Images and Shadows

by Iris Origo

  The truth was that, but for Desart, he attached very little importance to the house he lived in, except as a frame in which he could see his wife and children and do his work. Every morning, wet or shine, Gran walked with her husband as far as Hyde Park Corner (she was still doing so forty years later, when I stayed with them as a child, sometimes looking in at Harrods, on the way home, as a treat). Every evening at six, his latch-key was heard in the door, and he had the hour in the drawing-room with his wife and daughters (and later on with his grandchildren), which was for him the happiest time of the day. His family and his work were his whole life. After the death of his elder brother and his accession to the peerage, in 1912, he resigned from the Treasury, but worked no less hard in the House of Lords, taking part in any debate about Ireland and belonging to many Parliamentary Commissions; he was appointed a member of the Privy Council, served on the International Court of Arbitration at The Hague, became an Irish magistrate and the Lord Lieutenant of his county, was appointed Treasurer of the Inner Temple; and finally, at the age of seventy, was a leading figure in the small group of Irish Loyalists who, at the Convention in Dublin and Belfast in 1918, made a last despairing effort towards the settlement of the Irish question. ‘With short intervals’, he wrote to me in his old age, ‘I have served the Crown all my working life, that is, for something over fifty years.’

  “Your dear father”, said Bernard Berenson to my mother, after having shown him his celebrated collection of Italian pictures without eliciting more than an intelligent interest, “always makes me think of the Roman prefect, in one of Anatole France’s stories … Yes, don’t you remember? The prefect, hearing that Saint Simon had been standing on a pillar motionless for a year, was shocked to think how little he had done in that time for the State!”

  It is singularly difficult to give a true picture of my grandfather, even though I have a great deal of information to draw upon, both in his own memoirs and the book in which my mother completed them, in many packets of letters, and above all, in the close tie of affection and sympathy between us, since I was three years old. For any portrait of him, to be authentic, should be etched with a very light pen—as fine, as unemphatic, as the one used by Chinese artists to depict their sages. He, too, was, by temperament and by conviction, a dweller in the Middle Kingdom.

  Though a man of strong moral convictions, his mind was always open to the ‘other fellow’s’ point of view. I remember my mother telling me that, when the news of the Jameson Raid had just reached England and all her young friends were ardently championing the ‘gallant raiders’, she wrote to her father, who was then abroad, a youthful letter reflecting this enthusiasm and received, by telegram, a damping reply: ‘Facts not yet ascertained: reserve opinion.’

  I think, too, that this natural impartiality was reinforced by an aristocratic conviction that too great vehemence, or too extreme an expression of opinion, were slightly ill-bred. I remember exclaiming as a child, in full assurance of being approved of: “I hate so and so; he says Ireland should break away from England at once!”—and being suppressed, as he glanced at me over his spectacles, by the quiet reply: “But, my dear, one doesn’t hate people on account of their political opinions!” Since then I have been acquainted with two generations of Nazis, Fascists, Communists and their aftermath, in a very different climate, and know that such a comment was the product of a more stable, more secure and more self-confident generation. It was the only attitude possible for a man like him, and it was not shaken even when, only a few years later, his own Irish house was burned to the ground in ‘the Troubles’.

  A similar moderation—together with a quiet refusal to be swept off his own ground by other people’s enthusiasms, or by what seemed to him merely a matter of prestige, whether social or aesthetic—coloured his taste. My mother has described how on one occasion, after having spent a long morning with her in the picture-gallery of Siena, looking at a long series of fondi d’oro, he showed signs of having had enough.

  “But you like Italian pictures,” she said, “you always took us as children to the Italian room in the National Gallery!”

  “I took you perhaps twice a year,” he answered firmly. “I like a little Italian art—not too much, and not every day. What I should like now is a country walk.”

  A countryman he always was, both by inheritance and taste, and it was to his father’s house in Ireland, which had been his home in boyhood, that his affections were most closely bound. It was not until middle age, however, that the death of his elder brother, in 1898, caused him to inherit both the earldom and the estate and, though Desart then at once became the true centre of his life, he was only able to live there for as much of the year as his work in London would allow. Then, at last, he could throw off the burdens of a harassed civil servant and become the easy-going country gentleman that his father and grandfather had been before him; a good landlord, who improved the grass for his cattle and cared for his woods, who kept his cottage and farms in good repair and often closed an eye on the quarterly rent-day—and also a host who liked to keep open house, as in the days when, as he himself wrote, ‘No-one cared if you came in a donkey-cart or a coach-and-four to a garden-party, and any officer who possessed a horse was welcome in any house to dine and sleep before a meet.’

  So, as in the old days, they all came to the ‘Big House’, and Gran (while struggling hard, by small economies, to make both ends meet) came to accept her husband’s dictum that ‘nobody cares what you give them to eat in Ireland’. Safely hidden in the boughs of a leafy copper-beech, my cousins and I would peer down at the guests, as we heard carriage-wheels bowling down the drive, and decide whether or not we wished to join the party. Sometimes it would be a young English officer posted at Kilkenny, inquiring about hunting prospects for next season, sometimes the courtly Trollopian Bishop of Ossory—aptly named Dr. Crozier—for lunch; or the Kilkenny solicitor or doctor and their wives for tea, or the neighbours with their house-parties to see the garden with its long rows of tall sweet-peas and clumps of delphiniums, or some young people for tennis and croquet on the rough lawns, and children to swing with us under the trees, to creep under the gooseberry and strawberry-nets in the kitchen garden and eat and eat, to present carrots and sugar to Sally the donkey in the paddock and to coax her to let us climb on to her dusty, boney back. Once a year, too, there was the school party, with long trestle-tables laid under the trees and some seventy tangle-haired, bright-eyed children with their schoolmaster, Mr. Commins, rather too deferential. There were races and competitions and small prizes so attractive that we all secretly longed for them, too. And in the centre of all these occasions moved my grandparents—she as gay, as innocently pleased by these small gaieties as when she had been a young girl; he with the air of being equally at ease, equally relaxed in every sort of company, that is perhaps a peculiarly Irish gift.

  Looking back upon those days, it is difficult to realise that beneath this gay and friendly surface—for every farmer and cottage-woman, too, appeared devoted to their landlord and called him ‘the spitting image’ of his own father—so much hatred (of religion, class, and race) was stirring, that the years of the Great Famine were less than half a century away, and ‘the Troubles’ just ahead. How much these preoccupations, in those first years, troubled my grandfather I do not know, but certainly by the time that I was growing up they filled a large part of his thoughts and even from the first they may have accounted for what seemed to my mother in her youth a somewhat intolerant impatience with the cult of Irish folk-lore, superstition, and poetry which was then just coming into fashion and which so greatly appealed to her. She could not understand that her father should prefer the Ireland of ‘An Irish R.M.’ to that of Yeats and Synge, of A. E. and Lady Gregory, and tried hard to convert him. But he only smiled. “I know you think me a Philistine,” he told her, “of course there is charm in all these fancies, but sooner or later they lead to cruelty and trouble. There is danger in every denial of reason.” He felt
a faintly amused irritation, too, at the activities of his younger brother, Otway Cuffe—my mother’s much-loved ‘Uncle Dot’—a great traveller and a confirmed theosophist who in his later years settled down on the banks of the Suir, and extended his enthusiasm for the wisdom of the East to Irish lore and the nationalism of ‘Young Ireland’. When Otway told my grand-father that, according to Yeats, the divulgation of Irish folk-tales among educated people and the association of literature with popular music, speech and dancing might “so deepen the political passion of the nation that all—artists and poets, craftsmen and day-labourers—would accept a common design”, he dryly replied that this was precisely what he feared. But Otway followed his own course—wearing a highly picturesque costume which he (but no-one else) declared to be the Irish national dress, setting up workshops for wood-carvers and bookbinders in the manner of William Morris, collecting folk-stories about the ‘Little People’ and changelings, and encouraging the study of Erse. Of this last my grandfather disapproved not only on practical grounds but because he believed that all differences of language tend to divide, and that what Ireland needed was unity.

  As for my grandmother, she did not concern herself much with these matters, but interpreted what came before her eyes with realistic and kindly common sense. One day (the story is told by my mother in her reminiscences) she had driven with an English cousin and her brother-in-law Otway down the straggling, poverty-stricken street of a neighbouring village. “They need poetry, poetry and music,” said Uncle Dot as they drove away. “Perhaps,” said Gran a little doubtfully. “What they seemed to me to need most, though, was buttons and teeth.”

  Desart Court: garden front

  * * *

  It is with the recollection of Desart that my own story becomes intertwined with my grandfather’s, since it was, for my cousins and myself, our home in the holidays—and our earthly Paradise.

  Can these holidays really have been as long and as untroubled as they seem in my recollection? Was the house so stately and the shrubbery so thick and dark, the park so green, the woods so deep in bluebells? I could walk about the house, if it still existed, blindfold today.

  The square entrance hall, in which stood the post-box of which my grandfather held the key, was flanked on one side by the dining-room with its great oval table over which my grandparents presided and at which at least twenty people of all ages generally sat down to lunch, my grandfather carving the roast beef or leg of mutton at one end and my grandmother the fowls at the other. On the sideboard stood the bowls for the dogs’ dinners and for the chickens—both prepared by my grandmother herself, not without an occasional anxious glance at her guests’ plates for fear that they would not leave enough; while another sideboard was given up to the delicious hot-house fruit, which no child might touch until every guest had helped himself. On the other side of the hall was my grandfather’s study, with its well-bound ‘gentleman’s library’ and family portraits; behind, looking over the garden, was the drawing-room, with its gay chintzes, smelling of sweet-peas, wet dogs and fresh roses, and the pianola on which some child was always playing, while a fine double staircase led to the bedrooms upstairs.

  The kitchen was in the basement, together with the housekeeper’s room, the servants’ hall, the still-room and the pantry, all linked by a wide, damp, stone-flagged underground passage, which led into the cobbled stable-yard. Here stood the loose-boxes for Gabba’s hunters, the carriage-horses and our ponies, the saddle-room, with its delicious smell of leather and fine array of old harnesses and saddles, and the dairy, in which we learned how to make rich, golden butter. It all suggests great lavishness, yet I know that, in order to keep it up at all, my grandparents often denied themselves many small personal comforts, and to local eyes their reign seemed economical, if not stingy, compared with that of their predecessors, for the tramps who came into the stable-yard used to complain, “In the old Countess’s time there’d be legs of mutton for the picking on the dust-heap every day!”

  Freedom, that was the dominant note of our life at Desart, the spice of our delight—freedom within a rule of order. Punctuality, in my grandfather’s eyes, was not relative but absolute: you were late for lunch, unless you were standing in the hall before the gong had finished ringing. (I must add, however, that since we were in Ireland—where, as in Italy, rules are mercifully flexible—the old butler went on ringing the gong until a glance over his shoulder told him that the last breathless grandchild had arrived.) Good manners, too, were not so much required as taken for granted: they were an instinctive response, in all his grandchildren, to his own urbanity, and my mother used to say that the same was already true in her childhood. ‘The sound of his latch-key in the door’, she wrote, in her reminiscences, ‘was the signal for the straightening of sashes and the steadying of behaviour; to be boisterous or mannerless in his company was somehow inconceivable.’

  It was not that he was sharp with us; indeed I can remember him waiting for a long time on his horse in a cold wind, patient and amused, beside one of the park gates, while I, on a restless pony, struggled clumsily to open it and hold it back with my riding-crop for the others to pass; but it never occurred to him to let me off this small act of good manners; nor did he admit shyness as an excuse for any lack of friendliness towards the bedridden, complaining old women he took me to visit in the dank, musty cottages.

  A few well-defined duties, too, were demanded of both my cousins and myself: to help Gran with picking sweet-peas and raspberries and, after lunch, with the dogs’ dinner and feeding the chickens; to collect the eggs beneath broody hens (this I disliked very much, when they squawked and pecked); to pick up windfalls in the orchard—often with a great soggy slice of ginger cake from the cook, as a reward for a full basket—and to learn the Collect for the day by heart before breakfast on Sunday mornings. When all this was accomplished, the rest of the week was ours.

  To an only child like myself, the daily companionship of my Verney cousins—the good-looking eldest boy, Gerald (for whom, since he was my mirror of perfection, I would even carry home dead rabbits by the ears), my immediate contemporary and close companion Ulick, and the two younger ones, Desmond and Joy—was intoxicating in itself, and indeed my mother used to complain that at Desart my good manners suffered as much as my pretty clothes, though she did not know that, as soon as I was out of sight, the long white muslin dresses in which she took such pride were tucked into my bloomers, and the floppy hat hung on a bush. But it was the freedom that was the real delight; to explore the woody tangle of laburnum and laurel in the shrubbery, where we had a ‘secret’ hut, thatched with branches and carpeted with hay; to climb the apple-trees and pear-trees and munch their sunny fruit; to bicycle, when I was a little older, on the road outside the lodge gates, though terrified, whenever my cousins outdistanced me and disappeared from sight, that the bogey we had all been warned against, a tramp, might suddenly emerge from behind a hedge.

  “Wait for me! Oh, wait for me!”

  A certain anxiety, too, attended my first ventures on a pony. It was delightful to set off across the park in the early, early morning, always hoping, as one entered the beechwoods, for the glimpse of a vixen with her cubs slinking across one of the green rides. I never really had, however, the makings of a good horsewoman; my pony was often too fresh, I was always too nervous, and there was a certain relief in the pronouncement—after a bad toss on a stony road had resulted in some days in bed with concussion—that I had better ride no more that summer.

  Only unmitigated pleasure, however, attended the yearly excursion to the wooded hill of Ballykeefe, where the thickest blackberry bushes grew, and where, every year, we had a picnic to celebrate jointly my grandfather’s birthday and my own. Picnics in those days were no matter of thermoses and neat plastic boxes. Gran drove the donkey-cart in which all the provisions were packed and a great kettle besides, while we followed on bicycles or on foot, and when the picking was over and we had all come back with purple hands and mouths
and full pails, she was waiting for us in a clearing in the bracken near the hill-top from which, on clear days, we could look down over several emerald counties to the Tipperary hills. Then we would build a fire and boil the kettle and roast potatoes in the hot ashes. Never has food tasted quite the same again.

  There was only one day of the week in which a rule was imposed upon us, Sunday—and that, too, had its own charm. Many children, I think, are interested and attracted by recurrent forms and ceremonies and external forms of observance fulfil a real need for them, if not necessarily a spiritual one. Certainly, though I hated the starch of my white Sunday frock and the prickliness of my clean woollen combinations, there was a distinct pleasure in coming downstairs in the morning in our best clothes, ready for church—a sixpenny bit for the collection pressed as firmly against our hot palms as the day’s Collect was embedded in our minds, and with the sense that this was the day to be clean and good.

  All the house-party would be assembled in the hall, the men in dark London suits, the ladies in summer gowns, feather boas, and trimmed hats rustling and leaving behind them a faint aroma of lavender and Parma violet. In the drive the carriages were waiting: the large brake for the household, the light wagonette with two horses which my grandfather drove himself, with a fortunate child beside him on the box; and for my grandmother and the older ladies, a more staid landau in fine weather, or a stuffy brougham when it was wet—since it made Gran nervous, she said, to go “whizzing along in the wagonette”. I realise now that the party from Desart must have formed the larger part of the congregation, since we were a very small Protestant community in a Catholic world, and I remember the carpenter’s son coming home from school in tears with a black eye, received for being ‘a bloody Protestant’. In church Gabba read the Lessons and I felt a conscious pride at his reading them so well, and also a snobbish satisfaction in the deference shown to him by the rest of the congregation and even by the clergyman himself, when we stood about afterwards in the churchyard, greeting our neighbours.