A Fortunate Life by Paddy Ashdown

Bedford:
    I am so glad he has finally achieved his aim in the Civil Service examination…. I fear this will mean that we shall be deprived of his invigorating and mature zest in and out of class. But he has achieved a great deal here and I am sure that the value of much of the work he has done this year does NOT lie in the examination labels he was incidentally seeking and that therefore the breaking off of his A level course is insignificant. I hope he will not let himself lose touch with the world of thought in the necessarily more restricted life of the Royal Navy.
    He has finished here in great style; everybody likes him and I am sure he will do well, for he has a fair ability and lots of sound common sense. He leaves with our sincere good wishes.
    And my report on Bedford?
    I hated the parting from my parents to go to Bedford. And during the year or so of my early misery the school did little to make things easier, while my contemporaries did much to make them worse. But the hard carapace I have ever since been able to construct when necessary, along with a certain self-sufficiency, a lifetime’s resistance to the attractions of ‘clubbability’, and a determination to choose my friends and not have them chosen for me by my profession, have helped me to live a life in which the temptations of easy or companionable choices have never weighed too heavily in my calculations. In Field Marshal ‘Bill’ Slim’s great book Defeat into Victory , his account of the defeat of the Japanese in Burma, he says somewhere that, whenever he was faced with a choice between two equally weighted options, he always chose the more difficult one. This has been, for me, somethingof a lifetime’s motto. But I knew the truth of it before Bill Slim told me, because Bedford had already taught me.
    I have also no doubt that, had I not had access to a privileged education, I would have failed my Eleven Plus exam and been consigned to the lower rungs of opportunity in the Britain of that time. I was a late developer, which our national education system in those years made no allowances for. So Bedford did me a great favour, though whether it was a just one is a different question. When it came to educating my children, I did not send them into the public school system that my father, in his time, regarded as so important and (as we shall shortly see) made such sacrifices for.
    Finally, Bedford gave me four attributes that were to prove invaluable to me. A sense of confidence in myself (maybe a shade too strong – but the Royal Marines soon knocked that out of me); an enquiring mind; a burning desire to go on learning; and a very good grounding in the techniques and disciplines necessary to do so. I have, in consequence, learned far more since the end of my formal education, than I ever learned during it.
    All things considered, this was not a bad armoury with which to equip an eighteen-year-old setting out to do battle with the world.
    * Now Bedford High School for Girls.
    * He committed suicide in 1979.
    * While the events described in the following passage are accurate as far as I can remember them, I have completely altered all personal and professional details, to disguise the identity of the person involved.

C HAPTER 4
The Royal Marines and Commando Training
    T HE DATE WAS 5 M AY 1959. Out of the train window I could see the mudflats of the Exe estuary. The tide was out, and the great river, a spangled blue ribbon shining in the May sun, threaded its way through brown mudbanks and haphazard battalions of tufted salt grass. Here and there stout little boats painted in primary colours bobbed to their moorings, and some busy oystercatchers were probing for shellfish in the ooze, like tiny nodding donkeys in an oilfield. South, across the river, were verdant fields, small whitewashed cottages, a huddled fishing village and the red earth of the Devon countryside rising to a wooded ridge on the skyline. There is just a hint of Dartmoor here in