‘You were smuggling weren’t you?’
‘I was.’
‘But we searched your bicycle and never found anything. What were you smuggling?’
‘Bicycles.’
In the spring of 2008, while researching for this book, my wife Jane and I paid a visit to Melvin and found old John Murphy, then well into his nineties, in his little house in Garrison. His gnarled old hands, still calloused and rough from a lifetime of rowing, were arthritic and bent, and his hearing was almost totally gone. But he still had a fund of stories of these times and of my father, of the smuggling and of the fish we had caught together. Sadly, he died a few months after our visit.
Among the laws my father omitted to respect was the law giving the well-to-do (as my father saw it) the ownership of fish. Or to be more precise, the ownership of pieces of water in which one could fish. He used to say, ‘Fish are wild. Catching them should depend on skill, not on how rich you are. I accept that people can own a piece of water, but how can you own the fish in it, for they could have come from anywhere?’ This unconvincing logic (which he never applied to anything else – pheasants, for instance) gave him, in his own eyes, all the justification he needed to poach. This he did with relish, his Ulster friends and me, whenever I was home from school.
We had two favourite poaching spots, the Hollywood Reservoir, which is in the hills above Belfast, and Lough Island Reavy, nestling under the Mourne Mountains. The fishing rights to both were owned at that time by the Belfast Anglers Association, who employed ghillies to guard their water and its fish. So we fished at night, especially during the moonless period, starting around midnight (when, we reasoned, all self-respecting ghillies would be tucked up in bed) and continuing till the dawn. Afterwards we called in for a monster breakfast at one of the workmen’s cafés on the way back home – or, better still, went onto the mudflats on Strangford or the Whitewater estuary in Dundrum Bay, near Newcastle, County Down, for a feast of raw cockles, dug up and consumed on the spot.
Normally, people do not fish at night. But we used a technique which my father’s cattle-dealer friend, Billy Thompson, taught him and which I have never used or heard of being used since. It depended on the fact that trout come into shallow water to feed at night and, once you had learned the technique, it proved highly successful. It involved using a fly rod with a worm as bait and casting as far out as possible with a very stiff arm (so as not to lose the worm) and then drawing the line in very slowly. You could feel the trout picking up the bait and the trick was to let him run with it a bit and then strike when you judged the worm to be fully taken. We caught some magnificent fish using this method. But we ourselves were nearly caught several times, too.
Our method for escaping ghillies was simple, effective and, again, taught us by Billy Thompson. Part One was avoidance. We would nearly always be able to hear the ghillies coming some time before they heard or saw us. Then, if we thought they hadn’t actually seen us, we would simply lie down in the dark, pull our overcoats over us and make like a stone. Ten times out of ten, the ghillies, not knowing we were there, walked past unseeing, leaving us to make good our escape. But if we knew we had been spotted, then we implemented Part Two: evasion. We would start walking round the lake keeping a good distance in front of our pursuer. If he ran, we ran. If he walked, then we did, too. If he shouted (which they always did) we would keep silent. And then, when we judged him frustrated, and choosing a point at which we were briefly out of sight, we would one by one drop to the ground, pull our overcoats over us, lie still and hope he would walk past us. And that was always what happened. Then it was just a question of making good our escape and meeting at the car, which my father had always taken the precaution of parking some distance away in an unlikely spot.
My father, however, was not very fit, having lost a lung in the war and being a heavy smoker. So it always fell to me to be the last person to drop out; it was reasoned that I had the best chance of outwalking – if necessary outrunning – our pursuer. I am not quite sure how it was we were never caught – but we never were. And in the process I learned some techniques of nightcraft that were invaluable to me much later in the Royal Marines.
Fishing was our spring and summer occupation, and shooting our winter one. But argument was an all-year-round affair. My father loved his discussions fierce, noisy and over family dinner for preference. This drove my mother to distraction as she tried to intervene to make space for food, or part us as the decibels went up and the insults grew more furious. He would take us all on together, giving no quarter to any of us and accepting none for himself. When losing he could, however, be completely unscrupulous and even fall back on the tired old tactic of telling us we were too young and would know better when we were older – that was when we knew we were winning. He would often take up an opinion contrary to his own in order to get an argument going, and then become ruthless in defence of the untenable. His opinions were surprisingly left-wing for a man of his upbringing and background. He was (though much later, of course) well ahead of me or any of my radical friends of the sixties in opposing the Vietnam war. The techniques of argument I learned at our dinner table have been invaluable all my adult life – but more valuable still was the lesson I learned from him not to be afraid to hold a minority opinion. I am sure it was my father who planted in me the latent seeds of liberalism that were to flower much later in my life.
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:
We are all the more one, because we are many.
For we have made an ample space for love in the gap where we were sundered,
Our unlikeness reveals its breadth of beauty, with one common life,
Like mountain peaks in the morning sun.†
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 ja
zz 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.
A Fortunate Life Page 4