A Fortunate Life (5 page)

He was impish, had a sense of humour (often bawdy) to go with it and boundless energy. He loved poetry in general, and Kipling in particular, and would read to us almost every night. He was a Catholic (the Ashdown family religion) but wore his faith very lightly (in fact hardly at all), often quoting a saying which he claimed came from the Quran (though I have never found it there): ‘There is one God but many ways to him’. And he would say that if he had been born in a Muslim country he would certainly have been a Muslim. He hated all religious bigots equally, but since we were a predominantly a Unionist and Protestant community in Comber, he had a special contempt for those of the Protestant persuasion. I suffered quite a lot in early life, at school and from the lads in the area, because I came from a mixed marriage. My father’s solution to the question I was frequently asked, ‘Are youse a Protestant or are youse a Catholic?’, was that I should reply that I was a Muslim. I tried it once, only to be met with the supplementary, ‘But are youse a Catholic Muslim, or a Protestant Muslim?’

He was as uninterested in his clothes and class as he was in cars. He used to say that a gentleman was not to be distinguished by what he wore or where he came from, but by how he behaved. His favourite clothes were his most threadbare ones, and his favourite hat had fishing flies stuck all over it, in case he saw a piece of water or a fish rising which might require one of them to be put into service (when fishing he had the disconcerting habit of wearing spare flies stuck in his exceptionally bushy eyebrows – making him a rather frightening figure to the unwary). His complete lack of sartorial awareness and interest used to drive my mother mad, for she was a very trim dresser with a special passion for shoes (especially outrageous high-heeled ones, into which, even at an advanced age, she would still cram her terribly bunioned old feet). My mother used to say that you could tell what a man wanted you to think of him by his tie; but you could tell what he thought of himself by his shoes. She was unable to influence my father’s dress (his ties, when he wore them, were usually regimental, splattered and severely moth-eaten), but his shoes were always sparkling.

Consistent with his dislike of bigotry, he had no side, no snobbery and a deep dislike for those who had either. But he was not an easy man to live with and could from time to time be destructively, even cruelly, self-centred, especially when things were not going his way.

My mother was a saint to put up with him, for I think he led her a merry dance. They often, especially in the early years of my adolescence,
had furious rows – chiefly, as I recall, over money, which was always difficult. But they were devoted to each other and, after age had burred the sharp edges, were like a couple of lovebirds in their latter years.

My mother was in all senses his opposite, except when it came to her total dedication to us children, who always came first for both of them. She was the calm centre around whom this maelstrom of shouting and argument and adventure raged. She was the balm who mended the bloody aftermath of our fights (sometimes, but not often, physical ones). She was the bromide who would calm my father’s rage when one of us did less well than he thought we should have done at school or offended in some way that he considered heinous. She was the bottomless dispenser of unconditional, tactile love to all six of her children equally. It was to her that we confided our deepest miseries and confessed our worst transgressions, which she magicked away with hugs and eternal understanding. She rarely put her foot down with my father, but, if she did, nearly always got her way in the end, for she knew the mystery, which completely eluded the rest of us, of how to handle him and turn his seemingly implacable will. She was, in short, the person who actually made the family work.

Although of true Northern Irish Protestant stock, she regarded herself as Irish, not just British, and she regarded the South – and especially its culture – as part of her heritage and genetic make up. She loved the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, the poetry of W.B. Yeats and Louis MacNeice and the writings of James Joyce and George Bernard Shaw. But her passion (not shared by my father) was music. I remember, as yesterday, the earth-shaking epiphany I experienced when she first introduced me to Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto (her favourite piece), and it is to her that I owe a lifetime’s love of classical music, which has given me constant enjoyment and discovery, as well as much solace in time of need.

She was, however, a firmly practising Protestant and a believer. She even persuaded me eventually to go to Sunday School and, in my early teens, to get confirmed in her faith, which I did more out of love and respect for her than from any sense of conviction. Like my father, I will, if pressed, admit to being a Christian, because I find the code for living contained in Christianity best suits the way I want to live my life in the context of time and place in which I find myself. I do not find it difficult to acknowledge the presence of God. Indeed, I do so in prayer every night and regard the glorious little Parish Church of
St Mary the Virgin in Norton sub Hamdon
*
as the earthly anchor point of my spirituality – though, God knows, except for religious high days like Christmas, I attend its services infrequently enough, for Northern Ireland has made me like my churches better empty than full.

As for creeds, I know of none in any religious catechism which I would prefer as a compass to the little poem of Rabindranath Tagore:

My mother had two helpers who completed our extended family. Bella Bailey, a mountain of a woman whose heart was as big as her frame, through which ran one of the most pure and marked seams of common sense I have ever known. Bella helped with the housework, while her colleague, Lottie Hoskins, only a handful of years older than me, looked after us children, to whom she dispensed love in great clotted-cream helpings. But, though she loved us children equally, she loved my mother most, regarding her, I think, as a saint whom providence had placed amongst us. I still remain regularly in touch with her by Christmas card, telephone and occasional visits.

I was a rather sickly child, suffering especially badly from whooping cough, along with all the usual childhood ailments. I have an early memory of lying in bed on a summer’s evening, racked with coughing and listening to my parents in the garden below discussing my health in terms of real concern. At one stage my mother (who, having already lost one of her children, was alert to the point of paranoia about her children’s illnesses – a trait I have inherited from her) was so worried about my tendency to anaemia that I was put (along with millions of others during those days of rationing in post-war Britain) on a diet of raw liver, regularly prescribed doses of Radio Malt and treatment under a sunray lamp at the local hospital.

It is one of the most terrible deprivations of my life that I saw my parents only three times a year, at best, after I went away to school in England at the age of eleven (and was inconsolably homesick), and
was to see them for perhaps a total of only a year or so between the age of eighteen and their deaths during my fifties. But I loved them both without limit, and they gave me all that a boy and a man could need in a life of many changes and a good deal of self-imposed turbulence. If there has been a single driver during what I suppose has been a pretty driven life, it has been to do things which would have earned the approval of my father.

My proper formal education began at the age of seven, when I was sent to a fee-paying ‘preparatory school’ called Garth House on the outskirts of the County Down seaside town of Bangor. It was a curious establishment, run by a retired army officer and Irish cricketer, Captain Wilfred Hutton, and a terrifying woman called Miss Swanton, who was of gargantuan proportions with horribly bunioned feet crammed into cut-away shoes whose squeaks entered the room a good ten yards before she did. Garth House was located in a late-nineteenth-century house that had clearly at some time been the home of a well-to-do family and was set in what to me, as a young boy, seemed sumptuously extensive grounds, including woods and a large paddock turned into a rather good sports field.

So far as I remember there were no Catholics in Garth House, which was determinedly Protestant in its teaching and outlook. It was here that I first experienced the ferocity of the religious division in Northern Ireland, for these were completely absent in my home life. I can still remember the feeling of intense disapproval from my school contemporaries when I asked our religious affairs teacher why the Protestant religion was so good and Catholicism so evil if we all believed in the same Christian God.

To be honest, I was not very good at school. I was especially bad at mathematics (which my father was especially good at) and was rather bored by the discipline of learning, which I regarded as a waste of good fishing or shooting time. (I was not, of course, at this age allowed a real gun, but I did have an air rifle, which I could use to good effect against the magpies and pigeons who raided our garden.) My school reports fell, pretty well without exception, below the academic standard which my parents (and especially my father) hoped for and expected. I still remember the dread, shame and pain I felt when my father received the end-of-term reports.

But I was good at sport, especially athletics, which I enjoyed enormously. (I have always been rather better at sports which require individual, rather than team effort.) I broke, and held for some time, the school high-jump record and was faster than all my contemporaries on the running track. I have only played one really good game of soccer in my life, and that was at my prep school. Soccer normally required more finesse and control than I was capable of; in this particular game though, for some reason my feet seemed to be on fire, and I could make the ball do whatever I wanted it to, to the cheers of my schoolmates and my parents, who were watching. I have, sadly, never been able to repeat the performance.

Garth House was too distant from our home in Comber for me to return home at night, so I used to board during the week and be collected at weekends by my parents. By the time I was nine, however, I was regarded as being old enough to make the journey by myself on the bus. This involved changing buses in the town of Newtownards. On one occasion I missed the connecting bus home and – aged, I suppose, ten – walked five miles or so along what was, even then, a pretty busy main road, causing my parents much worry until I turned up at last. One of my fellow bus passengers at the time was a very pretty Newtownards girl with whom I fell deeply in love – from a distance. Her name was Ottilie Patterson, and she was seven years my senior. She was to become famous as a jazz singer and the wife of one of the great British jazz masters of the sixties, Chris Barber. She would never have known of my love, of course, for it was as undeclared as it was unrequited.

In fact all my loves were unrequited at the time. But they were beginning to be there all right. We had a statuesque matron with Titian hair and breasts as sharp as missiles. I can remember, as early as ten, becoming highly disturbed by her regular monthly physical examinations, and especially by the nightly squeak of her stockings on the dormitory stair.

It had all along been planned that I should be sent to Bedford School in England at the age of eleven. This was the school my father had been to and, as an ‘old boy’, he had special rights to a place for his children, should he wish it. Which was just as well, because the alternative would have been for me to take the Eleven Plus examination which most of my contemporaries had to take to gain access to a grammar school. I have no doubt whatsoever (and neither had my parents or teachers) that, if I had been required to take this exam, I would have
failed it. This would have consigned me to the lower tier of education and, consequently, a lifetime on the lower rungs of opportunity, from which at that time it was almost impossible to climb free.

In the event, I only had to take the Common Entrance exam for public schools – a much less rigorous test, but one which, nevertheless, I only just scraped through. At the age of eleven I was finally informed that I would be given a place at Bedford. My education after this was thus the result of only one thing – not ability on my part, but the privilege inherited from my parents and my class.

This fact was to have a profound influence on me later. But at the time I was submerged under a tidal wave of excitement and apprehension at going to school ‘across the water’ in England, tinged only with the dread of partings from my family which would be measured in future, not in weeks, but in months.