A Fortunate Life by Paddy Ashdown Page A

the shape of the land, and the light has that soft luminescence which only seems to occur close to the sea on Britain’s south-western peninsula. It was a strange landscape to me then, but over the next few years this vista of intermingled sea and land would become so familiar that I could reconstruct it in my mind’s eye, almost tree by tree and field by field, for the rest of my life.
    Across the carriage from me was a young man whom I had been furtively watching, as he had been furtively watching me. I was sure that six weeks earlier he, like me, had received the fat envelope portentously marked ‘The Lords of the Admiralty’. It contained a magnificent scroll saying that Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, having complete confidence in me, her trusty and well-beloved subject, was conferring on me the rank and status of a probationary Second Lieutenant in the Royal Marines, a letter instructing me to catch this train to Exton on this day, a travel warrant for my ticket and some rather intimidating instructions as to what I should bring with me and how I should dress. I was to be smart, wear a jacket and tie and a hat. My travelling companion opposite me was indeed wearing a hat – a very smart brown trilby. My own hat was stuffed in my suitcase, as I hate hats. It was a most inappropriate green felt affair, with a slightly rakish Robin Hood air to it, which I had recently purchased and would, in the coming months, try to wearas little as possible. He was looking very smart in a new sports jacket, cavalry twill trousers and sparkling shoes. I was wearing a duffle coat and looking pretty scruffy with a jacket that had definitely seen better days (my father had lent it to me), a rather crumpled shirt I had washed myself and very down-at-heel suede shoes. He was looking every inch the young Royal Marine officer. I was feeling very inadequate.
    But then, apart from a brief return home to Ireland to see my parents, the last two months since I left Bedford had been spent in London, where I had been doing odd jobs and having a whale of a time. Mostly I had been interior decorating for a friend, rather older than me, who had just bought a couple of run-down houses in Ealing. He would go on to make a million and end in jail. I had also earned a little money washing up in Joe Lyons Corner Houses, and spent it all very fast with old Bedford friends of both sexes. All that was now being left further and further behind me with every clack of the rails under our little train rattling along the bank of the Exe estuary.
    Sure enough, when the train arrived in Exton, my travelling companion and I got out together. When we did our introductions later in the day, I discovered he was called Roger Munton. He would be best man at my wedding, all but get engaged to my wife’s cousin, and then be tragically killed in a car crash. But for the moment we found ourselves on the narrow platform along with eight other behatted young men being shouted at by a burly man who, we would discover, was our drill instructor, the inimitable Colour Sergeant Bert Shoesmith. He was giving us orders and referring to us as ‘young gentlemen’, though in a voice that told us he definitely didn’t mean it. He commanded us to pick up our kit and ‘embus’ in some nearby three-ton military trucks. Beside him, in quiet but wordless command, was an incredibly smart, rather suave officer with black, slightly oiled hair, a cane under his arm and a Sam Browne belt with brass buckles so shiny that the sun, reflecting off them, seemed to lose none of its intensity. We were to discover that this was Lt Graham Mackie, our course officer.
    We were ‘marched’ (if such a term is applicable to a ragged group of young men without the slightest idea of how to march) to the waiting truck, driven up the hill and through the gates of ITCRM (Infantry Training Centre Royal Marines), which was to be our home for the next two years. Today CTCRM (Commando has replaced Infantry) consists