A Fortunate Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

caught it. Monkey continued to do this for half an hour (or so it seemed), with my mother and the gardener dashing backwards and forwards to position themselves beneath the bowl each time it threatened to fall, while trying vainly to entice him down between times. Finally, Monkey descended the tree, laid the bowl at the foot of the trunk and sauntered off, in carefree manner, back to the house. I swear that if monkeys could whistle he would have done so. He never got beaten again – which was bad news for me. And I have, ever since, felt myself somehow deficient for lack of prehensile toes.
    In May 1945 my second brother, Tim, was born. And a year later, when the war in the Far East ended and it became clear to my parents that the days of the British in India were drawing to a close, it was decided that my mother should take my brother and me back to Northern Ireland, where she would set up home and wait for my father to return after the British hand-over in India was concluded. At the time we were living at Simla, in the foothills of the Himalayas, so our journey to Bombay took us down the length of the Punjab and into India proper. Although the full-scale partition riots and ethnic massacres which accompanied the end of British rule did not really begin until a year later, in August 1946, there were, even at this time, a number of communal riots and mass killings. It must have been the aftermath of one of these – glimpsed from the folds of my mother’s skirts on our last journey across India to Bombay and the boat home – that formed the indelible childhood memory described in the Prologue. Whether the bodies I saw were those of Muslims killed by Hindus or the other way round, I do not know. Nor can I, with confidence, describe the detail of what I saw that day, for I fear this has become too distorted and exaggerated by childhood terrors and nightmares to be reliable. But smell is a more accurate hook for memory. A quarter of a century later the whole scene came flooding back in Technicolor when I next smelt that sickly sweet odour of putrefaction, this time from the long-dead bodies of our enemies on a riverbank after one of our actions in the Borneo war.
    Bombay in 1946 gave me my first ever sight of the sea, and I was immediately captivated by it, making a solemn promise, along with a shipboard friend of the same age, that we would both go into the Royal Navy, which later (if you count the Royal Marines as part of the Navy) we both did.

    Our first home in Northern Ireland was in a collection of coastguard cottages which stood sentinel over the mouth of Belfast Lough, called Lisnarynn. My memories of this time are of sea-lashed bluffs, vertiginous scrambles down to wild rocks and pools of indescribable romance and treasure, the blaze of whin (gorse) blossom in the spring and hedgerows festooned with wild fuchsia in the summer. And of an old anti-aircraft gun position at the back of our house, littered with faeces and old French letters (not that I recognised them as such at the time), where, to my mother’s despair, I loved to re-enact the wartime defence of Belfast against German bombers. My father meanwhile, now promoted to Colonel, stayed behind in India to help manage the British handover, returning home in 1947.
    It was on his return that we moved from our isolated coastguard cottages to the nearby seaside town of Donaghadee, directly facing Portpatrick in Scotland across Beaufort’s Dyke and the North Channel. We lived on the first floor of a gloomy old late Victorian house within a hundred yards of the seashore, and there my third brother, Robert, named after my mother’s father, was born.
    I remember three of our Donaghadee neighbours, especially. The first was an old retired couple downstairs, who would always give me sweets and had a Victorian print called ‘The Last Survivor’ hanging on their wall; it depicted Dr Brydon, the only survivor of the Massacre in the Snows of 1842 (which my ancestor is