Read A Fortunate Life for Free Online Page B

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.
    He was impish, had a sense of humour (often bawdy) to go with it and boundless energy. He loved poetry in general, and Kipling in particular, and would read to us almost every night. He was a Catholic (the Ashdown family religion) but wore his faith very lightly (in fact hardly at all), often quoting a saying which he claimed came from the Quran (though I have never found it there): ‘There is one God but many ways to him’. And he would say that if he had been born in a Muslim country he would certainly have been a Muslim. He hated all religious bigots equally, but since we were a predominantly a Unionist and Protestant community in Comber, he had a special contempt for those of the Protestant persuasion. I suffered quite a lot in early life, at school and from the lads in the area, because I came from a mixed marriage. My father’s solution to the question I was frequently asked, ‘Are youse a Protestant or are youse a Catholic?’, was that I should reply that I was a Muslim. I tried it once, only to be met with the supplementary, ‘But are youse a Catholic Muslim, or a Protestant Muslim?’
    He was as uninterested in his clothes and class as he was in cars. He used to say that a gentleman was not to be distinguished by what he wore or where he came from, but by how he behaved. His favourite clothes were his most threadbare ones, and his favourite hat had fishing flies stuck all over it, in case he saw a piece of water or a fish rising which