Wicked Little Joe

by Joseph Hone

  Dear Mr Butler,

  Mrs Hone brought her grandchild to see me and I had a letter from Mr Hone about the position. I may not have heard the full story of the case, but I think they have told me everything, including the stealing in Kilkenny.

  I do not feel that this child’s psychological difficulties are such as would need a special school; he spoke to me fairly freely about the various upsets, and I do not suppose was any more untruthful than most children of his age. He is quite intelligent and I feel should do well at school.

  As you know his family condition is far from satisfactory, and certainly you and your wife have been very good to the child, but it is always difficult for a child knowing he is being brought up by foster parents or grandparents. I feel that to send this boy to a special school in England is more likely to make him more difficult, as no matter how much they try to improve the conditions in these schools there is always an atmosphere of abnormality and he would have to associate with children who have much more serious difficulties.

  As you probably know, this kind of pilfering by children represents an urge to compensate for some feeling of insecurity, and this is a child who must feel insecure, in that his early life has been irregular, except when he was living with you. Living in his present atmosphere, of being very much a junior child and smaller than most of the others in the boarding part of the school, he cannot but feel insecure and it makes it difficult for him to meet others on his own level.

  His father talks of taking him over to England with him for his summer holidays, and I do not know whether this would be a wise move or not, but it would be a solution of how he should spend his holidays, and it may help him to know what his own parents are like.

  Yours sincerely,

  H J Eustace.

  A very sensible letter. Though, as we shall see in a subsequent letter from Hubert to the doctor, Hubert was either puzzled or frustrated by the doctor’s responses. Meanwhile I did go over to England for the holidays, for a first meeting with my parents in London. I was put on a plane at Dublin airport by Oliver Hone, the son of my grandfather’s brother Pat. ‘Noll’, as he was known, had a senior position with Aer Lingus, and I was cosseted by the air hostess and had a bumpy flight in a Douglas Dakota, which frightened and excited me. My mother Biddy was working at that time with Tyres Scotland, a motor firm in the Kingsway, and I must have been met at the airport by my father, though I don’t remember this. The first thing I remember of London was being taken by Nat to a pub on the river in Chelsea, the King’s Head and Eight Bells. There were tables outside. Nat told me to take a seat. He went inside. Later he brought me a glass of cider, which tasted nice. My parents then had a flat in a big red brick mansion block on Prince of Wales Drive over the river in Battersea. I must have met my mother that evening. But I have no memory of my meeting her whatsoever. The next thing I remember – it must have been the following day– was wandering alone along Battersea High Street and being very curious about everything in this big city, the shops, the trams, the strange taxis – and a vast station I arrived at, Clapham Junction, where I stood on a bridge watching the trains beneath, amazed at the number coming in and out of the station, over the dozens of criss-crossed lines. My mother must have been very pleased to see me. My not remembering anything about her, on this first meeting, must have been an unconscious rejection of her. Or just that I had a numbed feeling about being with my real parents in London. Numbed as I had been during my first frozen year at Sandford Park. I was aware only of London sensually, visually – the taste of cider by a river, the strange taxis, the clanging trams, the incredible number of electric trains.

  I do remember one day when my mother took me off to see a great friend of hers, Patsy Kilmartin, who had a flat in a big house in Carlyle Square off the King’s Road in Chelsea. There were drinks and jollity with this woman and her son, who lived nearby and had come to call. A sudden feeling of ease and civilization, though I use these words only in retrospect. But I was right to feel what I did – leavening conviviality, together with good sense and intellect, a new world that had nothing to do with the petty worlds I had so far experienced, the cruelties of Sandford Park, my insecurities and thefts with the Butlers and my grandparents; all that could be put aside as nothing in this enlightened atmosphere. The world could be a kind and sensible place, among understanding, easy-going people. Patsy Kilmartin was just such a person. And so was her son, Terry Kilmartin, whom I met that summer, and who shared the awful stammer I had then. He went on to become the distinguished literary editor of The Observer and later the second fine translator of Marcel Proust’s great novel. My mother, with her loving nature and great social gifts, got on with everyone: barmen, Irish navvies, intellectuals, literary critics and French scholars. But Hubert was not pleased with my first visit to my parents’ world, their louche Bohemian world as he no doubt saw it after his experiences of having to run Nat and Biddy to ground in the Holborn bar in 1942. He writes to Old Joe in August 1946:

  Dear Joe

  I’m sorry that Joe has gone to England. I think it most weak of you and Vera, who, by holding the purse strings, can exercise control over Nat and Biddy, to have allowed this. I warned you that for all our good will towards Joe and you, we cannot share any responsibility for his upbringing with Nat and Biddy. We feel now that he is definitely passing into shady and unknown regions, into which we cannot, in justice to Julia and his friends here, follow him. Whether, if he is stranded again, we shall take him back here, I do not know – but very definitely one kind of chapter ends …

  Yrs,

  HB.

  Now the melodrama moves into Greek myth, Little Joe descending into Hades, where he will face some awful Nemesis. My good great-aunt Olive will have something to say about Hubert’s dire prophecies later. But meanwhile there is a reply to this letter in the file, in August 1946. Indeed, while I was away in London, my grandfather clearly bestirred himself in a flurry of letters to Peggy and Hubert:

  Dear Hubert

  I hope you won’t think I’m keeping back that letter of yours to Biddy purposefully, for you would certainly be welcome to it, and indeed I instituted a long search for it the other day. As I said I had two editions of it, Nat having sent me his. I might have destroyed one, but would be surprised if I destroyed both, so one may turn up. Anyhow, if you ever want evidence, I will give it, that you wrote to the parents about the incident in Bennettsbridge and advised and urged that the child should go to the Allens for the holidays.

  It is true that I have responded to SOS calls (from Nat and Biddy) from time to time. But I don’t give him an allowance. I couldn’t therefore try to prevent him taking the child this holidays in the way you suggest. We might of course have refused their request for travel facilities; but I think that course would have been morally dubious, since after all the child is theirs, and I really cannot propose to believe that they intend to ill-treat him, or teach him evil. So much for the ‘weakness’ with which you charge us.

  Furthermore, if we had simply done nothing Biddy might have turned up here for him, which would have been a damned nuisance and expensive, as I should have had to pay to get her back to England with Joe.

  I think you underestimate our difficulties. I think they are more serious than your worryings and your speculations as to some possible injustice falling on Julia in the distance, rather an absurd speculation, if you will forgive me for saying so.

  Perhaps there was an original misunderstanding on your part, of which I did not clearly disabuse you. I never wanted to detach Little Joe from his parents. He was left on my doorstep, and the rest followed, including Peggy’s great kindness, which makes him think of Maidenhall as his home.

  I must say we found him very little trouble and saw no signs of abnormality. If I were to prophesy about his future I would think that the danger lay in excessive physical and ‘psychological’ normality. He might so easily, if circumstances permitted, turn into a good fellow hanging round bars, the admired of all admi
rers. The practical test on which he should be brought up is that circumstances won’t permit that kind of leisure … Therefore I am coming to think that he might be better off with his parents – that they should have the task and responsibility of setting him to a career or employment, I helping them on his account while he is still a child. Especially since you are now doubtful whether you can do anything for him in the holidays.

  Yrs,

  Joe.

  In another letter to Hubert my grandfather is again playing the card of handing me over to my parents, suggesting I would be living a more ‘normal’ life, though he must have known how abnormal my parents’ life was:

  Dear Hubert

  I wrote to Nat and suggested that he should write to you. I get cross and stupid if involved with Biddy.

  I said you were worried about certain aspects of his character which had come out lately in Joe’s conduct, and that you suggested this treatment and the English school. I said in other words I was an agnostic (rather than an atheist) about ‘psychology’ but that I thought there were advantages in the child being near his parents as he could feel more normal, and very great disadvantages to Joe if you should feel obliged to disinterest yourself in him, as he was so fond of you and you had done so much for him, and that it was clearly unsatisfactory with us in the holidays.

  Who was that woman in the Kildare Street Club? It is awful having that pistol put to one’s head – ‘You don’t remember me’ and then we both fled from her.

  Yrs. Affect,

  Joe.

  This meeting with Hubert at the Club may have been the occasion (afterwards recounted to me by another member who was present) when Old Joe, aiming to save money, ordered just one pot of tea and one cup and saucer for Hubert, and said he would take his tea from Hubert’s saucer. But here he is now in his next letter in an almost extravagant writing mood:

  Dear Hubert

  Unfortunately I put the wrong number of Nat’s road. I have written to him again and told him of your views and how far I can go in the matter. I want him to keep further correspondence on the project between you and Peggy, and not to bring me in, until the end when you can advise me on the result. It is much better this way …

  If the other plan breaks down [I suppose my being sent off to the Allen family in the wilds of County Cork], I will think of sending him to the National School in Enniskerry, the Protestant one, which is very good, so good the plutocrats think of sending their children there. He could go and come home with the other children who pass the gate. Dr Eustace or some other doctor of nervous diseases could see him from time to time. There is a charming retired Irish doctor up the road here, a really nice man, who used to attend these cases, and I could ask him for the name of a good doctor of nervous diseases without saying who the case was. I don’t want to publish Little Joe to all the world.

  There is an article on Kleptomania in Chambers Encyclopaedia (1896). It uses words like ‘inhibition’ that I thought had only lately been invented. I daresay the ordinary conscientious, intelligent doctor, who has specialised in nervous cases, or if you like diseased minds, is just as good and knows just as much, as these clinics which always suggest to me an exploitation of ‘Decaying Capitalist Society’.

  Yrs,

  Joe.

  One can see why Old Joe was keen on the National School in Enniskerry, some few miles down the road from where they lived at Ballyorney House. It was free – and it was Protestant. His last paragraph, no doubt in the light of this idea of free schooling for me, is almost jokey. And of course he saw himself as very much an exploited member of a ‘Decaying Capitalist Society’.

  Now to return to my ‘peculations’ – in an earlier letter dated June 1946, from my sensible great-aunt Olive, in reply to one from Hubert:

  Dear Hubert,

  It really is very sad and terrible about Little Joe – and I quite agree that it is worth trying now to see what can be done to cure him.

  Joe (senior) told me about it … How cruel it seems that there is no way of showing the child his errors and his ultimate misery if he goes on this way. After all he has had a very happy home with you and plenty of affection, and it is tragic that he is not influenced by Peggy’s efforts.

  As to other younger members of the (Hone) family taking on responsibility, I’m afraid this is not possible. The only others are Pat’s family. Of these Noll is married and starting a family of his own. Moreover he will I think be saddled with some responsibility for his sister’s children, as her husband is useless, and she has gone off to work in England, leaving the elder child with Pat. The younger one is with her father, John Price, and his mother, but is promised to Pat also! So you can see that Pat and Noll and the children’s mother have their own troubles and cares. Pat’s other girl, Leland, could not be expected to take on another cousin. She is working in England and naturally any interest she has in other people’s children will be in the ones of her sister.

  I would be sorry to see the child handed back to Nat and Biddy, but possibly it might make Nat shoulder responsibility and make Little Joe feel secure. I don’t know that I would put much faith in this however! I have said nothing to George [Olive’s husband] about this. He is greatly anti-Nat and no use making him prejudiced about the child.

  Love to Peggy,

  Olive Symes.

  It can be seen from this letter how my father was not alone in the Hone family in messing up his life. My grand-uncle Pat’s daughter, Paloma, was a dab hand at it, too, abandoning both her daughters in due course. Hubert now takes the stage again, in reply to Dr Eustace’s earlier letter to him:

  Dear Dr Eustace,

  I am glad Mrs Hone took Joe to see you, but it naturally must have been very difficult for you to form an opinion on so short a meeting and so little information. I agree with most of what you say …

  Is it possible for children to be born amoral, as they can be born colour blind? And, if so, is there not some way of dealing with them? I would not make this very damaging suggestion about Little Joe to anyone but a doctor, or on anything but very long experience of him. He is a very bright and attractive little boy, but ever since we have had him, aged two, he has shown no signs of being really able to distinguish, except on grounds of expediency, between truth and falsehood. We have had many other children with us, as guests or relations, and have never noticed this in them. His sense of insecurity may have something to do with it, but not everything. If his heredity is bad, something could be done about it.

  We hoped that discipline at school and companionship of other boys would have helped him, but instead it has made him worse. We have no evidence that he stole before he went to school. He used to come out and see us for weekends in Dublin from Sandford Park, bringing my wife, of whom he is very fond, very handsome presents, cigarettes, scent, etc. She was worried about this, but until he admitted later to myself and one of his schoolmasters that he had been taking money from his grandfather’s room and also from my wife and little girl, we did not know how he came by it.

  Three days after he’d been taken to the guard’s barracks in Bennettsbridge he was stealing comic papers from a shop in Sandford Road. Surely this is not normal and cannot be treated by normal school methods – beatings, etc – nor is it normal for a child to recover his spirits after such an experience in the barracks, so that until after he had left for school we had no inkling of what had happened at the barracks. He was laughing and shouting all afternoon.

  I am quite out of my depth in regard to psychological treatment – but I am extremely sceptical that the normal school will handle him well. They will take a rosy view of it all – ‘Boys will be boys’, etc., until something disastrous happens to him. Then they’ll pitch him out, lest he contaminate the other boys.

  We don’t want to put him out of our home, because he has no other. This is why we would sooner take a serious view of his character now than later, when he might have done some grave damage which we could not forgive.

  We’ve n
ever once suggested to him that this was not his home always, and trust that his relations have not done this either – because we felt this would increase his sense of insecurity. We still do not want to make this suggestion till he has recovered his sense of security and is on his way to building up his character, somehow and somewhere else, for I cannot see this happening with any of his relations or at his present school.

  We have no legal status in regard to him and have no power to hold out any hopes and provision for his future. But he has been with us since he was a baby, and we cannot disinterest ourselves from him. His relations are aware of this and will, I think, in the long run accept our advice.

  I feel that if some family could be found with boys and girls, which he would go to school with as a day boy, a very normal ordinary family which was interested in things like carpentry and mending bicycles, etc., and who would take a spontaneous, evangelical view about theft – this would be an alternative to psychological treatment. He is an eager and active participant in anything that interests him. It is his misfortune that none of his protectors belong to the bicycle-mending class.

  Forgive this long letter. I do not see what you can do immediately. But if you bear his case in mind, it is possible that later some solution might occur to you.

  Yours sincerely,

  Hubert Butler.

  From a classical scholar, liberal humanist and a realist in most matters, this is rather a strange letter, with what seems an almost mystical longing for truth and light about the nature of children. Had he never read Lord of the Flies? What is puzzling in the letter is Hubert’s puzzlement. He might almost be putting my bad behaviour in a biblical context – Genesis, the Fate of Adam and the Fall of Man, instead of seeing my pilferings, my selfish and aggressive behaviour (as Dr Eustace has told him before) as commonplace – expected, indeed, from a boy with my difficult background and insecure circumstances. Does the puzzled tone of the letter suggest that Hubert wished he’d been a bad boy himself? Dr Eustace might have helped him there.