Like Stalin, my boyhood best friend and distant cousin Ronnie Bunting held the view that friends outside the cause of armed revolution were no more than useful idiots. As I was no revolutionary but had always done his bidding, it was clear into which category I fell.

He made my life a misery for years before going on to blow up Airey Neave, a close ally of Margaret Thatcher, in the car park of the House of Commons.

Ronnie had his own dark destiny to fulfil as an Irish terrorist leader. He should have been no part of mine, but he had a peculiar ability to bend others to his will. I tried to break free of him several times during our long friendship, but he always drew me back. The connection was so close that I was arrested myself on suspicion of terrorism.

Not until I left Ireland as an adult was I able to put him behind me. Even then, from hell’s heart, he continued to stab at me. If you have ever wondered where terrorists come from, and what it means to know one, here’s our tale. It began as farce and ended as history.

Ronnie entered my life soon after I failed the “qualy”, Ulster’s 11-plus. Denied grammar school entry, I was put in the G (for grammar) stream of Orangefield boys’ secondary intermediate, in east Belfast, and found Ronnie in the same class. He was my second cousin once removed, a blood bond in Ulster.

On that first morning in the autumn of 1960 we all introduced ourselves, Ulster-style, by religious denomination. I was a Presbyterian, Ronnie a Methodist. There were, of course, no Catholics; they went to church schools.

Ronnie was a year older than the rest of us. His father, Major Bunting, had recently retired after 20 years with the British Army. Ronnie had grown up in Malaysia, Germany and Cyprus, where his education never quite took hold.

A malign version of myself, more outrageous and more cunning, he became the godfather and I the consiglieri of our two-man “mob”. I didn’t like the bully and the braggart in him. But the other side — the dreamer, the thinker, the fool — was attractive.

He began talking about revolutionary socialism in his teens, taking against the school and the system that underpinned it. As he still wanted to pass his exams and go to university, he needed an instrument with which to upset the school’s equilibrium — me.

He egged me on to greater and greater excess. Typical was my excursion from one side of the school to the other on the outside, holding on to window frames with nothing but air below. On another occasion I exchanged blows with the vice-principal and had to defend myself with a chair.

There were ludicrous moments. At 16, Ronnie was besotted by a girl called Pat; but her dad, like any concerned parent, warned the young vermin off. This led to the episode known as Le Déluge.

The scene was Braniel Hill, Belfast. Ronnie moved swiftly up the street, bent on revenge. My progress was more jerky. I was carrying a bucket of water.

“Any chance of you carrying the bucket for a while?”