In the same letter, she reminded me that the sale of the contents of Tullamaine was about to take place. It is wonderful what a country house sale can produce. The glasses she had bought at Woolworths in Clonmel sold for four times their purchase price, even though the exact same ones were available in Woolworths down the road. She included a lot of eggs in the sale that had been stored in Ali Baba pots of brine since the spring flush of the year before. Diana and I teased her that they were all bad and would go off at intervals like pistol shots. But everything went for tiptop prices and several times I heard her announcing loudly, ‘Nothing is to go out of this house till it’s paid for.’
After she left Ireland, Pam went to live in Switzerland. She took her dogs with her and decided to stay there until they died, not just because of the quarantine regulations but, as she explained in an interview to a German magazine, because she thought they would prefer to spend their old age on the Continent. She made many friends in Switzerland. Diana said that she was the local star and when she walked down the street in Zurich she was greeted by gnomes of high degree with, ‘PAMAILAH. How are you? How vonderful to see you!’ She was loved and appreciated for her unique qualities, and her friends listened open-mouthed to her oft-told tales of childhood. She shared a house with her friend Giuditta Tommasi, an Italian riding teacher. Today any such relationship is immediately connected to sex, and two men or women who choose to live in the same house are said to be homosexual. In some cases no doubt they are, but in many others they are just friends who share a roof. In either case, it is of secondary interest. I find this guessing about the sex life of friends or relations tiresome in the extreme. It is the people who matter; their private lives should be their own.
In 1951 the Mosleys also came to live in Ireland, at the Bishop’s Palace (a grand name for what Diana described as ‘a pretty old house’) in Clonfert, near Ballinasloe in County Galway. The house needed re-roofing, heating, bathrooms and the rest of the necessities for modern comfort. In the unhurried way of Ireland, these additions took some time and it was three years before it was finished to Diana’s high standards. On a cold December night in 1954 an ancient beam in a chimney that had been dried out by the new central heating caught fire and before help could arrive the house and most of its contents were well alight. The desperate whinnying of horses in the nearby stables woke the family and, miraculously, no one died in the conflagration. Diana described how all that was left of her four-poster bed, newly trimmed with pale blue silk, were a few red-hot springs. Portraits of her by John Banting and Helleu, drawings by Augustus John, Tchelitchew and others, were reduced to cinders. Diana, her husband and their two sons, Alexander and Max, were homeless.
Andrew immediately lent them Lismore Castle where they spent Christmas in mourning for Clonfert. When a house called Ileclash, 1½ miles from Fermoy and overlooking the Blackwater, came up for sale, although it was a poor substitute for Clonfert, they bought it. This was good news for me as it was only about twenty miles away. We were both busy, but not too busy to meet halfway in the village of Ballyduff (called Ballyduff Cooper by us, of course). The Ballyduff Cooper summits became a feature of life and we would sit enclosed in the privacy of the car, talking to our hearts’ content. Diana used to walk from Ileclash to the shops in Fermoy. A necessary part of a visit to that busy town was to lean on the bridge that overlooked the broad Blackwater and watch the torrent below. Diana leant and watched. She was aware of a man next to her doing the same and they stood there together for some time. ‘’Tis all going to the sea,’ he said at last. ‘’Tis,’ she replied, after some thought.
Eddy Sackville-West moved to Ireland in 1956 mainly to escape the responsibility of Knole, his family home in Kent, and all that went with that great house. He bought Cooleville in the village of Clogheen, the other side of the Knockmealdown Mountains from Lismore, and made it his own creation. Nancy often stayed with Eddy, combining it with a visit to Lismore. (I think she preferred Cooleville.) Eddy was unmarried and what my father called a ‘literary cove’, a lover of music and books. Andrew enjoyed his company and he became a regular dinner guest at Lismore. He arrived one evening when no one had been in to tidy and everything was lying about. His first words, in a trembly voice, were, ‘Secateurs on the mantelpiece, saws on the hall table.’
At the time we had a craze for an after-dinner billiard-table game called Freda. It was not athletic and dangerous like Billiard Fives but it did involve running round the table at vital moments. For this, his only attempt at such sport, Eddy brought a little case with daytime trousers and shirt – to save his dinner jacket from possible damage. A convert to Roman Catholicism, he fitted well into the Irish landscape but his romantic view of the country sometimes caused him to invest his duller neighbours with imaginary qualities. When he laughed, which often happened when he was describing one of them, he drew his knees up to his chin. But even he was brought down to earth by the food they served when it was their turn to entertain him. ‘There is no excuse,’ he wailed with emphasis on each word, ‘for coarsely mashed potatoes.’
Andrew’s uncle, David Cecil, came to Lismore several times. He was a great friend of Elizabeth Bowen and asked me one day if she lived near by. I had heard of the novelist but knew nothing of Bowen’s Court, the family house in County Cork that she inherited in 1930. I asked David if I should invite her to lunch. ‘Yes, do,’ he said. Elizabeth came and we all fell for her big-boned charm and hesitant speech that came out with such good stuff. She invited us back to Bowen’s Court, the archetypal Irish house: dilapidated, beautifully proportioned and freezing cold, except for the sitting room where you could imagine happily spending days in her company. On the top floor of this big and almost empty house was a long broad gallery – unusual in a house of 1776 as it harped back to an Elizabethan plan. At either end of the gallery, which had floorboards as wide as an old oak would allow, there were tall windows and on the south window, engraved with a diamond, was: ‘Baby Bowen 1899’, commemorating Elizabeth’s birth. The floor of the yard that led to the garden was made of the knuckle bones of sheep – something I have never seen before or since. Like everyone who had known the house, I was appalled when I read that Elizabeth had had to sell it and that a few months later the new owner knocked it down. Poor Elizabeth. When she returned to Ireland it cannot have been with pleasure.
We all loved Betty Farquhar, a fierce hunting lady who lived at Ardsallagh, a small, well-proportioned house that stood on a rise near the town of Fethard. She was a product of the Shires and the world of the Quorn, Belvoir and Cottesmore hounds – those legendary packs that she had hunted with six days a week before the war. I once asked her what it was like. ‘Ow, just like going to the office,’ was the reply. She could dismay a stranger when introduced to him by turning and asking at the top of her voice, ‘Who is this ghastly man?’ Her house was a surprise, with its pieces of stained glass by Evie Hone and paintings by Irish artists of the 1930s and 40s that would fetch a king’s ransom today. Her garden was immaculate, as was her appearance; unlike some ex-pats she never went to seed or lowered her standards.
Twice widowed, Betty had no children and fell in love with Ireland through Sylvia Masters, the friend who shared her life and who had grown up at nearby Woodruffe. A legend of courage and originality, Sivvy was Master and Huntsman of the Tipperary hounds long before any woman dreamed of such a thing. She won 101 point-to-points, riding against men who gave no quarter because of her sex. Sivvy was quiet but stood out in a crowd with her straight, daffodil-yellow hair and large eyes. Children adored her and she encouraged them in everything their parents forbade, slipping fags into their hand as soon as the grown-ups were out of sight. Her brother, the actor and playwright John Perry, was a great friend of Binkie Beaumont, the theatrical impresario who ruled the London stage for thirty years. Thus Sivvy and her brother covered a broad spectrum, from hunting hounds to The Winslow Boy and The Little Hut.
Clodagh Anson, the most loved of spinsters, was a dist
ant cousin of Andrew (their grandmothers were sisters). She lived alone in a damp house across the river ‘belonging to the castle’; an eyecatcher among the trees for our north-facing rooms, it carried evidence of the Troubles in the form of bullet holes here and there. Clodagh was the only person I knew of Anglo-Irish background who was accepted by the inhabitants of Lismore, and beyond, as one of them. Unworldly to the last degree, she was the antithesis of a snob and the best of company; it did not matter who was staying with us, she captivated the lot. Tall, ugly and with charm to beat the band, she had lived through the ‘bad times’ in Ireland and her throwaway tales of her experiences as a girl could have come straight from Somerville and Ross. When she was eighteen her mother, Lady Clodagh Anson, took her to London and made a half-hearted attempt to bring her out as a debutante. Lady Clodagh devoted herself to down-and-outs and their London house was a refuge for beggars. When returning from a grand ball, her daughter had to pick her way over sleeping tramps in the hall, all described in Lady Clodagh’s two volumes of memoirs, Book and Another Book, which are among my unstealables.
At Lismore, Clodagh kept unusual hours and did not wake till lunchtime. From the castle kitchen I could see the blind of her bedroom window pulled firmly down till 12.45 p.m., even when she was lunching with us at 1 p.m. She loved her garden but it was often dark before she was ready to start work so she weeded and dug by the headlights of her ancient car and when the battery failed she wore a miner’s lamp so as to be able to garden late into the night. She was a regular churchgoer to the magnificent Church of Ireland cathedral in Lismore. When the service started at 10.30 a.m. Clodagh was always half an hour late and came in with a clatter of banged doors and dropped books. It was decided to start the service at 11 a.m., to give her a chance. She made the same noisy entrance at 11.30. The service was not delayed further or the congregation would have had no lunch.
In 1987 Hubert de Givenchy and Philippe Venet came to stay. I asked Clodagh to lunch and told our unworldly neighbour a bit about them beforehand, how they were leading couturiers in Paris and therefore the world. Over lunch, I heard Clodagh tell Hubert that she was going to stay with her brother in Rome. ‘I believe you are a dressmaker,’ she said. ‘Should I have the hems of my cotton frocks taken up or let down this summer?’ With impeccable manners, Monsieur de Givenchy turned to her and said, ‘Madame, I cannot advise you, but I would like to make you something to wear when you go to Italy.’ We went to measure her. (Hubert and Philippe wore gumboots because they had heard her house was damp.) Clodagh was top-heavy and walked headfirst, her jutting nose hanging over clicking false teeth, and her big hands those of a gardener. She stooped and had a pronounced dowager’s hump, which meant that the measurement between her shoulders was some inches longer than that of her long-forgotten bosom. Hubert and Philippe could not help smiling as they made a note of these measurements, but Clodagh was unaware of it. A few weeks later a couple of strong cardboard boxes, with the magic name of Givenchy attached, arrived at Clodagh’s house. She had no idea how lucky she was but her friends were jealous of her windfall trousseau from the Avenue George V.
Wendy (nothing to do with Peter Pan but short for Wendell) Howell was a grand American gone native (‘How yer dawgs?’) whom I prized as a friend because she did not take to just anyone and made an exception for me. She liked whippets and whisky and had too many of both. Lots of husbands (including a Roosevelt) had come and gone and she eventually settled with a lady vet in one of those Irish cottages which were rare then and now only happen on postcards. It had an earth floor and stable doors and, in the sitting room, a vast opening for the fireplace where, if you bent down to look up the chimney, you could see a big patch of sky. At the entrance to the cottage was a sculpture of two whippets, old friends to me as they were an echo of a similar model by Gott at Chatsworth. Wendy held a pilot’s licence but luckily never offered to take me for a spin.
Obbie, the Twelfth Duke of St Albans, lived at beautiful Newtown Anna, by Clonmel. He had converted his garden shed into a sitting room, ‘the finest room in Europe,’ he announced. It still had a lot of the garden shed about it and reminded me of my father’s at High Wycombe. Like Farve, Obbie had fought in the Boer War, the First World War and joined the Home Guard in the Second. And, like Farve, he had refused promotion to Corporal saying he did not want the responsibility. Another trait they had in common was unpredictability. Obbie once telephoned my mother-in-law and, with no preliminaries, said, ‘Moucher, you’re not a has-been, but a has-been has-been,’ and put down the receiver. During the Second World War, when food was rationed and it was strictly against the law to ask anyone in a neutral country to send any, Obbie delighted in sending postcards, open for all to read, from neutral Ireland to his niece Betty Salisbury, whose husband Bobbety held, at various times during the war, the posts of Paymaster General, Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs, Colonial Secretary, Lord Privy Seal and Leader of the House of Lords. The postcards read, ‘I will send the ham, butter, bacon and steak you asked for tomorrow,’ and arrived at intervals throughout the war.
Another reason for enjoying Lismore was the company of our land agent, John Silcock. When he was a young man and had just finished his training, he had a farewell chat with the Norfolk landowner on whose estate he had been working. ‘I’ll give you two pieces of advice,’ said the landowner. ‘Don’t go to Ireland and don’t marry your principal.’ John did both and it was through Irish connections that he came to run Lismore, spending two days a week in the estate office. He was the best of company and got on well with the people who worked at Lismore, which made life smooth for all concerned. I spent hours with him, touring the farm and woods, listening to his tales of working in Ireland. I used to say to Andrew, ‘You know, John is wonderful.’ This was repeated so often that he became ‘Wonderful John’, later shortened to ‘Wonderful’.
A surprise is always around the corner in Ireland. There was an elephant skull by a bend in the road to Cappoquin and at Ballynatray human bones were dug up in the little churchyard and scattered to allow a new coffin to be buried there. In our early years at Lismore, the beautiful house of Ballynatray belonged to Horace Holroyd-Smyth. The billiard table served as the dining table, with the remains of breakfast at one end, teacups at the other and lunch in the middle. I am not sure about dinner but I remember thinking what a good idea it was. The silver cups won by Mr Horace’s point-to-pointers were shiningly clean and obviously prized far beyond anything else in the house. Mr Horace and his fiancée loved hunting so much that in the closed season they listened to a gramophone record of a hunting horn: ‘Gone Away’, ‘The Find’, ‘A Kill’, all blown to perfection by an expert; and the response of the hounds was tantalizing to hear in the off-season. The hounds were fed on salmon, the cheapest food available because they were caught in a trap at the bottom of the garden as they swam up the Blackwater.
Social life dies hard in Ireland. During the war when there was no petrol for cars, Mr Horace went out to dinner on his tractor dressed in his dinner jacket. In the 1930s Ballynatray took paying guests and Penelope Betjeman and Joan Eyres Monsell (later to marry Paddy Leigh Fermor) slept there on a riding tour. One of the party discovered an unwelcome object far down in the bed: the mustard plaster worn by someone who had died of pneumonia. I cannot help wondering if this was true or whether John Betj invented it. It would have been typical of that house – and of John. The last time I went to Ballynatray, three pigs and a couple of hounds were asleep in the sun, guarding the front door.
Careysville, sixteen miles upstream from Lismore, had some of the best salmon fishing in Ireland. It had been rented by my father-in-law during the 1930s and when it came up for sale soon after the war, he bought it. Andrew took his fishing friends there for the first two weeks of February. They spent the day on the river and usually stayed at Lismore but sometimes at Careysville House which in my father-in-law’s day was so cold that it was normal procedure to pick up the rug off the floor and put it over the thi
n eiderdown. The soil was good and snowdrops in the garden grew so thick and tall that the hounds drew them for a fox.
A green and white hut, more of a cricket pavilion than a fishing hut, stood on the flat ground by the riverbank and was where we had lunch. The food was carried in baskets down the steep steps by beautiful Irish maidens whose job it was to do just that. The fare was always exactly the same: cold meat, salad, hot baked potatoes, a rich Christmas pudding and cheese (usually the squashed up kind in silver paper). Had there been any deviation from this menu there would have been a revolution among Andrew’s guests. I never took to fishing – a terrible waste when I could have had the best – but there was always a queue of aficionados for the limited number of rods, so it was just as well.
Careysville produced its own unforgettable people. John O’Brien, the head ghillie, was Andrew’s friend and was one of the reasons Andrew loved the place so much. The two men talked to each other all day long of much more than fishing and any rare moments of silence were without awkwardness. Sport produces a unique friendship and Andrew was deeply affected by O’Brien’s death in 1964. He was crossing the river with two other ghillies when their boat overturned in turbulent water and all three non-swimmers were drowned. Andrew never felt the same about Careysville again.
Billy Flynn was another ghillie remembered by all. His charm and funniness and tales of the fishery were Ireland at its most beguiling. With his lifelong experience, he hardly needed scales to tell the weight of a fish and a 29½ pounder was brought up to the magic 30lbs by Billy stuffing plum pudding into its mouth. One day the children and I had been talking about ghosts and I asked Billy if he had ever seen one. He thought for some time and said, ‘Sure, I saw a sow where never a sow there was.’ I went to visit him in hospital when he was dying of a horribly disfiguring cancer of the face; his grossly enlarged cheek and jaw were awful to see and he could only whisper. He wanted to tell me something. I bent down and could just hear, ‘Will there be fishing in heaven?’
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