A Fortunate Life by Paddy Ashdown Read Free Book Online

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 ofSt Mary the Virgin in Norton sub Hamdon * as the earthly anchor point of my spirituality – though, God knows,