Read Online A Fortunate Life by Paddy Ashdown - Free Book Online Page B

financial difficulties. The pig farm had folded, and my parents were now trying to make their living from a small market garden set up in the grounds of our house, where they grew vegetables for sale in Belfast market. It was therefore decided that I should try for a Naval Scholarship, which would pay my school fees from the age of sixteen, so taking enough financial pressure off my parents for them to be able to send my brother Tim toBedford as well. To be eligible for a Naval Scholarship, I needed to pass the Civil Service exam, of which mathematics was an essential part. Everyone agreed that I would not be able to pass this unless I received special individual, extra instruction.
    Private maths lessons were arranged for me with the wife of a local businessman, who had given up teaching when she got married * . I used to see her on Wednesday afternoons, the school half-day. Since I fell in love with every member of the opposite sex who came within touching distance at the time, I naturally fell hopelessly in love with her, despite what must have been at least a fifteen-year difference in our ages. And with good reason, for she was extremely pretty with a trim figure and a habit of wearing tight Jane Russell sweaters and those narrow-waisted very full skirts with flouncy petticoats which were in fashion at the time (Bill Haley and the Comets’ ‘Rock Around the Clock’ had just burst upon us).
    I spent hours preparing to go and see her and none of it, I fear, was on mathematics. I had a slight stammer at this age, which, together with wild untameable waves of blushing, became uncontrollable in her presence. In retrospect, she could not have avoided seeing my confusion. Whether she deliberately made it worse I cannot say. But that was the effect when she leaned over me to correct some hopelessly incorrect calculation, and I could smell her perfume and feel her warmth. For brief moments I even felt her breasts brushing my shoulder and on one, much mentally reconstructed occasion, she permitted one to briefly touch the back of my hand as it steadied my exercise book while she corrected a sum. The effect on a young teenager with a head full of fantasies and a bloodstream boiling with a cauldron of adolescent hormones was predictable and, one might say, elevating. I used to dread the end of our lessons when I had to try to hide this somewhat prominent fact with my textbooks as I stood up to leave.
    Things came to a head on our last lesson before the school broke up for Christmas 1955. She had clearly been to a lunchtime drinks party, for she arrived in a very boisterous and jolly mood, an especially flouncy dress tightly gathered at the waist, a silk shirt with the top button carelessly undone and her bosoms more than usually visible. The effect on me, exaggerated by the fact that she was especially closein her attention to my exercise book, was entirely inevitable. After about ten minutes of this torture, she instructed me to get a book from the bookshelf. Now there was no disguising my embarrassment and nothing to hide it with. And this time she did not pretend not to notice, but to my horror asked me whether I was embarrassed by it. I stammered that I was and, in a flame of blushes, apologised! She replied that it was nothing to be embarrassed about, unbuttoned her blouse and, gently taking my hand, placed it on her breast.
    Our Wednesday afternoon affair lasted, I think, about two months after I returned from Christmas holidays. It did not do anything for my deficiency in maths – but it did teach me a very great deal that was useful for a young man to know on the edge of manhood. She dealt with my inexperience and gaucheness with kindness, tenderness and patience, and for this I have been eternally grateful to her. When it ended I was distraught and did all the things ardent boys do at that age, like hanging around her house and writing her dangerous, passionate notes. But I soon got over it, and with it my shyness