Since I was the first parcel in the Pass the Parcel game that my parents forced on their children, my grandfather, unaware of the other babies to follow on his doorstep, moved me on fairly carefully. In 1939, aged two-and-a-half, I was lucky to land up with Peggy and Hubert Butler, who wanted a companion for their daughter Julia, eighteen months older than me.
The Butlers then looked after me, with a small board fee of fifteen shillings a week paid by my grandfather. Initially Peggy would have liked to adopt me legally, but my parents wouldn’t agree to this. So the matter of my status with the Butlers was left in abeyance for a year or two. But as I grew up, it understandably became a vital issue for Peggy and Hubert and thus a main bone of contention between them, my parents and grandparents: which of the trio was to have authority over me? And was I meanwhile to be just a paying guest with the Butlers (as other children were at Maidenhall then and later), or a full member of the family, as I was clearly becoming with every month that passed? The matter was never resolved. And my betwixt-and-between position with the Butlers and my own family was to continue indefinitely, to the detriment of all concerned.
For of course my parents never took me back. They didn’t have the money to support themselves, let alone me or the six other children who followed. And my grandparents, Joe and Vera, were too old and infirm to deal with me on a permanent basis. So the Butlers were left holding the baby, though by now the baby was growing into a difficult, obstreperous little boy.
Nat, with Biddy on the sidelines in wartime London at that point, did nothing to help resolve this issue of my future. From the evidence in the file Nat wasn’t in any direct touch with his parents or the Butlers during the war (except for one notably fraught occasion when Hubert went to see them in London in 1942, of which more later) and he simply didn’t reply to any letters on the subject of my future. One reason for this, I think, was that having spent all his cousin’s ten-thousand-pound legacy on high living, and then having contracted tuberculosis just before the war and lost half a lung, my father was a semi-invalid and saw the welfare of his progeny as a secondary issue. Realizing that he was going to need Biddy to look after him, he was anxious not to have her dilute her efforts in this by having to care for any of their children.
But for me, at that point, there were the beginnings of a life in two very different worlds. Since Hubert Butler’s father was still alive – as a somewhat disturbed old man living at Maidenhall in the south – I was first taken north with the Butlers to live an Annaghmakerrig in County Monaghan. This was the family house of Peggy’s mother, Norah Power, before she married Dr Guthrie, an Edinburgh physician who had moved his practice to Tunbridge Wells. But on his early death in 1929, Mrs Guthrie, partly blind, returned to live at Annaghmakerrig. Peggy and Tony had spent their childhood holidays here, and loved the place, and after their father died the house in Tunbridge Wells was sold and Annaghmakerrig became the Guthrie family home.
By the time I arrived there, late in 1939, old Mrs Guthrie – Mrs G as she was always called – lived there with her tiny tidy Yorkshire nurse-companion, Miss Worby, known as Bunty, with a fair deal of help inside and outside the big house, in those days also a working farm and forestry estate.
Annaghmakerrig is a lovely, winding-corridored, secret-cubby-holed, mid-Victorian house, with many variously angled roofs and rounded gable ends in the Dutch manner, set on a hill in rhododendron-blooming grounds, overlooking a big lake, and surrounded by pine forests. A touch of Bavaria. In winter one expected snow and glittering ice on the lake. Indeed that is my first memory of Annaghmakerrig, during the icy snowbound winter of 1940: a horse pulling a big wooden sleigh drawing up at the front door steps; and being pushed about, with other children, on nursery chairs over the frozen lake, while the adults skated around us. And later summers there, playing in a wooden Wendy house on the front lawn under the big sycamore tree – a little house called Rosebud.
Afterwards, living at Maidenhall, we children only went to Annaghmakerrig for Christmas and summer holidays, so we especially looked forward to our visits there. I’m a little surprised at this, for Annaghmakerrig then was a household where a formal order prevailed, very different from the informal, workaday world I came to know later at Maidenhall. At Annaghmakerrig there was a precise Victorian manner of things, a nineteenth-century air and ethos, serenely but strictly maintained in the house and on the estate – an almost feudal world, which continued there for fifty years after Queen Victoria had died. The house and its inhabitants were imbued with things and thoughts Victorian: the heavy drapes and furnishings, red-andgilt bound copies of Punch and the Illustrated London News in the morning room, paintings of farm animals and bewhiskered nineteenth-century military ancestors; an impression permeated especially by the Protestant work ethic, where pleasure was always to be earned, where it was not merely incidental, chanced-on in pursuit of some much more serious goal.
And yet the pleasure for us children there was often incidental and unearned. It lay all around us – through the winding corridors, endless rooms and attics of the house and about the wider estate. And when Bob Burns, Mrs G’s chauffeur, met us at Newbliss off the Dundalk train in the immaculate leather-smelling green Austin 12 and the house finally reared up across the lake over the last hill, I always felt a thrill of pleasure, thinking of the impending adventures and surprises.
I was lucky indeed, living there in my early years and afterwards at Maidenhall, unaware of my real background, of my grandfather in Dublin coming to fear every knock on the door; the postman as stork, delivering another baby; of my mother, an office slave, filing papers nine to five, and of my father holding up four ale bars in London and Cheltenham.
Annaghmakerrig, moated by lakes, remotely distant beyond its three avenues, inviolate behind its fir-clad hills, boggy fields and small brackish canals, was a dream kingdom, a view of the exotic over that last hill. Once up the steps and into the big hall, the smell of Aladdin oil lamps and candle wax for this was the only form of lighting in the house until the 1950s.
Settled and secure, the house offered both mystery and comfort – the soft-carpeted, lamplit rooms warmed by log fires, where pools of rose-gold light ran away into shadowy spaces, down long corridors into ghost-haunted nooks and crannies, hidden rooms filled with novelties, secrets. In winter the house was clearly divided between light and dark, just as the seasons of our visits were equally extreme, divided into either midwinter or midsummer holidays. We children never knew the place in its rehearsal seasons of spring and autumn. For us the curtain was always about to rise on Christmas or the summer play was in full swing.
Winter was the more obviously exciting, with its central drama of Christmas. But the teasing prelude was almost as good. Dumb Crambo and charades – getting dressed up in the hall from boxes of Victorian finery and tat. Children’s parties: musical chairs to the dance of ‘The Dashing White Sergeant’ from the cabinet gramophone; ‘Oranges and Lemons say the Bells of Saint Clements’, the procession through a pair of arched arms where you were trapped on the last words of ‘Here comes a candle to light you to bed, here – comes – a – chopper – to – chop – off – YOUR HEAD!’
And then the long woolly stocking at the end of the bed on Christmas morning, waking early in the dark, the thrill of touching its bulky folds, but resisting until dawn; simple wartime stocking fillers, with pencils and sharpeners, a notebook, a torch, an apple in the toe. The thrill was in the earlier unknowing. And later the opening of the proper presents, that evening round the tall fir tree in the study at the end of the hall, the magic of the candles all over it, the intoxicating smell of melting wax and warmed fir needles. And finally the heart-stopping moment when the labelled brown-paper parcels – the presents piled round the tree – could be set upon and fiercely unwrapped. The brown paper and every bit of string had to be kept, afterwards to be folded and the string wound up in balls, by Mrs Guthrie.
If Christmas at Annaghmakerrig, with its silks of Araby in the charades, its décor of tinsel and coloured streamers, its warm perfumes of wax, fir and almond-cake icing, had a touch of A Thousand and One Nights, our summer holidays were straight out of Swallows and Amazons. The drama moved from the house to the lake – a windblown watery theatre: boating, bathing, fishing, picnicking.
There were two heavy rowing boats and big crayfish under the stones in the shallow water by the boathouse. To avoid what I understood to be their fierce pincers I soon learnt to swim, surging away as quickly as possible into deeper waters. Again, the spaces of the lake, like those of the house, always beckoned: an equal invitation to promote our fantasies. For the lake was silent and private then, a water which we children could make over entirely in our own adventurous images, living Ransome’s book in reality, or creating our own fictions, as explorers and cartographers, making for secret waters, compassing the island on stakes, the prow of the boat pushing through a carpet of water lilies there; or daringly swimming beneath them, seeing the tangle of their long slimy stems sinking from the sunlit surface into the greeny-black depths – the sudden fear of sinking too far, of drowning in the forested underworld, those realms of the big fish that had snatched at the legs of Jeremy Fisher.
Life at Annaghmakerrig made the heart beat faster. My own real family, or what little I knew of it, faded into the background. Instead, at Maidenhall and Annaghmakerrig, I found two much more engaging families. And in Tony Guthrie, a father figure.
By the time I arrived at Annaghmakerrig late in 1939 Tony was the well-known theatre producer and administrator of the Old Vic and Sadler’s Wells in London. And during the next few years, up on holidays from Maidenhall, Tony and his wife Judy would come over from London for a few days, and always at Christmas, and then there would be the real drama, for me and the other children staying in the house.
Dressed up for charades, waiting in the hall before making our entrances into the drawing-room – Tony or Peggy or her great friend Ailish Fitzsimon directing us, to see that we made our entrances at exactly the right moment. And although we children knew nothing of real theatre then, there was a theatrical heightening of reality, a mood of sudden invention flooding the staid Victorian house, with Tony master of the revels, alchemist in the dross-to-gold department.
Tony was a transforming influence for me. It was from him, over the next few years at Annaghmakerrig, that I had the first intimations that life need not be unhappy, dull, difficult, penny-pinching; that in the stage setting of the house with its Victorian props and costumes, life could be ‘produced’ to show a much more significant, exciting side; that in Tony’s inventive hands it could be transformed into all sorts of magic, when the workaday would be banished in the cause of illusion. And just as importantly I came to see that all this make-believe world was valid (which other grown-ups were wont to deny – ‘Don’t tell lies, Joe!’) since the fun and games were promoted by this scion of the family, this giant visiting uncle.
Tony was pushing six-foot-six in his socks. He towered over everything. Eyes narrowed in the smoke from a dangling cigarette, pondering some dramatic plan – anything, as I see it now, which would kick ordinary life in the pants, or celebrate it, or alter it entirely. There wasn’t a moment to waste in this transformation of the mundane, nothing of life that couldn’t be tinkered with, fashioned by his vital spirit into something unexpected, astonishing, spectacular. Everything was prey to his inventions. Evenings, taking to the soft-toned Blüthner piano in the drawing-room, he would sing in his high voice old ballads with exaggerated relish, a Thomas Moore melody or ‘The Skye Boat Song’. Or just as suddenly, in his quick military way, he would go to the cabinet gramophone, wind it up, put on a record and bring forth The Pirates of Penzance, annotating the songs mischievously, taking different roles, counterpointing the words in a basso profundo or an exaggeratedly high tenor voice.
He was a man overcome with endless schemes, and fits of energetic, creative or sometimes destructive fever, whether directing us in our charades or in leading an attack on the garden scrub, with bonfires, the whole household commandeered, the grown-ups issued with bow-saws, scythes and choppers, we children the lesser spear-carriers, as the wilderness rapidly diminished, the whole tiresome business made fun, produced as vivid spectacle, like the mob scene in Coriolanus.
‘On, on!’ he would shout, rising up suddenly from behind a bush like a Jack-in-the-Box, with a mock-fierce smile, urging us on, prophet-like, to smite the nettles and brambles – storming the barricades of convention, in life as in theatre, gathering up every sort of hungry cat and setting them among the complacent pigeons, to propose and often to achieve the unlikely or the impossible. Like Peggy, his sister, he was another very unconventional figure from whom I took courage in my own dumb feelings of being an outsider. I was lucky. Life at Annaghmakerrig became a repertory theatre for me, a cabinet of curiosities filled with surprises that I could pick and finger and possess. A time of gifts indeed.
On the death of Hubert’s father in 1941 the Butlers, with me, all moved south to the workaday world of Maidenhall. Though there was nothing grim or grinding about life in Maidenhall, in a house as attractive in its way as the holiday home in the north.
If Annaghmakerrig had rumours of Victorian neo-gothic, Maidenhall was minor Irish Georgian classic. Set on another hill, the four-square, lime-washed house lay, and still lies, beyond two white gates on a rook-clamorous, tree-covered ridge overlooking sloping lawns, beehives, a chestnut-and-beech-filled parkland bordered by a tree-arched byroad, with water meadows and the river Nore beyond. On the other side of the valley sits a ruined sixteenth-century Norman castle and a much earlier Celtic round tower before the land rises again in gorse-covered green hills and distant blue mountains.
I still see it in this way – perhaps because this was the first view I remember when I arrived at Maidenhall, seen from high up in the old nursery on the top floor, as I looked out of a small low window, wondering where I was.
Years of the same view, through the seasons, from the same nursery window that became the playroom and then the schoolroom. Yellow daffodil springs, lush-green chestnut summers, orange autumns, dark rain-stormed winters, snow-powdered New Years. I spent a lot of time by the nursery window. This room was my world, my centre, the start of governess schooling shared with Julia and the Mosse girls, Pam and Berry, nieces of the village mill owner; and the two Fitzsimon boys, Christopher and Nicky, who sometimes stayed at Maidenhall to take lessons with us – from a succession of governesses – high up, where the rest of the house was barely known territory to me.
Morning, noon and night – and sometimes best when it was getting dark, in the autumn, winter rushing in, a blowy wind rattling the windows, the other children gone, Julia and I roasting chestnuts in the ashes of the fire beneath the small Victorian iron grate. And then there were words in the evening from children’s books or poems, read by Peggy or by Ailish Fitzsimon, both in wonderfully clear, dark-dramatic voices:
Up the airy mountain
Down the rushy glen,
We daren’t go a-hunting
For fear of little men;
Wee folk, good folk,
Trooping altogether;
Green jacket, red cap,
And white owl’s feather …
Or Young Lochinvar, who came out of the west; or Nesbit’s The Phoenix and the Carpet, the first proper book I remember, with the petulant Phoenix breaking from its egg in the ashes of a suburban London fireplace, so that I tried to repeat the trick in the playroom fireplace with an egg stolen from the larder, with messy, disappointing results.
Or getting to play with the strange machine found in the playroom cupboard – a mahogany, brass-cornered box which, when you opened it, displayed on the inside of the lid groups of pink, flimsy-winged piping cherubs, gliding up towards a blue empyrean – on their way to God, I was sure. A musical box with a large selection of indented metal discs, which you pressed down onto a comb of metal bars of different musical notes, then wound the machine up and listened to the tinkly, ethereal music. ‘Ave Maria’ and ‘In a Monastery Garden’ I remember. And another disc, which played just the opposite sort of music, martial airs, military marches and ‘Goodbye Dolly Gray’. I found this machine potently evocative of something I knew not what; looking at the cherubs, hearing the music, I was carried away with these fat little infants on the wings of song.
But the greatest thrill of all was a magic lantern, with its coloured glass slides pushed across a beam of oil light onto a sheet in the nursery-playroom, showing one heart-stopping scene after another, the progress of Little Red Riding Hood towards her awful nemesis with the Big Bad Wolf. Another collection of slides showed Royal Occasions – Queen Victoria ‘Reviewing the Fleet at Spithead’, her Diamond Jubilee and such like.
Vision, words, music, roasted chestnuts, the nursery-playroom held everything I needed, and more. If I’d been abandoned by my real parents I never knew it. I’d been given the company of young Lochinvar, of Nesbit’s Bastable family, of Barbar on his travels and of Red Riding Hood in those eye-popping images, seen at the end of a smoky light cast by a magic eye shining on the wall of the playroom. And with this a dozen other secret rooms and attics at Annaghmakerrig and Maidenhall, full of novelties and surprises, opening into or out of life. In any case I don’t remember ever feeling that I’d been abandoned by my parents, or wondering where I was. Maidenhall was home and that was that.
At some point I moved from the nursery-playroom to a small bedroom on the first floor. But my world was still bounded by the orbit of the house and grounds. I had no conception of a wider world beyond the gorsey blue mountains. Apart from the supplies from the local grocer, Mr Hennessy, who came down a back lane every week with a cob and a trap with a delivery of candles, tea, sugar, matches, Brasso, starch and so on, almost everything needed in the household was supplied from the small dairy farm and market garden. Fruit and vegetables, milk, cream and butter from the basement dairy with its Alfa-Laval separating machine, big oak churn, grooved butter pats and rollers, where I helped turn the whirring, pinging separator every evening with Mrs Kennedy from the village, rapt at the miracle of cream from one spout, thin milk from the other. Hams and black puddings from the pigs in the back yard, snuffling through the vegetable waste that was cooked up for them every week in a vast iron cauldron in the back yard with a bonfire beneath. Electricity from an erratic windcharger on a nearby hill, water from a deep well hidden in the woods and pumped up by a tub-thumping Croxley diesel engine.
There was an old Morris 12 car (CMU 716) abandoned without petrol during the war, set on bricks in one of the garages, but all our transport was in the corduroy-upholstered trap, pulled by Pat the pony. A trap that, when we were older, took Julia and me rain or shine (and mostly the former) to junior school at Kilkenny College five miles north, the reins held in the gnarled fingers of Joe Devine, the elderly Maidenhall coachman with Hubert’s father, asked out of retirement, whose wind-scoured red nose always had a lengthening drip at the end which we watched intently, waiting for it to drop.
We had a wireless in the sitting-room, but the acid batteries leaked so that it rarely worked. Entertainments at Maidenhall were almost entirely familial and non-mechanical. Arthur Ransome was the most modern author read aloud to us children every evening, from a greater store of Victorian and Edwardian children’s classics. Nesbit again, The Wouldbegoods, Five Children and It, and R.M. Ballantyne’s Coral Island – a book that, just writing the title here, gives me a tingle up the spine: seeing again those sun-struck, distant, coral waters, my living again with the three so totally liberated boys; above all diving with Peterkin in his stomach-turning free fall – hundreds of feet off the cliff into the blue lagoon – an image renewed mint fresh for me, sixty years later, and in so doing experiencing again that reading in the drawing-room and the very moment of that high-diving fall.
Then the traditional card and board games on the round sitting-room table: Beggar-my-Neighbour and Old Maid (Peggy, to us children beforehand: ‘Make sure Miss Doughty [a pernickety house guest] isn’t left holding the Old Maid card’); and a board game, Cargoes, played with dice, each player pushing a little lead steamer round the oceans of the world from dot to dot, landing on hazards in ports which were not part of the Empire: (‘Coolies at Shanghai refuse to load cargo, miss a turn’), attacked by pirates lurking in seas not patrolled by the Royal Navy (‘Go back to Singapore’); the little ships racing across the Pacific, facing a hurricane rounding Terra del Fuego (‘Make for shelter at Port Stanley, miss a turn’), then across the Atlantic (‘Delayed at Madeira for repairs, miss two turns’), before being the first (or last) to end up at the final haven of Tilbury Docks.
And older, reading to myself now from the store of other boys’ adventure books at Maidenhall or Annaghmakerrig – dusty, empire-glorying books from attics and playroom shelves; seduced by the covers, the gilt and gaudy pictorial boards with their Union Jacks and blood-red images of derring-do. Dusting them off so that the young lieutenant’s scarlet tunic, white pouch belt and pith helmet on the cover of Captain Brereton’s With Wolseley to Kumasi shone mint fresh, as the intrepid officer pushed through an evil mangrove swamp, service Webley at the ready. And the same author seeking revenge against the lesser breeds in his The Grip of the Mullah.
I went in search of Prester John, too, and rose over the animal-choked plains of East Africa with Jules Verne for six weeks in his balloon, and went with him to the vast mysterious caverns in his Journey to the Centre of the Earth.
Above all I went with Allan Quartermain to King Solomon’s Mines. And Gagool the Witchfinder afterwards was never truly dead for me. She lurked, half crushed, half alive, in a dark corner of the old laundry at Annaghmakerrig where there was a malign Victorian device, a thundering linen press that worked on huge rollers, pressed down by a moving coffin-like half-ton weight, a mangle that had caught the hideous sorceress in its rolling jaws but had not quite extinguished her evil flame.
The magic lantern, with its thrills of Little Red Riding Hood and staid views of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee; the musical box, cherubs with pipes and lyres rising heavenwards to the tune of ‘Goodbye Dolly Gray’; the Cargoes game, where it was clear that Britannia actually did rule the waves – these were vivid Victorian worlds that kept the real world at bay for me, and the world of my real family whom I knew barely anything about.
But as I see it now from letters in the file they and the Butlers were hard at work behind my back arguing between themselves, all of them at cross purposes with only one thing in common, it seems – to do their best for Little Joe by thinking up a future of schools and other unpleasant schemes. Knowledge of this unhappy reality, with my real family in Dublin and Cheltenham, lay in wait for me beyond the happy isles of Maidenhall and Annaghmakerrig.