A Fortunate Life (4 page)

Bombay in 1946 gave me my first ever sight of the sea, and I was immediately captivated by it, making a solemn promise, along with a shipboard friend of the same age, that we would both go into the Royal Navy, which later (if you count the Royal Marines as part of the Navy) we both did.

Our first home in Northern Ireland was in a collection of coastguard cottages which stood sentinel over the mouth of Belfast Lough, called Lisnarynn. My memories of this time are of sea-lashed bluffs, vertiginous scrambles down to wild rocks and pools of indescribable romance and treasure, the blaze of whin (gorse) blossom in the spring and hedgerows festooned with wild fuchsia in the summer. And of an old anti-aircraft gun position at the back of our house, littered with faeces and old French letters (not that I recognised them as such at the time), where, to my mother’s despair, I loved to re-enact the wartime defence of Belfast against German bombers. My father meanwhile, now promoted to Colonel, stayed behind in India to help manage the British handover, returning home in 1947.

It was on his return that we moved from our isolated coastguard cottages to the nearby seaside town of Donaghadee, directly facing Portpatrick in Scotland across Beaufort’s Dyke and the North Channel. We lived on the first floor of a gloomy old late Victorian house within a hundred yards of the seashore, and there my third brother, Robert, named after my mother’s father, was born.

I remember three of our Donaghadee neighbours, especially. The first was an old retired couple downstairs, who would always give me sweets and had a Victorian print called ‘The Last Survivor’ hanging on their wall; it depicted Dr Brydon, the only survivor of the Massacre in the Snows of 1842 (which my ancestor is supposed to have escaped by the skin of her teeth), approaching a Khyber hill fort on an exhausted horse. The second was an eccentric neighbour with an unpronounceable Greek name but, according to local gossip, an impeccably English aristocratic pedigree. He was given to practising yoga by standing on his head every morning in front of the huge picture window of his bungalow, stark naked and with all his appurtenances dangling in reverse. Our Northern Irish ‘daily’, a good Catholic girl called Bridie, who always referred to the male organ as ‘the article’ (and to the female genitalia as ‘the underneaths’ – as in ‘Old Mrs So-and-so is having terrible trouble with her underneaths’), took care to be scandalised by this apparition on her arrival every morning. Best of all, however, was the fact that my bedroom window gave me a perfect view not only of ‘the article’ itself, but also – and much more interestingly – of unwitting passers-by taking a morning stroll along an adjacent path. This was so aligned that they did not suspect the affront to decency which lay in ambush for them until they
turned the final corner, to be confronted face to face (as it were!) and at a range of only a couple of yards or so, by this tableau of body hair and inverted human biology. I used to make my mother peal with laughter by putting on a little play every day over her morning coffee, re-enacting the contortions of horror and scandal I had witnessed earlier.

Our third neighbours were the parents of my bosom pal, Willy Orr. His father, Captain ‘Willy’ Orr
*
, was to become the Ulster Unionist MP for South Down, and they lived in a house which seemed to me the very pinnacle of luxury and grandness. And Captain Orr himself, in my eyes, was just as grand as was necessary to go with it. But his son and I were scamps who got into every mischief possible for small boys living in a carefree society with a whole wild foreshore as a playground. On one occasion I was so offended by what I regarded as an unfair upbraiding from my father that I concluded that my parents didn’t really want me, so I would sail away for ever. Willy and I jumped in an old potato box and set off to paddle out to sea. Fortunately, the box was so unseaworthy that it sank after only a few yards, while still within comfortable wading distance (even for seven-year-olds) of the shore and safety. Later, we conspired to tempt the school mistress of the little Donaghadee primary school we were by now both attending (whom we hated with a passion), into the stationery cupboard, after which we locked the door on her and ran away home. For this we were both severely (and very reasonably) chastised.

In the bitter winter of 1947 my parents took me ‘across the water’ for a trip to England. I remember being stunned at the size of London and the grime and the scale of the destruction. It seemed to me a city of bombsites connected by occasional streets of houses. I remember also the cold (this was the worst winter in living memory) and huddling round the gas fire in our room in the Army and Navy Club. And, of course, I remember Hamleys toyshop, which I thought the Aladdin’s cave of my dreams when my father took me there. We also visited my father’s eccentric relatives, who lived in a beautiful (but rather dog-eared and ice-cold) Elizabethan manor called Thorne House outside Yeovil. There is a photograph, taken in February of that year, of me standing in the grounds with snow up to the top of my Wellington boots. Little did I realise that this was to be the place I would in due course call home and, thirty-six years later, represent in Parliament.

I
N 1948, A YEAR OR SO
after my father returned from India, we moved from Donaghadee on the coast, to the little market town of Comber, lying at the head of Strangford Lough in County Down. The town’s most famous son was General Sir Robert ‘Rollo’ Gillespie, killed in front of a Indian fort in 1814, apparently uttering the unlikely last words, ‘One more shot for the honour of Down’ (County Down). He played a key part in the British conquest of India and has a statue, in the manner of a mini-Nelson’s column, in the town square. The great family of the town, however, were the Andrews, one of whom, Thomas Andrews, was both the chief designer and a victim of the ‘unsinkable’ Titanic (built at the Belfast shipyard of Harland and Wolfe).

The town was also famous as the home of Comber Whiskey, produced in an old distillery (now sadly closed) which I passed on my way to our family home on the south-eastern outskirts of the town.  The warm, steamy smell of mashing and distilling whiskey is one of the most evocative smells of my early youth.
*

My father and a business partner bought an old nineteenth-century flax mill in the centre of the town
†
and turned it into a pig farm with over a thousand head of pigs. My father sank all his army savings into the business, which was called The Comber Produce Company. For his partner, a Northern Irish businessman, this was a speculative investment. But for my father, who ran the business, it was a full-time job. To start with, they prospered, but then they were hit very hard in the mid-fifties, when UK markets were opened to continental produce, and Danish bacon flooded the shops. By the second half of the fifties, the business was in steady decline, with my father taking more and more desperate measures to save it and my mother doing the same to ensure that the family lived within our increasingly straitened means.

When we moved to Comber, we first took up residence in a rented nineteenth-century town house called Glenbank on the outskirts of the town. Here my siblings increased from three to six with the arrival of my sister Alisoun and, finally, the twins, Mark and Melanie. Later my parents bought one half of a 1930s house, Eusemere (previously owned by Sir James Andrews, the Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland), which had recently been divided in two. It was in Eusemere that I spent most of my adolescent years, and they were, despite the gathering financial clouds, very happy ones.

My parents had one of those marriages which are built on opposites. My father, to whom I was completely devoted, had three great loves in his life: shooting, fishing and strong arguments, and I was bought up with a gun in one hand, a rod in the other and a head full of disputatious opinions.

In the winter, even from the age of ten or so, I would go shooting with him, either on the bogs of Northern Ireland after snipe, or wildfowling on Strangford Lough, a vast bottle-shaped tidal inlet so named by the Vikings, whose shores lay no more than a half mile from our back garden. The best of all our shooting expeditions were those that took us to shoot duck and geese across a winter moon on the great Lough’s mudflats. This was a dangerous pastime, as the tide comes in fast on Strangford, and the tangle of mudbanks and water channels can be very confusing. But we soon learned the Lough’s secrets from local friends, and especially from a larger-than-life local cattle-dealer and all-purpose rogue called Billy Thompson (of whom more later).

To be honest, I was never very good with a shotgun in comparison to my brother Tim or my father, who was an outstanding shot, despite very poor eyesight. So I would often come back empty-handed. But I loved the wildness and desolation of Strangford, its bleak mudbanks crouched against the tide while racing clouds flew by on a northerly wind, and the wild calls of a skein of geese filled our ears as they wheeled and circled round us, seen only as brief black shapes across a silvery moon.

My father loved shooting. But the passion that exceeded all others was for his rod and line. I remember as a boy that, when the Farlows fishing catalogue arrived from London in early January, we would both spend hours poring over it together and deciding what flies and spinners and reels and tackle we would need for the season to come.
In spring we would load up our battered Standard Ten car (my father was completely uninterested in material possessions, especially cars – this one, I recall, had a top speed of 58 miles per hour downhill with the wind behind us, and you could see the road through a rust hole in the floor by the back seat) and on atrocious roads thread our way south through Northern Ireland’s little towns for eighty miles to fish for salmon on Lough Melvin on the Fermanagh–Leitrim border. We always stayed in the same rather primitive fishing hotel, The Melvin Hotel in the little town of Garrison. There was a huge stuffed brown trout in a glass case above the bar, which they claimed had been caught in the Lough, and my boyhood dreams were all about catching one like it and of how proud my father would be.

My memories of these trips are of being bitterly cold while telling my father I wasn’t; of long hours in the back of the boat trawling spinners or casting a wet fly on leaden water; of sardine sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs, which we seemed to have to wait an eternity to eat, and of bars of Highland Toffee (my father had a very sweet tooth) and ginger beer in stone bottles. We always paid a second visit to the Lough in the summer, which I loved even more. Then we would fish for a trout special to Lough Melvin – the beautiful, golden gillaroo – by ‘dapping’ with a daddy longlegs. ‘Dapping’ involves using a very light line that you allow to blow in the wind so that you can then gently lower the daddy longlegs onto the surface of the water from five or six yards away. It worked best when the fish were lying in shallow, weedy water over a sandy bank on a hot August day. The other special Lough Melvin trout is the sonaghan, also found nowhere else in the world. They do not grow big, but are tremendous fighters.

But it was the salmon we were chiefly there for, and I caught my first one, weighing ten-and-a-half pounds, at the age of eleven. Actually, I had caught one the year before, but our boatman, John Murphy, took one look at it, swore and, to my horror, threw it back. I was so furious I wanted to throw him after it, until my father explained that it was a ‘kelt’ or spent fish (i.e., a female which had just spawned), and so could not be taken and had to be returned.

Besides fishing, we had a second and more clandestine excitement during our twice yearly trips to Lough Melvin – smuggling. For my father, though an ex-Indian Army Colonel and to all appearances a pillar of the community, was no great respecter of any law he regarded as irksome.

The border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland runs through the middle of Lough Melvin. Our boatman, John Murphy (to whom my father used to send Christmas cards every year – even after he himself had emigrated to Australia) came from the Irish side. No trip was ever made backwards and forwards across the Lough without carrying some contraband or other. It was my job to sit on top of the cartons of whatever it was most profitable to smuggle at the time. The favourite was butter, which was much cheaper in the south than the north, but I have sat long hours on Melvin, in rough weather and smooth, on crates containing everything from cigarettes to Irish whiskey, depending on what my father and John Murphy thought at the time would return the best profit. On one occasion we went on a rather larger smuggling trip, which we undertook in a dilapidated truck. I was positioned at the rear and equipped with a large sack of tin tacks. I asked what these were for and was told that if we were chased by the police or the customs I was to throw as many handfuls as I could onto the road behind us to puncture the tyres of our pursuers.

Smuggling across the border was a regular business at the time, and many were the stories of near escapes told in the bar of The Melvin Hotel. My favourite was of a local man who was big in smuggling and well known for it to the local police and customs. On one occasion he was observed cycling backwards and forwards past the customs post many times a day, for several days. The customs knew he was smuggling something, but, however many times they stopped and searched him, they could find nothing. Some time later, at a local bar, they bearded him with their suspicions:

‘You were smuggling weren’t you?’

‘I was.’

‘But we searched your bicycle and never found anything. What were you smuggling?’

‘Bicycles.’

In the spring of 2008, while researching for this book, my wife Jane and I paid a visit to Melvin and found old John Murphy, then well into his nineties, in his little house in Garrison. His gnarled old hands, still calloused and rough from a lifetime of rowing, were arthritic and bent, and his hearing was almost totally gone. But he still had a fund of stories of these times and of my father, of the smuggling and of the fish we had caught together. Sadly, he died a few months after our visit.

Among the laws my father omitted to respect was the law giving the well-to-do (as my father saw it) the ownership of fish. Or to be more precise, the ownership of pieces of water in which one could fish. He used to say, ‘Fish are wild. Catching them should depend on skill, not on how rich you are. I accept that people can own a piece of water, but how can you own the fish in it, for they could have come from anywhere?’ This unconvincing logic (which he never applied to anything else – pheasants, for instance) gave him, in his own eyes, all the justification he needed to poach. This he did with relish, his Ulster friends and me, whenever I was home from school.

We had two favourite poaching spots, the Hollywood Reservoir, which is in the hills above Belfast, and Lough Island Reavy, nestling under the Mourne Mountains. The fishing rights to both were owned at that time by the Belfast Anglers Association, who employed ghillies to guard their water and its fish. So we fished at night, especially during the moonless period, starting around midnight (when, we reasoned, all self-respecting ghillies would be tucked up in bed) and continuing till the dawn. Afterwards we called in for a monster breakfast at one of the workmen’s cafés on the way back home – or, better still, went onto the mudflats on Strangford or the Whitewater estuary in Dundrum Bay, near Newcastle, County Down, for a feast of raw cockles, dug up and consumed on the spot.

Normally, people do not fish at night. But we used a technique which my father’s cattle-dealer friend, Billy Thompson, taught him and which I have never used or heard of being used since. It depended on the fact that trout come into shallow water to feed at night and, once you had learned the technique, it proved highly successful. It involved using a fly rod with a worm as bait and casting as far out as possible with a very stiff arm (so as not to lose the worm) and then drawing the line in very slowly. You could feel the trout picking up the bait and the trick was to let him run with it a bit and then strike when you judged the worm to be fully taken. We caught some magnificent fish using this method. But we ourselves were nearly caught several times, too.

Our method for escaping ghillies was simple, effective and, again, taught us by Billy Thompson. Part One was avoidance. We would nearly always be able to hear the ghillies coming some time before they heard or saw us. Then, if we thought they hadn’t actually seen us, we would simply lie down in the dark, pull our overcoats over us and make like a stone. Ten times out of ten, the ghillies, not knowing
we were there, walked past unseeing, leaving us to make good our escape. But if we knew we had been spotted, then we implemented Part Two: evasion. We would start walking round the lake keeping a good distance in front of our pursuer. If he ran, we ran. If he walked, then we did, too. If he shouted (which they always did) we would keep silent. And then, when we judged him frustrated, and choosing a point at which we were briefly out of sight, we would one by one drop to the ground, pull our overcoats over us, lie still and hope he would walk past us. And that was always what happened. Then it was just a question of making good our escape and meeting at the car, which my father had always taken the precaution of parking some distance away in an unlikely spot.

My father, however, was not very fit, having lost a lung in the war and being a heavy smoker. So it always fell to me to be the last person to drop out; it was reasoned that I had the best chance of outwalking – if necessary outrunning – our pursuer. I am not quite sure how it was we were never caught – but we never were. And in the process I learned some techniques of nightcraft that were invaluable to me much later in the Royal Marines.

Fishing was our spring and summer occupation, and shooting our winter one. But argument was an all-year-round affair. My father loved his discussions fierce, noisy and over family dinner for preference. This drove my mother to distraction as she tried to intervene to make space for food, or part us as the decibels went up and the insults grew more furious. He would take us all on together, giving no quarter to any of us and accepting none for himself. When losing he could, however, be completely unscrupulous and even fall back on the tired old tactic of telling us we were too young and would know better when we were older – that was when we knew we were winning. He would often take up an opinion contrary to his own in order to get an argument going, and then become ruthless in defence of the untenable. His opinions were surprisingly left-wing for a man of his upbringing and background. He was (though much later, of course) well ahead of me or any of my radical friends of the sixties in opposing the Vietnam war. The techniques of argument I learned at our dinner table have been invaluable all my adult life – but more valuable still was the lesson I learned from him not to be afraid to hold a minority opinion. I am sure it was my father who planted in me the latent seeds of liberalism that were to flower much later in my life.