A Fortunate Life Read Online Free PDF

supposed to have escaped by the skin of her teeth), approaching a Khyber hill fort on an exhausted horse. The second was an eccentric neighbour with an unpronounceable Greek name but, according to local gossip, an impeccably English aristocratic pedigree. He was given to practising yoga by standing on his head every morning in front of the huge picture window of his bungalow, stark naked and with all his appurtenances dangling in reverse. Our Northern Irish ‘daily’, a good Catholic girl called Bridie, who always referred to the male organ as ‘the article’ (and to the female genitalia as ‘the underneaths’ – as in ‘Old Mrs So-and-so is having terrible trouble with her underneaths’), took care to be scandalised by this apparition on her arrival every morning. Best of all, however, was the fact that my bedroom window gave me a perfect view not only of ‘the article’ itself, but also – and much more interestingly – of unwitting passers-by taking a morning stroll along an adjacent path. This was so aligned that they did not suspect the affront to decency which lay in ambush for them until theyturned the final corner, to be confronted face to face (as it were!) and at a range of only a couple of yards or so, by this tableau of body hair and inverted human biology. I used to make my mother peal with laughter by putting on a little play every day over her morning coffee, re-enacting the contortions of horror and scandal I had witnessed earlier.
    Our third neighbours were the parents of my bosom pal, Willy Orr. His father, Captain ‘Willy’ Orr * , was to become the Ulster Unionist MP for South Down, and they lived in a house which seemed to me the very pinnacle of luxury and grandness. And Captain Orr himself, in my eyes, was just as grand as was necessary to go with it. But his son and I were scamps who got into every mischief possible for small boys living in a carefree society with a whole wild foreshore as a playground. On one occasion I was so offended by what I regarded as an unfair upbraiding from my father that I concluded that my parents didn’t really want me, so I would sail away for ever. Willy and I jumped in an old potato box and set off to paddle out to sea. Fortunately, the box was so unseaworthy that it sank after only a few yards, while still within comfortable wading distance (even for seven-year-olds) of the shore and safety. Later, we conspired to tempt the school mistress of the little Donaghadee primary school we were by now both attending (whom we hated with a passion), into the stationery cupboard, after which we locked the door on her and ran away home. For this we were both severely (and very reasonably) chastised.
    In the bitter winter of 1947 my parents took me ‘across the water’ for a trip to England. I remember being stunned at the size of London and the grime and the scale of the destruction. It seemed to me a city of bombsites connected by occasional streets of houses. I remember also the cold (this was the worst winter in living memory) and huddling round the gas fire in our room in the Army and Navy Club. And, of course, I remember Hamleys toyshop, which I thought the Aladdin’s cave of my dreams when my father took me there. We also visited my father’s eccentric relatives, who lived in a beautiful (but rather dog-eared and ice-cold) Elizabethan manor called Thorne House outside Yeovil. There is a photograph, taken in February of that year, of me standing in the grounds with snow up to the top of my Wellington boots. Little did I realise that this was to be the place I would in due course call home and, thirty-six years later, represent in Parliament.
    * The Special Boat Section (now Special Boat Service) of the Royal Marines.
    * Leather artisan.
    † Maidservant.
    * Bog or marsh.
    * Captain Lawrence ‘Willy’ Orr, MP for South Down 1950–1974 (succeeded by Enoch Powell).

C HAPTER 2
A Northern Ireland Childhood
    I N 1948, A YEAR OR SO after my father returned