* The Comber distillery closed down in 1956, before we left.
† It is a car park and supermarket now.
* St Mary’s is referred to in Pevsner’s The Buildings of England: South and West Somerset (1958) as ‘the jewel of Somerset’.
† Sir Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), ‘Unity in Diversity’ – from his anthology Oriental Caravan.
CHAPTER 3
Teenage Years and Bedford
WHEN I WAS SENT there in 1952, Bedford School was a rather traditional middle-ranking, boys-only public school with about a thousand pupils. It was divided into what were essentially three separate schools: the Incubator (or ‘Inky’) which took children from 7 to 11; the Lower School, for boys from 11 to 13, and the Upper School, which continued pupils’ education through to 18. Set in the middle of the town of Bedford, the school was said to have existed as a Church school since before the Domesday Book. In 1552 Bedford’s School was issued with letters patent by Edward VI as a Grammar School. But, like so many other similarly founded schools, it raised itself to the status of an independent Public School in the mid-1860s. In my time it was less a forcing ground for achievement than the educational institution of choice for Bedfordshire’s yeoman farmers and its middle classes. In one respect, however, the school’s reach went well beyond the county. It had a strong reputation for educating the sons of military officers and the colonial civil servants who ran the Empire. My father had been sent home from India at the age of eight, to be educated first at a Jesuit college and then at Bedford. Indeed, he went to the same boarding house that I subsequently attended.
The school in the 1950s (no doubt it is very different now) was not particularly famed for its academic prowess (though my year had a fair crop of bright students who went on to glittering careers in academia). Most of its students were at the hearty, rather than brainy, end of the spectrum. Sport was thus a very important part of school life. We had a good rugby team which in my time briefly included Budge Rogers, seven years my senior, who later won many England caps and was acknowledged as one of the best rugby players of his generation.
The River Ouse runs placidly through the middle of the town, providing perfect facilities for rowing which, ahead of cricket, was the major sport of the summer. In all these sports, as well as in athletics and boxing, we played in the usual rounds of independent-school tournaments, whose membership included most of the major public schools of England from Eton downwards.
Although primarily a market and light industrial town (which in the 1950s had become something of a magnet for post-World-War-Two Italian immigrant families), Bedford, the home of John Bunyan, had (and still has) an unusual number of educational facilities. There was Bedford High School*, the female equivalent of Bedford School, a boys’ secondary modern (known as Bedford Modern, and now an independent co-educational school in its own right) and the Dame Alice Harper Girls School, a grammar school for girls. The last two were viewed with a good deal of rather unpleasant snobbish disdain by Bedford School staff and pupils (though this did not stop them regularly beating us at sports). And on top of all that, there was Bedford College, which at the time was one of the nation’s foremost establishments for educating physical training teachers. All this made for quite a sizeable, if not particularly prestigious academic community, as well as a great deal of opportunity for (at the time strictly illicit) fraternisation between the boys and girls of school and college age.
In the manner of public schools at the time, ‘japes’ were regarded as being an essential part of school life, even if formally frowned on. These were pranks which sometimes involved personal danger, but nearly always resulted in damage of some sort or another to public (or school) property. They were at the time looked upon as ‘good clean fun’, provided they were carried out by the ‘young gentlemen’ of the town, rather than its ‘yobs’. The legendary jape, carried out long before my time, but still talked of with admiration and approval while I was there, was the nocturnal painting of red footsteps down from John Bunyan’s statue in the town square, into a nearby ladies lavatory and back up to the statue again. (They could, apparently, be seen for many months afterwards, despite determined attempts by the Council to erase them.) The best such prank in my time was the painting of the words ‘Frying Tonight’ on the gym roof, which also stayed for many months, but could not be said to be so witty. The other prank, spoken of in hushed whispers, was ‘beam walking’, which consisted of walking at night along the beams which held up the roof of the Great Hall, three storeys and some forty feet above the floor. One of my friends, two years my senior, became so addicted to the business of japes that he took his skills with him to Cambridge and claimed to have been one of those involved on the fringes of the famous jape of putting an Austin Seven on the roof of the University Senate House in 1958.
It was into this, to me utterly strange, environment that I was plunged in the early 1950s, just as Britain was entering the last decade of Empire, privilege and class – soon to be swept away by the 1960s. My father made the first journey from Belfast to Bedford with me. Thereafter, from the age of eleven until eighteen, I made the journey alone, waving goodbye to my parents standing on Belfast dock as the ship for Liverpool bore me away for a three-month parting from them. Next morning the ship would dock under the Liver Birds statues on Liverpool dock, and I would make my way to Lime Street Station, through the grime and bustle of Liverpool’s crowded streets. From Liverpool, the train went to Crewe, where I changed and, after an hour or so’s wait, caught the train to Bletchley. Here I changed once more for the train to Bedford. I can still remember the journey intimately. But most of all I can remember the fear of missing the train engendered in me then (and never since lost). I can recall perfectly the cold and misery of sitting out on the platform of a wintry and windswept Crewe station for half an hour before the train was due, in case it should come early and leave without me. To this day, I drive colleagues and companions mad with my compulsion to arrive for trains and aircraft long before it is necessary, for fear of missing the connection.
On 31 January 1953 I had to return home from Bedford to Northern Ireland for a family funeral. This was the day of the ‘Great Storm’. I was twelve years old at the time and remember the crossing of the North Channel from Liverpool to Belfast as by far the roughest and most frightening voyage of my life. In the event we were probably lucky to make it, as that same day the MV Princess Victoria, crossing from Stranraer to Larne, sank, with the loss of 133 lives. One of my childhood memories is of seeing the frozen bodies washed up on the Donaghadee foreshore for days afterwards.
Since I was a full-time boarder, I went into the Lower School’s boarding house, called Farrar’s. Here my broad Northern Ireland accent and a severe bout of early homesickness immediately attracted unwelcome attention. They nicknamed me Paddy, which remained my name right through my school years. And then as no less than thirteen of my contemporaries at Bedford also joined the Royal Marines, Paddy followed me there. Thus it was that Paddy became the name by which I have been known for the rest of my life. This, I fear, caused some distress to my parents. I, however, have always felt more comfortable with Paddy than with my given name of Jeremy, not least because it was not long before my strong Northern Irish accent was driven out of me (to my regret, with hindsight) so my schoolboy nickname now remains the only personal acknowledgement I have of my Irish blood and upbringing.
Farrar’s was a pretty rough-and-tumble, physical place in my time, and I soon learned to be very self-sufficient, a habit which, together with a dislike of clubbishness, has remained with me all my life. The discipline was strict, the corporal punishment frequent and the play rough. Most of my contemporaries had been together in the Inky for four years previously, so I was something of a stranger intruding into already established relationships and found my first months there, parted from my parents and in a totally alien environment, very painful. It was not long, however, before I realised that if I wanted respect, I would have to
fight for it. I became rather good at fighting in the rough-and-tumbles that were encouraged in the evenings. No damage beyond an occasional bloody nose was ever done, so far as I remember, and genuine anger in fights was something of a rarity. Indeed, the one golden rule of these scrimmages was never to lose your temper (I have a fiery Irish one, which I have always had difficulty controlling). We were more like young animals testing their strength through rough-and-tumble than genuine combatants. But it was a tough school of knocks nevertheless, and I soon found that I was bullied and teased less because I could both take it and give it on the rough-house floor. All in all it did me little harm, for I was a physical boy. But I cannot say I think it was a good way to bring up all boys, and there must have been many who found it deeply unpleasant and even permanently scarring.
My prowess on the rough-house floor and on the sports field was, once again, not matched in the classroom. I found study irksome, and my early reports were not good ones – to my father’s chagrin. My Form Master’s General Report for the Easter Term, when I would have turned twelve (signed off by my father in his neat hand on 27 April 1953), is pretty typical and reads:
A disappointing term; I am sure he could have done better. His effort is much too variable and his concentration poor. There is no doubt he means well, but it is a case of the spirit being willing, but the flesh weak. There has also been very little attempt to improve his handwriting.
A little over a year later, in the summer of 1954, I caught double pneumonia. The school authorities were sufficiently worried about my condition to send for my mother, who came over from Ireland and helped nurse me back to health. I have hazy memories of being delirious during this period and of nightmarish dreams in and out of which swam my mother’s face and interminable wheeling columns of marching ginger biscuits (which seemed to be my staple diet when I was ill, and which I have hated ever since). It was also about this time that I started to get migraines, to start with as often as once a week. They were crippling, involving first blindness and lights and then brain-splitting headaches and nausea. I used to dread them, as they were very unpleasant, and I had to remain in a darkened room for twenty-four hours until the attack passed. They diminished in frequency and severity as I grew older, but have stayed with me, albeit in less severe form, all my life. I fear I hid them from the Admiralty authorities when I joined the Royal Marines and (with the help of friends and service colleagues who would cover for me during an attack) during my subsequent service career, for they would have disqualified me from entry at the start and could have caused me to be invalided out later.
At the age of fourteen, I contrived to break both bones in my lower left leg during an escapade in the Gym that resulted in my falling some fifteen feet onto the wooden floor. They made a bit of a mess of resetting the bones, with the result that I have one leg slightly out of alignment and shorter than the other.
In the autumn of 1954, at the age of thirteen, I moved to Bedford Upper School and a new boarding house, Kirkman’s, situated about a mile from the main school on the banks of the Ouse. The first thing I saw when I entered my new home was a large board showing the names of all the previous heads of the house, amongst them my father’s against the year 1925.
It was at about this time that, on holiday visits back to Northern Ireland, I started to become more and more aware of the position of Catholics in the Province, who at the time were heavily discriminated against in jobs, housing and almost all aspects of social life. The great annual Twelfth of July triumphalist celebration of the victory of the Protestant William of Orange over the Catholic Stuarts at the Battle of the Boyne often took place in a huge field opposite our house in Comber. As a child, I used to look forward to this as a great and fascinating spectacle. But now I increasingly found its ceremonies bizarre and its atmosphere ugly. I remember very clearly, from about the age of fourteen, having a most powerful premonition that this could not last, and that violence was coming.
Back at Bedford, however, my first year at my senior boarding school meant that I was required to be a fag for one of the senior boys, or ‘Monitors’. The ‘fag master’ who chose me was someone I had looked up to with something close to hero worship since I first met him, ‘Ram’ Seeger. I later followed him into the Royal Marines, where he won a Military Cross in Borneo. I also followed him into the SBS, where he was (and still is) a legend. He subsequently saw unofficial service in Afghanistan during the war against the Soviet occupation, where he carried out acts of outstanding courage and endurance. He remains one of the most extraordinary men I have ever met. His outstanding gifts of leadership, mental focus and bravery would have better served both him and his country had he lived in a different and earlier age, or perhaps during a time of great war. He asked me to do none of the things normally expected of fags, like making his bed or cleaning his shoes. Instead, I had to join him doing PT in the backyard with a pack full of bricks on my back, or running considerable distances along the banks of the Ouse in large boots and the heaviest clothes we could find. He taught me the techniques of endurance and the importance of physical fitness, alongside that of an active mind.
I greatly enjoyed my time in the Upper School. Not that my academic work was any better, at least to start with. Here is a selection of comments from my early Upper School reports which give the flavour:
On the whole I am not satisfied with his work and progress…. He must try to work a little quicker…. Excessively Irish…. I was glad to see him show such pluck in the House boxing…. He works well but easily gets muddled…. He has some intelligence and with just a little more control over himself and some restraint of his high spirits, he could do quite well…. He has enthusiasm, but not always understanding…. His work is spoiled by carelessness…. Very weak, but need not overly despair [French]…. He is far from being an accomplished linguist [French again], but in his own way he makes a contribution to the class…. Pleasantly argumentative…. Tries hard but finds it difficult.
Sport, however, was a different story. I was in the House rugby team for my age every year and eventually in the School’s First XV. I played in various positions; first hooker, then wing forward, then No. 8 and occasionally in my last years, as I became more fleet of foot, as a wing three-quarter. My rugby, however, was more brawn than skill. Here is what my team Captain wrote in the House yearbook of Christmas 1958.
Ashdown (2nd row). An amazing player, who never seems to run out of energy, even though leading the pack. He was the mainstay of the forwards, shoving like a maniac in the tight, leaping fiendishly in the line-outs and crashing into the loose. He inspired the pack to greater heights than we thought possible and combined them as a unit around him. He is slightly devoid of rugger intelligence, owing possibly to his fantastic energy, and is not very good at passing. Dribbles well.
I boxed, too, but hated it. At one time, in the annual blood match against Eton, the tournament depended on the result of the last bout in which I was pitched against Lord Valentine Charles Thynne*, the son of the 6th Marquis of Bath. Although he was four years my senior I was much the stronger. But no matter how many blows I rained on him, he refused to go down and succeeded in landing an equivalent number on me – each of us being spurred on with roars from our respective supporters in the audience. At the end of a most bloody fight, the bout was declared a draw.
I was, however, hopeless at cricket, which I have never really seen the point of, and so during the summer took up rowing and athletics. I was not neat enough to be a good oarsman, but in athletics I found I could excel. I loved the one-on-one competitiveness and the thrill of winning. To start with I was better at field than track events, particularly the high jump and the shot put, at which I set a new school record. But later I discovered I could run fast too, and in my last year won the Victor Ludorum for the best all-round athlete in the school.
Apart from sport, I took quite an active part in the other ‘extra-curricular’ school activities. I was an active member of the Debating Society from
the age of twelve right through to my final year, arguing at various times against corporal punishment, against too much conformity, in favour of Sunday cinemas, in favour of suppressing gambling and against the abolition of fagging (in which I said that being a fag helped leaders to understand what it was like to be led). I also rose through the ranks to become a Warrant Officer in the School Cadet Force. But my extracurricular agenda was beginning to extend somewhat wider than official activities. As I approached my mid-teens, adolescence and puberty came roaring tempestuously into my life.
After the age of fourteen, we were all required to go to dancing classes. I was, and remain, a completely hopeless ballroom dancer and have, over the years, inflicted much grievous damage on members of the opposite sex unfortunate enough to be paired with me. But this was a chance to meet and actually touch those, to me, mythical creatures – girls! I was paranoid about my curly hair at the time and used to spend hours washing it an attempt (always vain) to get the frizziness out (in those pre-race-conscious days, the nickname my detractors gave me was ‘the white wog’, because my hair, though mousy blonde, was so negroid in character). I had actually had my first kiss in a hay loft on the night of the Coronation at the age of eleven, when visiting the home of my father’s favourite sister (whose house in Dorset became a kind of ‘home from home’ during half-term holidays when I could not get back to Ireland). But this had not in any way diminished the paroxysm of nervousness and confusion into which my body was plunged whenever I was required to have social contact with a member of the opposite sex. And so, despite falling deeply in love with every single one I was nominated to dance with, I was not very successful and envied the louche and easy manner of my (straight-haired) school colleagues, who always seemed to be able to make progress where my clumsy approaches had been embarrassingly rejected.
A Fortunate Life Page 5