Free A Fortunate Life by Paddy Ashdown

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:
    4 cuts [strokes of the cane]. Talking and joking in prep [the Public School equivalent of homework] after repeated warning. Generally bad attitude. I was going to give him only 3, but when he appealed to Mr Reeve [the housemaster] in an obstreperous fashion, I gave him one extra.
    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:
    Being caught down [in the garden] fully clothed to go for a swim (so they said). The extra 2 were given [to me and my friend] for arguing to justify themselves on a blatantly obvious case of wrongdoing.
    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