By now, however, my friendship with Tim Courtenay had another and deeper strand.
ITCRM held its annual Christmas ball on 12 December 1959, some seven months after we had joined. At this time I was ‘between’ girlfriends and so invited my cousin Freda, who lived close by in south Devon. Tim was in the same position. We arranged for both cousins to be put up in the nearby local, the Railway Inn (now rechristened with the rather more consumer-friendly name of ‘The Puffing Billy’). The ball started, if I recall, at 7.30 p.m., so it must have been about this time that, in full Royal Marines mess kit (but nursing a huge black eye from a boxing bout the day before), I went down in a friend’s car to pick up my cousin. I asked the publican, who by this time knew us all well, which room my cousin was in. But he confused the cousins and directed me to the wrong room. After a peremptory knock I opened the door to find, not my cousin, but a very pretty girl in the last stages of getting ready for the Ball. I could see she was pretty, even though her hair was in curlers. I stammered my apologies and beat a flustered retreat. It was only later at the ball (when she looked even more radiant and beautiful), that I discovered that she was Tim’s cousin, Jane Courtenay. I will not say I fell in love with her that night, for we only danced together twice (a foxtrot and a waltz my wife tells me – but how could she tell, given how bad my dancing was?). But I did fall in love with her next day when, along with other colleagues and their girl friends and partners, we met for lunch in the Clarence Hotel in Exeter’s Cathedral Square. I was bored with the lunch, and so was she, so we went off to look round the Cathedral together and, wandering round, found that we shared a love of architecture and classical music. Jane, it turned out, was an art student studying at Bristol and was as engaging, unpompous and fresh in her views as she was beautiful.
We started to write regularly and see each other whenever we could. I couldn’t afford a car at the time, and so I relied on Tim Courtenay to drive me up to see her at her home in Burnham-on-Sea in his open-topped MG. I have very fond memories of these drives up the Exe Valley, full of anticipation at seeing Jane again. These were days when roads were less crowded, and we could stop off at a pub for a couple of pints and a sandwich without worrying about alcohol limits. And it always seemed to be summer, and the sun always seemed to be shining.
It was just at this time, as I was finding a new dimension to my life, that I lost the most important anchor on which I had relied for all of my eighteen years. Straight after the ball at which I had met Jane, I returned home to Ireland for Christmas with my parents. A day or so after I arrived home, my father took my mother, my brother Tim and me off to the Grosvenor Hotel in Belfast. This was, by family tradition, the place we always went when there was something really important to celebrate. But this was not a celebration. My father, with tears in his eyes, told us that he had failed us – his business would have to fold. He had decided, with my mother, that the only sensible course for them now was to pay off their debts and emigrate with the whole family – except me, since I was now established – to Australia, where the Government had initiated a scheme that offered British families passage and assistance in setting up in the new country for £10 (the so-called ‘ten-pound Pom’ scheme). They would leave in the spring. My father explained that his only lifetime ambition left was to give his children a proper start in life, and in class-conscious Britain that meant paid-for private education. It was now clear that that he would not have the money even to do this, so he would take the family to a country where it didn’t matter. They had considered Canada, but the Australian scheme was all they could afford. I was heartbroken, almost as much by the sight of my beloved father with tears running down his broken face as at the prospect of being permanently parted from them all.
We had a pretty miserable last Christmas in a rented house in Donaghadee, where we had started in Northern Ireland, and then I returned to Lympstone at the end of the Christmas holidays. I saw them once more, a few weeks before they left from Tilbury Docks on the SS Strathaird on 6 June 1960. They had gone down to spend their last few days in Britain with my Dorset aunt, and I got time off to go and say farewell to them. After I had said goodbye to my brothers and sisters, my parents decided to accompany me as far as Axminster on the first leg of my bus journey back to Lympstone. It was not a wise decision. Most of the journey was spent in dumb misery, broken only by my father trying, in a choking voice, to give me advice on how I should live the rest of my life. It was on this journey that I first told them about Jane. And then, there in the town square of Axminster, I said goodbye to them both. It was dusk, raining and very cold for early summer. I remember seeing their faces out of the rain-streaked back window of the bus as it pulled out of the square, carrying me back to my life in England, as they headed off to refound their family on the other side of the world. I was to see my mother again for only three (albeit extended) occasions, and my father for four, before they died.
Many ‘ten-pound Poms’ found it too difficult in Australia and quickly returned to Britain. But not my parents. After a very tough beginning in a transit camp, my father took up a ‘temporary’ teaching post in the Victorian town of Castlemaine (they chose the town because it had the same name as a town in southern Ireland). He became, in time, a much-loved and respected teacher at the local high school. On a recent visit there to see my sister I was frequently stopped in the street by his grown-up pupils, telling me how much he had changed their lives, as two of my teachers had changed mine. My mother, also much-loved, worked as a nurse in the local hospital. Australia and Castlemaine were very kind to my parents and my brothers and sisters. Of the five of my siblings who went there with my parents, one has died, one was killed in a road accident, one, Mark, has returned to England and is a solicitor in Bristol. But the remaining two, my brother Tim and my sister Alisoun, are proud Australians and have established families firmly planted in that country’s welcoming soil.
Now, however, I was on my own – apart from Jane that is. But our relationship was still in its early stages.
The next phase of our training took my colleagues and I to the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth to learn navigation and seamanship. This culminated in a three-month training voyage with the Dartmouth training squadron, consisting of three frigates, HMSs Venus, Vigilant and Urchin. We visited Gibraltar, Tenerife and the Cape Verde Islands before making a very rough Atlantic crossing to the West Indies, where we spent six weeks cruising the islands and calling at the major ports. We learned the routines of shipboard life, watch-keeping, gunnery, engineering, damage-control, first aid, and how to fight the ship on active service. We also had a very good time, climbing Teide (the mountain on Tenerife), visiting the strip joints in La Linea, close to Gibraltar (grubby, sweaty and sordid and enough to put me off such things for life), drinking too much rum in Barbados, and then learning the technique of negotiating the gangway on our return, under the alert eye of the Officer of the Watch, without letting it show too much.
During these three months Jane and I kept up a regular and passionate correspondence as our relationship deepened. I spent that summer holiday with her and her family and then, in late August, sailed to Norway to take part in a joint-services expedition based in the town of Glomfjord, well north of the Arctic Circle and sheltering under the largest glacier in Europe. The town was also famous for being one of the targets of the daring SOE raids (immortalised in the film The Heroes of Telemark) on Norwegian power stations during the war, in order to prevent the German production of heavy water, a key ingredient for the development of a nuclear weapon.*
Our task, however, was far less dangerous. We were to map some of the high mountains above the fjord and, in the process, learn about cartography. We lived at the time almost totally on dried rations, which share one quality of almost all service field rations, only more so: they look very much the same when they come out as they did when they went in. This is especially true of dried apple rings, which formed a major part of our diet and which, I observed, could pass
through the entire intestinal tract of healthy young men without any detectable change to either their composition or their shape.
I know this because in Glomfjord I helped to construct the finest latrine upon which I have ever sat. It happened like this.
One of my fellow expeditioneers was a young Royal Engineer officer who had just finished his demolition course. He was given the job of building the camp latrine, and I was apprenticed as his assistant. After an extensive reconnaissance we finally settled on a small ravine, perhaps thirty feet wide and twenty deep, which formed a cleft in the mountain not too far from our base camp. Along the side of the ravine was a small stand of fir trees. My Royal Engineer friend selected two stout ones growing close together and, using expertly placed plastic explosive, dropped them neatly across the ravine. A little work with levers was all that was then required to manoeuvre them so that they lay parallel to each other and about six feet apart. We secured them firmly to each bank with rope and spikes driven into the ground and then used them as the basis for a most impressive structure which had a narrow walkway giving access to a most magnificent eight-holer. We were miles from anywhere and some two thousand feet above the fjord, so there was no need for screens to hide us from prying eyes. I have known few more congenial experiences in my life than sitting every morning, in the company of my fellows, over a twenty-foot-deep latrine, with the mountains around us, looking down on the returning trawlers of the local fishing fleet dotting the fjord below and listening to the distinctive ‘pot, pot, pot’ sound of their big, single-cylinder diesel engines wafting up to us from the calm waters below.
My first act when I got back from our Norwegian adventure was to go and see Jane, who had now got a job in London. I turned up unannounced at her bedsit on the fourth floor of 13 Philbeach Gardens, Earls Court. I had fixed nowhere to sleep that night and hoped to be able to stay with her. But I reckoned without her dragon of a landlady, Miss Griffith-Jones, who instructed me in tones not to be disobeyed that ‘All visitors are to be out by eleven o’clock’. So, after a scratch meal of baked beans from her fridge (all she had at the time), I left to take pot luck on the streets of London. I called in at a nearby mobile tea and buttie stand, where I met a very pleasant man of around 60, who asked if I had anywhere to stay? I said I didn’t and he offered to give me a bed for the night. We walked back to his flat nearby where we sat and talked over glasses of whisky. I found him engaging, interesting and utterly charming. He introduced himself as very well-known contributor to a popular tabloid newspaper. After about two hours conversation and several more whiskies he told me that he was homosexual, was I? I said I wasn’t, and the conversation then continued as though the subject had never been raised, until the early hours of the morning. I remember him as one of the most urbane, interesting and civilised people I have ever met.*
Next on our training agenda was the much feared Commando course, which we began in late September 1960. Newly joined Royal Marines wear the Corps’s distinctive blue beret with a red patch on the front, on which is mounted the Globe and Laurel which is our insignia. The green beret of the Commandos has to be earned on a six-week course designed to test the limits of physical endurance. The centrepiece of the course is a series of forced, or ‘speed’, marches which must be accomplished at a pace of a mile in ten minutes, carrying full kit and rifle. These speed marches escalate from the ‘five-miler’ to the final march in full kit across thirty miles of open Dartmoor, which we Officers had to complete in seven hours and the Marines in eight. In addition there were exercises to test mental endurance when tired, negotiating an assault course while carrying a ‘wounded’ comrade over obstacles, and high rope and net work in the upper branches of a local wood. It was very tough going, but we all got through it and received our much-coveted green berets on 28 October 1960.
This brought us to the next phase of our training, in which we were posted as junior Troop officers to an active service Commando for a year. To my delight I was posted that autumn, along with my two colleagues Tim Courtenay and Rupert van der Horst, to 42 Commando Royal Marines, then serving in Singapore.
Before the start of our posting, we were given a month’s leave, which I spent in part with Jane’s family and in part, accompanied by Jane, with my Dorset aunt, who was now, after my father’s departure, the senior member of the Ashdown family in Britain. My aunt, though at first sight soft, feminine and feline, was in reality something of a tartar, with a very strong will and decidedly settled views. She could be very intimidating when roused or displeased. But she immediately took to Jane (whom she called ‘little Jane’, despite being at least three inches the shorter of the two). It was during this visit, on a hilltop overlooking her house in Upwey, on a fine spring morning in May, that I proposed to Jane. I was nineteen at the time, and Jane, who is a few months older than me, was just a month short of twenty. We agreed to get married as soon as my training was over in eighteen months. At this time the services strongly discouraged officers from getting married before they were twenty-five. So we would have to ask their Lordships of the Admiralty for permission to marry, and even then would receive none of the allowances, accommodation or travel support given to married couples until I was twenty-five. Since neither of us had any money at all, life was going to be very tough for us – but, of course, we thought little of that in the excitement and joy of the moment. I think that my aunt was a little shocked, though, when we came back that day and told her the news.
But we had strong support from my parents in Australia (even though they had never met Jane) and from Jane’s parents – and from one other invaluable source. One of the senior officers at ITCRM at the time was a remarkable man who was admired, respected and loved by all of us as a most just person and an outstanding soldier. He had had a glittering war record in the Commandos. He had also taken to Jane and, I think, realised that, because of my upbringing and the recent loss of my parents, I had seen more of life than most nineteen-year-olds. He supported us and it was, I am sure, because of him that we did eventually (but a year later) get permission from the Admiralty to marry. Some years later he resigned from the Royal Marines over an issue related to homosexuality in the armed forces – a tragedy for him and a terrible loss to all he commanded. Many years later, when, as an MP, I was amongst the first to campaign to have the law changed to allow homosexuals to serve in the armed services, I was doing something which I not only knew to be right but which also enabled me to repay a small debt to this outstanding man.
A month later on 15 November 1960, Jane and I said rather tearful goodbyes in the Bunch of Grapes pub on the Kings Road, Chelsea, and I left to take up my new posting in Singapore.
A Royal Marines Commando unit consisted in those days of around six hundred men who were divided into five rifle troops, each commanded by a Major or a Captain and consisting of five sections and a support section armed with mortars and heavy machine-guns. Each section was commanded by a Sergeant. Each troop also had two junior subalterns (Lieutenants) whose job was to assist the Troop Commander and to command any sub-units formed from the Troop when operational circumstances required. I was assigned to be one of the junior subalterns in ‘X’ Troop of 42 Commando.
My colleagues and I considered ourselves most fortunate to be posted to 42 Commando, not just because it meant going to Singapore, but also because the Commando was, at the time, testing out new techniques for using helicopters for amphibious assaults from a specially converted aircraft carrier, HMS Bulwark. We also had a specially dedicated Royal Navy helicopter unit, 848 Squadron, assigned to us. At the time the Senior Pilot of 848 Squadron was the legendary Lieutenant Commander ‘Digby’ Lickfold, an outstanding flyer who lived life as fast as he flew his aircraft. His pilots, following his lead, had a spirit of élan that would not have disgraced a Battle of Britain fighter squadron and an equivalent disregard for the rules if they interfered with getting the job done. They referred to all Marines as ‘grunts’, but the badinage between us was very much a two-wa
y affair, and we loved them for their willingness to take risks, especially when it meant getting us out of trouble.
At that stage we were using Westland Whirlwinds, which were so inadequately powered for the job that the joke was that they could carry one Royal Marine, or his hat, but not both – in reality, in tropical conditions, they could lift up to four fully kitted Marines at a time. They also ran on the highly inflammable Avgas (high-octane petrol, rather than the kerosene that later became the standard aircraft fuel) and in the event of accident were lethal firebombs.
When we arrived in Singapore the Commando was away testing helicopters in Hong Kong. The Major in charge of the element of the Commando that had stayed behind in Singapore (under whose command we fell until the Unit returned) decided on our second day in Singapore, that we should fill in our time by doing a parachute jump. When one of us hopefully pointed out that we were not trained he replied, ‘I don’t give a fuck if you are trained or not. If any of you don’t make it, when the Commando comes back I shall just tell the Colonel that you never joined!’ (What we did not know at the time was that what was planned was a jump into the sea, so we would not need training in parachute landings.) My two colleagues, Tim Courtenay and Rupert van der Horst, seemed keen, so I felt I ought to be as well. To be honest, parachuting scared me to death then and has scared me to death ever since. (Although I later qualified for my parachute wings and did more than sixty jumps with the SBS, I never managed to bring myself to believe that it is a rational thing to throw yourself out of an aircraft travelling at 120 mph a thousand feet above the ground, on the basis that the pack on your back really contains a parachute and not just a collection of old socks someone has absent-mindedly left there by mistake.) In the event we all got down without mishap.
A Fortunate Life Page 8