would tune in to Radio 1 to listen to Alan Freeman’s Pick of the Pops, dancing on desks and chairs, playing air guitar. The Boomtown Rats’ ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’, which topped the UK singles chart in Cameron’s last term at Heatherdown, was a particular favourite.
Whereas over half a century earlier the actor David Niven had got into trouble with the Heatherdown head – in fact, he was expelled – for a misdemeanour with a marrow, the cause of David Cameron’s downfall was strawberries – or more particularly the strawberries grown by Bar Edwards. Determined groups of small boys, David Cameron prominent among them, repeatedly mounted midnight raids on her kitchen garden, with a view to devouring her produce back in the dorm. This classically jolly jape ensured hours of hilarity spiced with the fear of discovery. Deep into the night, formidable matrons with torches would patrol the sleeping quarters in the knowledge that those whose beds were empty would most likely be found whispering among the soft fruit. Cameron more than once felt the sting of the clothes brush.
Because it was a small school, all the pupils knew one another, giving an air of intimacy that some more soulless establishments of this type might have lacked. Former Heatherdown boys remember with fondness the woods and the lake. Here, dressed in distinctive green boiler-suits, pupils would make dens, arrange mock fights and generally play. In many respects, it seems to have been idyllic and carefree. ‘It was a very happy place, a great school,’ says Alexander Bathurst. ‘One or two might not have been well suited to it, but the majority would have certainly enjoyed it.’
Both Cameron boys played for the school’s cricket First XI, Alex with marginally greater accomplishment. David was a stylish, medium-pace bowler with a good eye. ‘He was the sort of person who just knew how to throw a ball,’ said a friend later of the way sports came easily to him. Cricket was his strongest team sport, with rugby his weak spot. ‘He didn’t have the physique of a great sportsman, but he didn’t hang back. He was quite a brave little boy; he wasn’t windy at all,’ recalls one who knew him well.
Rhidian Llewellyn was dutifully raking a long-jump sandpit on the school’s sports day in 1978 when he was approached by Mrs Gordon Getty. She was making plans for her son Peter (grandson of the oil billionaire John Paul Getty) to invite four classmates to the USA, and would he like to accompany the boys, by way of looking after them? As the young teacher was barely out of school himself and had never flown, he jumped at the opportunity. The trip turned out to be even more lavish than he can have dreamed. One of the lucky four friends of Getty was David Cameron, and such a dizzying glimpse of the high life may have contributed to his perception of wealth. Years later, answering claims that his was a life of privilege, he said he wasn’t rich because he didn’t ‘own a private jet and I have no friends with a private jet’.
At lunchtime on 21 July 1978, two days after the end of term, Getty, Cameron, Simon Andreae (brother of Giles), Peter Romilly and Fergus Wylie, accompanied by their eighteen-year-old minder Rhidian Llewellyn, boarded BOAC Flight 579 (Concorde, as it happened) at Heathrow to fly to Washington DC. As the excited boys tucked into their caviar, salmon and beef bordelaise, Llewellyn turned round to check that all was well and that his charges were more or less behaving themselves. He was met with the sight, a few rows behind, of David Cameron, eleven years old, cheerily raising a glass of Dom Pérignon ’69 and exclaiming ‘Good health, Sir!’ ‘Sir’, only seven years older than Cameron, was so disbelieving of his own good fortune that he felt it would be churlish to challenge Cameron’s cheek. This willingness to nudge jovially at the barriers of authority (rather than to throw stones at them, for example) comes from Ian Cameron, and generally seems to have been carried off disarmingly. ‘There were times when you needed to tell him to shut up,’ says Llewellyn. ‘Like any ten-year-old, he would get a bit out of line and need a bit of a metaphorical cuffing, but I was never irritated by him and often amused by him.’
Washington was going through a heatwave that summer, but no matter. For four days the excited boys from the UK were conveyed to all the capital’s most celebrated sights in an air-conditioned Lincoln Convertible. It also took them to a French restaurant where they enjoyed the spectacle of roller-skating waiters. From Washington they went on to a further three days of sight-seeing in New York, where they were based at the Hotel Pierre. The itinerary included the Empire State Building and the World Trade Center. They then flew on to Disneyworld in Florida, roller-coasters and all, and, to celebrate Peter Getty’s twelfth birthday, to the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral. Next it was Las Vegas, where the temperatures reached 120ºF, which somewhat curtailed the sight-seeing, restricting them to hanging round the MGM Grand Hotel’s pool and investigating the hotel’s gaming devices. The tour was rounded off with three days at the Grand Canyon, including a helicopter flight, followed by a trip to Hollywood. They regained their bearings with a week based at Pacific Heights, the Getty home overlooking San Francisco’s Golden Gates and Alcatraz.
At Heatherdown there wasn’t a great push, as there is at many schools nowadays, to get children into a certain public school. It seemed part of the natural order of things that it would go on doggedly churning out boys who got into Eton (and less often Harrow), and it saw no reason to change. The only scholastic pressure that most boys felt came in the last year, when the exam was nearly upon them. But this began to change in the late 1970s. Eton started making greater demands of its pupils and upping its standards. Heatherdown was shaken when one or two boys started to fail the Common Entrance exam (often being taken away to a crammers to retake it, generally with success). David Cameron was fortunate that only at the end of his spell at the school was Common Entrance beginning to be a problem. In any event, he applied himself to the task with what has become his customary efficiency and in the summer of 1979, he was accepted at Eton.
Asked in 2004 whether he thought his schooling would hold him back politically, David Cameron sighed heavily. ‘I don’t know. You can try and be logical about it and say the upside is a terrific education, the downside is the label that gets attached and mentioned in every article. Or you can just think to yourself: I am what I am. That is what I had, I am very grateful for it.’ Cameron, by his own confession a late developer, has good reason to be grateful. Eton unearthed rich talents in a boy who at first seemed remarkable only for being thoroughly average.
To any boy on the threshold of his teens, arriving at Eton is a daunting experience – even for prep school boarders like Cameron, used to being away from home from the age of seven. Six and a half centuries of history crowd around new arrivals. Cameron, short for his age and a little overweight, could at least take refuge in a room of his own, his first private space either at home or at school. This was in John Faulkner’s house, JF, situated near the end of Eton’s Common Lane, one of twenty-five houses of around fifty boys each that make up the school. Each one is its own universe, a more intimate home from the buffetings of the wider school. The refuge of having one’s own room is not unassailable, but an Eton boy can generally shut out as much of the rest of the world as he wants. To a newcomer, this can be invaluable, a quiet place to learn the school’s arcane names, rules and acronyms and for coming to terms with wearing a tailcoat every school day for five years.
One of the distinctive features of Eton is ‘private business’, when a handful of boys meet a master – known, in the first three years, as their Classical Tutor – allocated to them for a weekly meeting to discuss a range of extra-curricular topics. For new boys at Eton, this can be one of the best ways of talking informally with a master and getting one’s bearings. As was the practice in several houses, John Faulkner himself played the role of Classical Tutor to the new boys in his house. This was in part to provide a forum in which to get to know the boys in his charge, something not always easily achieved in the hectic day-to-day life of running a house.
When Cameron arrived at Faulkner’s house in late 1979, he once again had the implicit protection of his brother Alex, three years above him. A friend describes the older Cameron as a ‘glamorous, popular and arty’ presence at the school, which would have gone some way towards smoothing the