by Joseph Hone
However, there is one clear fact: Hubert can’t accept that my pilferings, egotism and assertiveness, my gorging on boxes of chocolates and so on, are not surprising. He saw my behaviour, I think, as a shocking failure in a world which his own Victorian parental background of high purpose and stern good works had brought him up to see as unquestionably open to enlightenment, always open to improvement through the rational, or by way of the Christian ethic. I was an insult to both these ethics, for I was not being improved. He knew full well of the darker side of humanity, but could not accept this on his own hearth. And of course, very creditably, the overriding tone of his letters about me is that I should be sensibly saved – but not at this point by warming my toes at his fire. Which was the only way I was likely to be saved.
One notices also that, in keeping with his Victorian good-and-useful-deeds ethic, he hopes that I would find a family to live with who would take an ‘evangelical’ view of theft. It doesn’t strike him that, given my proven taste for thieving bicycle parts, such a bicycle-mending family, however evangelical, might find my presence oppressive – might soon find they were having to ride their own bikes circus style, one-wheeled with no handlebars. Finally he makes the serious comment that it’s my misfortune that none of my present protectors are of the bicycle-mending class. But how could he have seriously thought that this was a misfortune? – knowing full well that none of my family, nor his, had ever been of that class. Rather he should have acknowledged how lucky I was to be in his and Peggy’s very intelligent and caring hands.
Next there is revival of the possibility of my spending time, possibly permanent time, with the Allens in County Cork. My grandfather writes:
Dear Peggy,
As you know the Allens put off the visit on the 1st and suggested the 5th instead. Now I have written to Mrs Allen to say that he’d better go on the 12th. The reason is the 5th will be a hell of day to travel at the worst of the holiday.
I mentioned too that there was a question of the parents wishing to see him but did not go into details.
Did you write to the Allens? I think it would be wrong to give them the idea that there was any opposition from the parents of his going to Co Cork. It would make them feel uncomfortable.
As regards Sandford Park, he has to go back there next term, since I would be charged whether he did or not. The charges are about the same as the school you mention. The important thing about his schooling is that he should be equipped early for taking up a trade, for he will have to go out in the world early.
Yrs,
Joe.
There is no chance now, in Old Joe’s view, of my taking up a career. A trade at best, and as soon as possible. Carpentry? Bicycle mending? This letter incurs a real blast from Hubert:
Dear Joe
It is no pleasure for either of us to take all this trouble about the child of your erring son. You have explained that you are not young enough to take much interest in him, that you are in any case probably going to live abroad, that David and Sally should not be put upon, and you admit that his parents are incapable. Aunt Olive equally says that none of his younger relatives can be expected to take an interest. Who is left? Peggy and me. You do not like to admit this but you know it quite well.
We are ready to take an interest in Joe but on our terms and safeguarding our own interests. You must see this – yet you cannot be bothered to return the copy of the letter I wrote to Biddy. Nor have I received the carbons of the letters to you giving an account of what happened to Joe here. You may not have read them, but Aunt Olive kept them for you to discuss. They are quite essential if any serious attempt is to be made to cope with Joe’s difficult character. Your attempt to minimise the difficulties of Joe’s character may be amour propre, but looks to me more like wishful thinking and the desire to save yourself bother.
I told you years ago, and Aunt Olive too, that we were greatly opposed to any idea of Joe being shared with Nat and Biddy.
I wonder you weren’t ashamed to write that devastating sentence about the bills at Sandford Park having to be ‘paid’, (to begin with you would probably get a refund). I have stood out for about £50 owed me by Nat for several years, uncomplainingly. As you know I told him he must either pay properly or not interfere. He interferes and has not paid.
Of course you can easily realise that sum by selling something. Everybody else does that with infinitely less fuss. You are not the only people with ‘commitments’, money difficulties, children and impending old age. It is no doubt too late to take him from Sandford Park, where he first learnt to steal, but your arguments for leaving him there are futile and contemptible.
I am sorry writing like this, but the tranquil way in which you accept Peggy’s unceasing efforts to see that Joe gets a good start infuriates me. You know that Peggy and I can’t afford morally to abandon Joe – you are too mean. You know that we are prepared to take, if we must, a great deal of trouble on his behalf, which would be far more fittingly taken on by a member of your own family. But you are not entitled to exploit these moral scruples of ours.
Hubert.
A real stinger. How far my grandparents and the Butlers were from the carpentry and bicycle-mending class is shown by Hubert’s answer to financial difficulties, implicitly for him and obviously for my grandfather, in their simply ‘selling’ something. Not their labour, of course, but stocks and shares. ‘Everybody else does that,’ he says. This surely wasn’t true. Only people with a fair portfolio of stocks and shares could realize cash in this way then. As both of them could, being fully paid-up members of the (exploited) capitalist class, who were in a distinct minority in the Ireland of the times. Hubert and my grandfather were never really in the nine-to-five brigade, as most of the Irish were then, who had to earn their living with ploughs and picks and shovels – or through carpentry and bicycle mending.
I give myself no particular praise for having had many nine-to-five jobs later in my life. What used to annoy, but now only amuses, is that while every sort of nine-to-five ‘job’ was endlessly proposed for me, neither Hubert nor my grandfather nor most of the others concerned with my welfare then (except my mother), ever did any regular work in their lives. They didn’t have to. The money was there for them already, through family inheritance, in land or property rents, in 2½ per cent War Bonds or São Paulo Tramway stock.
There is no reply in the file to this letter from Old Joe – possibly numbed and certainly hurt by its accusations, as is clear in a very sensible letter from great-aunt Olive who writes to Hubert instead, defending her brother. In fact it’s clear to me now that I have great-aunt Olive largely to thank for my staying on with the Butlers at Maidenhall, and with that all the benefits I gained from them and the Guthries later. It was thanks to her that I wasn’t farmed out again to a family of total strangers, with whom I might well have gone truly to the bad. It was great-aunt Olive’s straightforward good sense and kindness, unalloyed with psychological enquiries into the nature of childhood or views dictated by the Scrooge-like attitudes of Old Joe, that saved the day for me:
Dear Hubert,
I am sorry not to have replied sooner to your letter, but it was a difficult letter to answer in a hurry. No one could have been more sorry than I that Little Joe went to England instead of to you. But the whole point was that you had previously said you were not having him any more, and you know we all said there was no other prospect for the boy, in that case, except to go to his parents.
Nat came over here in a great state about Biddy having left him and wanting to get her back, and you have to admit that if there is to be any prospect of a home for the children in future it would have to be with their parents, who are considerably younger than myself or Joe and Vera.
Well, when Nat came here from the boat and told me the tale of Biddy, I said, among other remarks, ‘And I’m sorry to say the Butlers say they can’t keep Joe any longer.’ ‘Well,’ said Nat, rather naturally, ‘He’d better come over to me, and it may influence Biddy
to return to me.’ I couldn’t very well disagree with this, as the boy is their son, but I did say definitely that he shouldn’t go over unless Biddy and Nat had some sort of home for him in the holidays … I only then heard that you had offered to take Little Joe for the holidays. This altered my feelings towards the plan, and I know both Joe and Vera would definitely have preferred to send him to you. Once Nat heard Little Joe was not to spend holidays with you any longer, it was a chance, however slight, of keeping Biddy and inducing both her and Nat to start some sort of decent home for their family.
You say Joe is an egoist; I can’t agree. He does his best for Joe junior and for his family, under very difficult circumstances, and if you talk of worries, very few fathers, luckily, have had such a perpetual worry and expense as Nat has been to him.
I think you are unfair and unkind to say ‘we’ were all ready to exploit Peggy’s affection and care for Little Joe as long as it suited us. Don’t bring me into it all. I have always been wholeheartedly in favour of his being with you, and have never exploited you in any way. I have enough to think of and arrange with the other two, Geraldine and Antony [my siblings, whom aunt Olive was taking financial responsibility for while they lived with my mother’s parents in south Kilkenny].
Joe tells me the child is with his father, and none the worse for the time over there. I rather think Biddy never came back, but no one has definitely heard. At least I haven’t.
Now as to any idea of Joe going to school in England. I’m afraid it’s hopeless. He is too old to pass an exam to any of the state aided schools, and they are so crowded they don’t want boys even if they are paid for. The County Council schools only keep boys till 15 or 16 and in London you get a type of boy who would do Joe no good; the type who failed in the exams, and the underdeveloped and the wild type – so I’m told anyhow. This only leaves the public schools, beyond the reach of Joe’s purse.
Now do let me make an appeal to you not to cast the child out of your life because he went over to his father. I quite see you are not going to have him regularly, but I was so pleased that you had considered having him last holidays, and do forget this unfortunate affair and ask him again; it is his best hope and you are doing the child real harm if you leave him nowhere to go in any holidays, except Enniskerry, where he has nothing to do, or London, and this is most improbable I think.
Joe was greatly hurt at your telegram; he is a sensitive man and an affectionate one too and he felt very much that you would not come and let him explain his difficulty over the matter.
I wish you would ring me if you are in Dublin; I would like to talk to you. Let us try to forget any recrimination and give the boy a chance. I’m sorry to have written you such an epistle. I do so hope you’ll see our point of view over this episode and let it sink into the past.
Yours sincerely,
Olive Symes.
‘Telegrams and anger’ – one thinks of E.M. Forster, an author Hubert much admired, where Hubert’s beliefs closely paralleled Forster’s liberal-humanist ethic. But here again, Hubert has been unable to maintain this ethic. I have sympathy with both sides – for Hubert, other than with my great-aunt Olive, has clearly had great trouble in getting anything straight with the Hones. ‘Only connect’ – that was another Forsterian challenge for Hubert with my family.
It is also interesting that great-aunt Olive writes of Old Joe as an affectionate man. I didn’t figure greatly in his affections. But I can understand this. For some it can be impossible to show affection towards the innocent cause of all one’s troubles and pain. My grandfather’s life, so far as I knew it, was dominated by Nat’s increasing ‘prodigal son’ behaviour – and by the decreasing value of his São Paulo Tramway stock. And that’s a pity, since of course showing affection beats any amount of tramway stock, and had Old Joe been able to give this to my father as a child, he might have prevented Nat from becoming a prodigal son. Affection in my grandfather had been choked by his family circumstances. The possibility of an openly loving nature may have been strangled in him at his own severe Victorian prep school, to the like of which, and worse, he had consigned me. My father was in part a casualty of my grandfather’s early schooldays. I very nearly was.
And here, too, in this letter, is another mention of Biddy leaving Nat. I don’t know any details of this, and there is nothing in the file from her about her leaving. But I imagine that, like Old Joe, she became unable to support Nat’s moods any more, his illness, depression, his futility, his sponging off her. She didn’t have Old Joe’s money, though. So there is a letter from her to Hubert from a boys’ prep school in Scotland, where she has got a job as junior matron or some such, with board and lodging and three pounds a week. And it must have been at this point, in Scotland, that she met Ian McCorkadale, the rich Scots business man, who became her lover, and who I met on subsequent holidays in England: the three of us touring the ’shires in his smart Sunbeam Talbot, and later doing the same in Ireland when Ian came over and met me with my mother in Clonmel, not far from her parents, and we all had ‘refreshments’ in the Commercial Hotel there.
Ian was a big kind jokey man, with sandy hair and a moustache; a gin-and-tonic Scots hearty, with the typical drinky, hail-fellow-well-met slang of the time – ‘Top of the morning!’, ‘Bottoms up!’, ‘One for the road!’, ‘Wizard prang!’ and so on. He might have been in the RAF during the war. I certainly enjoyed my trips with him and my mother – mostly, I see now, because he had a speedy car and spent money freely and happily, which was something of a change, to put it mildly, from my grandfather’s and the Butlers’ way with cash.
Yet thinking of this now, of Biddy’s understandable departure from Nat and taking up with Ian, I can put myself in my father’s position and have sympathy there too, for this once gilded youth, now left alone and penniless in Peter’s Bar playing shove ha’penny, saddled with his grim demons and decaying lungs – coughing, spitting and drinking his life away.
At any rate, despite this flurry of confused and angry correspondence about what to do with me, a line of least resistance was apparently taken and I was returned that autumn term in 1946 to the sadist Dudgeon and the untender mercies of Sandford Park School.
SIX
Aside from its prison-like aspect (for us boarders at least), Sandford Park School in retrospect has an air of music hall and high farce for me. Of course, remembering those old British POW Colditz movies and the prisoners’ desperately jolly stage shows, this is appropriate. The teachers at Sandford Park, as much as the boys, sometimes took major roles in these theatricals. Some of them, no doubt, like us, were in fear of Dudgeon. And I imagine that, apart from the several genuine eccentrics, these teachers sometimes clowned around or behaved oddly whenever Dudgeon wasn’t about as a release from his all-seeing beady eye, his endless diktats and prohibitions. Fear finds a ready release in farce.
So when in a benevolent mood I look back on the place, the bizarre personalities and antics of some of the staff come first to mind, overlaying the pain. Like an old music hall playbill I see the various star turns: Froggy Bertin, the small, portly caricature of a French teacher, a Belgian refugee from the Great War who had stayed on in Dublin, a near replica of Monsieur Poirot indeed; Furness, the lanky Northerner, who did Maths; Cookman, one of the idealistic young housemasters from Wexford; Len Horan, the very decent, tall, muscular and fiercely moustachioed Irish teacher and rugby coach who had once played prop forward for Ireland; and Peter Allt, Yeats scholar and my grandfather’s literary friend who had unaccountably come to teach junior English. Unaccountably, since he was a brilliant academic, had taken a First at Trinity College, had a Lectureship there in French and English and among many more original and imaginative academic gifts could apparently quote from memory every poem that Yeats had ever published – and the ones he hadn’t.
Allt came into the category of genuine eccentric. My first experience of him was in the fourth form, in the big assembly hall, the old ballroom with its minstrels’ gallery to
one side where discarded school books were stored. Allt was taking us for poetry, and we’d had to memorize Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’. He went up the stairs to the gallery, lay flat out on his back among the old books, and one by one, down below, we had to quote the poem from memory a verse each. And each time that any of us forgot a word or a line a book would fly down, tossed willy-nilly by Allt from his recumbent position, hitting this boy or that or flying off the far wall, a saturation bombing raid that went on for most of class till the floor below was littered with copies of Kennedy’s Latin Grammar and Durrell & Fawdry’s Mathematics. I can remember Tennyson’s poem almost in its entirety to this day.
But this aerial sport was only an entr’acte to Allt’s subsequent floor shows. Later on that winter term we had a grammar class. I’ve mentioned the tall, red-hot, cast-iron stove at one end of the hall. Allt on this occasion put it to educational use. There was a boy called O’Grady in our class, an owlish innocent swot, with pimples and spring-wired specs that clipped on behind his ears, a boarder from County Cork with a shock of black hair that would never lie down so that he greased it heavily with Brylcreem every morning – a natural victim in short, who fell foul of Allt that day in the matter of some grammatical construction. Allt wore a grubby tattered black gown, one arm of which he had tied into a hard knot.
‘That is not the answer, O’Grady,’ he said ominously. He then proceeded to whack the desk in front of the boy with the knotted sleeve. Whack! Whack! ‘The answer, O’Grady is …?’ No reply. O’Grady was stunned. ‘Come, O’Grady, perhaps we may tease the answer out of you in some other manner. Come.’ Bringing a chair with him, he beckoned O’Grady up to the stove. ‘Stand on that chair, O’Grady, and take your spectacles off.’ O’Grady did as he was told. Allt opened the top of the roaring stove, and taking O’Grady’s head started to push it down towards the fiery opening. ‘The mood we were curious about, O’Grady, was the …?’ ‘Please Sir!’ O’Grady was petrified now. And then there was the smell, a burning perfumed smell – it was the Brylcreem on O’Grady’s mop of hair, beginning to warm and singe. ‘The mood, O’Grady?’ ‘Please Sir! It was the pluperfect.’ ‘It was not the pluperfect.’ The head was pushed a little closer. O’Grady started to yelp out answers any old how. ‘It was the past tense!’ ‘No.’ ‘It was the future indicative!’ ‘No.’ ‘It was the past perfect!’ ‘No.’ The head getting closer to the fiery furnace. ‘It was the subjunctive, Sir!’