Chapter 3: DAY TWO (Monday, 12th September)
A chip off the old block and a chip on the old shoulder.

Gerard's son was very concerned, but he was also intrigued. Here he had a rocker running his dad's business and being very amusing, I like to think. The production crew told me that the son actually said on film that he thought I was a really good bloke and had a really intriguing sense of humour except I kept getting political and that spoilt it all. Well, excuse me, again.

'You are inheriting that much power and you have no interest in politics?' I said to him. 'Who is really running this show?'

All this kid wanted to do was ride around on his quad bike. He did not want to have to think. He had been pushed into the situation. I walked around the site with him the first morning, just him and me, and from a distance they filmed us, right the other side of the fields, so they could get a long shot, but we both had clip-on microphones. I had about forty-five minutes of conversation with him that could make a programme in itself. I found out everything about that estate and his dad's empire that I could, and he knew all of it. He knew everything. He was obviously someone who felt that he had no choice. Surely the idea of teenage is the birth of true choice, this sudden liberation from having to do things that anybody else wants you to do, self-determining, autonomous. Everybody has to be a rebel at least once, but the fact that my rebellion went deeper and was not based on age was something that absolutely threw him. Here I was, old enough to be his dad, indeed, the same age as his dad, talking to him as if we were just going down to the pub together, something he has never shared with his dad.

If you are a normal teenager, you are not employed by your parents, for goodness sake. You are, though, if you are in the upper echelons. That is how it is, really. "You are going to take over the business one day, but until you do, I'm your boss as well as your father." He admitted to me that he did not like horses and he did not like polo either, but his dad had pushed him and pushed him and now he does. He had not been shooting for more than a couple of years because he did not like that.

He, like Redman, fancied himself as quite the Alpha Male, and Gerard wanted to show him off to us. We found what we considered a pornographic calendar with him and various other sons of the rulers in very homoerotic poses, naked and semi-naked, in the kitchen with the month that his son's photo was on as a kind of advertisement. Gerard was not only trying to make money out of everything and everyone around him but was even selling his son as a sexual commodity! We turned the calendar around because, although we did not find it offensive we thought it embarrassing for him. 'Stable Boys' it was called, and some of them were covered in foam! It would have made any kind of trendy gay in the West End get his old feller out. They were all teenage boys. Gerard evidently wanted the cameras to catch it, as a blipvert of his son of good stock. It was like having a stud horse and my wife took offence at that idea, especially as they had left it for our daughter to see.

'You know, I'm sorry,' she said, 'but I do not want Gerard's sexuality forced on us. We are quite able to make our own.'

'Yes,' I said. 'We do not have to be the head boy and we do not have to throw a javelin.'

'There's something disturbing about that,' Kiran had said to me, turning the calendar to the wall.

'I should think so,' I said, 'I should think so. Are you telling me he has got some kind of repressed homoerotic relationship with his own son?'

It was like Ancient Greece, like Oedipus, except the other way round. In this version he kills his mother and marries his father. Of course, if you are going to instil into your son the fact that the men of the species are superior, then surely the next logical step is to want to sleep with the men and not the women, yes? Unlike the Greeks, though, this was a modern, post-industrial capitalist phenomenon. Here was a calendar that has sold thousands, and Gerard has made money from it. It was almost like a kind of weirdly homoerotic version of the one that the Womens' Institute did, so it must be the in-thing. Gerard probably sees it as very funny but I would imagine, from what I saw of his son, he finds it a bit embarrassing. Can you imagine your parents doing that to you? What does the froth on the calendar mean, for goodness sake? Does it mean that the horse has a bestial, homoerotic relationship with the boy? I knew some of the “stable boys” were covered in soap because they were washing the horses down but it was obviously a 'sex juice' reference. Who is buying those calendars? I think men are, Gerard. I do not think that the average teenage girl is running out to buy those.

The son did not seem to have many emotions on the boil. I would say his ability to fall in love with a woman would be quite stunted and I should hope that changes for him. He did have a friend and his friend was one of the stable boys and they were like a younger version of the two characters, Ralph and Ted, in that 1990s comedy The Fast Show but as teenagers. That is where that kid is going to be for his life.

I ran into him, the stable boy, with the groundsman on my first morning. I had a can of lager, because I was obviously going to cane everything I could really quickly, in a Hunter S. Thompson, Gonzo-journalism fashion. I came out into the garden with my can of lager, in a leather jacket and I found the groundsman and this lad. Now, this boy was one of the few staff allowed at the polo club ball because he was the personal batman of Gerard Braughn's son and these relationships are started during childhood, and so it was a bit like Great Expectations. You have two human beings and we will completely favour one and subordinate the other to make one super-human being. I do think that is terrible. You cannot force evolution like that. It always backfires. Anyway, here was this kid with a flat cap and this gentleman with a flat cap and I came wandering out with a can of lager and I told them what had happened, that I was boss for a week. They had not been informed. They are not given any information really. It is not theirs to have an opinion or even know why things happen.

'Do you want to come in for a tea then?' I said.

'Oh no. We're not allowed in there,' said the groundsman.

'You're joking,' I said. 'It's just through that door, into that massive kitchen and we'll all have a cup of tea and a chat.'

'Oh, I've never been in there,' he said, and they started laughing.

'You what?' I said. 'What? You're not allowed...?'

'No.'

'Oh,' I said. 'I've got this polo club ball later in the week. You are coming aren't you?'

'I've never been to one of those,' the old fellow said.

'How long have you been working here, then?'

'Oh, I don't know... This particular place, I was here when the former owner was here as well. Some forty years.'

He was riddled with Parkinson's Disease. Parts of his body would not stop shaking and he still, at five, or six o'clock every morning had to get the dead frogs out of the filter in the swimming pool, which involves submerging himself. This man should not be doing physical work, I thought. I mentioned this to Gerard Braughn when I met him and I said, 'Can you retire your groundsman on full pay and afford to keep his income the same as it was without having to work him? Because you should not have a bloke in his physical condition doing those jobs.'

'Oh, I have tried to stop him doing all of this for me but he won't,' he said, 'it's bred into him.'

'Yeah, right!' I thought. 'You lying bastard! If he doesn't provide you with that, you don't pay him. If you let him go, he's destitute. So you're doing him a favour? You bastard!'

'Well,' I said to the groundsman, 'you have my permission now...'

They would not go in there. They would not move, even with me telling them. I almost tried to impel them, like the exorcist, "I command you!" But no. They would not and that was that. They thought it was hilarious, though. The stable boy does a lot of the physical work around the estate. He will become the groundsman after the old man dies, or is put in a home or something. They will squeeze the last drop of work out of him first, though. I found out he was not as old as I had thought he was, which really upset me because that was very nineteenth century. He looked about seventy but I think he had only just turned sixty.

'This ain't on,' I said to myself. 'This was the way people were worked in eighteen seventy-eight.'

So, that was the son's one real friend. He was not a complex person.

'Have you been to a gig, then?' I asked when we were walking around the fields, when I had ascertained how much his dad owned. He did admit that his dad had acquired some of the surrounding land against the will of the previous owners.

'How did he do that?' I asked. 'Now, how did he do that? What do you do?'

You threatened someone, that's what you did. That's the only way in which you can do it. If you cannot financially bankrupt them and impel them to get off the land, you hire people who are a physical threat to them. Those are the only two ways you can do it. He knew I knew that, and he looked at bit guilty that it had come out.

'Oh really,' I said. 'I don't believe in land ownership at all, isn't that interesting.'

He looked at me.

'We went wrong when that started,' I said. 'You want to study American Indian culture. That's a far more advanced way of thinking and then you don't get all this upset, do you? But,' I said, 'your dad doesn't feel like he'd be anything without all of this, does he, really?'

He told me the history of the family. He confided in me, and again, I felt like Rasputin. If I were to stay there for months, they would all start doing exactly what I said, because they are wandering around without any game-plan whatsoever. They do not need one, because it was all set before they were born. We need a game-plan because we are trying to change the programme, as Jerry Cornelius in Michael Moorcock's books about him would put it. Otherwise it is end-day. We are scrabbling around for sense in all of this but most rich people do not see anything outside of what is. Gerard's son was a typical example.

'Is he self made, then,' I said, 'you dad?'

'Well, yeah,' he said, 'up to a point. My grandfather owned two farms when my dad was born.'

'Oh,' I said. 'He didn't work them, then?'

This came out later, when I discussed with Gerard Braughn the fact that his father owned two farms. To own two farms way back at the middle of the twentieth century, I would imagine meant that you had quite a bit of dosh. You would probably have quite a few employees. His dad was not a farmer.

'I started with nothing,' Gerard Braughn said to me when I met him at the end. 'I owned a garage.'

'I didn't know you were a car mechanic,' I said.

'I'm not.'

'So, you didn't actually work on the cars, you just owned the garage? That's not starting at the bottom! You've got eighty, maybe ninety percent of the rest of society lower down than you already, because most people think it's a bit of a touch to become a car mechanic and have that kind of wage assured and if you look at that on a global scale, you ain't even half way down the ladder, if you, as a youth, owned your own garage! How many garages did you own after a while?'

'Oh, loads,' he said.

'It takes money to make money, doesn't it? If you hadn't had that capital to start with how the hell would you have ever got two garages?'

If you do not have a garage at all, your chance of making a leap into having a garage and not having to work it yourself is almost unheard of. That is how stringent this is.

'So,' I said to his son, 'your grandad owned two farms and you say he was a farmer?'

'Oh, yes, he worked hard.'

I have seen what Gerard Braughn does. He does not work hard. So, I had to be very careful with his son when I was walking around the fields with him, because I did not want to upset him.

'So, you get hands on?' He does work with the people there. Redman the polo trainer, well, he would not lift a finger to help anybody with so much as a trestle table, setting up the party, and I think he thought I was lowering myself when I immediately helped out as I would at a festival, unloading chairs and all that. 'Ain't you going to help then?' I said to him, and he just looked at me with a pained expression as if to say, 'You shouldn't be doing that, you're supposed to be running this estate. We don't actually do the work!'

I had to skirt around it with Gerard's son.

'Oh, right,' I said to him. 'You know, I wouldn't consider that self-made, really, because my family didn't own any kind of property or anything until recently. You live in a very different world to me. But, do you know, I could take you to some places in your own back yard you don't know exist, my friend. I could show you your own generation from my perspective, from the point of view of what I went through. I could show you pubs, clubs, raves, I could take you to festivals that could blow your mind. The women you would see! Not these painted, undernourished stoics who drift around your father. I'm talking about fully emancipated women with a sense of sexuality that would knock you sideways, so you wouldn't even have to get off with any of them, or have physical contact with them. It would be enough to know that you were their friend and that the whole division between the genders and the races is just being torn down. I could introduce you to African women in Brixton who would absolutely melt your heart...'

I could have gone on, but I remembered then that I had to be careful with him, because you can snap a man, especially a young man, if you know that they have no previous idea of what the hell you are and yet you know exactly what they are, and you've been given a position of unimaginable power. His father did not expect a man like me to be replacing him, that he would be leaving his son in my company. No wonder he was on the blower as soon as he touched down in our flat. I should hope that his first concern was his son. I am sure that might be one common denominator between me and Gerard Braughn because if anyone from his class got anywhere near my daughter, my alarm bells would be ringing like the clappers.

"Oh God," I imagined he was thinking, "I'll go back and my son will have dreadlocks and be sniffing glue! I don't know if I'm capable of having another son to save the family..."

Gerard did have another son, who was younger and had accompanied him over to our place. Did he but know it, Gerard was close to losing him at the other end because he had never spent a week with his father before. The twelve-year-old's room was like Gandalf's cave. Now I cannot deny that there is a bit of Odinism in Tolkien and a bit of white supremacy in the sword and sorcery game, but he was more interested in wizards and goblins and creatures than he was interested in knights. There is no mistake, we are those goblins. Tolkien made sure that the orcs were Cheeky, Chirpy, Cockney Characters ("Oh, I fancy a nice meal. I think I'll have your forearm... Bullseye! Bullseye! Nancy, Nancy, come here! I want to slap yer!")

So, Gerard's younger son walked into Middle Earth when he went with his dad to West Wales. The event at our end put him in the midst of his main obsession. His being introduced to my parents, who are Hobbits, and who live in a rolling landscape like Hobbiton, was to be introduced to rural eccentric types the like of whom he has not encountered in the rural area that he has experienced through his father.

The elder son, bless him, was very honest with me and to find that he had only recently been broken by his father was quite a shock. There were loads of photos of him as a child around the place. He did not look happy in them.

He talked to me about how his dad had accumulated his money. He was surprised that I had managed to get to this point in my life, the same age as his father, and yet be so completely different from him.

'I'm a singer in bands,' I said to him. 'That's principally what I do. Are you into bands then?'

'Oh yeah,' he said, 'I like the Red Hot Chilli Peppers.'

This did not come as a surprise to me at all. Obviously the son of a multi-millionaire is going to be very impressed by bands who are also millionaires.

'Have you ever been to a gig then?' I asked him and he looked really pained at that.

'Well, no.'

'Bloody hell, I'd been going to gigs for four years by the time I was your age,' I said. 'Oh, we can arrange this. You're right next to Hull. It's only an hour away by car. I know some good clubs in Hull, I know some good venues, you should go out.'

He went really red, and it was quite obvious, he did not need to say anything, he would not be allowed to, I was sure of it. I changed the subject.

'How much does all of this cost?' I asked him. I got quite a lot of information, but he and his father appeared to differ on this. Apparently the helicopter had only cost a hundred and twenty thousand pounds and that his father had had two until a couple of weeks before.

'The other one flipped over after getting tangled in some telegraph wires on take-off,' he said. 'It crashed upside down and exploded on impact. Both father and the helicopter pilot survived but the pilot was immediately sacked and reprimanded.'

'Okay,' I said. 'And I'm going up in that am I?'

'I think you're expected to.'

'Oh, fantastic.'

'Well,' he said, 'it's the same chances as being in a car crash.'

Honestly, I thought, was it worth it, quite apart from the environmental stuff? Anyway, his dad swore blind the helicopter was worth a quarter of a million and that his son had made an error there, so I wondered where the truth was here. Who the hell knows? Maybe he wants it to look more expensive because that means he is a more powerful figure and he does not want to make it look as though lots of people could afford a helicopter. He probably tells the insurance company it is worth that much money, whereas I always undercut ours so as it lowers the bloody premium, but then there is no chance of a pay out if I have a prang.

Apart from that, most of the things we talked about were a laugh. I hang around with eighteen year olds quite a lot, especially musicians, and I just thought, we are all born the same. This kid could change very quickly. It would only take a very short time. I have a favourite analogy about a Nazi skinhead, who was about eighteen and was put in a cell with a forty-something Jamaican Rastafarian. After only eighteen months he had come out an anti-Nazi with a Patois accent. We are very malleable, us human beings, all the way through. I just looked at Gerard Braughn's son and I thought, 'If I could just unbolt the doors in your head and show you a little bit of what is going on out here, you would change like that. It happens the other way, the amount of radicals who end up selling out, it can happen to anyone at any point in their life. It could still happen to me, although I am very doubtful of that. This was an opportunity for it to happen, it was being offered to me on a plate, I could have made friends and influenced people. Do not think that I have not thought, more than once, that I could have kept close to these people. It would have to have been on their terms, but I would have been very well remunerated for providing an example that I was wrong. 'I have decided that it is all right to be a capitalist.' I know they wanted me to say that. They are still waiting.