A Fortunate Life (8 page)

John Eyre was one of those really great teachers who inspired all he came into contact with. In 1996 I joined some of the other pupils whose lives he had also changed for a lunch in the Reform Club. Amongst his past pupils present were: Michael Brunson, ITN Political Editor; Sir Michael Burton, our ambassador in Prague; Quentin Skinner, Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge (an exact contemporary of mine and also a considerable influence on me in these years, especially on music); Richard Lindley, BBC
Panorama
reporter; Andrew McCulloch, screenwriter and actor; John Percival, independent television producer; and Robert Hewison, the cultural historian, who wrote of Eyre:

Richard Lindley, in the 2006
Independent
obituary, quotes me as saying:

At the end of his life John Eyre came to live close to us in Shaftesbury, and Jane and I went to see him for lunch there in 2001, five years before he died. He had lost none of his old spark, or his impish and acerbic nature. He opened our last meeting with ‘Ah yes, Ashdown – you were always an interesting boy. But you were one of the few to surprise me – I never thought you would get as far as you have. Still, there’s no accounting for fate is there?’

Eyre and Barlen tried hard to persuade me to give up the Marines, take my A levels and go to university. But this would have involved paying back the Naval Scholarship and would have meant, in those days, that my parents would have had to pay for me at university too. So it was out of the question. And, with the benefit of hindsight, it would have been wrong for me, as well. One of the strange features of my life has been that my wisest choices have been made by fate, not me. Had it not been for my parents’ financial situation, I would probably have gone to university. And it would have been a mistake. For I still had some rough edges to be knocked off, and I fear I would have wasted my university years in an excess of rough pursuits. In due course I would take my tertiary education, but much later: in my late twenties. At eighteen, the Royal Marines were exactly the right place for me, and that was where my course was now set.

By this time, I was leading an increasingly independent life. The continued decline of my father’s business meant that my parents no longer had the financial resources to keep my brother Tim at Bedford, and he was withdrawn and sent instead to Campbell College in Belfast. This tightening of family belts also meant that it became increasingly difficult to find the fare for me to return home during the shorter school holidays. So it was arranged that I should spend these with relations, and especially my aunt in Dorset. In practice, I contrived to spend much of the time I was supposed to be with her in London, living with an actress, somewhat my senior, who I had met at a joint amateur dramatic production put on by Bedford and its sister girls’ schools.

My last year at Bedford was an exceptionally happy one. I was promoted to be a Monitor (which meant being allowed to wear a coloured waistcoat – in my case dove grey – and carry a cane). At the end of 1958 I was appointed as the Head of my House, so following in my father’s footsteps. I loved this job and the new experience of being a leader. To my great surprise I enjoyed the pastoral side of leadership
most. As Head of House I was allowed to inflict corporal punishment on younger boys with a cane. It was my proudest boast that I was the first-ever Head of a House who never did. I regarded this kind of corporal punishment, even then, as barbaric and unnecessary and, when it came to one boy inflicting it on another, dangerous and completely indefensible. The House punishment book at the end of my term as Head of Kirkman’s rather mournfully records, ‘The use of the cane was not required this term.’

I left Bedford before taking my A levels at the end of the Easter term of 1959, with a six-week gap to fill before joining the Royal Marines in May.

Here is what John Eyre wrote of me in my last report from Bedford:

And my report on Bedford?

I hated the parting from my parents to go to Bedford. And during the year or so of my early misery the school did little to make things easier, while my contemporaries did much to make them worse. But the hard carapace I have ever since been able to construct when necessary, along with a certain self-sufficiency, a lifetime’s resistance to the attractions of ‘clubbability’, and a determination to choose my friends and not have them chosen for me by my profession, have helped me to live a life in which the temptations of easy or companionable choices have never weighed too heavily in my calculations. In Field Marshal ‘Bill’ Slim’s great book
Defeat into Victory
, his account of the defeat of the Japanese in Burma, he says somewhere that, whenever he was faced with a choice between two equally weighted options, he always chose the more difficult one. This has been, for me, something
of a lifetime’s motto. But I knew the truth of it before Bill Slim told me, because Bedford had already taught me.

I have also no doubt that, had I not had access to a privileged education, I would have failed my Eleven Plus exam and been consigned to the lower rungs of opportunity in the Britain of that time. I was a late developer, which our national education system in those years made no allowances for. So Bedford did me a great favour, though whether it was a just one is a different question. When it came to educating my children, I did not send them into the public school system that my father, in his time, regarded as so important and (as we shall shortly see) made such sacrifices for.

Finally, Bedford gave me four attributes that were to prove invaluable to me. A sense of confidence in myself (maybe a shade too strong – but the Royal Marines soon knocked that out of me); an enquiring mind; a burning desire to go on learning; and a very good grounding in the techniques and disciplines necessary to do so. I have, in consequence, learned far more since the end of my formal education, than I ever learned during it.

All things considered, this was not a bad armoury with which to equip an eighteen-year-old setting out to do battle with the world.

T
HE DATE WAS 5
M
AY 1959.
Out of the train window I could see the mudflats of the Exe estuary. The tide was out, and the great river, a spangled blue ribbon shining in the May sun, threaded its way through brown mudbanks and haphazard battalions of tufted salt grass. Here and there stout little boats painted in primary colours bobbed to their moorings, and some busy oystercatchers were probing for shellfish in the ooze, like tiny nodding donkeys in an oilfield. South, across the river, were verdant fields, small whitewashed cottages, a huddled fishing village and the red earth of the Devon countryside rising to a wooded ridge on the skyline. There is just a hint of Dartmoor here in the shape of the land, and the light has that soft luminescence which only seems to occur close to the sea on Britain’s south-western peninsula. It was a strange landscape to me then, but over the next few years this vista of intermingled sea and land would become so familiar that I could reconstruct it in my mind’s eye, almost tree by tree and field by field, for the rest of my life.

Across the carriage from me was a young man whom I had been furtively watching, as he had been furtively watching me. I was sure that six weeks earlier he, like me, had received the fat envelope portentously marked ‘The Lords of the Admiralty’. It contained a magnificent scroll saying that Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, having complete confidence in me, her trusty and well-beloved subject, was conferring on me the rank and status of a probationary Second Lieutenant in the Royal Marines, a letter instructing me to catch this train to Exton on this day, a travel warrant for my ticket and some rather intimidating instructions as to what I should bring with me and how I should dress. I was to be smart, wear a jacket and tie and a hat. My travelling companion opposite me was indeed wearing a hat – a very smart brown trilby. My own hat was stuffed in my suitcase, as I hate hats. It was a most inappropriate green felt affair, with a slightly rakish Robin Hood air to it, which I had recently purchased and would, in the coming months, try to wear
as little as possible. He was looking very smart in a new sports jacket, cavalry twill trousers and sparkling shoes. I was wearing a duffle coat and looking pretty scruffy with a jacket that had definitely seen better days (my father had lent it to me), a rather crumpled shirt I had washed myself and very down-at-heel suede shoes. He was looking every inch the young Royal Marine officer. I was feeling very inadequate.

But then, apart from a brief return home to Ireland to see my parents, the last two months since I left Bedford had been spent in London, where I had been doing odd jobs and having a whale of a time. Mostly I had been interior decorating for a friend, rather older than me, who had just bought a couple of run-down houses in Ealing. He would go on to make a million and end in jail. I had also earned a little money washing up in Joe Lyons Corner Houses, and spent it all very fast with old Bedford friends of both sexes. All that was now being left further and further behind me with every clack of the rails under our little train rattling along the bank of the Exe estuary.

Sure enough, when the train arrived in Exton, my travelling companion and I got out together. When we did our introductions later in the day, I discovered he was called Roger Munton. He would be best man at my wedding, all but get engaged to my wife’s cousin, and then be tragically killed in a car crash. But for the moment we found ourselves on the narrow platform along with eight other behatted young men being shouted at by a burly man who, we would discover, was our drill instructor, the inimitable Colour Sergeant Bert Shoesmith. He was giving us orders and referring to us as ‘young gentlemen’, though in a voice that told us he definitely didn’t mean it. He commanded us to pick up our kit and ‘embus’ in some nearby three-ton military trucks. Beside him, in quiet but wordless command, was an incredibly smart, rather suave officer with black, slightly oiled hair, a cane under his arm and a Sam Browne belt with brass buckles so shiny that the sun, reflecting off them, seemed to lose none of its intensity. We were to discover that this was Lt Graham Mackie, our course officer.

We were ‘marched’ (if such a term is applicable to a ragged group of young men without the slightest idea of
how
to march) to the waiting truck, driven up the hill and through the gates of ITCRM (Infantry Training Centre Royal Marines), which was to be our home for the next two years. Today CTCRM (Commando has replaced Infantry) consists of a shining complex of multi-storey buildings and modern facilities; then it was just a collection of old World War Two wooden huts. Here,
and on nearby Woodbury Common and Dartmoor, young commandos had trained during the war, and their ghosts were everywhere, including in initials carved in the woodwork of the huts and on the trees of the little wood inside the camp that was used for rope work, ‘death slides’ and instruction on how to climb rope nets on the side of a ship.

We were given a short briefing and then shown to our ‘cabins’ (ITCRM, Lympstone was very solidly on terra firma, but, the Royal Marines being part of the Navy, everything was in naval terminology – so the room you slept in was your ‘cabin’, and an evening having fun off camp was known as a ‘run ashore’.) Each cabin housed two of us. We were arranged alphabetically. In the next-door cabin to me was Tim Courtenay, soon to become one of my best friends; I would marry his cousin in three years’ time. I shared my cabin with Richard Armstead, who married my wife’s sister a few years later.

My nine fellow trainee Second Lieutenants were:

Together we made up Young Officer Batch No. 19, known as YO19, or simply ‘The Batch’ for short. We were one of two ‘batches’ of young officers who joined the Royal Marines (known internally as ‘The Corps’) in 1959; YO20 joined six months after us.

At this stage we were all strangers. But by the end of the two-and-a-half years’ training that lay ahead, we would know every detail of each
other. We would know which of us would need help to cover the last few miles of a thirty-mile, seven-hour march in full kit across Dartmoor; whose mental processes were not to be trusted after three nights on the march without sleep; who would get drunk first and who would be sick first, and how many pints of beer it would take. We would know whose visio-spatial sense was so bad that, whenever he was leading us, one of the others had to be always at his shoulder to check his map-reading; we could spot early signs of bad temper in each other, even before we recognised them in ourselves; we would know who could do brilliantly at everything, but somehow could not command men; whose feet smelled worst in a wet trench, and who not to sleep close to after they had been eating beans; who snored so loudly that a would-be enemy could hear him from hundreds of yards away; we would even know the pattern of each others’ bowel movements after a week in a bivouac on ‘compo’
*
. In short, we would come to know each other probably more intimately than any other living human being (including parents and partners) ever would.

Our training began in earnest the following day. We were harried from morning to night, and the pace was frenetic. Physical training and runs were intermingled with classroom work (the history of the Royal Marines, military history, the principles of tactics, the theories of warfare, world affairs and much else). There were exercises, and instructions on field- and woodcraft, including the techniques of living out in the wild. There were tests all the time, including changing clothing quickly. There were inspections of kit at unannounced times. There was weapons training – lots of weapons training – with the whole range of weapons used by the Royal Marines at the time, from light machine-guns to rocket-launchers. But, above all, there was drill … and drill and more drill.

We were taught first how to clean our kit, and spent long hours deep into the night trying to make rough, service-issue leather parade boots and the equally dull officers’ Sam Browne belts shine with a spit-and-polish sparkle you could see your face in. I was never very good at parades, being rather ungainly in gait, and my uniform seemed to act as a magnet for gathering pieces of fluff and general scruffiness out of
nowhere. I have a good voice, however, and therefore found commanding a parade rather better than being under command on one. This was not always true, though. On one occasion, when I was supposed to be in charge, I recall haplessly watching my colleagues marching off to the farthest reaches of Lympstone parade ground while my mind froze, unable to remember the command to turn them round. This caused the ever-present Bert Shoesmith to bawl in my ear, ‘Come along, young sir. Say something – even if it’s only goodbye!’

Drill sergeants ruled our lives in those days, and they had an inexhaustible store of choice phrases. The only difference between the vocabulary they used on the Marine recruits, who trained alongside us, and on us officers was that with us the word ‘Sir’ was included somewhere, no matter how eviscerating the language which surrounded it. A favourite of one of our instructors – usually shouted with his tonsils about an inch from one’s nose – was, ‘You, sir, are enough to make bishops bag off
*
and barmaids eat their young.’

We Officers used to be paraded alongside the Marine recruit squad every Sunday for church parade, which took place outside the little brick World War Two army hut that served as ITCRM’s church at the time. As officers, it was assumed that we would know how to behave in church. No such presumption was, however, made about the ordinary Marines alongside us; they therefore needed a briefing from a drill sergeant. A legendary story has it that one of these briefings went as follows:

A similar legend tells of a Lympstone Drill Sergeant who, spotting that one of his new recruits had not taken off his beret in church, bawled at the unfortunate:

On one occasion, during an inspection of kit, I was found to have squirrelled away more than the regulation three bits of lavatory paper we were allowed to carry in our kit. The Drill Instructor was clear:

Shortly after we joined, one of my colleagues made the mistake of attempting to try and grow a moustache. After three weeks the wretched thing was barely visible, but Shoesmith spotted it and, pointing at the moth-eaten growth with his drill sergeant’s cane from three yards away, bawled, so that the whole parade could hear:

We also played a lot of sport, especially rugby. It was at Lympstone that I played alongside another of the great rugby players of my generation, Richard Sharp, the famous fly-half who was capped for England fourteen times and captained his country in their triumphant Five Nations victory in 1963. He was three years my senior and had joined up as an ordinary Marine in one of the last National Service intakes before conscription was abolished. He was also an exceedingly decent and modest man. The story goes that his rugby playing talents were spotted by an alert officer who put him in the Unit third team, where, of course, he excelled. Then, in the Unit second team, he excelled again. Finally, he was selected for the Unit first team. When told of this exceptional honour and given the date of the match, he said, as politely as possible, that he could not attend because of a previous engagement. His Troop Officer ordered him to cancel the engagement, which Marine Sharp, again respectfully, declined to do. ‘Why not, Marine Sharp?’ came the disbelieving and angry response. ‘Do you not realise what a great honour it is to be chosen to play for the Unit? What on earth are you doing that can be more important than that?’ ‘Playing for the Barbarians at Twickenham, Sir. Sorry, Sir,’ was Sharp’s reply.