A Fortunate Life Read Online Free PDF Page B

from India, we moved from Donaghadee on the coast, to the little market town of Comber, lying at the head of Strangford Lough in County Down. The town’s most famous son was General Sir Robert ‘Rollo’ Gillespie, killed in front of a Indian fort in 1814, apparently uttering the unlikely last words, ‘One more shot for the honour of Down’ (County Down). He played a key part in the British conquest of India and has a statue, in the manner of a mini-Nelson’s column, in the town square. The great family of the town, however, were the Andrews, one of whom, Thomas Andrews, was both the chief designer and a victim of the ‘unsinkable’ Titanic (built at the Belfast shipyard of Harland and Wolfe).
    The town was also famous as the home of Comber Whiskey, produced in an old distillery (now sadly closed) which I passed on my way to our family home on the south-eastern outskirts of the town.  The warm, steamy smell of mashing and distilling whiskey is one of the most evocative smells of my early youth. *
    My father and a business partner bought an old nineteenth-century flax mill in the centre of the town † and turned it into a pig farm with over a thousand head of pigs. My father sank all his army savings into the business, which was called The Comber Produce Company. For his partner, a Northern Irish businessman, this was a speculative investment. But for my father, who ran the business, it was a full-time job. To start with, they prospered, but then they were hit very hard in the mid-fifties, when UK markets were opened to continental produce, and Danish bacon flooded the shops. By the second half of the fifties, the business was in steady decline, with my father taking more and more desperate measures to save it and my mother doing the same to ensure that the family lived within our increasingly straitened means.
    When we moved to Comber, we first took up residence in a rented nineteenth-century town house called Glenbank on the outskirts of the town. Here my siblings increased from three to six with the arrival of my sister Alisoun and, finally, the twins, Mark and Melanie. Later my parents bought one half of a 1930s house, Eusemere (previously owned by Sir James Andrews, the Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland), which had recently been divided in two. It was in Eusemere that I spent most of my adolescent years, and they were, despite the gathering financial clouds, very happy ones.

    My parents had one of those marriages which are built on opposites. My father, to whom I was completely devoted, had three great loves in his life: shooting, fishing and strong arguments, and I was bought up with a gun in one hand, a rod in the other and a head full of disputatious opinions.
    In the winter, even from the age of ten or so, I would go shooting with him, either on the bogs of Northern Ireland after snipe, or wildfowling on Strangford Lough, a vast bottle-shaped tidal inlet so named by the Vikings, whose shores lay no more than a half mile from our back garden. The best of all our shooting expeditions were those that took us to shoot duck and geese across a winter moon on the great Lough’s mudflats. This was a dangerous pastime, as the tide comes in fast on Strangford, and the tangle of mudbanks and water channels can be very confusing. But we soon learned the Lough’s secrets from local friends, and especially from a larger-than-life local cattle-dealer and all-purpose rogue called Billy Thompson (of whom more later).
    To be honest, I was never very good with a shotgun in comparison to my brother Tim or my father, who was an outstanding shot, despite very poor eyesight. So I would often come back empty-handed. But I loved the wildness and desolation of Strangford, its bleak mudbanks crouched against the tide while racing clouds flew by on a northerly wind, and the wild calls of a skein of geese filled our ears as they wheeled and circled round us, seen only as brief black shapes across a silvery moon.
    My father loved