by Joseph Hone
Faced with this problem the Major pulled off what proved to be an academic masterstroke: he employed as Latin teacher a Mr Carpenter, a small, mild-mannered, apologetic, clerkish gent who always wore a long black overcoat, even in class, and always carried a briefcase. A caricature of a civil servant. In fact this was just what he had been, having spent a previous career with the Ministry of Education in Dublin. The Major’s unintended masterstroke (or was it intended?) was based on the fact, as I learnt later, that Mr Carpenter had filled his days at the Ministry in the department that dealt with the setting of public exam papers – in his case, as it conveniently happened, with the setting of the Latin papers. We half-dozen boys in the Intermediate year knew nothing of this at the time, of course. And Mr Carpenter, of course, made no mention of his previous career at the Ministry.
We continued to struggle thought the Latin syllabus – ‘Amo, amas, amat’, endless sentences from Latin into English and vice-versa, together with Virgil’s Aeneid and Caesar’s Gallic Wars. Even with the forbidden cribs we had for the Aeneid and the Gallic Wars all this was pretty well Greek to most of us.
The June week of the Intermediate exam approached, to be taken at another school in the suburbs. Latin was the first exam. Someone, Wilshire very probably, had told me that if I only managed to put my name, school and date at the top of my exam paper I would at least get two marks out of a hundred, since the authorities were keen never to give a zero mark. I expected to get two marks.
There was a tradition at Sandford Park that the subject master gave us a final revision class on the night before the exam, in one of the garden classrooms. Mr Carpenter brought us all together on that bright summer evening. I remember the fluttery golden light on the old apple and pear trees, for this part of the grounds had been an orchard. What did failure in the Latin exam matter? I’d failed at most subjects in Sandford Park. I gazed at the trees from the window, the wind stirring the leaves, dreaming. Mr Carpenter politely interrupted my reverie.
‘Hone, you might care to pay attention – all of you. I’m going to give you, on the board, a mock outline of the sort of Latin exam you may expect tomorrow. Six sentences English into Latin, six Latin into English.’ This he proceeded to do on the blackboard – translating each sentence into the appropriate language. We started to take notes of his translations. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No writing down. Just memorize these translations.’
Now though some of us realized that something important was happening, we weren’t sure what. ‘Memorize these sentence translations carefully.’ Mr Carpenter went on in his mild, self-deprecating way. ‘Take a good look at them,’ he said, ‘while I’m outside for a moment.’ He left the classroom for a cigarette. And now we realized what was happening. Mr Carpenter had been giving us part of the Latin paper for tomorrow morning. We said nothing, of course, when he came back and rubbed all the sentences off the blackboard. At the end the class he said, ‘Oh, and by the way, boys, take a good look at the first paragraph of Chapter Seven in the Aeneid and the same with the third paragraph of Chapter Two of the Gallic Wars. We knew, of course, that we could get the English translations of these paragraphs from our cribs. ‘Good luck tomorrow, boys!’ Mr Carpenter said in as bright a manner as he could ever muster, and left the classroom with his briefcase.
The day boys rushed home to consult their cribs for a session of intense memory work. And I did the same, back in the boys’ common room, being the only boarder doing the exam, for now there were only three boarders, me and the two small Brownlee brothers. But there was a problem. One of our class, a day boy, a genial friend of mine, Charlie Culley, had been absent from the revision class. I would have to telephone him and at least give him the chapter numbers and paragraphs of the two set books for the exam. Here was another problem. The only telephone in the school was in the Major’s study. Since it was now around nine o’clock I was pretty certain he’d be engaged with his bosomy wife, on the other side of the hall in her gilded boudoir, downing whiskey sodas prior to other stimulations.
I was right. There was no light or sound from the study. The study had two doors, one leading in from the hall and a side door leading out to the Major’s private drinks pantry and the back stairs. I crept into his study by the side door and phoned Charlie, giving him the chapter and paragraph details. At the end of transferring my vital information, I heard the Major’s footsteps coming across the hall, so I bolted out the side door of the study, making for the back stairs. But the Major was coming towards me, along the back corridor. I was standing in the doorway of his forbidden private pantry. All hell broke loose. He was well on, eight parts cut and sweating, his nervous neck tic in sudden ominous movement. ‘So, Hone, caught in the act getting at my drinks! You blackguard!’ He dragged me into his study, got the cane out in an instant, and whacked me half a dozen times. Whack! Whack! Whack! Then he marched me up to the top dorm where the two junior Brownlee brothers were getting ready for bed. ‘You two,’ he shouted. ‘I want you to keep Hone under house arrest until he goes to the exams tomorrow morning. Close arrest’, he added. ‘Yes, Sir!’ ‘Yes, Sir!’ they said, terrified. Since the Brownlee brothers were small and I was quite the hulking athletic brute, this idea of their managing to keep me under house arrest seemed unlikely if I decided to make a break for it. I didn’t. I wrote down and memorized as much as I could of the Latin/English sentences and the two set book passages, and went to the Latin exam next morning.
Sure enough the Latin paper was exactly as Mr Carpenter had outlined it, and sitting on my sore backside I answered all the questions with relative ease. When the results came out I had failed in most subjects – but in Latin I passed with honours, with something just over 60 per cent. Wilshire got 96 per cent, having had to make mistakes, he told us later, not to get 100 per cent, which would have been suspicious. I thought then how lucky it was that I’d been caught by the Major next to his drinks pantry, his thinking I was thieving his lager. Had he caught me in his study on the telephone he would have wanted to know who I was phoning – and why. And the truth of Mr Carpenter’s tactful help might have emerged.
In any case I see that Mr Carpenter probably gave us the Latin paper in advance in order to make sure that we would all pass the exam, so that the school rolls and reputation might be increased and he would keep his job at Sandford Park. Full-time Latin school-teaching in Dublin, in a Protestant school, was likely hard come by then. Like Peter Allt, Mr Carpenter was simply keeping the wolf from the door. ‘All Gaul is quartered equally in three parts’ – what I remember is the old chestnut about how the first sentence of the Gallic Wars went, though as far as the Irish Examination Board was concerned I ended up being reasonably good at Latin.
But thinking of that Latin exam now, of Mr Carpenter and the Major, I see another side to things – some understanding of all their mad and dishonest efforts: the Major valiantly trying to keep the school going, pouring himself another chota peg in the gilded boudoir, dreaming of creating a great British prep school in republican Dublin; Mr Carpenter, in some small, lace-curtained suburban villa, equally brave in his very risky academic deception, simply trying to make up on his overdue mortgage payments.
Finally, I imagine the Major dying penny-pinched in a faded south coast hotel, with a last dream of Empire, and loyal sepoys marching to Kabul, his head resting happily on what I hope were those still-bouncy bosoms of his wife. And Mr Carpenter in his suburban villa likewise, expiring carefully, arms crossed on his chest in his single bed, one of his old students reading Tacitus to him – ‘Fortune favoured him, in the opportune moment of his death’ – as indeed it had, his having just the week before paid off his mortgage. These things matter, a good or bad death – not crazy swimming pools and not deceptions over exams. Not even my great and unexpected success in that Latin exam. (I wonder if I might have got into Balliol?)
Neither the Major nor Mr Carpenter did us boys any real harm at Sandford Park. Nor did the other teachers with their sometimes bizarre behaviour,
which probably came as a result of their having to take on the-atrical roles, in order to endure the dull process, year in and out, of teaching dim and unwilling boys. The teachers, like the boys, had to put on the motley now and then to survive.
So there was benefit in these comedies for us boys, a touch of extra-curricular drama from the teachers, giving us, or me at least, an early experience of the marvellous quirks of human nature, more valuable and lasting than the messages in Caesar’s Gallic Wars: a first sense of the world’s strange foolishness and excitements – from Froggy Bertin and ‘Dirty Songs’ Furness, from the fiercely kind Len Horan, wispy Mr Sheehan keen on Katherine Mansfield and Peter Allt of the lofty Yeatsian surmise, from jovial young Mr Cookman and the chronic medic Mr Elliot. And I think of Bull Cordner, too, when I first came to Sandford Park, looking out on the playing field at the house cricket match – ‘Ah, the boys in their whites. Their summer whites …’
The Bull is a spectator now, I hope, in a deck chair, at the edge of some Elysian cricket field, watching an endless game, with the poet Francis Thompson, the two of them reunited with the great cricketing heroes of their youth:
For the field is full of shadows as I near the
Shadowy coast.
And a ghostly batsman plays to the bowling of
A ghost.
And I look through my tears on a soundless-
clapping host,
As the run-stealers flicker to and fro,
To and fro –
O my Hornby and my Barlow long ago!
Now those great players are no longer ghosts for the Bull. He’s with Hornby and Barlow, watching them hit sixes for eternity. Goodbye, Mr Chips to them all. It was only Dudgeon who caused us real harm at Sandford Park. I hope he’s in some fiery scholastic underworld now, writhing in pain, with all the other sadistic headmasters and teachers.
As to Sandford Park and the Major, unfortunately our academic success in Latin didn’t help him. He was gone by the next term, and I was gone at last from the painful and bizarre school as well. Fresh woods and pastures new. There were other pastures grazed, though, upon during those Sandford Park years, at home in Maidenhall and in Dublin.
SEVEN
‘The past is another country – they do things differently there’ L.P. Hartley famously wrote in The Go-Between. Was he entirely right? If some incident in the past was important enough we can find they do things just the same there. We can regain the past almost exactly as it was in a vivid mental photograph, because the intense feelings we had at those moments lead us back to the actual vision. These strong emotions remain imprinted within us, preserving the past – the feelings waiting their resurrection, when we can experience those vital moments again.
I must have been about nine or ten, at my grandparents’ Grange House in Rathfarnham. Our next-door neighbours the Phipps family, who lived in a larger, tree-surrounded house, had two daughters, a little older than me. Playing together one hot afternoon, we went into the porch and shared some lemonade from a pewter tankard with a glass bottom. Fooling round with the tankard when my turn came, I lifted it right up and suddenly saw the face of the older girl through the glass distorted with the swirls of liquid, so that her smile danced. She was laughing, happy. She liked me. And the excited feeling I had from her then gives me the image of her face now, a round face, short fair hair, bubbly lips. Laughing. And I can feel and see the afternoon now as well, the heat and the big chestnut trees around the house, the heavy summer shadows. And that I was aware of an emotion, for the first time, quite clearly, as I am now, sixty-odd years later. I liked her. It was more than that, though I didn’t recognize it as such then – it was a first hint of sensuous attraction. So the future of love came to me first through a glass lightly.
It was the start of a long river of girls, and of women, who floated past me later on the water with beautiful indifference, or with whom I jumped in for a flirting mile or two downstream, or house-boated with for longer stretches, or whom I escaped from, swimming thankfully for the bank; or women who nearly drowned me in the flow.
The file has a letter from my grandfather, in 1950 to Peggy, discussing my summer holiday arrangements – a time during which, unbeknown to my grandfather or to the Butlers, I experienced the first obsessive longing in my life for another:
My dear Peggy
Olive speaking to me on the ‘phone today reminded me that it was only on certain conditions that we agreed to let the child go over to his parents in England. She knows what they are like. [My memory of Nat’s visit here has the incoherence of a dream, so I leave it to Olive and Vera to decide whether the conditions are fulfilled.] So he may very well be in Ireland after all, and go to you for two weeks if you can still have him, and then to Col. McLeod – who we all think sounds excellent for him, especially for the boat building on hand. It would be a great thing if Joe could get some experience in tar painting (or carpentry).
Yrs. affect. Joe.
My grandfather now clearly seems taken, as he had been in his hopes of my joining the merchant navy by sending me to the Napoleonic wars hulk in Colwyn Bay, by the chance of my making a nautical career, though not officer class, of course – still before the mast, as a tar boy or ship’s carpenter. The letter reflects nothing of my real interest in the McLeod family whom I’d known for a year, and I certainly wasn’t interested in the boat building and the tar painting offered. I was interested in Angela, the eldest daughter, and so more than anything I wanted to stay with the family that summer.
Angela was beautiful, one of the few women I’ve met that I can honestly describe as ravishingly beautiful. Tall, a perfect figure, easy movements, grace. Pale faced, with dark, silk-shiny hair, high cheekbones, narrowing down to a sharp chin – literally chiselled features.
I was about twelve when I first met her and her younger sister Lucy. Angela was a year or so older than me, the eldest daughter of a Scots family who had come to live near us at Maidenhall in the Mill House in Thomastown, a small town lower down on the river Nore. Her father, a retired Colonel (another Tory escaping from the new Labour government’s strictures and privations in England perhaps), was a remote figure: always busy, not unfriendly but otherworldly, with eyes that flickered unfocused, or roved about intensely, fiercely, looking for something.
These searching looks might have been explained when I afterwards learnt from Hubert that the Colonel was a member of the British Israelites, a bizarre sect who thought the British were one of the lost tribes of Israel – and further that they were the Master Race, something he was perhaps intent on proving in Ireland, where, Hubert suggested, the Colonel imagined that the lost tribe might finally have settled with the Ark of the Covenant, beneath the Hill of Tara in County Meath, where the old Irish kings had been crowned. The Colonel was a maverick. So, in their way, were his two daughters, which was one reason, I think now, why I came to see Angela as the be-all and end-all of love. I knew I was an outsider, too. We were the same sort, so it was first love, as if there could never be another.
I can’t remember the mother or my first meeting with the two girls, though I think it must have been on some shared Maidenhall pony business, for the two girls were passionate horsewomen. I had no interest in horses whatsoever, but I sometimes tagged along on my bike, with Julia (Hubert and Peggy’s daughter) on her pony Pat, to meets of the local hunt. And it must have been at a meet that I first saw Angela – mounted, proud, tightly encased, top to bottom, in a hard bowler, tie-pinned white stock, a dark jacket, breeches, high black boots, pink-cheeked in an icy wind. I was smitten. Though I wasn’t able to see that the smile was somehow icy, too.
In any case I was soon sweating furiously on my bike, cycling the six miles from Maidenhall over to the Mill House, as often as I could the next summer. I can’t remember much of what we did. The girls were being educated at home, as I remember. They were fiercely and, to me, startlingly independent, quite unlike any of the local girls I’d met. They did what they wanted. Daring. Tomboyish. T
hey seemed to have no other friends. There was no boat building or tar painting, but everything else we did was open aired. Walks with the basenjis, who weren’t my sort of dogs, with their curled-up tails and back hairs going to wrong way; swimming in the rushing mill stream, where once, arriving early and from a distance, I saw the two girls getting out of the deep water naked – a vision which I though to be improper and so the more exciting. For the rest I hung about the stables, watching the girls tend their ponies, mucking out, feigning interest.
And that was one problem. I had nothing in common with the two girls, or their horsy lifestyle. I just needed to be in Angela’s orbit, and would go to any lengths to achieve this, following her with the hunt the next winter on my bike, not just to the meet but lugging the bike afterwards along muddy tracks, over the hills and mountainy gorse bushes above the river. And that same winter, hoping to see Angela at one of the teenage dances Julia and I went to then at the houses of the local gentry – longing to dance with her, steeling myself to do so as she stood against the wall with her sister, for few of the boys danced with her, put off perhaps by her cold, knock-you-down beauty. Neither of us was much of a dancer. I remember the chill of her hand as I held it in the dance, and the smooth hard feel of her white satin ball dress as I nervously touched the back of it with my other hand, stepping on each other’s toes to the blaring of the little local dance band.
I longed to be with her more often. So when the Butlers suggested that I might stay with the family that summer I was all cock-a-hoop. I might now have the opportunity properly to press my suit, and she might thaw.
In the event my summer stay at the McLeods, with my visions of further glimpses of the girls’ nakedness in the chilly mill stream, was cancelled, and I was sent off to my parents’ cold-water flat in Cheltenham instead. The torrents of young summer love never occurred, and I thought myself very unlucky in this at the time. On the other hand, had my suit been even vaguely returned, I might long since have forgotten Angela. One tends to forget early success with girls in the youthful merry-go-round of flirtation and mild sensual experiment. As it is Angela remains a vivid emblem of the obsessively loved ideal by being unobtainable, unpossessed; whereas other warmer-hearted women, with whom I was later to some degree successful, have largely disappeared from memory.