Free A Fortunate Life by Paddy Ashdown Page A

more influential, was a man called John Eyre, who became legendary among all those he inspired (but was, I suspect, something of a thorn in the side of the School authorities).
    To these two, I shall return in a moment. But first I had to win my scholarship.
    In fact, I failed at my first attempt at the Civil Service Exam (mathematics again!). But it was decided that I should nevertheless go ahead and take the second stage anyway; then, if I passed that, I could return to retake maths later. The second stage was one of those initiative tests for leadership, which went on over two days and was held in HMS President , then (and still) moored on the banks of the Thames, just down from the House of Commons. It was my first visit alone to London, and I was completely bowled over by the place. My memory is of fog and dirt and grime and derelict bombsites covered in rosebay willow-herb and buddleia, all overlaid with an intoxicating sense that this really was the centre of the world. I was captivated by the House of Commons, which I visited twice during the two days, and by Whitehall, in which, in my mind’s eye, were all the levers which, when pulled, made things happen even in the farthest corners of the world.
    I must have done quite well in the initiative tests, because I received a letter from their Lordships of the Admiralty a few weeks later, saying that the Royal Marines (always, anyway, my first choice over the Navy) would overlook my deficiency in maths and accept me. My father was delighted, and I suddenly, and perhaps for the first time, experienced the glow of being able to do something to help him.
    My teachers did the rest. Michael Barlen inspired in me a fascination for history which has never since left me, and my school reports suddenly begin to be sprinkled with praise for academic and intellectual things.
    But it was John Eyre who really changed my life. He persuaded me to join the Poetry Society (which all rugby playing ‘hearties’ resolutely despised) and gave me a lifetime love of poetry, even getting me to write some for the school magazine. Eyre lit in me a fire for literature, especially Shakespeare, which has never gone out. He persuaded me to act in the school play (not at very high level – I was a wordless monk in W.H.Auden’s The Ascent of F6 , on the basis of which success Iwas entrusted the following year with a single spoken line – ‘Sound the alarums without!’ – as a soldier in Macbeth ). He even, with the assistance of another master in my house, got me to join a group to sing in (and win!) a madrigal competition – which, to anyone who knows my totally tuneless voice and incapacity to hold a melody, was nothing short of a miracle. Richard Lindley wrote a wonderful description of John Eyre in his obituary for The Independent in January 2006.
    There he would sit at his schoolmaster’s desk, a theatrically tattered gown draped about his gaunt shoulders, tossing back a lank mane of hair and holding forth like some actor manager, explaining to his youthful cast the drama of life in which they were about to play a part.
    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:
    The red tie he wore was taken as a thin ray of radical hope by boys of a more intellectual persuasion, who found themselves trapped [at Bedford] in philistinism and rigidly enforced