A Fortunate Life by Paddy Ashdown Read Free Book Online Page A

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), andwas 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