Читать книгу Mansell: My Autobiography - Nigel Mansell - Страница 14

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FAMILY VALUES

I was born in a small room above my family’s tea shop, in a quiet corner of a sleepy town called Upton-on-Severn, in the heart of England. The third of four children, I was christened Nigel Ernest James Mansell. It was August 1953.

It had been a momentous summer. Everest had been conquered for the first time by Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tensing; Queen Elizabeth II had been crowned at Westminster Abbey; and over in France, Mike Hawthorn, an Englishman driving for Ferrari, had beaten the great South American champion Juan Manuel Fangio in what was being hailed as the Formula 1 ‘Race of the Century’.

I remember my childhood at home being very happy. My brother Michael was a fair bit older than me and we were quite distant as we grew up. I was closer to my two sisters, Gail and Sandra and to my parents Eric and Joyce, whom I loved very much. Throughout my childhood and adolescent years before I left home, they were the model parents and I couldn’t have wished for a better mother or father.

We weren’t rich, but neither were we poor. My father was an engineer and had quite a senior job with Lucas Aerospace based in the Midlands. My mother, who had her hands full with a young family to look after, managed the day-to-day running of the family tea shop with help from my father.

When I was three, my father’s job forced us to move closer to Birmingham and we ended up in an area called Hall Green, which is a southern suburb of the city and where we stayed a few years before moving on again. We seemed to move a great deal during my childhood. As soon as I settled into a new area and a new school we would up sticks and move again. It was pretty hard on me, especially changing schools. When you go to a new school you don’t know anybody and it takes time to settle in.

The second school I attended was a private preparatory school called Wellsbourne, which I liked a lot. I immediately took to sports and soon became the captain of the school soccer and cricket teams. I loved sport and it seemed to come naturally to me. I realised early on that I could derive tremendous satisfaction from competing against children in other school teams and winning. Even at the tender age of seven, winning was everything to me. I made quite a good sports captain because I so badly wanted to win that I always motivated the other players in my team to try harder.

Academically I was one of those children whose end of term report usually contained the phrase, ‘He’s bright and does well at the subjects he’s interested in, but could try harder.’ I didn’t care too much about studying and I hated doing my homework. After school I preferred to kick a ball around with friends or to ride my bicycle rather than settle in for the evening with a few mathematical puzzles.

Although I got by in most subjects, I didn’t like Latin at all and I really wanted to get out of it. Luckily the Latin professor headed up the school chess team and when I expressed my dislike for ancient languages he said to me, ‘If you don’t like Latin, I’ll do a deal with you. If you get into the chess team, you can go to chess classes instead of coming to Latin.’ At the time, chess was pretty big at Wellsbourne and we had regular competitions with other schools in which we used time clocks, large size boards and all the proper paraphernalia. It was all taken deadly seriously. I played intensively for two months, got into the chess team and never went to another Latin class.

Sadly the school closed down in the middle of a term and I was shunted into a school near my house called Hall Green Bilateral. It was a real culture shock. Whereas Wellsbourne had been an all-boys school with class sizes of around fifteen pupils, Hall Green was mixed and the classes were twice the size. To make matters worse, I started half way through the term, so I was out of step with everything.

It’s a very difficult situation being the new boy. You stand out because you have a new uniform when everyone else’s is worn in, and you don’t know anybody. Before you get up to speed and settle in you get teased for being a ‘dunce’ and a ‘thickie’ because you don’t know what’s going on. At the age of between 7 and 14, other children don’t care about you and they don’t think for a moment about how you might feel. They only care about the things they are interested in, like sport, girls or being a bully. There were a lot of bullies at Hall Green Bilateral and predictably, soon after I arrived, they came to pick on the new kid.

I have never taken kindly to bullies and so I had a lot of problems. When they got rough with me I would always fight back and never give in. It was pretty nasty for a while. Although I was miserable at the time, I believe those formative years helped me a great deal in that they made me quite tough early on. Children can be unbelievably cruel to each other and if you can cope with that as a small child, very little in the adult world is likely to defeat you. As an adult I’ve been intimidated a great deal and I’ve been able to cope with and overcome all the hurdles.

I don’t think a child usually forms a pattern of how he or she is until their middle teens, but I was forced to be my own person from a very early age because when you are thrown in at the deep end you learn to swim rather than sink. When you don’t know anybody and nobody believes in you, you either shrink into nothing or you learn to believe in yourself and become more self-reliant.

My mother had a sixth sense when it came to people. She would be able to tell very soon after meeting them whether they were genuine or false, and I inherited that ability from her and put it to good use at school and later at college. It’s an animal instinct, rather like dogs have, which tells you straight away whether someone is a friend or a foe. It has helped me to survive and to succeed in the business that I’m in. I have stopped a lot of people in their tracks when they have come over all gushing and insincere, or when they have tried to get me to do something I don’t want to do. I hate falseness and deception.

Like my mother, I am very sensitive to what’s going on around me. I am renowned for being an incredible fighter, yet I have a soft side to my character. Nothing gives me more pleasure than to do something for a friend or a family member. Throughout my life I have found that many people seem to regard kindness as a weakness and will prey on that perceived weakness. It’s is a side of human nature that I will never understand. Kindness is fundamental to my nature. But if a tough decision has to be made, I can be as hard as nails. If I believe something is right I will go through a brick wall to make it happen.

I used to get up to quite a bit of mischief, as any young boy does, but I was always pretty responsible and early on I developed a clear set of beliefs and values. I learned to trust what I thought was right and wrong and to do what I thought was right for me. It became the code by which I have lived my life and according to which I have made every important decision.

Looking back, my formal education was totally inadequate at times, mainly because of the lack of continuity. But in another way it was marvellous, because I was constantly thrown in at the deep end with people and I learned more because I was up against it. I was always mechanically minded and when I went to technical college a lot of the work came as second nature to me. It was a question of applying myself and if I wanted to apply myself I did pretty well, whereas at school I did just enough to pass the exams.

After Hall Green Bilateral I moved again, to Hall Green College, where I stayed until I was 16. I got a couple of GCE O-levels and a few CSEs, then went to Solihull Technical College. I was 19 years old when I transferred to Matthew Bolton College in Birmingham to study engineering.

Although when I was young I had a lot of unpleasant problems to contend with in the playground and I struggled on the academic side, my athletic ability always kept me going. I became a good, disciplined athlete and my competitive spirit grew stronger and stronger throughout my school years. I loved to win and however steep the odds I never regarded any game as lost until the final whistle blew. I played hard at soccer, crunching into every tackle and chasing every ball. Even if we were playing a so-called ‘friendly’ match against another school, I felt it absolutely necessary to play to win. I was at my best when my team was a goal or two behind and we had to fight back. If we won after coming from behind the satisfaction was even greater than usual. I loved team sports. Although I also enjoyed solo sports like tennis, I was always a team player and I learned a lot of lessons from playing team sports which would stand me in good stead later in life.

I had a lot of fun playing sports. I remember one soccer match I had at college where I scored the winning goal completely by accident. I was running back from the goal, trying to slip away from the defender who was marking me. The ball was crossed into the middle, but I couldn’t see it because my marker was standing in the way. Suddenly the ball came through, hit me right in the face and flew into the goal. My team-mates seemed pretty impressed with my header. I had no idea what had hit me and I fell to the ground, so everybody thought it was a diving header and were even more impressed. In reality it was a total fluke, but the result was marvellous!

Some people have suggested that my fighter’s mentality was shaped by the fact that I come from Birmingham. They argue that because Birmingham is looked down upon by people in the more genteel South of England, its people have to fight harder for recognition. I think that’s a bit of a myth. I don’t believe that where you come from really matters. Although I am proud of my background, we have lived and travelled all over the world and my allegiance is to England rather than to any particular part of it.

My family and in particular my parents were very supportive of me as a child and my father backed my karting career. However, as will be explained in later chapters, they were not in favour of me pursuing a career as a professional racing driver. It caused a few problems for us initially, although they came around to my point of view in the end and we were reconciled. Their main objections to my chosen career were from the safety point of view as they didn’t want me to get hurt or killed, but also my father saw a terrible struggle ahead for me and he just wanted me to be happy and settled. Our family did not have the money that many aspiring racing driver’s families have and I think that my father felt frustrated at times that he was not in a position to do anything about it. He badly wanted to help, but he was inhibited financially. As a result I think he felt a bit out of place in the early days.

I persisted in my dogged pursuit of success in racing and when I made it into Formula 1 they were genuinely very happy for me. Unfortunately, my breakthrough into F1 with Lotus coincided with the awful news that my mother had terminal cancer.

She was a strong and marvellously brave lady through to the end, despite having to go through endless treatments of radiation therapy. I remember one time I took her to the hospital for her treatment and on the way home I had to stop three times for her to be sick. It was so upsetting. She was proud of me for getting into Fl, but all she ever saw of my F1 career was the struggle. Neither did she get the chance to see her grandchildren.

My mother was terribly ill for a few years before eventually succumbing in 1984. Sadly, the illness had a bad effect on my father. As happens often when one partner has a terminal illness, it does odd things to the one who survives. My father had a hard time dealing with the situation and handling life. He went off at a tangent and nobody within my family, including myself, could understand him any more. He remarried two years later to a woman 26 years his junior. It put a strain on the family and upset me terribly.

Then he became very ill and he died too. In the space of three years I had lost both of my parents. It was very hard. Rosanne lost her mother five years before I lost mine, so we have one last surviving parent between us. When I see people today who are ten years older than me and who still have both their parents, I think that they should be very proud of them and very happy.

Losing both my parents in that way was upsetting, but you have to be strong and realise that you have your own life to lead and you must make the most of it. My life has shown me many times that virtually nothing is ever certain. The only thing which is certain is that one day you are going to die. The day you are born is the day you start to die. Everyone has their allotted time and that will be made up of good times and bad times. It doesn’t matter who you are or how clever you are, you are going to age, gradually lose your health and fitness and eventually die. So when my parents were gone I said to myself, ‘Right I’ve got to get on with my life and make my own decisions, because I’m only young once and there is a lot to be done.’

Rosanne and I turned to each other and worked through it. Our marriage has gone through many ups and downs but we have a solid family unit. We had no parental advice or guidance about bringing up our three children and in the business we’re in that’s not been easy. Hopefully, it is possible to bring up normal children in this kind of environment. You only really know when they grow up into adults, but I feel that our three children are just like anybody else’s children. Certainly their father and mother think that they are exceptional. Rosanne and I are very close and the five of us are a tightly knit family. I wouldn’t swap that for the world. Our children dearly love us and we dearly love them.

I became a father for the first time in August 1984, half way through my final year at Lotus, when Rosanne gave birth to our daughter Chloe. It was a magical experience. The births of all three of my children are some of the most special moments I have ever had.

Becoming a father changed me considerably. Life is very blinkered at times. Ignorance is blissful. Fatherhood opened up a whole new aspect of life which I don’t think you can even begin to appreciate until you become a parent. You have a tremendous responsibility to this little child who can’t feed itself or look after itself or do anything for itself until it reaches a certain age. Even then it has to have great counselling and schooling from its parents.

Rosanne and I waited seven years after we were married before we had children. We wanted to make sure that we had all the necessary security before we brought a child into this world. Parenthood is a huge responsibility. The financial burdens it places on you are great. To bring children into the world when you can’t give them the basics and all the love they need, is totally irresponsible. All it does is create problems for everybody, not least yourself.

Without doubt my own experience of education has helped me to plan my children’s schooling and to make sure that where my education fell short, theirs would not. Like any father I want them to have all the things which I did not have. Away from school, they are also getting an education on life from following Rosanne and me around the world. Having seen the inside of the Grand Prix scene, they are more worldly wise and have a better understanding of the wider picture than most children and certainly more than Rosanne and I had at their age. Chloe, Leo and Greg are learning certain disciplines which I would have found very useful at their age. For example, they will all be karate exponents to at least black belt level before they are eighteen and I am sure that they will grow up to be self-reliant and self-disciplined. Helping them to get the right start in life is the least I can do for them.

My family is the the most important thing in my life and I would go through a brick wall to give them the environment they need to flourish and grow.

After all, it’s the way I was brought up.