All this changed, however, when I was just a couple of months short of my fifteenth birthday.
Two academic subjects consistently caused me problems at school. French (all my French teachers agreed on one thing – I had absolutely no aptitude for languages) and mathematics. Lack of ability in French was not regarded as being too serious. But mathematics was a different matter. By 1955 my father was in severe financial difficulties. The pig farm had folded, and my parents were now trying to make their living from a small market garden set up in the grounds of our house, where they grew vegetables for sale in Belfast market. It was therefore decided that I should try for a Naval Scholarship, which would pay my school fees from the age of sixteen, so taking enough financial pressure off my parents for them to be able to send my brother Tim to Bedford as well. To be eligible for a Naval Scholarship, I needed to pass the Civil Service exam, of which mathematics was an essential part. Everyone agreed that I would not be able to pass this unless I received special individual, extra instruction.
Private maths lessons were arranged for me with the wife of a local businessman, who had given up teaching when she got married*. I used to see her on Wednesday afternoons, the school half-day. Since I fell in love with every member of the opposite sex who came within touching distance at the time, I naturally fell hopelessly in love with her, despite what must have been at least a fifteen-year difference in our ages. And with good reason, for she was extremely pretty with a trim figure and a habit of wearing tight Jane Russell sweaters and those narrow-waisted very full skirts with flouncy petticoats which were in fashion at the time (Bill Haley and the Comets’ ‘Rock Around the Clock’ had just burst upon us).
I spent hours preparing to go and see her and none of it, I fear, was on mathematics. I had a slight stammer at this age, which, together with wild untameable waves of blushing, became uncontrollable in her presence. In retrospect, she could not have avoided seeing my confusion. Whether she deliberately made it worse I cannot say. But that was the effect when she leaned over me to correct some hopelessly incorrect calculation, and I could smell her perfume and feel her warmth. For brief moments I even felt her breasts brushing my shoulder and on one, much mentally reconstructed occasion, she permitted one to briefly touch the back of my hand as it steadied my exercise book while she corrected a sum. The effect on a young teenager with a head full of fantasies and a bloodstream boiling with a cauldron of adolescent hormones was predictable and, one might say, elevating. I used to dread the end of our lessons when I had to try to hide this somewhat prominent fact with my textbooks as I stood up to leave.
Things came to a head on our last lesson before the school broke up for Christmas 1955. She had clearly been to a lunchtime drinks party, for she arrived in a very boisterous and jolly mood, an especially flouncy dress tightly gathered at the waist, a silk shirt with the top button carelessly undone and her bosoms more than usually visible. The effect on me, exaggerated by the fact that she was especially close in her attention to my exercise book, was entirely inevitable. After about ten minutes of this torture, she instructed me to get a book from the bookshelf. Now there was no disguising my embarrassment and nothing to hide it with. And this time she did not pretend not to notice, but to my horror asked me whether I was embarrassed by it. I stammered that I was and, in a flame of blushes, apologised! She replied that it was nothing to be embarrassed about, unbuttoned her blouse and, gently taking my hand, placed it on her breast.
Our Wednesday afternoon affair lasted, I think, about two months after I returned from Christmas holidays. It did not do anything for my deficiency in maths – but it did teach me a very great deal that was useful for a young man to know on the edge of manhood. She dealt with my inexperience and gaucheness with kindness, tenderness and patience, and for this I have been eternally grateful to her. When it ended I was distraught and did all the things ardent boys do at that age, like hanging around her house and writing her dangerous, passionate notes. But I soon got over it, and with it my shyness towards the opposite sex – and this I owe to her, too.
I met her again four years later, between leaving school and joining the Royal Marines. At the time I was filling in time by working as on odd-job man in London, and our affair flared briefly and then died again.
This early initiation into one of the key rites of passage into adulthood marks a decisive watershed in my time in Bedford. But it was not, I fear, in any way beneficial to my academic studies, as the reports on my fourteenth and fifteenth years show only too clearly.
Corporal punishment was a feature of all public schools at the time and could be administered with up to six strokes of a cane, not only by the masters, but also by our fellow pupils who were Monitors. During my next two years I was beaten several times. Mostly this was for minor misbehaviour, though I was clearly beginning to develop a somewhat rebellious streak. One record in the punishment book of a caning by my Head of House notes:
4 cuts [strokes of the cane]. Talking and joking in prep [the Public School equivalent of homework] after repeated warning. Generally bad attitude. I was going to give him only 3, but when he appealed to Mr Reeve [the housemaster] in an obstreperous fashion, I gave him one extra.
A mere nine days later I got caught again – this time on my way out ‘over the wall’ at midnight to meet some local girls at a party. All those caught with me got four strokes, but I and one other fellow miscreant were given ‘six of the best’. The note in the punishment book explains why:
Being caught down [in the garden] fully clothed to go for a swim (so they said). The extra 2 were given [to me and my friend] for arguing to justify themselves on a blatantly obvious case of wrongdoing.
Fortunately for me, all that could ever be proved against me was that I was either preparing to be absent (as in the case above), or was absent – if we had actually been discovered in any of our secret nocturnal liaisons (often in the town’s taverns), we would have been expelled.
In Bedford, apart from the Monitors, there was also a second and more junior tier of pupil authority, called ‘Options’. Options had certain lowly privileges and were generally regarded as students who were on the way up to become full Monitors in due course.
So, given my record, it was to my very great surprise that, close to my sixteenth birthday, I was promoted to this first rung of student authority and appointed an ‘Option’. It did not last long, however, as I was, with others, shortly afterwards discovered in an illicit (but daytime) rendezvous with some girls from one of the Bedford girls schools in an old derelict barn we had discovered on a school cross-country run. I cannot quite remember how we were discovered: I think one of the girls blurted it out to a friend, and it all fell apart from there. I should point out that nowadays what went on at these illicit rendezvous would be regarded as entirely tame stuff; some furtive fumbling was about as far as it got. But it caused a great scandal, nevertheless, and I, along with others, was removed from the list of ‘Options’ and was again lucky not to be expelled.
Altogether my sixteenth year was shaping up to be pretty disastrous. I managed to get seven O levels (English Language, English Literature, History, Geography, General Science, Elementary Maths, Physics), but they were a real struggle, and classroom study became an increasingly irksome chore.
Then two things happened that, together, formed the second watershed of my school years. First, it became evident to me that my father’s business was now failing fast and that, unless I got a Royal Naval Scholarship, I would effectively deny my brother a chance to go to Bedford. I had to pass this exam.
The second was that amongst the teachers to whom I was assigned in this year were two who literally changed my life for ever. The first was a history teacher Michael Barlen, and the second, even more influential, was a man called John Eyre, who became legendary among all those he inspired (but was, I suspect, something of a thorn in the side of the School authorities).
To these two, I shall return in a moment. But first I had to win my sc
holarship.
In fact, I failed at my first attempt at the Civil Service Exam (mathematics again!). But it was decided that I should nevertheless go ahead and take the second stage anyway; then, if I passed that, I could return to retake maths later. The second stage was one of those initiative tests for leadership, which went on over two days and was held in HMS President, then (and still) moored on the banks of the Thames, just down from the House of Commons. It was my first visit alone to London, and I was completely bowled over by the place. My memory is of fog and dirt and grime and derelict bombsites covered in rosebay willow-herb and buddleia, all overlaid with an intoxicating sense that this really was the centre of the world. I was captivated by the House of Commons, which I visited twice during the two days, and by Whitehall, in which, in my mind’s eye, were all the levers which, when pulled, made things happen even in the farthest corners of the world.
I must have done quite well in the initiative tests, because I received a letter from their Lordships of the Admiralty a few weeks later, saying that the Royal Marines (always, anyway, my first choice over the Navy) would overlook my deficiency in maths and accept me. My father was delighted, and I suddenly, and perhaps for the first time, experienced the glow of being able to do something to help him.
My teachers did the rest. Michael Barlen inspired in me a fascination for history which has never since left me, and my school reports suddenly begin to be sprinkled with praise for academic and intellectual things.
But it was John Eyre who really changed my life. He persuaded me to join the Poetry Society (which all rugby playing ‘hearties’ resolutely despised) and gave me a lifetime love of poetry, even getting me to write some for the school magazine. Eyre lit in me a fire for literature, especially Shakespeare, which has never gone out. He persuaded me to act in the school play (not at very high level – I was a wordless monk in W.H.Auden’s The Ascent of F6, on the basis of which success I was entrusted the following year with a single spoken line – ‘Sound the alarums without!’ – as a soldier in Macbeth). He even, with the assistance of another master in my house, got me to join a group to sing in (and win!) a madrigal competition – which, to anyone who knows my totally tuneless voice and incapacity to hold a melody, was nothing short of a miracle. Richard Lindley wrote a wonderful description of John Eyre in his obituary for The Independent in January 2006.
There he would sit at his schoolmaster’s desk, a theatrically tattered gown draped about his gaunt shoulders, tossing back a lank mane of hair and holding forth like some actor manager, explaining to his youthful cast the drama of life in which they were about to play a part.
John Eyre was one of those really great teachers who inspired all he came into contact with. In 1996 I joined some of the other pupils whose lives he had also changed for a lunch in the Reform Club. Amongst his past pupils present were: Michael Brunson, ITN Political Editor; Sir Michael Burton, our ambassador in Prague; Quentin Skinner, Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge (an exact contemporary of mine and also a considerable influence on me in these years, especially on music); Richard Lindley, BBC Panorama reporter; Andrew McCulloch, screenwriter and actor; John Percival, independent television producer; and Robert Hewison, the cultural historian, who wrote of Eyre:
The red tie he wore was taken as a thin ray of radical hope by boys of a more intellectual persuasion, who found themselves trapped [at Bedford] in philistinism and rigidly enforced conformity…. There can have been few teachers of that period who kept a copy of Joyce’s Ulysses on the classroom shelves.
Richard Lindley, in the 2006 Independent obituary, quotes me as saying:
It’s often said that we can all remember a single teacher who changed our lives by giving us a love of something we didn’t know we loved. John Eyre was that teacher for me. Pretty well single-handedly he converted a rough, tear-away schoolboy interested only in rugby and sport into somebody who discovered the benefits of music, poetry (especially the Metaphysicals, who are still my favourites), literature and art which have stayed with me and probably improved me ever since.
At the end of his life John Eyre came to live close to us in Shaftesbury, and Jane and I went to see him for lunch there in 2001, five years before he died. He had lost none of his old spark, or his impish and acerbic nature. He opened our last meeting with ‘Ah yes, Ashdown – you were always an interesting boy. But you were one of the few to surprise me – I never thought you would get as far as you have. Still, there’s no accounting for fate is there?’
Eyre and Barlen tried hard to persuade me to give up the Marines, take my A levels and go to university. But this would have involved paying back the Naval Scholarship and would have meant, in those days, that my parents would have had to pay for me at university too. So it was out of the question. And, with the benefit of hindsight, it would have been wrong for me, as well. One of the strange features of my life has been that my wisest choices have been made by fate, not me. Had it not been for my parents’ financial situation, I would probably have gone to university. And it would have been a mistake. For I still had some rough edges to be knocked off, and I fear I would have wasted my university years in an excess of rough pursuits. In due course I would take my tertiary education, but much later: in my late twenties. At eighteen, the Royal Marines were exactly the right place for me, and that was where my course was now set.
By this time, I was leading an increasingly independent life. The continued decline of my father’s business meant that my parents no longer had the financial resources to keep my brother Tim at Bedford, and he was withdrawn and sent instead to Campbell College in Belfast. This tightening of family belts also meant that it became increasingly difficult to find the fare for me to return home during the shorter school holidays. So it was arranged that I should spend these with relations, and especially my aunt in Dorset. In practice, I contrived to spend much of the time I was supposed to be with her in London, living with an actress, somewhat my senior, who I had met at a joint amateur dramatic production put on by Bedford and its sister girls’ schools.
My last year at Bedford was an exceptionally happy one. I was promoted to be a Monitor (which meant being allowed to wear a coloured waistcoat – in my case dove grey – and carry a cane). At the end of 1958 I was appointed as the Head of my House, so following in my father’s footsteps. I loved this job and the new experience of being a leader. To my great surprise I enjoyed the pastoral side of leadership most. As Head of House I was allowed to inflict corporal punishment on younger boys with a cane. It was my proudest boast that I was the first-ever Head of a House who never did. I regarded this kind of corporal punishment, even then, as barbaric and unnecessary and, when it came to one boy inflicting it on another, dangerous and completely indefensible. The House punishment book at the end of my term as Head of Kirkman’s rather mournfully records, ‘The use of the cane was not required this term.’
I left Bedford before taking my A levels at the end of the Easter term of 1959, with a six-week gap to fill before joining the Royal Marines in May.
Here is what John Eyre wrote of me in my last report from Bedford:
I am so glad he has finally achieved his aim in the Civil Service examination…. I fear this will mean that we shall be deprived of his invigorating and mature zest in and out of class. But he has achieved a great deal here and I am sure that the value of much of the work he has done this year does NOT lie in the examination labels he was incidentally seeking and that therefore the breaking off of his A level course is insignificant. I hope he will not let himself lose touch with the world of thought in the necessarily more restricted life of the Royal Navy.
He has finished here in great style; everybody likes him and I am sure he will do well, for he has a fair ability and lots of sound common sense. He leaves with our sincere good wishes.
And my report on Bedford?
I hated the parting from my parents to go to Bedford. And during the year or so of my early misery the school did little to make thi
ngs easier, while my contemporaries did much to make them worse. But the hard carapace I have ever since been able to construct when necessary, along with a certain self-sufficiency, a lifetime’s resistance to the attractions of ‘clubbability’, and a determination to choose my friends and not have them chosen for me by my profession, have helped me to live a life in which the temptations of easy or companionable choices have never weighed too heavily in my calculations. In Field Marshal ‘Bill’ Slim’s great book Defeat into Victory, his account of the defeat of the Japanese in Burma, he says somewhere that, whenever he was faced with a choice between two equally weighted options, he always chose the more difficult one. This has been, for me, something of a lifetime’s motto. But I knew the truth of it before Bill Slim told me, because Bedford had already taught me.
I have also no doubt that, had I not had access to a privileged education, I would have failed my Eleven Plus exam and been consigned to the lower rungs of opportunity in the Britain of that time. I was a late developer, which our national education system in those years made no allowances for. So Bedford did me a great favour, though whether it was a just one is a different question. When it came to educating my children, I did not send them into the public school system that my father, in his time, regarded as so important and (as we shall shortly see) made such sacrifices for.
Finally, Bedford gave me four attributes that were to prove invaluable to me. A sense of confidence in myself (maybe a shade too strong – but the Royal Marines soon knocked that out of me); an enquiring mind; a burning desire to go on learning; and a very good grounding in the techniques and disciplines necessary to do so. I have, in consequence, learned far more since the end of my formal education, than I ever learned during it.
A Fortunate Life Page 6