If my grandfather was always writing at a kitchen table, Nat was always sitting at the end of a bar – alone with a pint of bitter, a packet of Players and The Daily Telegraph open at the crossword. I can hardly see him in any other position, usually at Peter’s Montpellier Bar in Cheltenham, where he and my mother Biddy had unaccountably come to live when they left London in the late 1940s.
Nat spent most of the pub’s opening hours here, his thin dark hair slicked down with water, a faraway expression set off, alarmingly, by the same startling pale-blue eyes as his father, always wearing the same sick-coloured tweed jacket, carefully creased pre-war flannels, brown shoes of a similar age, holes in the soles, but carefully tended, polished every morning. And always – his proudest possession I think – the same faded lightning-striped Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve tie. A tie so long used that the beery pub airs had acted on it like starch, and I saw it once in his bedroom practically standing up by itself against the back of a chair.
Nat was as much part of the fixtures and fittings of Peter’s Bar as the slate shove-ha’penny board (a game he played so often in pubs that he never lost), the beer-pull labels for Bass and Worthington Pale Ale and the stale sandwiches under a glass dome. I see him querying the odd crossword clue with Peter the landlord, a big, bear-like, bearded nautical man who had sunk a few German pocket battleships, I gathered, in the war.
Here Nat would eke out his languid, gentlemanly days, fingering his top lip, carefully pacing his cigarettes and pints of bitter, one of each every forty-five minutes or thereabouts, so that his money allocated for that morning would last from twelve until the two-thirty closing time. Then he would go home to a snack of strongly soused herrings and onions, prepared the previous day for him by my mother, with heels of white bread, before drowsing the afternoon away in bed, reading ‘tec novels.
At six he would stroll out again, down the faded Georgian glories of Landsdowne Crescent where they had a third-floor cold-water flat, buying the Cheltenham Echo at the Montpellier corner for the racing results to see what he might have won or lost, for he was a passionate follower of the turf, not at any racecourse (that would have been too costly) but via the racing pages and the bookie’s runner who came into Peter’s Bar every morning. Now I think of it he may have chosen to leave London and live in Cheltenham for its great racing traditions and its excellent off-course betting and credit facilities, in the shape of its many bookie’s runners, with their hot tips for the two-thirty.
At half past six my mother would meet him at Peter’s Bar, having finished work as a filing clerk at Walker Crossweller, a firm that made bathroom fittings in the Cheltenham suburbs. He would buy her a pint of bitter – with her money. For, as I soon learnt, all his beer and cigarettes and racing debts – along with the food and rent for the flat – were paid for out of my mother’s wages packet, handed over to him every Friday when they met at Peter’s Bar. I remember the exact sums she got – nine pounds a week to start with, then ten pounds after a few years and finally, before she left the firm ten years later, eleven pounds a week. She would keep only a pound or two for herself.
Apart from being paid for delivering flyers around Cheltenham for the local Tory party at election time, the only money my father received was from his father in Dublin – meagre, most unwilling cheques which soon dried up, and afterwards secret cheques from his loving mother, Vera, which he cashed with Peter, so allowing himself a pint and a cigarette every thirty minutes instead of forty-five – and some rash bets on outsiders at the races. Though Old Joe was sometimes prepared to give money to Nat in kind. On his being asked by my mother for cash to buy Nat a pair of shoes – winter coming on, his one other pair down to their last – my uncle David remembers being told to look under Old Joe’s bed, where he found a pair of cracked Edwardian dancing pumps, which were laboriously parcelled up and sent, second class, to Cheltenham.
My father, since he was strictly a one-outfit man, had trouble with his clothes. After the war, he came on one of his visits to dun money from his parents, then living at Ballyorney House beyond Enniskerry in the Wicklow mountains. At that time they employed a smiling, round-faced, mischievous, lank-haired little dwarf of a man, Johnny, as chef and general factotum. My grandfather – always anxious to get rid of his son as soon as possible – gave Johnny cash for Nat’s ticket on the mailboat back to England, and charged him with making sure Nat got on it. A mistake, for Johnny was as partial to the drink as Nat. The two of them drank away the ticket money in Dun Laoghaire bars so that penniless now and fearing – or unable – to return home, they put up for the night in a boarding house. But with no money for the bill next morning, Johnny set out with Nat’s suit, overcoat and shoes, hocked them and returned with the money to settle the account.
It can’t have occurred to them in their befuddled state that Nat, apart from his shirt and socks (for some reason he never wore underclothes – penury, bravado, hygiene?), had now been left almost naked, trapped in the boarding house. A blanket and a taxi were negotiated. They got home. History doesn’t relate my grandfather’s reaction on their return. But it can well be imagined.
My father was the mother of all remittance men.
But considering he was good-looking, charming, intelligent, had been to Radley and (briefly) to New College, Oxford and had been left ten thousand pounds when he was twenty-one by a rich bachelor cousin, William Hone, whose fortune had come to him as a bookmaker (discreetly no doubt since he lived in one of London’s most elegantly respectable addresses, at Albany, Picadilly), one may wonder at Nat’s later come-down. Or not wonder. Such a silver-spoon-in-the-mouth background, in a wilful, suddenly rich, free-spending young man-about-London-and-Dublin in the 1930s would seem a good recipe for a possible fall. And so it was for Nat.
How had all this come about? Well, that Nat had his glory days there is no doubt, though of what exactly he got up to in those days I learnt only a few details, then or after he died in 1959 aged forty-six. These matters were never spoken of by my grandparents or the Butlers. A pall – an appalled pall – of silence surrounded Nat’s doings in young adult life. I heard only vague accounts from my uncle David and from friends of Nat who I met years later. One friend of his (who later became a director of the Shell Oil Company) was a student with him at New College in the early 1930s. He told me how Nat was often absent from the college, taking a hire car to London to restaurants and nightclubs several evenings a week and climbing over the high college wall on his return, for which he was soon sent down. Though not before he had run over someone in Oxford on his motorcycle, resulting in serious injuries to both, with Nat breaking his jaw in several places, which must have accounted for the unnerving, palpitating movement of one cheek like a stranded fish when he was annoyed.
These Oxford high jinks might be seen as par for the course among the gilded youth at the University between the wars, except that Nat had some demon in him that always pushed him a mad stage farther. On returning to Dublin in the mid-thirties, when General O’Duffy’s Nazi-inclined Blueshirts were out and about recruiting, Nat became a camp follower of the movement, patrolling the Dublin cocktail bars carrying a loaded .45 revolver under his coat, where he once blasted the tops off the brandy and Benedictine bottles in the Wicklow Hotel; target practice for the real thing in the Spanish Civil War to fight for Franco, a campaign frustrated when the plane he was piloting never made it beyond Biarritz, where he and the others of his bibulous Irish Brigade spent a few days attacking the Champagne at the Imperial Palace Hotel instead of the Republicans.
Yes, some devil came to possess my father. But in one crucial matter at least I should thank this demon in him, for without his irresponsible behaviour I would never have come to write this book – since I wouldn’t have been abandoned as a child, or have taken all the great advantages I did from the Butler family, and there would have been none of all these concerned letters from my minders and I would probably have led a pretty awful life with my parents.
Nat’s sad demons probably started with his good looks and his great charm; though when I came to know him there was little enough of this latter left. Several people described it to me later as a ‘fatal charm’. The cliché in his case proved to be almost literally true. Nat had always got what he wanted, with the usual whims and tantrums of childhood indulged by nannies and servants in the household of his parents who, it’s clear from the Beerbohm cartoon, knew little or nothing about either conceiving or bringing up children.
Nat was partly brought up by my grandfather’s elder sister, my great-aunt Olive, who lived at Lime Hill, a lovely parkland Georgian house near Malahide outside Dublin. Olive was a most kindly, motherly, well-off woman, who, childless herself, took Nat under her wing. He spent a lot of his childhood with her and her stockbroker husband, George Symes. Here, as surrogate son to Olive, he found loving affection and no doubt traded on this. So for him there was initially a ‘farming out’, as there later was for me more formally with the Butlers – and so no doubt a feeling of parental abandonment that, mixed with his quick intellect and charm and a great whack of money too soon in his life, led him around to those Dublin cocktail bars with a loaded .45 revolver.
And afterwards, in 1936, to a meeting with my mother Biddy, Bridget Anthony, and marriage to her on 30 August of that year – at the registry office in Plymouth of all inexplicable places, since they had no connections with the town. And since I was born in the following February 1937, Biddy was three months’ pregnant when she married Nat. A shotgun marriage, in order to legitimize my birth? A holiday in Cornwall and spur-of-the-moment decision to confirm their love affair? Possibly both.
In any case my mother Biddy would have gone along with anything Nat suggested. She was gentle and yielding by nature. And in this, and her clear skin and fine hands, long delicate fingers and country-blue eyes, she was an attractive woman. Her mind was intuitive, untutored, but with veins of a strong native intelligence running through it. A free and independent spirit showed few traces of what must have been an impoverished Catholic upbringing and education in the wilds of 1920s rural Ireland. She had an innate sense of style, a quiet charm, an ability to get on with literally anyone. She was her own woman, except with Nat, who in many ways was her undoing.
Her gentleness, delicacy and non-confrontational character played into his hands. He came to use her. She became a put-upon woman. So in the end her marriage with Nat defeated her and, in her last years when she was still only in her forties, she took to drink and sad confusions.
Nat met Biddy in the King’s Head and Eight Bells, a Chelsea pub on the river. Meetings anywhere else than in a pub were a sore trial for Nat. Biddy was about twenty, studying to be a nurse in London at the time. She was from a widespread family of Anthonys in south Kilkenny (a cousin ran the large inn on the main road through the village of Piltown). She was the second-oldest of some dozen or more children. I’m not certain of the exact number or how many survived, for several died early and I met very few of them. Certainly, a great number of children – aunts and uncles to me, but difficult to keep track of afterwards. My maternal grandparents were clearly better at the family game than my paternal grandparents.
My mother’s Anthonys lived in a small whitewashed cottage outside the village. It must have been crowded. My mother’s father, from what little I knew of him, for I can’t remember ever meeting him, did little if any work. (I heard years afterwards from my sister Geraldine that he suffered from serious depression – which didn’t stop him fathering a dozen or more children). My grandfather writes of him to Hubert in 1955 in the light of the Hone family having ‘very varied temperaments’:
And then there is Joe’s mother’s family to be taken into consideration. I understand that Mr Anthony, the grandfather, has leant entirely for material support upon his wife and children for many years. Oh dear, oh dear, it is frightful. If Little Joe can’t help himself who is going to help him?
It seems there was a tendency on both sides of my family for the men to rely entirely on the women.
I visited the Anthony cottage only twice, with my mother when I was about eleven. I found the visits embarrassing. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I helped out once at the inn, filling bottles with porter from a barrel and a semi-automatic filler, six weighted spigots and a corking machine. On another occasion I went out shooting with a cousin with a .22 rifle. On another day, my mother and I and an older and well-off Scots friend of hers, Ian McCorkadale (who I learnt years later had been her lover) went to the Commercial Hotel in Clonmel, where all three of us spent the afternoon in the lounge, gin and tonics for them, the local cider for me.
That’s all I remember. Or want to remember?
The discreditable fact is that I looked down on the Anthonys, their small cottage and generally impoverished set-up. All were light years from the people, the large country houses and gracious vistas, the maids and gardeners, the libraries and theatre goings-on of my other homes – with the Butlers and the Guthries at Maidenhall (which was only thirty miles up the road from Piltown), at Annaghmakerrig and at Old Joe’s successive attractive houses in and around Dublin.
I was a child of two utterly different worlds, and never the twain did meet. Except by that initial chance meeting between my parents in the King’s Head and Eight Bells in 1936.
For Nat and Biddy this meeting was the start of what seems to me to have been either a lifelong love affair between them or a union based on poverty-stricken inertia. A bit of both probably. I can see no other reasons for my mother sticking with Nat, for their practical life together was unhappy and one of almost continual crises. True, my mother left Nat several times, as is clear from my grandfather’s letter to the Butlers in which I was used as a decoy by my father to lure Biddy back. And she left him again in 1950, for there is a letter from my great-aunt Olive to Hubert dated 1 May of that year:
Nat came over here in a great state about Biddy having left him and wanting still to get her back, and you have to admit that if there is to be any prospect of a home for the children in the future it would have to be with their parents, who are considerably younger than myself or Joe or Vera … Nat said ‘He had better come over to me, and it may influence Biddy to return to me.’ … I went out to Enniskerry the next day and heard there that Nat had pressed the (same) point with his father, as his only hope.
On one or other, or all of these occasions, I think my mother took up with her older married Scots friend, Ian McCorkadale, for on the first occasion there is a letter from her to Hubert from a prep school in Perthshire where she was housekeeping. In any event she returned to Nat. Ian’s wife may have caused trouble. Or did Biddy come to feel guilty about leaving Nat, knowing he would not survive without her? Nat certainly needed her. And perhaps poverty made sex their one certain joy, which might help explain the seven children they had in almost successive years from 1937 onwards. Their penury, their endless struggle for survival, left them nothing reliable except each other.
For whatever reason, for my mother it was a remarkable attachment. Nat must often have been an impossibly difficult husband – using her, financially and emotionally; depressed, work-shy, a failure, the gilded youth become a very black sheep. And though he repressed all this, in Peter’s Bar, with slow pints of bitter, the Telegraph crossword puzzle, the racing pages, shove ha’penny, soused herrings and ‘tec novels, my mother must have been well aware of, and suffered from, his bitter disquiet. It’s clear that with Nat she was a loving and tenacious woman.
But what of us, the seven children, born and farmed out every year? Not much loving tenacity in my mother there. Or were the children forced on her by my father? Or the produce of drinky nights together? Or the result of my mother’s Catholic upbringing and ignorance of family planning? Hardly. She was a student nurse and rarely went to church. And one of her younger brothers was a salesman for the London Rubber Company – in short, for Durex contraceptives.
I imagine the reason for each of us seven children was a mix of all these factors, and perhaps I have no right to criticize here. Procreative urges are many and varied, the concern only of the couple. But to farm the product out, one after the other, abandoning each child to unhappiness, among strangers, mewling bundles thrown out, orphans of the storm – that’s another matter.
Orphans of the storm … On one level my whole family business has something of the air of a wicked fairy story, the babies cursed at birth, so that they had to be abandoned in the Evil Forest. But on another level it can only be seen as sheer crass irresponsibility on the part of our parents. Perhaps there’s some way for reason in between? Well, there is one reason – chronic poverty. Which would seem a very good reason for not having so many children.
However, there was one blameless circumstance in my father’s life which may help explain his decline and fall. A year before the war he got tuberculosis, which led to isolation wards in England, a stay in a Swiss mountain sanatorium in 1940 (arranged and paid for by aunt Julia, then living in a grand hotel in Lausanne with her bevy of Pekinese dogs) and an operation to remove half of one of his lungs. This incapacity must have been a major factor in curtailing his boisterous golden youth, and equally a reason for his sad depressive life afterwards. But it was a disease that didn’t deter his sexual potency. (It may indeed have increased it, as evidenced by the four subsequent children he fathered, year in, year out, from 1940 onwards.)
But to be fair Nat’s problems of nature and nurture, with which he might have come to live reasonably, included the destruction of the hopes he surely had by this tuberculosis; the then general fatality of the disease had given him a death sentence in 1939, so that he lived the rest of his short life on death row. And so it’s perhaps insensitive of me to be too critical of my father’s behaviour. I’ve not taken proper account of the medical and psychological horrors he must have undergone in the long twenty-year course of his disease before he died of it (and cancer) in 1959. Did my grandfather take these horrors into account in dealing with his son? He must have done; he was an intelligent and sensitive man. But his way of dealing with Nat’s continuous health problems and difficult behaviour was to retreat, to protect himself behind a show of fatalistic irony. And that’s understandable. We protect ourselves from hurt and the insoluble in whatever way we can. This distancing stance which my grandfather came to take about Nat is well evidenced – is curtly summed up – in a letter to Peggy Butler, in April 1942:
I hope all’s well with you. Someone told me Hubert was in Cork. Biddy had another child, a boy. Nat had a bad go of bronchitis (probably pneumonic) and lost his job in the brewery. We had to lend them money, a good deal, to tide them over. I hope it will.
Biddy has another child. (The boy was Michael, as I learnt years afterwards, who, born in 1941, died eighteen months later. A mystery boy, of whom more later.)
Meanwhile the pub-haunting Nat found a job with a brewery – work which, given his drinky character, was surely a bad career move. A touch of comedy. But then pneumonic bronchitis disconnects him from the brewery, and yet my grandfather no doubt has to sell a good whack of that São Paulo Tramway stock to keep my parents afloat. The letter reflects a typical episode in the Hone family tragicomedy. But more tragedy than comedy. I can only read this letter with sadness, for my grandfather, my father, mother and children.
Now it’s time for the two major players in my early life to make their proper entrance: Hubert and Peggy Butler, of Maidenhall, County Kilkenny. Hubert was from the old Anglo-Irish Butler family, ‘minor gentry’ as he described his family, but distantly related to the Dukes of Ormonde, who had lived for hundreds of years in splendour at Kilkenny Castle. Hubert’s grandfather was a local rector and his own father, a retiring conservative country gentleman, farmed some five hundred acres six miles south of the city, near the village of Bennettsbridge.
But Hubert was very different from his conventional family – a questioning boy, with great academic gifts who went to Charterhouse and, in 1918, on a scholarship, to St John’s, Oxford, reading first Maths and then Classics: a young man in the early 1920s of liberal views – indeed heretical views as far as his Unionist family was concerned – including support for Irish nationalism; a man who, as the historian Roy Foster said of him years later, ‘… could not see a boat safely moored without wanting to rock it’.
This tendency to rock the boat – not at home or socially, for he was very conventional in these fields – led him throughout his long life, in his journalism, essays and letters to the papers, to ferret out awkward truths, political, historical and religious, in Ireland and elsewhere in Europe. He became a lie hunter, successfully exposing the liars. And of course this did him no good at all with right-thinking people everywhere, especially in Ireland, concerned with avoiding ‘trouble’, quite happy to be accomplices with the liars, and indeed with murderers and war criminals. For having gone to Vienna after the Anschluss, there with the Quakers to help get Jews out of the country, he came particularly to sympathize with their subsequent fate and that of other European minorities. He made it his business after the war to search out some of their persecutors, war criminals who had gone to ground, most notably in Yugoslavia where from Zagreb in the late 1940s he followed the trail of Artukovic, the brutal Home Affairs Minister in Pavelic’s Nazi puppet regime in Croatia; Artukovic, who, with priests and prelates in the Catholic Church, had been responsible for the forced conversion and more often murder of some 750,000 Orthodox Serbs in Croatia during the war.
It was a trail that led him to Ireland, where Artukovic, with the help of a Vatican escape line, had found sanctuary in a Galway monastery, and afterwards lived comfortably with his family in a Dublin suburb for a year, before getting a visa for America.
Hubert was the first to publicize this religious holocaust outside Yugoslavia in articles and letters to the papers – and he made a very public exposure of it all in 1951 at a meeting of the Irish Foreign Affairs Society in Dublin at which, unknown to Hubert, the Irish Papal Nuncio was present. Hubert began to speak of how appallingly the Catholic Church had behaved in wartime Croatia. The Nuncio, naturally enough, got up and left. There was a front page scandal about it all in the Irish papers next day: INSULT TO NUNCIO!
These truths, as they were, did not go down at all well in the Holy Catholic Ireland of the early 1950s. Hubert was ostracized by his community, kicked out of the Kilkenny Archaeological Society (which he had re-established in 1940 after a lapse of over fifty years), denied milk by the local creamery and libelously condemned by a drunken member of the Kilkenny City Council as being a disgrace to the County of Kilkenny and a Red to boot.
The Irish Special Branch took an interest; the local village sergeant was asked to get on his bike and keep a watch on the front gates of Maidenhall. It was thought Hubert might do a runner to Moscow. Years later, when the Special Branch papers on the investigation somehow leaked out, a memo from one of the detectives to the head of the service said there was no communist taint in the man at all, that he was simply an apple grower, bee keeper and market gardener.
As indeed he was. And it was as ‘market gardener’ that he described himself on identity forms. And it was as this and bee keeper and apple grower that I knew him in my early years at Maidenhall, and not as a latter-day Orwell and Swift with whom he was later compared when his forgotten essays in small magazines were published as books, in Ireland, by Antony Farrell’s adventurous Lilliput Press, in the last decade of his life.
All this came years later. For me – I see the natural man, at home in Maidenhall, moving through the seasons, far from the terrible lies and murderers. A morning in late summer, perhaps, fifty years ago: he sees the warm day coming up outside, no wind. Ideal for his purposes. And a few hours later I see him again, a tall, slightly awkward figure, an old pair of flannels, belted with an older tweed tie, a ragged honey-smeared green flannel shirt buttoned to the wrists, gloves, smoker bellows in hand, a felt hat and bee veil. He’s dabbing furiously at one of the dozen beehives below the front lawn.
The sun is hot, the bees angry. I can hear their distant outraged hum from the safety of the porch. And half an hour later Hubert is digging out the small square honeycombs from their waxy beds in the hive, and the larger frames in the other hives.
And then it’s the next day and the frames are in the oak-barreled honey separator in the pantry, the handle turning. The honey is spinning out inside, the whole room dripping with honey. And I have the smell – the thick sweet smell. Hubert’s turning the handle, I’m turning it, we’re all turning it throughout the day, and the next day bottling it.
And as the year, that particular year, begins to turn, falling into September, it’s apple time. The risen fruit – red-cheeked, yellow, orange, brown. The early Worcesters and James Grieve, the Conference pears in the walled garden, the Coxes in the high orchard. The chip baskets to get ready in the basement, the pickers to pick, me to be persuaded to join in. I can smell those Maidenhall apples now, the tart-sweet odours, a day taken out of time, where he lives again, and is about to storm the orchard.
Winter. The drawing-room. He is in the high-back red chair by the fire. Legs crossed, slippers, winter. He’s older now. The face longer, thinner, sculpted, eyes a paler blue. Gazing at the fire a moment. Returning to his book. A book on the Irish Saints. His face like one.
And in an earlier winter – I’m about twelve. The two of us are out in the yard stables, with the big cross-cut saw. Hubert is feeling suddenly energetic and I’ve been press-ganged again. There’s been a gale, trees down in the wood. There’s a big pile of wet branches behind us. We start off at quite a pace. But soon the teeth are getting stuck in the wet wood. The saw wrenched out – fumbled in again, and stuck again. I say ‘It’s pretty useless, isn’t it? Let’s stop.’ The rain is pelting down outside. But there is his annoyed determination then. ‘No, let’s go on.’ Another minute or two. The cross-cut sticks again. Another five minutes and we pack it in. Rain. Rain and wind. Hubert returns to the drawing-room fire, to a journal in Serbo-Croat, then switches to a text in Gaelic, a commentary on the Irish Saints. I go and get the tea. Peggy is away. The house is empty. No TV then, or radio. No electricity. Lamplight. And after the tea Hubert switches his reading again, reaching for a long shelf of French books to his left. Picks one out at random, starts to read it straightaway. I see the spine. It’s Maupassant’s La Maison Tellier.
He glides through the three very different languages so deftly that they might all be the one to him. He hears Archbishop Stepinac, Saint Columcille and the chatter of the girls in Madame Tellier’s establishment – all in their original tongues. Where most of us see through a glass darkly in other languages, Hubert sees the light clearly in more than half a dozen of them.
Another winter. We children are up on the top floor playroom, at lessons – of a vague sort – with Miss Goulding, the awful ogreish yellow-haired governess. There is a big red felt screen by the door. Suddenly, heavy footsteps charge up the stairs. The door flies open, the screen falls with a great crash. And Hubert is there, thundering in stage left, vengeful, fire-breathing, a figure in a pantomime come to save the hero and heroine from the wicked witch. ‘How dare you tell the children not to speak to the maids, Miss Goulding! How dare you say it was vulgar to speak to them! You will take your notice immediately!’
Uproar! Joy! No more lessons. Miss Goulding leaves that afternoon. Hubert has promoted his liberal ethic in a most palpable way.
Spring, years later. I’ve come into the drawing-room. Hubert is sitting at the desk by the window. But he’s not writing. He’s lost to the world, gazing down over the lawn, the valley, across the river to the mountains beyond, the Blackstairs and Mount Leinster half hidden in cloud. Hearing me he gets up suddenly, energetic again. It’s spring, and it’s daffodil-picking time, lush gold carpets of them, all over the lower lawn, but planted in various patterns, circles or huge letters spelling out people’s initials. Picked, they must be counted and bunched in dozens for the country market in Kilkenny. ‘Joe, we need help with the daffodils.’ I am not too keen. The stalks, greasy with sap, will get my hands all sticky and why not leave the daffodils nicely on the lawn where they are? ‘Oh, Joe, do stop talking rot.’
Spring turning to summer, and Hubert abandons Archbishop Stepinac, Saint Columcille and Madame Tellier. For the bees and their hives are to be loaded onto a lorry and taken up to the gorse and wild flowers on the mountains across the valley.
And another summer and we’re all out on the upper lawn, having tea under the big maple tree by the swing and the tennis court. Hubert, with his felt hat – which he wore in the most unnecessary circumstances and lost when it was needed – is leaning across the table looking at some papers which James Delahanty, the very literate Kilkenny ironmonger, has passed to him. Peggy and her daughter Julia are poised on chairs, in summer dresses, talking to the novelist Ben Kiely. The scene is frozen suddenly. The papers stay halfway up in Hubert’s hand, the voices are unheard. The dappled sunlit patterns through the maple leaves are stilled. It’s high summer, set in amber now, at Maidenhall under the maple tree, by the swing next to the tennis court.
Autumn and rumours of fruit once more, and Hubert is togged out again in his old flannels, felt hat and bee veil, a cloud of furious bees about his head, and there is the smell of burning corrugated paper from the bellows smoker. And the oak-barrelled honey separator must be got up from the basement once more. And now he’s turning the handle, and I’m turning it, the honey spinning out. And a week later there are autumn storms, and Hubert is happy as ever with nature – a few more trees fallen by the river, more wet wood to be cut for the winter. He’ll be looking for me again with that damn great cross-cut saw.
I was often an unwilling participant in the natural life of Maidenhall. So, too, as it turns out, was Hubert in his early years there. I learnt afterwards of how he fell out with his family, his formidable mother particularly and elder sister, and in later years blamed this on his feelings of being ‘dumped’ as he put it, aged eight, at Bigshotte Reyles, a prep school in Berkshire. He was devastated, thinking his parents had given him away. So it’s strange that he didn’t forecast or afterwards seem to notice my own unhappiness at the dreadful Sandford Park School in Dublin, where I was dumped, aged eight, in 1945. Hubert would have had influence with my grandfather in removing me from it. But by then he and my grandfather were absorbed with the financial aspects of my upbringing rather than with my feelings.
It’s likely that both men, like many other men of their generation, were emotionally maimed by their prep schools, as I very nearly was. Hubert (like my grandfather) wrote very little about his childhood, or his personal feelings generally. It was as if both of them, as a result of their early boarding-school horrors, feared to unearth that sort or any sort of emotional problem in their later lives. Something awful had happened to them behind the bicycle shed or in the housemaster’s study which had frozen their hearts, so that afterwards in their lives they concentrated on philosophical dictionaries, apple growing and the fate of the orthodox Serbs in wartime Croatia.
But for Hubert, at least, going up to St John’s College, Oxford in 1918 was clearly an academic and social liberation, in that he met his match intellectually, and, in Tony Guthrie, a fellow student at the College, his first mature friend. And more importantly a year or two later he met Tony’s sister, Peggy Guthrie, visiting her brother from their home in Tunbridge Wells. Peggy, though she was only sixteen, took to Hubert at once, and forever after, though they didn’t marry until 1930. It was a lifelong love for her and, in a different way, for Hubert – for they were very different people. Yet in their lives together they convincingly proved that the chalk and the cheese can get along fine, if they come to understand why they are both very different, and appreciate that, and take strength from it.
If Hubert was very unorthodox intellectual chalk, Peggy was intuitive, a whole cheeseboard of different flavours. Yeats spoke well of the sort of love I think they shared: ‘In wise love each divines the high secret self of the other, and, refusing to believe in the mere daily self, creates a mirror where the lover or beloved sees an image to copy in daily life.’ On a more mundane level – and perhaps a more important ingredient in a long and, on most levels, a happy marriage – they never ceased to ‘pull together’, for their own and even more for the common good. ‘Are you pulling with me, or against me?’ the hero asks the heroine at the end of Mary Webb’s Precious Bane. This was a question neither of them, I think, ever had to ask.
Although they were very different people in character, they were equally unconventional – Hubert intellectually, in his rocking of every comfy boat, Peggy intuitively, in her whole attitude to life as it was and should not be. It was the key to her character, her impatience with the expected in a character that was always unexpected, without ever this being a shallow showy-off business. No time, for this fine, sharp-featured, six-foot-tall, vigorous commanding woman, for show in this most serious and exciting business of living.
And here is another key to her: her attack; her energy; in and for life and with people. She was quite exceptional in this. A tremendous getter-on with things, no footling about, an endless organizer, a real touch of the dictator. She could be ruthless – she played tennis in a quite merciless manner. But she could as quickly switch into a Victorian Mad Hatter’s tea-party mode, as on picnics by the river when we were children at Maidenhall, where things were turned on their head and moral lessons given: virtues made of horseflies, rain, forgetting the butter. She once said to me, when I was about nine and complained of the latter: ‘What a treat for you, Joe – bread with no butter!’
And in her latter years, in her eighties, when she was often wheelchair-bound, she never ceased her original and busy approach to her many schemes. For her, as for her brother Tony Guthrie in his theatre work, it was ever a matter of ‘Rise above! On, on …’
Like her brother, Peggy was dramatic, and sometimes explosively so, in word and deed. So that being with her could be a hair-raising experience, as it was equally for outsiders, even total strangers, usually public servants and such like, who had no idea that there was a real thunderflash in the post for them or coming down the telephone – that they were shortly to be at the cutting edge of her performance, her anger risen at some ignorant, fatuous or self-serving behaviour of theirs. Though she was absolutely no fool, she made a habit of rushing in where angels would never have dared tread. Like Hubert, but in a different abrasively verbal way, she was a great upsetter of applecarts so that her friends – and enemies, for she had quite a few – came to keep such vehicles well off the road and out of her way.
She was the enemy of every sort of ‘humbug’ – a favourite word of hers – old-fashioned, smacking of Tunbridge Wells and the Edwardian era into which she was born, both town and period equally hated. It was another part of her originality that, coming from this stuffy formal Empire background (and no doubt in reaction to it) she was passionately pro-Ireland and the Irish; sometimes rashly so. I doubt there was ever a better example of someone being ‘More Irish than the Irish themselves’.
She was equally modern in her other views: artistic, social and moral; always taking surprisingly advanced positions whether the matter was personal, among her family, with friends or in the public domain. She could be cruel in this way, with servants or with others who couldn’t or wouldn’t deign to reply. But her intuitive realism about people could hit the nail right on the head. Once, in a rather long-winded account of troubles I was having with a woman, she cut my cackle and said simply ‘Joe, if you are blackmailable – you will be blackmailed.’
Some of us, if we’re lucky, mellow with age. More usually we move from vivid youthful left to grumpy-grey right. Peggy did neither. She was always ‘advanced’. Age seemed only to sharpen her critical claws against the fuddy-duddies. For her it was always the new, right up to the end. I read her an Anita Brookner novel some months before she died. She admired things in it, but found it generally too formal and ‘expected’. She would have preferred Trainspotting I felt.
Of course she had a youthful background in this modernity, in the London of the 1920s where she studied painting at the Regent Street Polytechnic, and, in many of her oils and drawings of that period and later, showed herself to be a painter of great talent and technical ability. Indeed it’s clear that she could have made a successful career, as her brother did in theatre, as an artist or designer. She was intensely cosmopolitan, loved the concerts, art galleries, theatres and cinemas of big-city life.
She largely gave up these big-city stimulations and any of her own possible careers when she and Hubert came to live at Maidenhall in 1941. It was a real sacrifice for her; and a great benefit for Hubert, who was tone deaf and barely interested in the arts. Peggy, in the rural peace of Maidenhall, organized the household and became the anchor for his work. And if Hubert benefited so did the local community, for whom she did many fine things – helping organize the Country Market in Kilkenny in the 1950s, creating the Butler modern art gallery in the castle and getting the Kilkenny Arts Week going. None of which would have happened, given the reactionary nature of Irish rural officials at the time, without her tweaking innumerable council, corporate and clerical beards.
There was no element of do-goodery in her involvement in these local affairs. She, like Hubert, simply brought the virtue of what one might call Protestant private judgment to these neighbourhood matters.
And I was a beneficiary of Hubert and Peggy’s unorthodoxies and fearless outspeaking – and their scoldings. Of course I suffered these, in rows with Hubert over the cross-cut saw, and with Peggy, often enough – for example on my once cooking an omelette with butter, not margarine. ‘Joe, what extravagance! You either have it this way, or not at all.’
But even fighting over the cooker I benefited, for I would not have dared to reply to her thus but for her constant forthright and candid example. I got that sturdy, if sometimes abrasive, attitude from Peggy.
More importantly, I also got wonderful gifts of language from her, in her dramatic readings to us as children and from her own vividly descriptive, laconic and original use of words – the idea that words, if you adventured with them, were magic weapons, could be powerfully evocative, hilarious or killing things. And that to be unorthodox and creative with them was the road to salvation. To be a painter, as she was, or a novelist as I became, though not of course something to be made anything of in public, was of the essence.
Peggy gave me the excitement of words and some of the bare-faced confidence to write books. Peggy had a great deal of bare-faced confidence. She could put people’s backs up very quickly. But some of us emerged from the encounter with stronger backs. It was sink or swim with Peggy.
But there was another, largely hidden side to her. At heart she was a hugely understanding person. The sympathy of real concern – immediately in heartfelt words, or later down a telephone or in a letter. It was her greatest quality – the quick and genuine interest she took in people of every sort and background, their lives, problems. Her advice, when she gave it, was usually right and sometimes extreme. She could be coldly dispassionate here, in a manner that could be daunting.
However, if she could be dryly objective, she was far more a woman of intense emotion. This was cramped, ‘bitten back’, largely for lack of that channel of artistic expression through which her brother Tony so vividly expressed himself in theatre. Her own frustrated gifts and emotions led now and then to outbursts of cruelty, her talent twisted and hurtful. High-handed, imperious, naturally gifted, psychologically astute, fearless – and to be feared. A treader-on-toes.
Because one knew how often she was treading on her own toes, in frustration or unhappiness, you could understand the arrogance and scoldings and know of her great warmth beneath the cold. Impatient, inspiring and infuriating – she was all of a piece.
Peggy was an extraordinary mother to be landed with. How different from my real mother Biddy, in her transparency, simplicity and gentleness. And Hubert, with his high-minded pondering of ancient Serbo-Croatian texts light years away from my father’s mental efforts: studying the Telegraph crossword puzzle, the racing forecasts and playing shove-ha’penny in Peter’s Bar.
So here – apart from the minor players of headmasters, housemasters, a doctor-psychiatrist, uncles and aunts, well-meaning friends and acquaintances of my grandparents and the Butlers – here are the major players, all of them: stars, spear carriers, understudies, seemingly anxious to shine in the melodrama, ‘The Saving of Little Joe’, that real cracker of a play.