Chapter 1 - Part Three
I braced myself and jumped forward against the current, but I immediately felt myself sinking, my legs slicing uselessly through the water. The current pushed me around, tore at my underpants and dragged me downstream. I couldn't breathe and I swallowed water. I tried to reach up to the surface, but had nothing to push against. I kicked and writhed around but it was no help.
Then my foot found a stone and I pushed up hard. I came back above the surface and took a deep breath. The breath steadied me, and I relaxed. I had to win that ten shillings.
I kicked slowly, spread my arms, and found myself swimming across the surface. I was still bobbing up and down, but I suddenly felt released: I could swim. I didn't care that the river was pulling me downstream. I swam triumphantly out into the middle of the current. Above the roar and bubble of the water I heard my family clapping and cheering. As I swam in a lopsided circle and came back to the riverbank some fifty yards below them, I saw Auntie Joyce fish in her huge black handbag for her purse. I crawled up out of the water, brushed through a patch of stinging nettles and ran up the bank. I may have been cold, muddy and stung by the nettles, but I could swim.
'Here you are, Ricky,' Auntie Joyce said. 'Well done.' I looked at the ten-shilling note in my hand. It was large, brown and crisp. I had never held that amount of money before: it seemed a fortune. 'All right, everyone,' Dad said. 'On we go.'
It was then that I realised he too was dripping wet. He had lost his nerve and dived in after me. He gave me a massive hug.
I cannot remember a moment in my life when I have not felt the love of my family. We were a family that would have killed for each other - and we still are. My parents adored each other, and in my childhood there was barely a cross word between them. Eve, my mother, was always full of life and galvanised us. Ted, my father, was a rather quieter figure who smoked his pipe and enjoyed his newspaper, but both my parents had a love of adventure. Ted had wanted to be an archaeologist, but his father, a High Court judge, wanted him to follow Branson tradition and enter the law. Three generations of Bransons had been lawyers. When Ted was at school, my grandfather engaged a careers officer to talk to him and discuss possible careers. When it emerged that Ted wanted to be an archaeologist, my grandfather refused to pay the careers officer's bill on the grounds that he hadn't done his job properly. So Ted reluctantly went up to Cambridge to read law, and continued as a hobby to build up his collection of ancient artefacts and fossils which he called his 'museum'.Source: http://www.virgin.com/
Source: http://www.virgin.com/aboutvirgin/allaboutvirgin/richardsautobiography/default.asp