Chapter 23: Big News And Big Business

July 1971, age 16

After a week at Glastonbury, two weeks in the States and a brief excursion to Africa, I was looking forward to home comforts and my own bed. I was also hotly anticipating the following Monday morning when I would start flying lessons.

There were two weeks left of July (flying in the mornings, company stuff in the afternoons), followed by our usual three-week family holiday at the villa in Italy.

But all those wonderful plans went to shit with the news that Charlie and his mum were leaving us.

The tearful little boy in front of me wasn’t alone in being upset. Losing family was my nightmare, and Charlie had definitely become family during his seven months with us. I only avoided tears of my own by letting anger take control.

I turned to Dan and vented: “I told you to deal with this months ago!”

“I did try”, he replied, quietly. “Ruth is determined to move back home. She’s got a life back in Sheffield — friends and family. I’ve tried offering her a job; I offered to bring her parents down here and set them up in a nice house; I offered to make her a millionaire. But I can’t force her to want to stay here. Mind control is sadly not one of my powers. She’s already accused me of trying to buy her son. Reluctantly, Finn, we’ll have to accept this.”

I was in zombie-mode as I searched the house, finding Charlie’s mum in her bedroom. We stared at each other for a second, and then I dropped to my knees.

“Please, Ruth, I’m begging you: please don’t take my little brother away.”

She tried to downplay. “You’ll still be able to see him. You’re always welcome to visit us, and Charlie can come down here for holidays. But we need to get back home so Charlie can go back to his school in September. He misses his friends.”

“Please, I’m begging you. Think again. Please.” My eyes were leaking.

“Finn, get up. You look silly down there.”

“PLEASE!”

“No, Finn. You’ve been ... extraordinarily kind to us. You’ll never know just how grateful I am. But we don’t belong here. Can you understand that?”

“YES! But I don’t belong here either! Mum and dad would never have dreamt I’d end up in a big house like this. But you get used to it. Please, Ruth, give it a chance. You’re family now. We love you.”

She sat on the end of her bed and put an arm around my shoulders. “You love Charlie. I know that. And he loves you too. And he couldn’t have a better big brother. But I’ve thought long and hard, and this is the right thing for us. That’s my final word.”

The tears were flowing and I my speech halting. “Will you ... at least ... stay two more weeks ... come to Italy as planned. It would be cruel ... to steal Charlie’s holiday. I promised I’d teach him to sail.”

She sat back and regarded the pathetic 16-year-old, blubbering on the floor. Then she surprised me by conceding, “Actually, you’re right there. That could best be avoided.”

That was a small ray of hope. She sat thinking things through for a minute.

“Here’s what we’ll do: we’ll stay two more weeks. Then you and your family can take Charlie with you to Italy while I move back to Sheffield. It would be easier to sort things out without him under foot anyway. In return, I want you to bring him up to Sheffield when you get back. And I want you to stay with us at the flat for a few days to help him get settled back in. Deal?”

If this was the best I could get, at least I’d bought some time to change her mind over the next fortnight.

Everyone at home seemed down about them leaving. Caity and Uncle Will particularly. Charlie slept in my bed that night, curled up against me like he’d done when I’d first rescued him. His mum didn’t approve, but I wasn’t about to turn him away.

When Monday morning came, I went for my flying lesson as planned. But my afternoon plans were scrapped unless they were something I could take Charlie to. In any case, school term hadn’t quite finished yet (which I gloated to my sister about), so Charlie’s tutor was still coming in the mornings.

The flying was awesome. Time at the controls of a powered aircraft was long overdue as far as I was concerned. Air Cadets had been a useful introduction, but they had no sense of urgency about getting me through PPL, so I’d lost patience and gone private. Each morning, I made the 25-minute journey to our company’s factory at Brooklands, which had its own airstrip. I would do an hour of ground school followed by three hours airborne in a Beagle Pup. By the time my 17th birthday rolled around in March, I would have more than enough hours logged for my license.

Brian Trubshaw, BAC’s chief test pilot, was spending a fortnight in London, staying at a swanky hotel at our expense. I’d met him several times, got on well with him, and he proved to be a great teacher. Having already flown a glider solo, it wasn’t a huge jump to fly powered. Takeoffs were exciting, landings shit scary, and flying at altitude exhilarating. I was well and truly hooked, though I did kind of miss the peacefulness of a glider.

That evening, our television made a load pop, scaring the crap out of all of us watching it, and promptly gave up the ghost. The adults explained that machines have limited lifespans, and this wasn’t entirely unexpected. We went television shopping the following afternoon to avert the crisis of no TV, but the incident sowed a seed in my mind that took a few days to germinate into a conscious thought.

I led Dan to the safe-room for this conversation.

“You said machines have a limited lifespan. Yes?”

“Yes?”

“So one day, the iPad could just stop working?”

“Ah, I see. Yes, I suppose so.”

“That would be bad”, I said, getting a thoughtful nod back. “I’ve been thinking about what we can do to be ready for that day. I ... I think we need to start copying out the books by hand.”

“Finn, there are hundreds of them. It would take forever.”

“Well, we haven’t got forever. But some would be better than none, wouldn’t it? Do you have a better idea?”

Dan considered his next words carefully.

“Your grandfather didn’t want me to tell you this yet: he’s already made some handwritten notes. Not word-for-word like you’re suggesting, but key things he wanted to emphasise.”

That stunned me. “He didn’t want me to know?”

“I said ‘not yet’, not ‘not ever’. He was very clear that he didn’t want your childhood wrecked, so there are many things you’ve been shielded from. He always tried to balance the need to have you involved, against keeping it age-appropriate. I’m not sure how successful that was, not with some of the life and death stuff you’ve been involved with. But there are still things you don’t know. Your eighteenth birthday is going to be an interesting day.”

“Yeah? Well, there are plenty of things I want answers to. Is there anything that could replace a broken iPad?”

“No, probably not.”

“Then I’m going to start at the beginning and start copying. Even if it takes me thirty years.”

So that added to the long list of things I had on my mind.

Between the Charlie situation, my impending O-Level results, the fucking KGB, Grandpa’s empire of secrets, and of course the ever present teenage drive for sex, I found it very, very useful to fly up into the sky and escape from the world at the controls of a plane.

During those remaining weeks of July, I made just one visit to the office, and I took Charlie with me. Despite what the New York Times had said about ‘playing executive’ I didn’t even wear a suit.

The former conference room on the 32nd floor had been re-furnished and was now officially my office, complete with Executive Assistant: Freya Billingham.

Since meeting her at Glastonbury and accidentally offering her a job, security had vetted Freya very thoroughly. Their file detailed her childhood, school grades, work record, past boyfriends, political views and a host of other things right down to her bank balance and a list of family pets. How they found these things out, I’d rather not know. Dan agreed to hiring her, admitting that I’d need an assistant sooner or later. He did insist on subjecting her to a formal interview with the HR department, who assessed her as a good fit. I liked her a lot, instinctively feeling that I could trust her. So she got the job, and now I’d just have to work hard to avoid being the stereotypical lecherous boss.

We played at calling each other “Miss Billingham” and “Mister Harrison”, which Charlie found very funny. He asked me in a whisper whether she was my girlfriend, to which I answered no and explained what a secretary was. My office had a great view looking down on Soho Square and Oxford Street, with Hyde Park and Buckingham Palace visible in the distance. Charlie loved it, but I think perhaps Freya has a little phobia of heights (which wasn’t in her file).

She gave me a quick summary of various company matters, and then I shocked her with instructions to sit in on high-level corporate meetings whenever convenient. While I was still part-time, she was to spy on everyone from the top down, serving as my eyes and ears and keeping me well informed.

In all, we were in the office for about 25 minutes, which was quite enough. The rest of the afternoon was spent visiting Buckingham Palace to pull silly faces at the guards, along with a few other landmarks including Big Ben and Hamleys.

There were two high-profile events that I couldn’t really avoid. The first was the launch party for our new newspaper. We had bought the Beaverbrook Newspapers from the estate of the late Lord Beaverbrook, encompassing the Daily Express and the London Evening Standard. Now we were doing something radical by launching a free national newspaper, funded entirely by advertising. We already had the printing presses and the distribution network from the other papers. We’d made a deal with British Rail to have help-yourself newspaper stands at every railway station. And we’d been running television ads teasing big stories and a bingo competition. We were even doing a daily fitness-based centrefold with nearly-naked male and female models to compete with The Sun’s infamous Page 3. At least ours couldn’t be accused of being un-PC, as we objectified the sexes in equal measure. Something for everyone!

The Sunday night party had politicians, celebrities and media types. (They’d turn up to anything with free booze.) I felt completely out of place, but Dan thought it was important for me to show my face. Meeting the celebrities was fun. Politicians not so much, though a surprising number knew who I was. I stayed until 10pm when we did a countdown for the presses to start rolling for the first time. Then I was off home to bed.

It was the following morning that the fun began!

When you launch a new paper, you want an eye-popping story for your first front cover. Ours was: ROYAL CORRUPTION SCANDAL!

The courtiers at Buckingham Palace probably had a heart attack, but the story wasn’t about them. It was about the Lockheed Corporation and their bribery of officials around the world, up to and including the Prince Consort of the Netherlands. And from a British perspective, Rolls-Royce was implicated by their association with Lockheed.

We had delivered the story into the laps our new editorial staff fully researched and documented, thanks to the future history books and a team of private investigators. And what a story it was! Fucking hell!! Governments would fall, and the Queen of the Netherlands would abdicate! Our circulation on that first day for The Standard was huge!

When I asked Charlie whether he’d like to go with me to the second unavoidable event, he gave me a resounding yes. It was the launch of a new type of train.

It had been four years since we first started working with British Rail on the ‘tilting train’. The prototype was still in a repetitive cycle of testing, tweaking, focus-grouping and refinement. Comfort and reliability were key. We would not allow it to become ‘queasy rider’.

The Pendolino launch would be some months yet, but the advanced design had also spawned non-tilting offspring. At its core was the basic passenger coach, which BR was calling the Mark III. Unlike the Mark III from the history books, ours had electric plug-doors, angled sides (for tilting), a sealed toilet system (not dump-on-the-track), and modernistic decor. BR now planned a whole family of train models using that body shell, to meet varying requirements of power (diesel, electric overhead, electric 3rd rail), engine position (locomotive or multiple-unit), and seating density (commuter, regional, intercity). Now they just had to find some money to buy the fucking things!

While all that had been going on, our company had also extended its tentacles into another form of transport: airlines. Grandpa had owned a stake in the original Caledonian Airlines, and when they recently wanted to buy British United, we put up the £6.6m. As a result, we now owned a controlling share of Britain’s official second flag-carrier, British Caledonian.

Where our rail and air interests came together was Gatwick, BCal’s base. It desperately needed better connectivity, so we struck a deal with British Rail to build them eight new trains, leased to them at a discounted rate in exchange for them operating a non-stop Gatwick Express from Victoria, where BCal had a check-in terminal. It was a neat synergy.

So, long story short(ish), Charlie and I got to go on the inaugural ride to Gatwick.

When we got to the platform at Victoria Station and saw the train for the first time, Charlie told me, “It looks funny”.

“Why’s that?”

“It’s all curvy.”

Indeed it was. Compared to BR trains of the era, the sleek Pendoline-style front was radical.

I told Charlie, “The newspapers call it a bullet train because the curvy front means it can travel as fast as a speeding bullet!” No chance of that on London’s congested lines.

“Does it really go that fast?”, he asked, wide-eyed.

“Wait and see. Do you like the colour?” Blue was Charlie’s favourite colour, and the train was decked in British Caledonian’s livery of royal blue and gold, their gold rampant lion logo on each door.

He nodded, adding, “I like the Lion.”

After a quick tour of the driver’s cab, Charlie and I settled into our seats for the 30-minute hop down to Gatwick. We did a little plane spotting while we were there, then back. All in all, a fun trip out.

The following afternoon’s entertainment was a trip to Wimbledon park, right opposite the tennis club. We played crazy golf and went rowing on the lake, which was great fun. (At least, when we weren’t being chased by angry swans intent on eating us.)