Around the time of my brother Richard’s death, my mother moved back up to the Punjab. She spent much of her time in war work and, later, in nursing my father, who had returned from the victorious campaign in Burma terribly debilitated by illness and exhaustion. As a consequence much of my early upbringing fell to our Indian household, which consisted of an ayah, Aisha, a sais (or groom) called Hamid, a gardener whose name I have forgotten, and a father and son, Nur Mohamed and Eid Mohamed, who guarded the house and looked after our needs in my father’s absence. I loved them all dearly, and by the age of four understood the rhythms and symbols of Islamic life and spoke Hindi better than I did English. I am sure that my later apparent facility with languages comes from this early bilingual period of my life.
My father delighted in keeping strange and unusual pets, many of which he would bring back from his shooting expeditions in the jungle. We had snakes and (but not together) a tame mongoose, a small pigmy deer and a scaly anteater with a long trunk; at mealtimes the latter used to wander in and circumnavigate the room, hoovering up ants and termites from the skirting boards of our wooden bungalow with all the efficiency of a four-legged Dyson vacuum cleaner (and making a very similar sucking noise). But my favourite was a monkey who went by the very original name of: Monkey. He was a little older than me, but about the same size. We were inseparable companions. But what made our friendship even warmer was that we shared not only our lives, but also our chastisements. He would be beaten for some misdemeanour one day; me the next. This was the true cement of our fellow-feeling. Until one day Monkey was especially severely beaten for some sin and, in retribution (as I remember it), walked calmly over to a coffee table on which stood a blue Wedgwood bowl with nymphs dancing round it. This bowl was the last of my parents’ breakable wedding presents to have survived their many moves around India, and I knew it was my mother’s most valued possession because it was given pride of place whenever there was a dinner party, or drinks, or a bridge evening. And Monkey knew it, too. But it did not stop him. For he scooped the bowl up and ran out of the door and down our long front drive, with my mother and the gardener in hot pursuit. At the bottom of our drive, near the gate, there was a tall mango tree. Monkey, still grasping the bowl in one hand, scrambled up this at high speed. Once at the top he held out the bowl in one hand … and dropped it! And then, just at the very last moment, as the bowl passed his foot, the foot shot out and caught it. Monkey continued to do this for half an hour (or so it seemed), with my mother and the gardener dashing backwards and forwards to position themselves beneath the bowl each time it threatened to fall, while trying vainly to entice him down between times. Finally, Monkey descended the tree, laid the bowl at the foot of the trunk and sauntered off, in carefree manner, back to the house. I swear that if monkeys could whistle he would have done so. He never got beaten again – which was bad news for me. And I have, ever since, felt myself somehow deficient for lack of prehensile toes.
In May 1945 my second brother, Tim, was born. And a year later, when the war in the Far East ended and it became clear to my parents that the days of the British in India were drawing to a close, it was decided that my mother should take my brother and me back to Northern Ireland, where she would set up home and wait for my father to return after the British hand-over in India was concluded. At the time we were living at Simla, in the foothills of the Himalayas, so our journey to Bombay took us down the length of the Punjab and into India proper. Although the full-scale partition riots and ethnic massacres which accompanied the end of British rule did not really begin until a year later, in August 1946, there were, even at this time, a number of communal riots and mass killings. It must have been the aftermath of one of these – glimpsed from the folds of my mother’s skirts on our last journey across India to Bombay and the boat home – that formed the indelible childhood memory described in the Prologue. Whether the bodies I saw were those of Muslims killed by Hindus or the other way round, I do not know. Nor can I, with confidence, describe the detail of what I saw that day, for I fear this has become too distorted and exaggerated by childhood terrors and nightmares to be reliable. But smell is a more accurate hook for memory. A quarter of a century later the whole scene came flooding back in Technicolor when I next smelt that sickly sweet odour of putrefaction, this time from the long-dead bodies of our enemies on a riverbank after one of our actions in the Borneo war.
Bombay in 1946 gave me my first ever sight of the sea, and I was immediately captivated by it, making a solemn promise, along with a shipboard friend of the same age, that we would both go into the Royal Navy, which later (if you count the Royal Marines as part of the Navy) we both did.
Our first home in Northern Ireland was in a collection of coastguard cottages which stood sentinel over the mouth of Belfast Lough, called Lisnarynn. My memories of this time are of sea-lashed bluffs, vertiginous scrambles down to wild rocks and pools of indescribable romance and treasure, the blaze of whin (gorse) blossom in the spring and hedgerows festooned with wild fuchsia in the summer. And of an old anti-aircraft gun position at the back of our house, littered with faeces and old French letters (not that I recognised them as such at the time), where, to my mother’s despair, I loved to re-enact the wartime defence of Belfast against German bombers. My father meanwhile, now promoted to Colonel, stayed behind in India to help manage the British handover, returning home in 1947.
It was on his return that we moved from our isolated coastguard cottages to the nearby seaside town of Donaghadee, directly facing Portpatrick in Scotland across Beaufort’s Dyke and the North Channel. We lived on the first floor of a gloomy old late Victorian house within a hundred yards of the seashore, and there my third brother, Robert, named after my mother’s father, was born.
I remember three of our Donaghadee neighbours, especially. The first was an old retired couple downstairs, who would always give me sweets and had a Victorian print called ‘The Last Survivor’ hanging on their wall; it depicted Dr Brydon, the only survivor of the Massacre in the Snows of 1842 (which my ancestor is supposed to have escaped by the skin of her teeth), approaching a Khyber hill fort on an exhausted horse. The second was an eccentric neighbour with an unpronounceable Greek name but, according to local gossip, an impeccably English aristocratic pedigree. He was given to practising yoga by standing on his head every morning in front of the huge picture window of his bungalow, stark naked and with all his appurtenances dangling in reverse. Our Northern Irish ‘daily’, a good Catholic girl called Bridie, who always referred to the male organ as ‘the article’ (and to the female genitalia as ‘the underneaths’ – as in ‘Old Mrs So-and-so is having terrible trouble with her underneaths’), took care to be scandalised by this apparition on her arrival every morning. Best of all, however, was the fact that my bedroom window gave me a perfect view not only of ‘the article’ itself, but also – and much more interestingly – of unwitting passers-by taking a morning stroll along an adjacent path. This was so aligned that they did not suspect the affront to decency which lay in ambush for them until they turned the final corner, to be confronted face to face (as it were!) and at a range of only a couple of yards or so, by this tableau of body hair and inverted human biology. I used to make my mother peal with laughter by putting on a little play every day over her morning coffee, re-enacting the contortions of horror and scandal I had witnessed earlier.
Our third neighbours were the parents of my bosom pal, Willy Orr. His father, Captain ‘Willy’ Orr*, was to become the Ulster Unionist MP for South Down, and they lived in a house which seemed to me the very pinnacle of luxury and grandness. And Captain Orr himself, in my eyes, was just as grand as was necessary to go with it. But his son and I were scamps who got into every mischief possible for small boys living in a carefree society with a whole wild foreshore as a playground. On one occasion I was so offended by what I regarded as an unfair upbraiding from my father that I concluded that my parents didn’t really want me, so I would sail away for ever. Willy and I jumped
in an old potato box and set off to paddle out to sea. Fortunately, the box was so unseaworthy that it sank after only a few yards, while still within comfortable wading distance (even for seven-year-olds) of the shore and safety. Later, we conspired to tempt the school mistress of the little Donaghadee primary school we were by now both attending (whom we hated with a passion), into the stationery cupboard, after which we locked the door on her and ran away home. For this we were both severely (and very reasonably) chastised.
In the bitter winter of 1947 my parents took me ‘across the water’ for a trip to England. I remember being stunned at the size of London and the grime and the scale of the destruction. It seemed to me a city of bombsites connected by occasional streets of houses. I remember also the cold (this was the worst winter in living memory) and huddling round the gas fire in our room in the Army and Navy Club. And, of course, I remember Hamleys toyshop, which I thought the Aladdin’s cave of my dreams when my father took me there. We also visited my father’s eccentric relatives, who lived in a beautiful (but rather dog-eared and ice-cold) Elizabethan manor called Thorne House outside Yeovil. There is a photograph, taken in February of that year, of me standing in the grounds with snow up to the top of my Wellington boots. Little did I realise that this was to be the place I would in due course call home and, thirty-six years later, represent in Parliament.
* The Special Boat Section (now Special Boat Service) of the Royal Marines.
* Leather artisan.
† Maidservant.
* Bog or marsh.
* Captain Lawrence ‘Willy’ Orr, MP for South Down 1950–1974 (succeeded by Enoch Powell).
CHAPTER 2
A Northern Ireland Childhood
IN 1948, A YEAR OR SO after my father returned from India, we moved from Donaghadee on the coast, to the little market town of Comber, lying at the head of Strangford Lough in County Down. The town’s most famous son was General Sir Robert ‘Rollo’ Gillespie, killed in front of a Indian fort in 1814, apparently uttering the unlikely last words, ‘One more shot for the honour of Down’ (County Down). He played a key part in the British conquest of India and has a statue, in the manner of a mini-Nelson’s column, in the town square. The great family of the town, however, were the Andrews, one of whom, Thomas Andrews, was both the chief designer and a victim of the ‘unsinkable’ Titanic (built at the Belfast shipyard of Harland and Wolfe).
The town was also famous as the home of Comber Whiskey, produced in an old distillery (now sadly closed) which I passed on my way to our family home on the south-eastern outskirts of the town. The warm, steamy smell of mashing and distilling whiskey is one of the most evocative smells of my early youth.*
My father and a business partner bought an old nineteenth-century flax mill in the centre of the town† and turned it into a pig farm with over a thousand head of pigs. My father sank all his army savings into the business, which was called The Comber Produce Company. For his partner, a Northern Irish businessman, this was a speculative investment. But for my father, who ran the business, it was a full-time job. To start with, they prospered, but then they were hit very hard in the mid-fifties, when UK markets were opened to continental produce, and Danish bacon flooded the shops. By the second half of the fifties, the business was in steady decline, with my father taking more and more desperate measures to save it and my mother doing the same to ensure that the family lived within our increasingly straitened means.
When we moved to Comber, we first took up residence in a rented nineteenth-century town house called Glenbank on the outskirts of the town. Here my siblings increased from three to six with the arrival of my sister Alisoun and, finally, the twins, Mark and Melanie. Later my parents bought one half of a 1930s house, Eusemere (previously owned by Sir James Andrews, the Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland), which had recently been divided in two. It was in Eusemere that I spent most of my adolescent years, and they were, despite the gathering financial clouds, very happy ones.
My parents had one of those marriages which are built on opposites. My father, to whom I was completely devoted, had three great loves in his life: shooting, fishing and strong arguments, and I was bought up with a gun in one hand, a rod in the other and a head full of disputatious opinions.
In the winter, even from the age of ten or so, I would go shooting with him, either on the bogs of Northern Ireland after snipe, or wildfowling on Strangford Lough, a vast bottle-shaped tidal inlet so named by the Vikings, whose shores lay no more than a half mile from our back garden. The best of all our shooting expeditions were those that took us to shoot duck and geese across a winter moon on the great Lough’s mudflats. This was a dangerous pastime, as the tide comes in fast on Strangford, and the tangle of mudbanks and water channels can be very confusing. But we soon learned the Lough’s secrets from local friends, and especially from a larger-than-life local cattle-dealer and all-purpose rogue called Billy Thompson (of whom more later).
To be honest, I was never very good with a shotgun in comparison to my brother Tim or my father, who was an outstanding shot, despite very poor eyesight. So I would often come back empty-handed. But I loved the wildness and desolation of Strangford, its bleak mudbanks crouched against the tide while racing clouds flew by on a northerly wind, and the wild calls of a skein of geese filled our ears as they wheeled and circled round us, seen only as brief black shapes across a silvery moon.
My father loved shooting. But the passion that exceeded all others was for his rod and line. I remember as a boy that, when the Farlows fishing catalogue arrived from London in early January, we would both spend hours poring over it together and deciding what flies and spinners and reels and tackle we would need for the season to come. In spring we would load up our battered Standard Ten car (my father was completely uninterested in material possessions, especially cars – this one, I recall, had a top speed of 58 miles per hour downhill with the wind behind us, and you could see the road through a rust hole in the floor by the back seat) and on atrocious roads thread our way south through Northern Ireland’s little towns for eighty miles to fish for salmon on Lough Melvin on the Fermanagh–Leitrim border. We always stayed in the same rather primitive fishing hotel, The Melvin Hotel in the little town of Garrison. There was a huge stuffed brown trout in a glass case above the bar, which they claimed had been caught in the Lough, and my boyhood dreams were all about catching one like it and of how proud my father would be.
My memories of these trips are of being bitterly cold while telling my father I wasn’t; of long hours in the back of the boat trawling spinners or casting a wet fly on leaden water; of sardine sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs, which we seemed to have to wait an eternity to eat, and of bars of Highland Toffee (my father had a very sweet tooth) and ginger beer in stone bottles. We always paid a second visit to the Lough in the summer, which I loved even more. Then we would fish for a trout special to Lough Melvin – the beautiful, golden gillaroo – by ‘dapping’ with a daddy longlegs. ‘Dapping’ involves using a very light line that you allow to blow in the wind so that you can then gently lower the daddy longlegs onto the surface of the water from five or six yards away. It worked best when the fish were lying in shallow, weedy water over a sandy bank on a hot August day. The other special Lough Melvin trout is the sonaghan, also found nowhere else in the world. They do not grow big, but are tremendous fighters.
But it was the salmon we were chiefly there for, and I caught my first one, weighing ten-and-a-half pounds, at the age of eleven. Actually, I had caught one the year before, but our boatman, John Murphy, took one look at it, swore and, to my horror, threw it back. I was so furious I wanted to throw him after it, until my father explained that it was a ‘kelt’ or spent fish (i.e., a female which had just spawned), and so could not be taken and had to be returned.
Besides fishing, we had a second and more clandestine excitement during our twice yearly trips to Lough Melvin – smuggling. For my father, though an ex-Indian Army Colonel and to all appearances a pillar o
f the community, was no great respecter of any law he regarded as irksome.
The border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland runs through the middle of Lough Melvin. Our boatman, John Murphy (to whom my father used to send Christmas cards every year – even after he himself had emigrated to Australia) came from the Irish side. No trip was ever made backwards and forwards across the Lough without carrying some contraband or other. It was my job to sit on top of the cartons of whatever it was most profitable to smuggle at the time. The favourite was butter, which was much cheaper in the south than the north, but I have sat long hours on Melvin, in rough weather and smooth, on crates containing everything from cigarettes to Irish whiskey, depending on what my father and John Murphy thought at the time would return the best profit. On one occasion we went on a rather larger smuggling trip, which we undertook in a dilapidated truck. I was positioned at the rear and equipped with a large sack of tin tacks. I asked what these were for and was told that if we were chased by the police or the customs I was to throw as many handfuls as I could onto the road behind us to puncture the tyres of our pursuers.
Smuggling across the border was a regular business at the time, and many were the stories of near escapes told in the bar of The Melvin Hotel. My favourite was of a local man who was big in smuggling and well known for it to the local police and customs. On one occasion he was observed cycling backwards and forwards past the customs post many times a day, for several days. The customs knew he was smuggling something, but, however many times they stopped and searched him, they could find nothing. Some time later, at a local bar, they bearded him with their suspicions:
A Fortunate Life Page 3