?Must keep the diary full,? she says, detailing the events of her autumn, which include a trip to the Mojave desert in California before Christmas, where passengers who have paid ?enormous sums? to travel on Virgin Galactic will meet their spaceship. Before then, she is organising a bench dedicated to her husband, the barrister Ted Branson, who died in March, aged 93; and taking a film crew to Morocco to visit the remote villages in the High Atlas where the Eve Branson Foundation helps women become self-sufficient.
On top of that, she hopes that her autobiography, Mum?s the Word, should be published by Christmas. Currently, she is launching Sarky Puddleboat, the first in a series of children?s adventure stories based on what happened after Eve, a ?magical? granny in a wide-brimmed pink hat, buys a wooden sailing boat to enable her 11 (now grown-up) grandchildren to have adventures off the Sussex coast, where she spends weekends. With the book launch about to take place in a school, she has glued a bleeping light inside her hat to amuse the children while telling her life story. It is plain who set the standards for academic non-achievement, love of flying and entrepreneurial spirit within the Branson family.
As Eve Flindt, brought up in Barnet and Devon, dancing was her passion. ?Otherwise I didn?t take much notice of my education,? she says. Aged 14, she moved back to London to study ballet and modern dance, eager to have experiences denied to her mother who was ?bored stiff? in the country with her golf-playing husband.
?When war broke out I joined the Navy. I rather fancied the bell-bottom trousers. I was stationed at the end of the pier in Yarmouth on the Isle of Wight, where the Army, Navy and Air Force were based, so you can imagine what fun I had. I learnt to signal but goodness knows what I wrote, being so dyslexic.?
During the Normandy landings in June 1944, the signallers, unwarned, were astonished to see so many ships go past. ?We signalled to them and waited in silence for them to return. Some did, some didn?t.? After the war she toured Germany with Ballet Rambert. ?Madame Rambert, who auditioned me, said: 'At least she will make the troops laugh.??
Returning to England, she found life so gloomy that she lied about her qualifications to get a job as an air hostess on British South American Airways, a private company equipped with rickety old planes that made everyone sick and had a habit of crashing, ?helping to create the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle?.
At a London cocktail party, she met one Edward Branson, ?a dashing ? or is it dishing??, cavalry officer. ?I know that the quickest way to a man?s heart is through his stomach, so I offered him a sausage roll.? Aged 26, she married the trainee barrister. ?We were mad. We had no money. No training. Nowhere to live. When, on honeymoon, we learnt that I was pregnant with Richard and Ted had just failed his Bar exams, we sat on our suitcases and rang my mother-in-law. The family was so furious with us for having a child that they cut us off without a penny.
?While Ted retook his exams, I cut pillows in three to make cushions, covered and sold them, slowly building up an objet d?art business. Luckily I befriended an old lady who offered us a derelict cottage to live in ? it was so old-fashioned that we changed the fuses lying in the bath. I wanted to work from home so I didn?t neglect the children [Richard, now 61; Lindy, an artist born 18 months later; and, six years on, Vanessa, who ?collects hotels in Morocco?] so I employed six local people in my studio.
?Richard was a handful, very hyper. When he was five, I threw him out of the car and told him to walk home because he was being stroppy. I was worried sick when he didn?t come back soon, but he survived and we both learnt a lesson.? By his teens, they could afford to send him to Stowe, a boarding school, which he left at the age of 16 to set up Student magazine and a mail-order record business which, in 1972, became the Virgin Records chain.
Eve supported him, re-mortgaging the family home when he hit a funding crisis. I imagine she has been well rewarded with Virgin shares, which have made her son the fifth richest person in Britain, with an estimated wealth of �2.58 billion. ?No, it?s a private company,? she says, looking astonished. ?Richard doesn?t work like that. But I love travelling Virgin because I get a bed and any drink I want.?
For years she has swallowed her nerves, watching him on his death-defying balloon trips, writing about her feelings in order to distance herself. Next year, when Virgin Galactic takes off, she gets her reward. ?One day Richard rang to ask: 'Mum do you mind terribly if I call my spaceship Eve, since she?s the mothership?? I shall probably go up in Eve and press the button.?
Isn?t she nervous? ?At my stage of life, if you come to grief it is just too bad.?
If she doesn?t, she looks forward to the arrival of great-grandchildren (?I wish they?d get on with it?), writing more books about Sarky Puddleboat, and spending further holidays on Necker. ?I know Richard,? she beams. ?It?ll come back up and it?ll be better than ever.?
'Sarky Puddleboat? by Eve Branson, �9.95, is out now
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