Hands-off parenting (and regular beatings) made us what we are, declares Boris’s sister
AS an old Etonian and former member of Oxford University’s exclusive Bullingdon Club, Boris Johnson probably isn’t the first figure that springs to mind in connection with a tough childhood.
So a new account of the upbringing of the London mayor and his three siblings may come as something of a surprise.
The Johnson youngsters apparently had a quasi-Dickensian childhood, enduring regular beatings and parents so miserly they rarely went on holiday or out to eat.
Much of the children’s time was spent reading or outside doing chores such as raking up leaves or collecting firewood, according to Boris’s sister Rachel Johnson.
However, she says her childhood was ‘character building’ compared to what she calls ‘today’s wet parenting’.
She describes life in the Johnson family in a forthcoming book How Rude. Modern Manners Defined.
She says her parents, despite owning a 500-acre estate on Exmoor – were so tight-fisted that when they did go on holiday it was invariably from Belgium, where they were living at the time, back to their home in England. For the Channel crossing her father Stanley would insist on catching the cheap late ferry but left his children in the car on the lower deck to ‘pass out’ from the diesel fumes. Miss Johnson, a former editor of The Lady magazine, wrote: ‘I remember only once going to a restaurant in the UK. It was a Happy Eater on the A303.
‘My father told us, wincing as he looked at the laminated text, with its stomach- churning pictograms, that we could have the spag bol. From the children’s menu.’
In the book – published by Waitthree
‘Brilliant for what
they didn’t do’
rose – Miss Johnson says she was beaten by her mother, the painter Charlotte Fawcett, and once, aged three, picked up by her hair, leading a complete stranger to intervene.
But despite claiming her parents ‘ both believed enthusiastically in corporal punishment’, she appears to bear them little ill will. She also recalls how she and Boris – then aged ten and 11 – were left at Paris’s Gare du Nord to travel alone – by trains and a ferry – back to school in England.
En route, they were forced to fend off paedophiles who were ‘waiting for lost little prep school children so they could offer us “sweets”.’
However, she wrote: ‘My parents were brilliant not for what they did but more for what they didn’t do.’
She criticises today’s ‘pushy helicopter parents’ and points out that all the Johnson siblings got to Oxbridge.
The estate in the Exe valley, Somerset, was bought by Miss Johnson’s paternal grandparents in 1951 and is still their father’s home.
After a spell at the World Bank, in the early 1970s he moved the family to Brussels to work at the European Commission. The children returned to Exmoor for the school holidays.