By Eve Branson
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When I rode pillion on a motorbike, you could say I was a traffic-stopper â€" with one arm clamped round my husband and the other stretched out behind, towing our rather unusual cargo.
The trick was to keep your arm straight. That way, I managed to drag our firstborn up and down hills in his pram.Â
Well, we didn’t have much money and it was an effective mode of baby transport, at least until our son Richard was two years old. Indeed, he thoroughly enjoyed those motorbike outings, looking round with interest at the passing scenery.
Up in arms: Richard Branson's mother Eve has revealed how her eccentricity has rubbed off onto her son. The pair are pictured together at a party
These days, of course, I’d probably be arrested for child cruelty. Even back in the Fifties, some of our stuffy neighbours weren’t that impressed, but I paid no attention to them.
Ever since I can remember, I’ve had an appetite for risk and adventure. So when I became a young mother, I was determined to do everything possible to prevent my children becoming namby-pamby, which was how I viewed the youth of the day.
I never saw a need for a babysitter. Instead, I’d put a mattress on the back seat of our family motor â€" an old baker’s van, which we called the ‘bumpety-bump car’ â€" take the children to wherever we were going, park and leave them inside.
My husband Ted and I felt strongly that, from an early age, children should be full of initiative, enterprise and self-reliance. Though I have to admit that I did once over-step the mark.
Full of fun: Richard Branson is pictured with his sisters Vanessa, left, and Lindy
We were on holiday in Devon and were driving back to my parents’ house. Six-year-old Richard was throwing himself about the car with his usual energy. I stopped the car about a mile from the house and told him to find his own way home.
Ted did wonder if this was a good idea, but Richard didn’t seem to mind the challenge, so we left him to clamber over hedges and wander down the valley and across the fields.
Back at the house, we started to get worried when dusk descended an hour later. Ted sounded the car horn every five minutes, hoping the noise would give Richard a sense of where to go.
By 7pm, two hours after we’d dropped him off, I was beside myself. ‘What have I done?’ I asked Ted.
At 8pm, by which time I was frantic, we had a phone call from the only nearby farm: ‘We’ve got a little blond boy with us who says he’s Richard Branson. Does he belon g to you?’
Richard, quite unaware of the panic, said he’d had great fun roaming the fields and had eventually knocked on the door of the first farmhouse he found.Â
Was it that experience that turned him into an adventurer?Â
My life changed for ever on the night I spotted a tall, blond, handsome man at a party in London.
The way to a man’s heart is surely through his stomach, I told myself, picking up a plate of cocktail sausages. I made my way across the room, unable to take my eyes off him.Â
Right from the start, I knew that former cavalry major Edward James Branson was the man I wanted to marry and to father my children.
That evening, we reminisced about our wartime experiences: he’d served in the Middle East and Italy, and I’d been a trainer of glider pilots and then a signaller.
The man I’d fallen in love with so precipitously turned out to be training as a barrister. After a wonderful romance, we decided we belonged together and married in October 1949.
As neither of us was earning anything, I decided one day to buy a job lot of pillows, which I took apart to make three cushions from each.
Feathers went absolutely everywhere, but I netted £1 profit per cushion by selling them in local shops.
Fortunately, by the time Richard was born in July 1950, Ted had been called to the Bar and we’d been able to buy a derelict 17th century cottage in Surrey for the princely sum of £1,700.
Happy: Eve Branson has told how she could not be any prouder of her hugely successful son. Branson is pictured with his mother, left, and sisters Vanessa and Lini in Minorca in the sixties
To supplement our income, I started teaching ballet in a village hall and expanded my cushion business to include trays and tablemats, some of which I sold to Harrods. The family was growing, too: Lindy arrived in 1953 and Vanessa in 1959.
Fortunately, Ted and I had remarkably similar views on bringing up children. Above all, we wanted them to learn the importance of being a self-starter who was never afraid of a challenge.
We also told them that if you were shy, you were being selfish. Sometimes, we’d drag the children downstairs to sing and recite in front of our dinner guests. They hated it to begin with, but it soon became second nature.
After all, if you can’t risk making a fool of yourself, there’s little chance of achieving anything in this world.
Today, people sometimes accuse Richard of being a show-off. That’s not true â€" he’s just trying to ent ertain other people, a lesson he learned young.
Still, I have to admit it could be difficult to curb his exuberance as a child. When we visited our friend the war hero Douglas Bader, who’d lost his legs in a plane crash, his two wooden replacements would sometimes go missing. The culprit was always Richard.
Not that Douglas seemed to mind. You’d often find him on the golf course playing with six or so children, who happily had to heave him out of bunkers.
Richard could never sit and read a book or do anything quietly; he was always charging around on his bicycle or climbing trees.
By the time he was eight, he had the exuberance of a fiery colt, but we were fearful about pulling on the reins too hard. Meanwhile, I was not only occupied with my crafts business, but also a local JP sitting three times a week, so I couldn’t give him the attention he needed.
At Richard’s first boarding school, Scaitcliffe Preparatory School, he excelled at games, but not much else. Eventually we had to face the fact that he was unruly and cared not one jot about schoolwork.
So we sent him to a crammer that was all work and no games â€" or so we thought.
We later found out that he’d almost been expelled for climbing late one night through the bedroom window of the headmaster’s daughter.
I gather Charlotte, an attractive 18-year-old, had taken quite a fancy to Richard, aged 12. Their illicit rendezvous came to an inglorious end when he was spotted sliding down a drainpipe and running across the playing fields.
At this point, we weren’t quite sure what to make of our rather unusual boy. Ninety per cent of the time, he was impossible to discipline. Yet we knew he had something special going on â€" though, unfortunately, no one could pin down exact ly what it was.Â
Close: Richard Branson is pictured with his proud mother Eve in 2007
Next, we sent him to Stowe public school, where his academic work went from bad to worse.
During the holidays, when he returned to our new home, a 16th-century manor house, he’d try his hand at being an entrepreneur.
One Easter, when he was 15, Richard bought 800 little Christmas trees with his £5 pocket money and planted them at the top of the garden. In four years, he reckoned, he’d be able to sell them and make £800. Alas, he lost all interest in the project when rabbits began to feast on the saplings. Â
He then became convinced that his fortune lay in budgerigars, because they bred quickly. They did, indeed: the first pair he bought rapidly turned into 20.
Before Ted had finished building a large aviary, Richard was losing interest faster than the birds could breed. Twenty budgies soon turned into 100, and it was left to me to feed and water them.
< span> One morning, I’m ashamed to say, I left the aviary door wide open and watched them all fly away to freedom. Richard didn’t mind: he was already planning his next money-making scheme.
Imagine my consternation when, one day, he rang us from Stowe to say he wanted to leave school. He was barely 15. That’s when he told us about The Student, a magazine he was proposing to launch nationwide. At our wits’ end, we told him he couldn’t leave school unless he’d passed at least one A-level.
For a few weeks after that, we didn’t hear much from him. The next thing we knew was he’d passed an A-level in ancient history after just one year in the sixth form.
‘Can I leave now?’ he asked us. ‘You told me to get an A-level and I’ve got one.’
Reluctantly, we kept to our word, though we were concerned about his future. So he left school, aged 16, and went straight to L ondon with his friend, Jonathan Holland Gems, to launch his magazine.
They worked madly, like men possessed, in a dark, dank and sparsely furnished church crypt that had been loaned to them by a kind vicar.
Nevertheless, we were still terribly worried. Each time I visited, I brought a big basket of food. I felt like the Red Cross parachuting in emergency supplies.
In the crypt, where they were also sleeping, I’d find the boys sitting on the floor surrounded by old coffins, which they used as furniture. They were completely absorbed and uninterested in their surroundings.
In the end, there were seven issues of The Student magazine, which launched in 1968, with feature articles such as ‘Easy Sex â€" Not So Easy Sex’ and ‘White Slavery Today’.
Family: Sir Richard with his wife Joan and daughter Holly
Some of the glossy covers were explicit even for the time: one was a somewhat shocking picture of a beautiful young girl, naked and pregnant, kneeling sideways.
On top of that, Richard had started standing on soapboxes at Hyde Park Corner â€" God only knows what he was saying!
Ted and I decided the less we knew about his life over the next few years, the better. If we hadn’t instilled the right values in him by then, it was certainly too late. In any case, we had two young daughters to worry about. So we merely told him to come to us for advice, should he need it.
As Ted and I were living in the country, I’d long dreamed of having a London pied-a-terre and suddenly the opportunity came up. I snapped up a short lease on a nice house near Marble Arch, owned by the Church Commissioners.
We told Richard he could have one small room for himself. Then I spent a few weeks hap pily buying furniture and making the place look smart.
What I didn’t realise was that my son had other ideas for the house.Â
Using the slogan ‘Our Headache and Your Headaches’, he was promoting phone-lines in The Student that offered help to any youngster in trouble.
The problems flooded in: some students needed advice with unwanted pregnancies; others were in need of emotional support or suspected they had VD. Unknown to me, Richard would often offer them a bed at our house, which filled up quickly with down-and-outs. Soon, everything I’d bought for the house had been broken or had disappeared.
Trying to persuade Richard to find a proper job was a waste of breath. In 1971, we were relieved when he appeared to have started a harmless enterprise â€" selling pop records through his Virgin mail order company. Little did we know that it would nearly prove his un doing.
I was on holiday in Menorca when I received an urgent phone call from Richard. As soon as he heard my voice, he broke down. Aged 21, he’d been arrested and wanted me to come home immediately. Â
It was a devastating blow. I felt sick, angry and fearful. And I wasn’t all that sympathetic: I told him to pull himself together and be a man.Â
It was only on my return that I learned what had happened. Richard had devised a clever and entirely illegal scheme to avoid purchase tax on records.
Customs had finally caught up with him. He’d been taken to Dover police station, where he’d spent the night in custody and been charged under the Customs & Excise Act of 1952. I was mortified â€" not least because Ted and I held positions in the legal system.
Richard was clearly mortified, too. Indeed, he was too ashamed to talk to his father.
The next morning, I took the train to Dover to attend the hearing. As we didn’t have £30,000 for Richard’s bail, I had to decide whether to put up our house as surety.
I’ll always remember looking across the court at Richard and for the first time in my life wondering if I could trust him.
Our eyes met. It was an important moment. He knew what I was thinking: we’d given him a free rein and here we were putting everything we’d worked for on the line for him. He was testing our relationship to breaking point.
After he’d been granted bail, we caught the train back to London together, sitting in silence.
A lengthy correspondence ensued between Ted and the authorities: they finally agreed to drop the charge if Richard paid £15,000 immediately and a further £45,000 fine over the next three years.Â
With financial help fro m Ted’s sister Joyce, Richard managed to avoid having a criminal record.
It was the best lesson he could have learned. After what we’d been through, I felt confident he was never going to break the law again.
Instead, he channelled his irrepressible verve into the music business. One weekend, he summoned us to hear something he was absolutely mad about.
‘Just shut your eyes and listen, Mum and Dad,’ he said, as we sank into an old sofa.
Then he put on some dreadful music at full volume. We were speechless: all we could think was that it was the most dissonant sound we’d ever heard.
It turned out to be Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, which went on to become a classic and make Richard a small fortune. It proved to be the cornerstone of what would eventually become the Virgin empire.
So you have to ask yourself: what do parents know? < br />
- ADAPTED from Mum’s The Word by Eve Branson, to be published by Author House on March 10 at £12.99. © 2013 Eve Branson & Holly Peppe. To order a copy for £10.99 (including P&P), tel: 0844 472 4157
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