The Living Years Read Online Free PDF Page B

long-haired guys playing electric guitars in their bedrooms while their parents – usually their fathers – screwed up their eyes in agony, and the guitars would always be plugged straight into the mains socket. That seemed fair enough to me.
    Just seeing my light blonde guitar lying in its crushed green-velvet lined case was exciting. As soon as we got back to Far Hills I rushed up to my bedroom and started strumming away in a very unmusical fashion. Even to me the sound seemed loud – beautifully loud – but I can’t imagine what it must have been like for my father: amplified music was such a complete unknown for his generation.
    On my father’s side there was a link to the romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (my great-great grandmother was sister to Shelley’s mother) and so I think my mother expected me to have an artistic streak. ‘Darling,’ she’d say, ‘it’s in the blood: Shelley’s line!’ But Dad, although he never put the brakes on me, must have been worried – not least about our house. Every time I started playing he’d stride round the house and start tapping the walls. He thought I was shaking the cement out of the brickwork (as I might have been, slightly). He never said anything to me though – and, needless to say, our house never did fall down.
    * * *
    As well as Dimitri, I had also made friends with a boy called David Sandford at The Leas. David came from Ireland and in my last term I was invited to go over and stay with him. It was the first time I had ever flown and David Sandford’s father, who was a turkey farmer in Strangford, picked me up at Belfast airport in his beaten-up old Land Rover.
    I suppose Mr Sandford thought he’d make the most of the opportunity because David and I were put to work feeding his turkeys and helping with the harvest. There were some other older boys there too and we all stayed in a caravan on our own behind the barn. It was free labour for David’s dad but freedom for me: I was twelve and felt very grown up.
    By this point I’d smoked the odd Player’s No. 6 but for those ten days I could (and did) smoke as much as I wanted. I also found that the cider the older boys were drinking was bearable. Growing up I had always aspired to my parents’ sherry at Christmas. I wasn’t interested in their gin and tonics and gin and vermouths. Sherry was the one that appealed to me: that lovely colour. Then one year they gave me a glass and I discovered that it was disgusting, although of course I couldn’t say that to them. ‘Mm! Lovely!’ I said, forcing it down. Cider was definitely an improvement.
    The only real downside of the whole trip was that the caravan was just yards away from 17,000 turkeys. I still get a lingering whiff of ammonia in my nostrils at the very thought of Strangford. What with that and the sherry, Christmas dinner hasn’t been the same since.
    Bar a few incidents at prep school and this rather heady Irish holiday I was a rather well-behaved boy. My father had always impressed on me the importance of politeness, trust and honour, and I felt that these were among the things for which he’d fought the war. In 1941 his ship,
Excellent
, had returned to Portsmouth for a refit the day after the first big blitz and he’d been appalled to see ‘the smoking ruins of our home port’:
    I went ashore for a look and had a rather disproportionate flash of anger at the damage done to the pubs where we had spent many rather cheerful hours and whence we had taken out the barmaids after closing time for a spot of dancing at the local Assembly Rooms (known generally by the less decorous name of the Arse and Belly Rooms). It seemed so spiteful and un-gentlemanly to bash a man’s pub – rather like smashing his golf clubs or damaging his children’s bicycles.
    The ethos of The Leas was clearly one that my father approved of because when I left the school in July 1964 he wrote to the headmaster:
    We are glad that Michael has acquitted himself as a