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

good at) and was rather bored by the discipline of learning, which I regarded as a waste of good fishing or shooting time. (I was not, of course, at this age allowed a real gun, but I did have an air rifle, which I could use to good effect against the magpies and pigeons who raided our garden.) My school reports fell, pretty well without exception, below the academic standard which my parents (and especially my father) hoped for and expected. I still remember the dread, shame and pain I felt when my father received the end-of-term reports.
    But I was good at sport, especially athletics, which I enjoyed enormously. (I have always been rather better at sports which require individual, rather than team effort.) I broke, and held for some time, the school high-jump record and was faster than all my contemporaries on the running track. I have only played one really good game of soccer in my life, and that was at my prep school. Soccer normally required more finesse and control than I was capable of; in this particular game though, for some reason my feet seemed to be on fire, and I could make the ball do whatever I wanted it to, to the cheers of my schoolmates and my parents, who were watching. I have, sadly, never been able to repeat the performance.
    Garth House was too distant from our home in Comber for me to return home at night, so I used to board during the week and be collected at weekends by my parents. By the time I was nine, however, I was regarded as being old enough to make the journey by myself on the bus. This involved changing buses in the town of Newtownards. On one occasion I missed the connecting bus home and – aged, I suppose, ten – walked five miles or so along what was, even then, a pretty busy main road, causing my parents much worry until I turned up at last. One of my fellow bus passengers at the time was a very pretty Newtownards girl with whom I fell deeply in love – from a distance. Her name was Ottilie Patterson, and she was seven years my senior. She was to become famous as a jazz singer and the wife of one of the great British jazz masters of the sixties, Chris Barber. She would never have known of my love, of course, for it was as undeclared as it was unrequited.
    In fact all my loves were unrequited at the time. But they were beginning to be there all right. We had a statuesque matron with Titian hair and breasts as sharp as missiles. I can remember, as early as ten, becoming highly disturbed by her regular monthly physical examinations, and especially by the nightly squeak of her stockings on the dormitory stair.
    It had all along been planned that I should be sent to Bedford School in England at the age of eleven. This was the school my father had been to and, as an ‘old boy’, he had special rights to a place for his children, should he wish it. Which was just as well, because the alternative would have been for me to take the Eleven Plus examination which most of my contemporaries had to take to gain access to a grammar school. I have no doubt whatsoever (and neither had my parents or teachers) that, if I had been required to take this exam, I would havefailed it. This would have consigned me to the lower tier of education and, consequently, a lifetime on the lower rungs of opportunity, from which at that time it was almost impossible to climb free.
    In the event, I only had to take the Common Entrance exam for public schools – a much less rigorous test, but one which, nevertheless, I only just scraped through. At the age of eleven I was finally informed that I would be given a place at Bedford. My education after this was thus the result of only one thing – not ability on my part, but the privilege inherited from my parents and my class.
    This fact was to have a profound influence on me later. But at the time I was submerged under a tidal wave of excitement and apprehension at going to school ‘across the water’ in England, tinged only with the dread of partings from my family