JUST BORIS: A Tale of Blond Ambition (6 page)

Primrose Hill also saw the start of a frustrating lifetime of musical endeavour, a rare activity in which Boris has been forced to accept almost abject failure. Soon Rachel was producing identifiable tunes from her descant recorder but her brother’s output was annoyingly confined to shrill peeps and a quantity of warm spit. After dismissing the recorder as ‘girly’ at the age of 11, in an effort to ‘express my musical personality,’ as he puts it, he tack led the trombone.
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His considerable wind power went in one end, but out of the other came only parps and what he refers to as a ‘soft, windy afflatus.’ There followed an embarrassing eviction from a rock band – ‘on the not unreasonable grounds that I was the only would-be bass guitarist in
history who could not play the opening bars of “Smoke on the Water.”’ Finally, at 17 he took up the piano and fell at the first fence, failing his Grade 1 despite ‘months of brow-beading effort.’
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It is not often that he is obliged to run up the white flag, but the musical challenge does seem to have defeated him.

In November 1972, the Johnson tribe (now numbering four with the addition of another brother, Jo, in late 1971) moved 500 yards away to 174 Regents Park Road. A substantial residence with a decent-sized garden in an elegant street, it marked a considerable rise in the Johnsons’ social and financial standing. A delighted Charlotte was finally able to spread her wings and give each child his or her own bedroom, with rooms to spare. Stanley’s career was beginning to bear financial fruit – boosted by an unexpected $10,000 cheque from Mr Rockefeller, with unintended irony, for ‘continuing good work’ on population control. As Stanley himself puts it, he has been ‘dogged’ by good luck all his life.

For once, he had wisely turned down another position in the US – although he initially accepted before recoiling from the prospect of subjecting Charlotte to yet another trans-Atlantic domestic wrench. But only a few weeks after moving to Regents Park Road, the young family were in any case uprooted once again, this time to a location that would help define Boris’s life and provide him with some of his clearest, if not fondest, childhood memories. They were leaving their new home for another country, but this time it was not the US (and at least somewhat closer to home).

Stanley had tired of the ‘ribbing’ received from some in the population control sector. Now widely known as the father of a brood of four, it was clearly time to seek out new pastures where his own birth control techniques, or lack of them, would attract less comment. Of course, by the time he finished siring children, Stanley had raised his tally to six.

As usual on Planet Johnson, something turned up. This time it was a job in the environment sub-directorate at the European Commission in Brussels, something of a pioneering role as Stanley was one of the first British officials to be appointed following Britain’s accession to the European Community in January 1973. While Charlotte was
clearly not enthused, Stanley took her silence to indicate assent, or at least, in his words, an amber rather than red light. In April 1973, la famille Johnson set off across the Channel to Brussels. The Belgian and European capital, cowering below what often feel like the greyest skies in Europe, has a peculiar hold on Boris and his family. Such is the poor quality of light in this corner of Belgium that the late Roy Jenkins, when president of the Commission, regularly railed at what he deemed the ‘Brabant gloom.’ In those days, the bi-lingual city (French/Flemish) lacked the romance and glamour of Paris or the arty edginess of Amsterdam. Ranks of stolid bourgeois, early twentieth-century houses were deliberately left scruffy to avoid attracting the attentions of the ever-vigilant Belgian taxman and the modern European Community buildings near the Rond Point Schuman were indeed exercises in slap-sided ugliness.

Despite the weather and the drabness, not to mention the fact that it became the setting for a great deal of childhood pain and loneliness, the Johnsons seem curiously drawn to Brussels, returning time and again for work or study. For Boris, this was to be where he was first really singled out academically, where his mother suffered a nervous breakdown and his parents split up; where he made his name in journalism, where he lived with both his wives, divorced one and his first child was born. On his first visit, the family would stay for six formative years (the longest he himself had lived anywhere).

Home was initially a rented home in the leafy suburb of Uccle, although this was soon exchanged for a larger house the Johnsons bought nearby. For the grown-ups (working ones, anyway), Brussels’ life was dazzlingly Continental. Lunch was sacrosanct and began at 12.45, and no one scheduled afternoon meetings until 3.15. A fine Belgian lunch was washed down with equally fine wine, everyone conversed in French and no one worked that hard, especially in the afternoon.

Meanwhile, Boris spent two years at school in Brussels, learning to be a ‘good European’ and rapidly becoming fluent in accent-less French. Although as an adult he has frequently played down his gift for foreign languages – adopting when it suits the classic ‘Brit abroad’ ‘peter pan and wendy’
assault on French vowels and syntax – he is virtually bi-lingual and proficient in three more languages.

As luck would have it, the Wheelers were also in Brussels, having moved over from Washington. Boris was able to revive his friendship with the quiet, but forthright Marina, who attended the same school. It is fair to say she was not much impressed by the clever young blond and his increasingly flamboyant attempts to attract her attention. Indeed, he was ‘generally to be avoided,’ she decided.

While Stanley enjoyed his new job and social life enormously, life was less fun for Charlotte and the children. Brussels in those days was a dull, stuffy place with little to offer those not involved in the stimulating business of European integration. For children especially, it lacked excitement. The environmentalist Oliver Tickell recalls: ‘My father [Sir Crispin Tickell, chef de cabinet to Roy Jenkins when commission president from 1977] and Stanley made friends in Brussels, but we knew the Johnson children less as we as a family deliberately chose not to spend too much time there. It was then a desperately dull place and we avoided it.’

Rachel has even bleaker memories, detached as they were from the comparative liveliness of central Brussels by the gloomy shadows of the Bois de la Cambre. She has told friends how the Johnson children, ‘had to be close to survive. Brussels was a very strange place in the early days, with people feeling they were away from home and so maybe the ordinary rules didn’t apply. People didn’t work that hard like they do now, so they had other distractions, but that meant that stuck out on the outskirts of town where we were, it had the feel of that Hollywood movie
Ice Storm
[set in a New York commuter suburb, also cut off by woods]. There was the same bleakness, the disconnection’. She has described it as a time when ‘our parents were breaking up – and breaking down. It was very hard, and Boris and I became very close as a way of dealing with it.’

Though now financially comfortable, for the Johnsons home life had become desperate. These were troubled and tortuous times, particularly for Boris as the eldest and his confidante, Rachel. As a result, they formed an unusually close bond, one that persists to this day. Stanley embarked on a series of affairs and after years of coping
with his long absences, the constant moves and his infidelity, Charlotte was in a state of collapse. There were many names in the frame, including the wife of the editor of a major British newspaper. ‘She is a very, very nice woman, but the number of people he had affairs with, Charlotte found it very hard to put up with,’ recalled Anthony Howard. She told friends that her husband was ‘one amazing womaniser.’
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Even her growing reputation as a painter, with an exhibition in a gallery in the smart Sablon district of central Brussels, failed to rescue her from despair.

In 1974, a year after moving to Brussels when her youngest child Jo was not yet three and Boris just 10, Charlotte had a nervous breakdown. She was admitted to the Maudsley Hospital in London for nine months, suffering from depression. As she herself says: ‘It was terrible because I’d had before this all that time when I was so, so close to the children and then I disappeared.’
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To this day, just talking about those times brings tears to her eyes – particularly the thought of Boris and his siblings leaving her in hospital to return to Brussels after a brief visit. Friends say she used to worry terribly about her children’s safety. ‘I went to see her in hospital when she was painting these haunting pictures,’ Howard recalled. ‘She painted children climbing up trees – mad, very powerful pictures. In the background there was an idea of evil spirits.’

Until she and Stanley were divorced, Charlotte was often in and out of hospital. The depths of her depressions were undoubtedly frightening for everyone. Boris’s life, which had revolved around the arty, sensitive, warm and cerebral mother known as ‘Mama’, would never be the same again. Her absence may account for much of the flamboyance, deliberate cheerfulness and resilience now associated with him and his siblings. ‘If you’re fearful when you’re young, or you’re growing up in a gloomy environment, you may well just decide to tap dance your way out of it,’ says Sarah Sands, the journalist who knows both Rachel and Boris well. Maybe, as an adult, you try to over-compensate for the gaps in your childhood by almost obsessively seeking public acclaim in what Rachel’s husband Ivo Dawnay only half-jokingly refers to as the Johnsons’ ‘severe case of Attention Deficit Disorder.’ ‘It was grim, there’s no doubt about it,’ confirms Rachel.
‘We had a succession of deeply unpleasant Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker au pairs, who would gang up against us.’
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Charlotte returned, but was not ‘entirely well’ for another two or three years.

Stanley, who had been absent during so much of their lives, was now sole parent in charge. However, this was not a role to which ‘Dada’ was accustomed and a solution was quickly found, at least for the eldest pair. ‘My line on parenting has been very straightforward throughout,’ he explains. ‘It’s too important to be left to parents.’
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So in September 1975, when Boris was 11 (and Rachel merely 10), they were packed off to Ashdown House, a preparatory boarding school in Forest Row, East Sussex and known as a feeder for the great public schools. Charlotte hints it was Stanley’s decision to send them away, rather than hers, largely absent as she was. ‘It was kind of what my husband wanted and my grip on things was not great,’ she says.
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What’s more, they were expected to make the cross-Channel journey to school by themselves, an experience that perhaps goes some way towards explaining their intolerance of weakness or hesitancy in others.

‘My parents used to leave me and my 11-year-old brother at the Gare du Nord in Brussels with a packed lunch and a few francs to buy chips on the cross-Channel ferry,’ chirps Rachel. ‘We would take the train to Ostend, then the ferry to Dover and the train to Victoria; and after a brief pit stop at the paedophile-packed Cartoon Cinema, we would shovel ourselves and our trunks onto the train to East Grinstead. It took a whole day.’
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Typically, the unusually resourceful pair made the trip without major incident but there was one hair-raising occasion when, returning at the end of a term, they managed to board the train to Moscow rather than Brussels. True to form, Rachel likes to recount the story with hoots of laughter, but she and Boris were certainly forced to face the misadventures of life from a very early age.

The family are all too aware of how difficult it must have been for Stanley to pick up the pieces after Charlotte’s sudden departure. ‘They’re very loyal to their dad and protective of him. I suppose he had to do more than he expected because of Charlotte’s illness,’ says a close friend. Indeed, Rachel dedicated her novel
Shire Hell
to: ‘My
father, for everything’. But the same friend also believes the children inevitably suffered from the absence of their beloved Mama. What is certain is that Rachel took on an early cosseting role beyond her years, playing ‘Wendy’ to Boris’s ‘Peter Pan’ and her younger brothers’ ‘Lost Boys’. ‘There is something of the child-carer in both Boris and Rachel,’ observes the journalist and friend Sarah Sands. Another close friend adds, ‘they all seem slightly in need of mothering, a bit vulnerable underneath the bluster. They became unusually close, all of them. Jo, for instance, became very attached to Rachel. When she had her first baby, he didn’t seem to know how to react. He certainly behaved very oddly – I think he was jealous.’

Charlotte and Stanley separated just before the Christmas of 1978. On a grey December’s afternoon, he drove her to Zaventem airport, on a desolate plain outside Brussels, returning alone to the former family home in Uccle. Afterwards, he wrote a poem about the split – it says much about the Johnsonian approach to life:

During reflective moments, Stanley has said he blames himself entirely for the breakdown of the marriage: ‘I do not in any way wish to minimise the distress that can be caused to a family by separation and divorce. I felt desperately sorry for the children. Happily, Charlotte and I have tried to keep our relationship on the friendliest footing possible.’
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It is to the credit of both that they are complimentary of each other as parents but friends of Charlotte, such as James Le Fanu, say she has never forgiven Stanley, rarely sees him by choice and was angry that she ‘barely featured’ in his autobiography. Boris has sought to avoid taking sides: it is instructive that he dedicates his novel,
Seventy-Two Virgins
, to both parents, with the Latin phrase ‘optimus parentibus’.