A Fortunate Life by Paddy Ashdown Page A

some sort or another to public (or school) property. They were at the time looked upon as ‘good clean fun’, provided they were carried out by the ‘young gentlemen’ of the town, rather than its ‘yobs’. The legendary jape, carried out long before my time, but still talked of with admiration and approval while I was there, was the nocturnal painting of red footsteps down from John Bunyan’s statue in the town square, into a nearby ladies lavatory and back up to the statue again. (They could, apparently, be seen for many months afterwards, despite determined attempts by the Council to erase them.) The best such prank in my time was the painting of the words ‘Frying Tonight’ on the gym roof, which also stayed for many months, but could not be said to be so witty. The other prank, spoken of in hushed whispers, was ‘beam walking’, which consisted of walking at night along the beams which held up the roof of the Great Hall, three storeys and some forty feet above the floor. One of my friends, two years my senior, became so addicted to the business of japes thathe took his skills with him to Cambridge and claimed to have been one of those involved on the fringes of the famous jape of putting an Austin Seven on the roof of the University Senate House in 1958.
    It was into this, to me utterly strange, environment that I was plunged in the early 1950s, just as Britain was entering the last decade of Empire, privilege and class – soon to be swept away by the 1960s. My father made the first journey from Belfast to Bedford with me. Thereafter, from the age of eleven until eighteen, I made the journey alone, waving goodbye to my parents standing on Belfast dock as the ship for Liverpool bore me away for a three-month parting from them. Next morning the ship would dock under the Liver Birds statues on Liverpool dock, and I would make my way to Lime Street Station, through the grime and bustle of Liverpool’s crowded streets. From Liverpool, the train went to Crewe, where I changed and, after an hour or so’s wait, caught the train to Bletchley. Here I changed once more for the train to Bedford. I can still remember the journey intimately. But most of all I can remember the fear of missing the train engendered in me then (and never since lost). I can recall perfectly the cold and misery of sitting out on the platform of a wintry and windswept Crewe station for half an hour before the train was due, in case it should come early and leave without me. To this day, I drive colleagues and companions mad with my compulsion to arrive for trains and aircraft long before it is necessary, for fear of missing the connection.
    On 31 January 1953 I had to return home from Bedford to Northern Ireland for a family funeral. This was the day of the ‘Great Storm’. I was twelve years old at the time and remember the crossing of the North Channel from Liverpool to Belfast as by far the roughest and most frightening voyage of my life. In the event we were probably lucky to make it, as that same day the MV Princess Victoria , crossing from Stranraer to Larne, sank, with the loss of 133 lives. One of my childhood memories is of seeing the frozen bodies washed up on the Donaghadee foreshore for days afterwards.
    Since I was a full-time boarder, I went into the Lower School’s boarding house, called Farrar’s. Here my broad Northern Ireland accent and a severe bout of early homesickness immediately attracted unwelcome attention. They nicknamed me Paddy, which remained my name right through my school years. And then as no less than thirteen of my contemporaries at Bedford also joined the Royal Marines, Paddy followed me there. Thus it was that Paddy became the name by which I havebeen known for the rest of my life. This, I fear, caused some distress to my parents. I, however, have always felt more comfortable with Paddy than with my given name of Jeremy, not least because it was not long before my strong Northern Irish accent was driven