Flying Free

by Nigel Farage

  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.

  INTERLUDE

  They gathered a week later in the thirteenth-century church of St Mary the Virgin in Downe.

  Of the fifty or so mourners who turned up to pay their respects, only three – my parents and a tall, blonde model called Vanessa whom I had met in a wine-bar the previous week – did not have hip-flasks in their pockets. Vanessa did not have a hip-flask in her fox-fur jacket because you don’t put champagne in hip-flasks and all those burly men in dark blue cashmere were just dying to give her a drink.

  They winked at one another in the porch, murmured things like ‘If it had been a Testarossa, OK…’ and ‘Dark suit, dark coat, bit pissed. Shouldn’t think the poor bugger behind the wheel saw a thing’, ‘Who’s the foxy bint with, then?’, ‘Heigh-ho. ’Nother one bites the dust… Way it goes…’

  They then took up the approved position in the pews – hands clasped before their groins, faces downturned – and heard a eulogy by a vicar who had mugged up on his subject the previous night.

  ‘Nigel was so full of promise and energy. At twenty-one, he was about to take up a new job which paid more than the entire tower restoration fund, which is ridic … splendid. Just think of tha
t. Who knows what heights he might have attained had he lived? Millions surely awaited him, fast cars, big houses, marriage, maybe children…

  ‘But it was not to be. A very seriously slow car was to snuff out the bright, feverishly flickering light which was Nigel Farage. I am sure that he would have been glad to think that he was heading home when the accident happened, back to the family house which he so seldom found time to visit save for three or four hours’ kip, but near which he will now sleep in unwonted peace and in perpetuity.

  ‘What can we say about this remarkable young man? Everyone liked him. At the pub, the golf-club and at least one church fête which he attended, he talked to everyone with such ease and understanding of their interests. Miss Maitland recalls his enthusiasm for, and understanding of, her bantams. Colonel Brereton tells me that he never knew a man so young yet so knowledgeable about fishing. The professional at the golf-club assures me that Nigel might have been truly exceptional had he devoted himself to the game…’

  And so they laid this paragon in the graveyard and returned to the City to get very drunk (and, in at least one instance, also laid) in my memory, and the stone subsequently raised above my head read ‘NIGEL FARAGE, 1964–1985’.

  And then, since the stonemason was absently taking dictation, ‘ER…’

  OK. I do not ask you to believe that I awoke, Scrooge-like, from a reverie of my own death and was instantly transformed.

  I wasn’t dead (there is another sentence which I seldom have cause to write), in part thanks to Adolf Hitler’s pet designers and their invention of the motorised computer mouse avant la lettre. A vertical radiator grille would surely have killed me.

  I wasn’t even strictly unconscious for long. My notes, of which I caught a glimpse in hospital, declare me to have been ‘lucid but aggressive’ as the ambulance decanted me from a very wet impromptu nativity scene on the pavement into A&E at Bromley General. My doctor on the night tells me that, when first he approached me to perform an examination, I told him, ‘Oh. Right. Yes. Listen, mate. Get me a cab, will you? I’ve had quite enough of this, thanks,’ before passing out again.

  They could not operate on me until my blood alcohol levels had declined, so they sedated me, for which, I think, I have cause to be grateful because I was a right mess. Then, I assume, came the general anaesthetic and the hours under the knife.

  I was very surprised when at last I awoke. I did not really do hangovers at that age, but if this was what they were like, temperance suddenly seemed alluring.

  First there was that sensation of something bound very tight about my temples. Then there were the discords inside my skull. For some reason, you never get a tuned-up orchestra playing a lush, harmonious, Brahms symphony-type chord. You always get the oboes and clarinets with frayed reeds tuning up whilst an obsessive timpanist pounds away. I was getting the Portsmouth Symphony orchestra let loose in the Radiophonics Workshop.

  The certainty that you are dying because of acute but obscure pains and wriggling things in chest and bowels? Check. And the dead leg because you’ve been lying on it for too long? Check.

  I was mildly surprised that the leg was in that position, though.

  Perhaps above all, my mouth was causing me distress. This was in part, I was to discover, because all my teeth had been knocked loose. It was also in part because I had had a very hot curry and a great deal of drink last night and nil by mouth thereafter, leaving my mouth feeling like Queen Nefertiti’s gusset.

  I opened my eyes. Only one opened. The other appeared to be buried beneath a lot of upholstery which had not been there before.

  The monocular view explained a certain amount, which was nice.

  The explanation wasn’t.

  *

  No, the reason for the daft little fantasy section above is simply that that was what was playing in my head in quiet moments over the next three months, during which I was occasionally visited, occasionally fed semolina (for a long time the only solid food permitted to pass my lips) and spent much of the time fretting.

  First I fretted because they thought that I would lose my left leg which was pretty much pulverised to north and to south. If they saved it, they said, I might just be able to walk – well, OK, hobble – short distances, but even that would take a long time.

  I fretted because I was not at work. Billions were being made, and not by me.

  I fretted because I could neither laugh nor cry because of the broken ribs, nor turn over and curl up in a foetal position because my left leg was raised high above me. My recovery position was that of a chorus girl in Pompeii when the lava hit.

  I fretted because of tinnitus which continued after the orchestra had left and continues to this day. Though some may dissent, the doctors assure me that my graceless landing on the kerb had caused no enduring brain-damage once the cuts were healed and the swelling went down. The echoes, however, persist. Dwarves mine for gold in there, and occasionally whistle happy diatonic tunes…

  Above all, I fretted because of the Halford Hewitt.

  It is given to few fully to understand the intensity of that fretting. Only sixty-four schools play in the matchplay foursomes tournament for the Halford Hewitt Cup, which takes place at the Royal Cinque Ports and Royal St George’s (known to all simply as ‘Deal’ and ‘Sandwich’) every April. Others wait poignantly outside, their privileged noses pressed against the pane, yearning in vain for admission.

  As for us whose schools are eligible, we spend the winters doing sit-ups and playing solo surreptitious rounds of golf in the freezing dusks or dawns in hope of the call from our Captains. If that call does not come, we conclude that our active lives are done, don slippers and lay in supplies of Viagra and cadet Country Cousins.

  I was hoping to play for Dulwich this year. Instead, I was in traction mumbling on semolina. I resented this.

  The funeral scene was just light relief from all this fretting. At first I blamed all the mourners (and particularly Vanessa) for being so insincere. Slowly, however, the ridiculous notion percolated through to me that perhaps I was missing something, that I might have given a little more of myself to my endeavours to date, that perhaps I wanted more from life before the next car hit me.

  It was only a thought, but it was a new one on me…

  It was a good thing that I had generous friends with a better line in medicines than the doctors. They saw no reason to bring mere grapes, skins, pips, stalks and all, when they could bring them already stripped down and distilled to their very essences. They brought them in quantity. I was soon providing medicinal cheer to the other poor sods in my ward, more hopeful than confident that I was helping them rather than killing them but, as ever, allowing them to make that decision for themselves.

  What? I am meant to have renounced my wicked ways and become an ascetic saint overnight because of a mere prang?

  Look, the people who wrote the Bible didn’t concern themselves much with psychological verisimilitude. Papyrus was expensive and time short, what with the Second Coming and Armageddon expected just as soon as they’d swept the wrong sort of sand off the rails. It was easier for them to stick to the headlines.

  A lot of miracles might not have been quite so miraculous if we’d had detail. The evangelists might have gone into other recorded cases of catatonia, novel resuscitation techniques, Lazarus’s hangover, the therapy which he had to undergo and what his wife and the life-insurance companies had to say about it all. But no. Lazarus dead, Lazarus alive. That’s all we get. Miracle.

  So we know that Saul (a European Commissioner if ever there was one) ran into some pretty impressive son et lumière stuff on his way to Damascus and subsequently decided that maybe these Christians were on to something, but the notion that he at once gave up all his former convictions, ambitions and friends is just downright silly.

  At a guess, he drank rather more than usual, told himself that he must have eaten some dodgy matzos, found that the fun had gone out of a good stoning, became thoroughly grouchy and h
ad to fake his laughter when they told the one about the praetor, the Philistine actress and the X-shaped cross, discussed the whole business with his mistress and only over months or years became a pain in the arse within the Christian camp rather than without.

  Augustine’s ‘Make me good but not yet’ is far closer to the mark, to judge by my own experience and all the recovering alcoholics, junkies and reformed rogues whom I have encountered. We all live by our faiths, however mundane, and if Saul abandoned his and his fellows for the sake of a few fireworks (like formerly Eurosceptic politicians within days of winning power), he was a berk. Had I been the ghost of a Christian put to the sword by him, I would have been affronted to have died for convictions so paltry.

  So the novel experience of being tenderised by a car may have been instructive and thought-provoking for me, but it did not cause me to renounce my loves and loyalties to date.

  It caused me immediately, however, to do two things which thousands of wounded soldiers have done in reality and in fiction. First, I fell in love with a warm smile, competent, jolly affection and Nature’s guarantee of a future: my nurse.

  Well, Carol Vorderman (Countdown was the daily boon amidst the drabness) and my nurse…

  Carol was not available, so my nurse bore the brunt.

  I don’t want to imply that Clare Hayes was merely a symbol, nor that I fell for her solely because her warmth and vivacity contrasted with the monochrome routine of hospital life. She was a great girl who was to make me happy for several years. At twenty-one, however, immature and only barely aware of prospects beyond those on my very near horizons, I was unfit for marriage and would surely never have considered it had it not been for my brush with death.

  I left the hospital in late January, still in a full cast. I was to remain in half-plaster until November.

  My brother Andrew was now working for a paper company near Waterloo and was the proud owner of a 2CV. He therefore chauffeured me daily to and from my work. This gravely circumscribed my social life. As I half-sat, half-lay in the back seat of the Gallic rattletrap, I thought that, were we to have an accident, I would be lucky to have ten mourners. To have started the job with a VW Beetle and to have finished it in a 2CV would surely have marked me forever as a failure.