Free A Fortunate Life by Paddy Ashdown Page B

conformity…. There can have been few teachers of that period who kept a copy of Joyce’s Ulysses on the classroom shelves.
    Richard Lindley, in the 2006 Independent obituary, quotes me as saying:
    It’s often said that we can all remember a single teacher who changed our lives by giving us a love of something we didn’t know we loved. John Eyre was that teacher for me. Pretty well single-handedly he converted a rough, tear-away schoolboy interested only in rugby and sport into somebody who discovered the benefits of music, poetry (especially the Metaphysicals, who are still my favourites), literature and art which have stayed with me and probably improved me ever since.
    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business meant that my parents no longer had the financial resources to keep my brother Tim at Bedford, and he was withdrawn and sent instead to Campbell College in Belfast.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 leadershipmost. 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