounced. The ball veered to the right. If it had done as it was told, it would have ended up on a cosy green carpet. As it was, its disobedient behaviour left it in deep, drenched scrub, nestling up against a steeply sloping shard of flint.

I was going to say that ‘it all went downhill from there on’. I wish it had. I might have putted it for the same score or even less. As it was, I took a sorry double-bogey six and finished in joint fourth overall. Traditionally, the winner of the event received a golf scholarship at Arizona College.

I might never have made it as a top-flight golfer, but it would have been an adventure. I suspect that I would have accepted. I suspect that I would have enjoyed the States. It is no consolation, I am sure, but when the EU Commissioners curse the name of Farage and wonder how I ever came to be the bane of their otherwise cushy lives, they can blame it all on the English weather and a Surrey flint.

On 1 September 1982, I strode into Maclaine Watson, shed my suit jacket and deposited a gold pen, a lighter and two packets of Rothmans on my desk.

‘Hmm,’ said a nearby colleague approvingly. ‘Good start!’

We worked beneath a strand of tobacco smoke. Our conversations were punctuated with the ‘pft’ sound as cigarettes were pulled from our lips. We worked hard, but we did not consider it work any more than a Tudor monarch arose from bed and groaned, ‘Oh, no! Not hunting again!’

Because that was what it was – hunting, with all the speed and risk and demands upon your intuition and nerve which the word implies.

And, like Tudor hunters, having amassed a goodly quarry, we adjourned to the tavern. It was a bit like hunting too because there were days when, barring freak events, there would be no scent and all the world’s traders would have gone to ground. On such afternoons, our office – no, the entire Exchange – was like the
Mary Celeste
and there was a constant surging, heaving swell in the pubs, wine-bars and restaurants.

On good scenting days, however, the floor was in full raucous cry and we, the huntsmen, hollered into our telephones over and over and whooped on the rare occasions that we laid them down. The coverts were busting with game, and when, late at night, we finally turned homeward, a fine bag of small fortunes was hanging in the larder.

To my no doubt puerile, materialistic mind, this was very heaven, though the serpent had already entered the garden (I sometimes wonder if this is why creationists cling so tenaciously to their improbable doctrine as literal fact rather than as beautiful myth, because it casts men and women as children trespassing against a stern but kindly parent rather than as autonomous adults entitled to take risks and accept consequences).

Maclaine Watson was a very old-fashioned, liberal, English outfit. It had lately, however, become a wholly owned subsidiary of Wall Street’s Drexel Burnham Lambert, whose ‘No guts, no glory’ motto was to inspire the barely fictional character Gordon Gekko in
Wall Street
and was to lead the company to sensational bankruptcy in 1990. We had a free rein for now, but the Americans were already in situ and plainly regarded our easy-going but efficient style with misgiving.

I started out as a backroom boy and spent five months on warrants at an income of £4,000 per annum. Although I memorably lost a silver warrant worth £90,000, which was never found despite a thorough ransacking of the building, I did well and was soon moved to the front office where I could schmooze clients, find business and, best of all, authorise trades.

At the age of eighteen, I was handling millions and drinking more or less continuously.

Of course, everyone was drinking more or less continuously. The City then was staffed largely by Essex wide-boys whose ambitions were measured in sports cars, and public-school dropouts, either too thick or too sharp and bloody-minded, like me, to stay on the slow but steady travelator to respectability. I did not quite belong in either category. I got on well with both.

I mistrust nostalgia. Not long ago, I was on a beach in north Cornwall on a sunny but sporadically cloudy day when a prone sunbather murmured sleepily, ‘I can remember the days when a patch of blue like that would have lasted an hour and more…’

There was a mumble of agreement. I too knew exactly what he meant. Then a tiny giggle bubbled up. It took a while before the absurdity of the statement percolated through the sun-drenched brain-cells, and then even
the speaker had to acknowledge that skies had probably not gone downhill since the good old days.

Nonetheless, I, in common with all old City hands, am nostalgic for those days when we floated on a smoky golden haze of champagne vapour and anyone could affix a brass plate to his front door declaring that he was a trader in futures.

Competent cavaliers thrived, just as competent cavaliers fare well as officers in wartime and with imaginative and discursive teachers, just as the Vincent Mulchrones – well, the one and only Vincent Mulchrone, but he had his fellows if not his peers – caused sober hacks in Fleet Street to essay alcoholism just in case it was the secret. It was an era of ‘wrong but wromantic’ excellent amateurs, where today we are ruled by ‘right but repulsive’ college-spawned clones.

The age of mediocracy was dawning.

I acknowledge, however, that the rate of attrition was high. Many friends from that era who existed only to earn now exist only in urns, having burned up twice. Their livers rotted, their flash cars crashed or they sought more enduring oblivion, this time without hangover.

That’s OK. They chose to enter the Darwinian gladiatorial arena. They knew the potential costs and would have rejected protection had it been offered. There were others, however, at whom the right but repulsive mediocrats will with some justice point – the parents, widows, children and the aspirants who copied them though plainly unfit – who were caught in the flames as they crashed and burned, but then the same is true of service personnel and steeplechase riders. Again, freedom is not negotiable.

We all drank far, far too much according to the advice of those who claim to know best. Some few of us (it has been roughly 10 per cent of the population ever since that notable lush Noah) had that gene which makes one drink too many and a thousand not enough. The worst of it is that we never know until it is too late whether we are of that cursed number.

I was far luckier than I deserved. Given my father’s experience, I should have been alert to the danger of alcoholism. It never crossed my mind. At eighteen, I was drinking throughout the day and night, but youth and adrenalin sustained me.

What was my motivation at that time?

I have many friends whose dreams are filled with wicked women. Their ambitions, when distilled, consist very largely of non-specific sybaritism. These took holidays in the Maldives, dreamed of yellow Lamborghinis and owned gadgets that did nothing much but did it ever so cleverly.

I have friends with clear visions from childhood of the rectory with five acres, a few children, an Aga and a couple of salmon-pools. These took Scottish fishing lodges and spent their weekends with tinkly girls in broderie anglaise petticoats.

I fancied a bit of all these. I liked girls – the wicked and the tinkly variety – but as extra-curricular diversions. I liked country sports. I enjoyed luxuries, but only briefly. The notion of a day’s, let alone a week’s, sybaritism was horrific. Somewhere at the back of my mind was the awareness that one day I would want children and a country house, and that a woman would presumably be necessary for both, but my idea of fun was trading, drinking and trading some more. I wanted life to be one long boys’ club jamboree with occasional bouts of conkers on the Exchange.

I was, in short, a puerile sexist in a puerile sexist world.

Oh, I was never a raucous, discourteous ‘Hooray Henry’. I was too well brought up and perhaps marginally too bright and too sensitive for that. I was as clubbable as ever, and aware of others’ feelings. I simply was not particularly interested in sensual pleasure or in the emotional nakedness necessary for intense personal communication. I preferred the city (or dress or morning) suit which symbolised and assured my cherished independence.

I discovered girls, of course, but even then I was principally concerned only to check that the experience was as pleasant and jolly as anticipated, then to get on with more important things. So I added girls to the list of pleasures (somewhere below trading and convivial drinking and way above, say, television or sleep) to be attended to whenever there was a moment spare. There would be time enough for such weakness when I was ill or old.

Some might accuse me of being scared. I, though no doubt less qualified than some, humbly suggest that I was bloody terrified.

I knew nothing of women (it should be remembered that they were only just beginning to enter the City. Nowadays, if I am scared, it is for far more realistic reasons) and I dreaded domesticity, which seemed to me slow death.

Maybe some will suggest that my subconscious retained the infantile conviction that my father had been harshly judged simply for being a good and gallant chap, and that I was not going to go the same way. Again, some seem to have plausible intuitions, though the thought certainly never then crossed my conscious mind.

All I knew was that, whilst conquests and associations with women were widely thought to confer the laurels of virility, they seemed to me to unman good men. That Antony had seemed like a thoroughly good sort – a toper and a bull-trader – until he started getting all unguent with Cleopatra, and several of my seniors similarly became cautious and sober so soon as they fell into the trap.

I had worlds to conquer. I considered not one of them well lost for a woman.

It was, then, some will persist, my own susceptibility rather than females per se which scared me…

I wish that ‘some’ would shut up.

Who invited them anyhow?

By 1985, I was earning £20,000 a year and still living – or, at least sleeping for an hour or two a day – at the family home.

In October of that year, the International Tin Agreement, a unique worldwide commodity pact which, since 1956, had sought to stabilise the supply of and the demand for tin, exhausted its credit and collapsed. Tin was delisted. The London Metal Exchange faced massive lawsuits from creditors. We brokers were owed hundreds of millions. The phones stopped ringing. There was nothing for us to do.

If I believed that a divinity given to vulgar and profligate drama was shaping my ends, I suppose I should have considered that to be the first indication that not only I but the games to which I had thus far dedicated my adult life were vulnerable and mortal.

If warning it was, I ignored it. I was a high flier. Another meeting on the golf course had opened up the prospect of a job at Rouse, who had a far broader portfolio and so offered me a greater understanding of financial markets. I was to accept the offer the following year at an increased salary with a very attractive bonus-scheme.

On 25 November, I enjoyed a very good, very hot curry over a prolonged lunch. In the evening, I engaged in a ferocious pub argument about the Anglo-Irish agreement, sustained, as was only decorous and fair, by English ale and Irish whiskey.

I was of the opinion that Thatcher and Co. had betrayed the Unionists. With what passes for maturity, I acknowledge that the declaration of an end to a blood feud is the prerogative of a truly strong ruler and is always painful, but it still hurts to consider the vile murderers who walked free and crowing from gaol after mere months. I believe that the new generation of trigger-happy pseudo-Republican punks believe themselves validated by that pact.

Right or wrong, I was, as ever, fighting my corner with particular vigour and enjoyment that night. It was an inconclusive but enjoyable bout, and I then decided that perhaps I should honour my mum’s house with my presence for a few hours.

I emerged at Orpington station still rehearsing arguments in my head. I remember lighting a cigarette and stepping from the station into darkness. I remember the soft veils of rain dragged along the street, the squirming pools of light beneath the lamps. There was speckled breeze in my hair and on my cheek. The pavement rustled beneath my feet as though wrapped in clingfilm.

I swaggered down to the pelican crossing. I grasped the lamp’s stalk and swung myself into the street.

I remember nothing more.

Others do. The couple sheltering in the shop doorway, the man walking his bull-terrier down the opposite pavement, the driver of the Volkswagen Beetle – they remember the tritone whine of brakes, the thud, a shout from somewhere. They looked up or span around.

And they saw a man fly.

I am told that I – or a body which had lately been mine but was by now unoccupied – did it beautifully. There was, they say, no ungainly flapping or flailing. I appeared composed, almost relaxed. Had style judges been there with score-cards, I would have been awarded an 8 or even (so the girl of the couple says, but maybe she’s just being nice) a 9. I vaulted that VW fully extended, without touching the bonnet or the roof. The parabola of my flight perfectly matched the famous curve of the car.

It was the landing which undid all that good work. Even in the
high-risk
, flashy, modern school, landing directly on the head is not considered stylish. It causes a certain … crumpling. The smooth line which I had thus far described became a sort of fractured swastika, an angular scribble on the wet pavement.

At the time, style no longer mattered much to me.