A Fortunate Life (7 page)

Sport, however, was a different story. I was in the House rugby team for my age every year and eventually in the School’s First XV. I played in various positions; first hooker, then wing forward, then No. 8 and occasionally in my last years, as I became more fleet of foot, as a wing three-quarter. My rugby, however, was more brawn than skill. Here is what my team Captain wrote in the House yearbook of Christmas 1958.

I boxed, too, but hated it. At one time, in the annual blood match against Eton, the tournament depended on the result of the last bout in which I was pitched against Lord Valentine Charles Thynne
*
, the son of the 6th Marquis of Bath. Although he was four years my senior I was much the stronger. But no matter how many blows I rained on him, he refused to go down and succeeded in landing an equivalent number on me – each of us being spurred on with roars from our respective supporters in the audience. At the end of a most bloody fight, the bout was declared a draw.

I was, however, hopeless at cricket, which I have never really seen the point of, and so during the summer took up rowing and athletics. I was not neat enough to be a good oarsman, but in athletics I found I could excel. I loved the one-on-one competitiveness and the thrill of winning. To start with I was better at field than track events, particularly the high jump and the shot put, at which I set a new school record. But later I discovered I could run fast too, and in my last year won the Victor Ludorum for the best all-round athlete in the school.

Apart from sport, I took quite an active part in the other ‘extra-curricular’ school activities. I was an active member of the Debating Society from the age of twelve right through to my final year, arguing at various times against corporal punishment, against too much conformity, in favour of Sunday cinemas, in favour of suppressing gambling and against the abolition of fagging (in which I said that being a
fag helped leaders to understand what it was like to be led). I also rose through the ranks to become a Warrant Officer in the School Cadet Force. But my extracurricular agenda was beginning to extend somewhat wider than official activities. As I approached my mid-teens, adolescence and puberty came roaring tempestuously into my life.

After the age of fourteen, we were all required to go to dancing classes. I was, and remain, a completely hopeless ballroom dancer and have, over the years, inflicted much grievous damage on members of the opposite sex unfortunate enough to be paired with me. But this was a chance to meet and actually touch those, to me, mythical creatures – girls! I was paranoid about my curly hair at the time and used to spend hours washing it an attempt (always vain) to get the frizziness out (in those pre-race-conscious days, the nickname my detractors gave me was ‘the white wog’, because my hair, though mousy blonde, was so negroid in character). I had actually had my first kiss in a hay loft on the night of the Coronation at the age of eleven, when visiting the home of my father’s favourite sister (whose house in Dorset became a kind of ‘home from home’ during half-term holidays when I could not get back to Ireland). But this had not in any way diminished the paroxysm of nervousness and confusion into which my body was plunged whenever I was required to have social contact with a member of the opposite sex. And so, despite falling deeply in love with every single one I was nominated to dance with, I was not very successful and envied the louche and easy manner of my (straight-haired) school colleagues, who always seemed to be able to make progress where my clumsy approaches had been embarrassingly rejected.

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:

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:

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 scholarship.

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.