A Fortunate Life Read online

  My father did not see his father again until the age of nineteen, when the latter returned to England for home leave just as my father was finishing his officer training at Sandhurst. My grandfather retired to Guernsey in 1927, the same year as my father left England to join a Punjabi regiment of the Indian Army, their ships, according to family legend, literally passing on the passage.

  To be honest, I am not at all sure that the Ashdowns, as a whole, were very nice people – my father excepted. They tended to have nasty tempers, a strong streak of snobbishness and, as far as the Ashdown women were concerned, a marked capacity for being catty, especially to those they considered below them in social standing.

  My paternal grandmother’s bloodline was at once more romantic and rather wilder than that of my grandfather. One of her great uncles declares his profession in the 1851 Covent Garden census as the entrepreneurial combination of ‘boot maker and brothel keeper’, presumably having discovered that attending to clients’ boots whilst they were otherwise occupied was a good way to add value to a thriving business. By the time she was born, however, her branch of the family, the Cliffords, were firmly rooted in India. The Cliffords were plantation Irish and Catholic to the core. It is through them that my line runs back to Daniel O’Connell, the father of Irish nationalism, emancipator of the Catholics and generally roguish politician of the mid-nineteenth century. In 1995 the Irish government got to hear of this connection and put on a little Press event to mark it when I was visiting them in December of that year. Afterwards they sent me off to see the great man’s grave in Glasnevin Cemetery outside Dublin. On the way the driver said in a thick Dublin accent, ‘I gadder dat you are the descendant of the great Dan O’Connell?’ I confirmed that I was. He replied ‘Do you know what dey used to say about him?’ I knew perfectly well that they called him ‘The Liberator’, but I wanted him to tell me that, so I pretended I didn’t. ‘Dey used to say dat you couldn’t trow a stone over an orphanage wall but you’d hit one of his children!’ It was the best put down I have ever endured. Clearly, being able to claim descent from O’Connell was a less exclusive distinction than I had supposed.

  O’Connell’s granddaughter, Anna Mary Fitzsimmons, married Richard Clifford, my great-grandfather on the maternal side and followed him to India. She wrote a Victorian monograph On the March, describing the life of an Indian Army officer’s wife in the second half of the nineteenth century, which I still have. The Cliffords were, with exceptions, more steadily illustrious than the Ashdowns. My fifth great-grand-uncle by the Clifford line was the celebrated traveller, orientalist and Chinese expert, Sir George Staunton, who accompanied Lord McCartney as one of the first British emissaries to the Manchu (Qing) Emperors in Peking in 1793 and was the inventor (or, to be precise, discoverer) of Earl Grey tea. The Indian branch of the family was established by his great nephew William Henry, whose father served with variable distinction in an Irish Regiment, the 3rd Dragoon Guards, in Wellington’s Peninsular army (he was at one time imprisoned for being absent without leave as result of a female entanglement). William Henry, his son, was born in Wexford 1800 and later went to India as an Irish soldier-adventurer with the East India Company. He first comes to notice in 1825, for being cashiered from his regiment, the Madras Cavalry, and exiled from India to Hong Kong as a result of a fight over a woman. Apparently he was provoked over breakfast by a fellow officer.

  (It seems that for the military there is something especially provocative about being insulted over breakfast which does not apply to other meals. I once saw a grizzled and much respected veteran of the war-time SBS* and former Colditz prisoner tip a bowl of porridge over a startled Guards officer in his own mess. Apparently, in the Guards, it is – or was – the tradition that, if an officer wore his hat to breakfast, it was meant as a signal that he didn’t want to be talked to. My SBS friend having collected his porridge plumped himself down next to a Guards officer just so attired and said a cheery ‘hullo’. Receiving no response he said it again and then, with increasing menace, a third and fourth time. The recipient of this cheery greeting then said in a very drawly upper-crust voice, ‘Don’t y’know, old man, that in the Guards the tradition is that, if we don’t want to be spoken to at breakfast we wear a hat.’ To which my friend replied, with a growl, ‘In the Royal Marines the tradition is that if we are rude at breakfast we get to wear a plate of porridge,’ and tipped the lot over his head.)

  Anyway, the authorities in India in the early nineteenth century seem to have taken the view that William Henry’s offence was mitigated by the fact that the provocation took place over breakfast and duly reinstated him, after a helpful intervention from his illustrious relative ‘Chinese’ Staunton. In 1832 he made the sea journey back to India with someone else’s wife (who he eventually married) and founded the Clifford dynasty in India, which lasted until the British left nearly a century and a half later.

  Being Irish and therefore dedicated to the proposition that a good story should not be spoiled by too much concern for the truth, the Cliffords have handed down many legends which would be fun to believe, but for which I can find no evidence. For instance, one of my female ancestors supposedly left Peshawar in the autumn 1841 to join her husband in Kabul and was one of the very few to avoid the wholesale slaughter of the British which we know as the ‘Massacre in the Snows’ and which, in January 1842, brought the First Afghan War to a disastrous end. The story (for which, I repeat, I can find not a shred of evidence) gets even more romantic: she was said to have crossed the Himalayas back into India in the company of a doctor whom she eventually ran off with (the early Cliffords seem to have had rather a tendency to untidy private lives).

  Solidity, however, was a definite feature of my mothers’ ancestors, the Hudsons. The Hudsons were as steady, Protestant and Northern Irish as the Cliffords were wild, Catholic and from the South. They came to Ulster with the Cromwellian plantation from, we think, Northumbria. The first Hudson we know of was Robert, who lived in the little County Down market town of Rathfriland, under the shadow of the Mourne Mountains. He, like my Ashdown ancestor from Pimlico (and at about the same time), was a boot-and shoemaker by trade – though we may be certain that, as a good Northern Ireland Presbyterian, he did not combine this with a brothel-keeping sideline. Succeeding Hudsons were variously musical reed-makers, grocers, and auctioneers and valuers. My grandfather, Robert Hudson, whose sisters were missionaries in China and India, must have done rather well for himself, for the three Rathfriland houses in which he lived reveal a steady progression up the middle-class ladder. He combined his profession as Rathfriland’s auctioneer and valuer with that of newsagent, bookshop-owner, cycle agent and occasional dancing master, while still finding time to play in the local hockey team, train the church choir, serve on the local School Management Committee, conduct the choral society, be married twice and sire, in all, twelve children. His second wife, my maternal grandmother, was a Hollingsworth. They came over to Ireland, probably also from Northumberland, in the 1660s, were fiercely Protestant and served as clergy with the army of William of Orange.

  My grandfather was largely self-educated, a great believer in the Victorian virtue of self-improvement, and deeply engaged in the affairs of his local community. It is his strong Northern Irish genes that sweep all before them and march largely unchecked through all his grandchildren and my children, right down to my grandson, all of us carrying his indelible mark of a robust frame, a tendency to run to weight, a broad forehead, deep-set eyes and a marked cleft in the chin. He was said to have an extraordinary feel for glass, which he valued for Christies, and to have been an expert in fine furniture, apparently able to assess the age, date and value of a friend’s dining table simply by running his hands along its underside during dinner. He must have been quite progressive, because he went to Paris in 1898 and returned with the first car in Ireland, an Orient Express. It was described in a book of the time as ‘petrol-driven, single-cylinder, leather belt, Brampton chains, 36-inch black whee
ls and costing £210 [sic]’. On my office wall, I have a picture of him sitting in it, outside his stable in Rathfriland in the last year of the nineteenth century. He was fascinated by automobiles and all that went with them, and predicted, in the face of some derision, that they would completely reshape the way society worked. His capacity to predict the future was not, however, flawless. He was once approached by a Belfast friend called John Boyd Dunlop, who told him of his new invention, the pneumatic tyre, and asked him if he would like to join with him in a manufacturing enterprise to produce them. My grandfather took one look at his friend’s new contraption, declared it would never work and declined.

  He is described in a book of Rathfriland reminiscences of the time as being widely read with a well stocked library and as someone who, being ‘forceful of personality, … influenced most of the cultural and social side of life in the district’. His funeral oration adds that, though a weak church-goer, he was a strong Mason. His portrait, in the full regalia of his Lodge (looking, to be honest, rather like a Sicilian bandit), still hangs in the Masonic Hall in Rathfriland. He was also involved in local politics, being at one stage a member of the Irish Liberal party (a fact I did not discover until I was a Liberal MP). Although a Mason, he hated the Orange Lodge. My mother used to tell me that, during the ‘troubles’ of 1917–1920, when the Protestant Black and Tans rampaged through the countryside and she could see Catholic farms burning from her bedroom window, he took considerable risks to give shelter to Catholic families in his home. But he was a good Ulsterman and was amongst the quarter of a million men and women who signed the Ulster Covenant of September 1912 against Home Rule.

  He died before I was born, and I am very sorry never to have met him.

  My mother, Lois, was the eighth child of Robert Hudson. She was striking rather than classically beautiful, had extraordinary grace (despite heavy bones), a strong face and a beautiful voice, because of which she was known by her father as Merle (thrush) and was at one time selected to be trained as an opera singer. One of my earliest childhood memories is of her singing around the house, especially Irish folk songs. Her favourite, which she sang with an almost unbearable poignancy, was ‘Down by the Sally Gardens’, which my daughter still sings to her children before sleep every night. But instead of training for the opera, my mother trained as a nurse at Belfast Royal Infirmary. I do not know why she went to India, but I think it was because she joined the Queen Alexandra’s Royal Army Nursing Corps (QARANCs), which provided nursing services to the armed forces, and was posted there. She met my father and married him on 3 November 1938 in Rawalpindi. The wedding was, to be frank, something of a surprise to the rest of my family. My father had already been engaged no less than seven times, leading my grandfather, according to family legend, to bet a substantial sum with a friend that this engagement would go the way of all his previous ones. I think some of my rather snobby Ashdown aunts also took the view that my mother’s family was somewhat inferior, judging by their behaviour to her even to the end of her life, a fact which my mother, strong woman that she was, affected to either ignore or disdain.

  My father was not a big man. He had a light, sinewy frame, a demeanour which gave off a constant sense of physical alertness and eyes from which a twinkle was never far away. His most powerful weapon was his charm, which I have seen bowl people over, especially women. He had, to put it euphemistically, a very active social life in India before he met my mother.

  She told two stories on the subject of my father’s conquests before her, which, if not apocryphal, were probably somewhat exaggerated. The first was that, when they first started seeing each other seriously, my father suggested that she should go down to the local bazaar and visit a particular leather shop, where he had left the skin of a python that he had recently shot. She should, he said, ask the leather wallah* if he would make her up some shoes and a matching bag from it. She duly visited the shop and made her request. The leather wallah smiled knowingly and advised her, ‘Memsahib, this would not be possible.’ He then showed her all that remained of the skin. ‘A small purse, perhaps Memsahib, but the demand to date has been quite great!’ My Mother kept the tiny piece of skin, which she would later produce whenever she told the story, eventually giving it to my sister-in-law.

  The second story concerns their wedding night, which was spent in a friend’s hill station bungalow where my father had stayed often before. On the following morning the ayah† came in with a tray on which was a teapot and one cup. This she put down by my father’s side of the bed announcing, ‘Tea, Sahib.’ She then went round to my mother’s side of the bed, lifted the mosquito net, pulled back the bed clothes, slapped her on the bottom and declared, ‘Time for you to go home now, missy!’

  Not long after they were married, the war came. My father, as a young Captain in the Royal Indian Army Service Corps, commanded a small unit of pack mules. His troops, apparently to a man, volunteered to leave India and join the British Expeditionary Force in France. They embarked for Europe on 10 December 1939 and were the first troops from India to go into action with the BEF. He was posted just south of Lille, where his unit was used primarily for ammunition supply near the front line. When the retreat to Dunkirk began he received orders to head for the coast. He turned his mules loose and marched his men to the sea, narrowly avoiding capture on several occasions. At one stage of the journey a staff officer told him that the order had gone out for British officers of Indian regiments to leave their men and make their way to the coast individually. My father refused and managed to get his men, without loss, onto the last ship to leave the Dunkirk mole and back to England. He was subsequently threatened with a court martial for disobeying an order, but the charge was wisely dropped, and the officer who gave the order was reprimanded instead.

  My father used to joke that he was involved in both the great British retreats in the war (Dunkirk and the retreat through Burma to Imphal) and had a son after each of them. I was Dunkirk and my first brother, Richard, was Imphal. On the day of his return from Dunkirk he met my mother (who had followed him from India) in a Folkestone hotel, and nine months later I was born, the eldest of seven children, on 27 February 1941.

  By this time they were back in India and in Delhi, where my father was serving in Army Headquarters. According to my Mother, the day before I was born, she accompanied my father on a snipe shoot over a local geel* and was bitten by a rabid dog. She was rushed to hospital and given the standard treatment for rabies, a large injection direct into the stomach through the stomach wall. Whether this had any direct bearing on my birth in the Willingdon Nursing Home in New Delhi at 4.30 p.m. the following day, history does not relate.

  Three months later, on 8 June, I was christened – at Christ Church in the hill station of Simla by the Reverend E. Claydon – with three names: Jeremy, John (after my father), Durham (the Victorian family name adopted by my upwardly mobile great-grandfather). My father came down to breakfast the day after my christening to be greeted by a puzzled and angry delegation of Indian soldiers from his regiment, who protested loudly about the fact that he had called me Jeremy. ‘Sahib,’ they complained, ‘We are at war with the Jerries so it is very improper for you to call your first son after the enemy!’

  Shortly afterwards my father was posted with his regiment to Burma, arriving just in time to begin the long retreat back to the borders of India. The fighting was bitter and the conditions terrible. My mother, distraught with worry, tried to get as close to the Indian/Burmese border as she could, so as to be nearby when he got out. To start with, I accompanied her, which meant staying down in the plains during the hot season, rather than going up into the hills as most Anglo-Indian families did. Somehow, around the age of two, I contracted serious tonsillitis and had to have my tonsils removed urgently. Apparently the nearest hospital was an Indian one, and at that stage in the war there was a severe shortage of anaesthetics, because they were desperately needed at the front. Indian hospitals, in consequence, were very short of sup
plies, and the one I was sent to had run out by the time I got there. So my tonsils were removed without the benefit of anaesthesia. I recall only something to do with masks and the salty taste of blood and, not so much pain, as terrible discomfort. My mother said that for the rest of my younger years I used to scream whenever I saw a nurse in uniform.

  My father had a brief leave after escaping from Burma, as a result of which, in due time, I acquired a brother, Richard, of whom I have only a very dim memory of a frail, small child with wispy fair hair. For Richard did not live long. He contracted some kind of unidentified tropical fever and died at around eleven months, the first of no less than three children that my parents lost in their infancy or early adult years. I do not know how they bore these losses with such fortitude. But I do know that they affected them greatly, especially in their latter years, when both of them became attached to spiritualism which seemed to provide some kind of antidote to their grief. My mother’s last words on her deathbed were that she could ‘see all her little ones, gathered around her’. I remain perplexed as to why two entirely rational beings could believe in such things. But I do not begrudge it to them. For I know that I could not have coped at all if what happened to them as parents had happened to me. For, even as a brother, my siblings’ deaths have marked me, too. I often feel that my luck in life has been bought at the cost of my parents’ terrible trials and losses, and, even to this day, I dissolve into panic whenever one of my children or grandchildren falls ill.