by Joseph Hone
I didn’t stay with the McLeods that summer because my mother wanted to see me over in Cheltenham. She writes to my grandfather from their first flat in Cheltenham at 4 Selkirk Street in June 1951:
Dear Mr Hone
I was very disappointed to hear your news this week about Joe. But of course I can understand your point of view. [His point of view must have been that it would be a very good thing for me to do a bit of boat building, tar painting and carpentry with the McLeods for the summer holiday.] However, Joe has been looking forward for months to coming over here [This seems strange, since I was much keener to go to the McLeods] and I cannot disappoint the child. I will send you the ticket next week – a friend of mine has offered to pay for it [This may have been her part-time lover, Ian McCorkadale]. I don’t mind him staying with the Butlers for the first two weeks if you have already arranged that, but I would like him over here then.
Months ago I mentioned his holidays to you and said not to arrange anything. There is room for the child here. I have not seen the child since Easter twelve months ago. I could not see him when I was in Ireland last year. Things are never very pleasant for me when I do go to Enniskerry. If you will let me know which route Joe will be coming on I will send you or the Butlers his ticket.
I am sorry if this is going to cause a lot of trouble for you but he is quite big enough to more or less arrange things for himself.
Yours sincerely,
Biddy.
So over I went to Cheltenham. I suppose I shouldn’t have minded. I was never going to have any relationship with Angela. But I was never to have any real relationship with my mother either. She remained as a distant aunt to me – someone never known in my early years, awkwardly introduced to when I was ten and rarely seen afterwards. I later came to understand her very difficult circumstances, which my father had largely imposed on her, but for me there were only the formalities, never the feelings, of a mother-son relationship with her.
My grandfather at least understood her predicaments, as he writes to Hubert Butler, on receiving my mother’s letter:
My dear Hubert
I enclose a letter from Biddy. I suppose if Biddy sends the ticket we will have to dispatch Joe over to her, though I feel that the ticket may not materialise. After all, she doesn’t get much joy out of life, and I/we can hardly refuse. I have written to say he will be with us when you and Peggy come up on the 14th.
I saw an interesting letter of yours in ‘The New Statesman’ and had to quiet down my demon of argument!
Joe
No, indeed, Biddy didn’t get much joy out of life. I wonder now how – apart from her leaving my father several times and furthering her affair with Ian (which was no real improvement since there was to be nothing permanent there) – she could ever have improved her situation? Other than the brief happiness she must have had by my mere presence, I, to my discredit, did nothing positive to help her. My presence with her in Cheltenham, since it was wished on me, was a duty. One of the few distractions I found there was that I could go with impunity to the various pubs in Cheltenham that my parents frequented. I was free of such prohibitions and the other formalities of life at Maidenhall, Annaghmakerrig and with my grandparents – where such pub life, for example, was out of the question. I wish I could say that I picked up something interesting by exposure to this very different style of life – the revealing argot, the raffish manners and mores, perhaps the shabby secrets of the Cheltenham lunchtime regulars in Peter’s Bar. I didn’t. They were mostly reticent retired servicemen, nursing small pensions over smaller beers, or faded remittance men like my father, who said very little, bent, like him, over their Telegraph crossword puzzles. There was a putting green opposite Peter’s Bar in Montpellier Gardens. I spent a good deal of time there, at sixpence a throw, putting against myself.
But it would be wrong to give the impression that my holidays with my parents in the late forties and early fifties in Cheltenham were altogether unrewarding. If my father was antisocial, my mother certainly wasn’t. She had made many interesting, talented and congenial friends about the town – in Peter’s Bar, the Cotswold Lounge (a select bar attached to the Queen’s Hotel) and the Restoration Inn down on the High Street. This last was a haunt for some of the town’s literary and artistic set. Here she had met, as I did later, Ben Howard, editor of the local literary Private Eye-style magazine, Promenade; Alan Hancox who ran a fine second-hand bookshop; the celebrated Scots poet Sydney Graham together with his wild painter friends Colohoun and McBride; Noel Woodin another young poet from London; and the Ascent of Man Dr Bronowski who, before ascending those heights, worked prosaically for the Coal Board in offices opposite the Ellenborough Hotel, another more select watering hole for topers in the professions, where the formidable owner, Mrs Davis, would let favoured customers stay for drinks after hours.
So, among the intelligentsia and the arty set, there were several of these little drinking schools about the town where my mother was a welcome scholar, not because she was literary – she, like my father, read nothing but the odd ’tec novel – but because, in her attractive, easygoing manner and intuitive sympathies, she was an addition to any company. Furthermore, beneath the accommodating surface she was no fool and always stood her round. Everyone liked her and several friends, knowing of her financial and other difficulties with my father, became particular confidants and helped her with cash advances. My father, in the often fizzy, talky, Guinness-charged company down at the Restoration Inn, made rare appearances. He preferred the depressing lunchtime silences over the crossword at the end of Peter’s Bar. I, on the other hand, was attracted by the company of these writers, poets, and their hangers-on – not because I had any real interest in poetry or other literary matters then: I was taken by the general vivid devil-may-care chatter, and by some of the Bohemian girls in the company.
But here I should make a correction: I had become interested in literary matters, but only in modern French literature – the works of Gide, Camus, Cocteau, Mauriac, Alain Fournier, Raymond Radiguet and the Paris novels of Henry Miller, the two Tropics. This unexpected literary interest – unexpected in someone who was very bad at French, had few intellectual tastes and was successful only as an athlete at school – had come to me in my early ’teens through Kingsley Scott, a Dublin schoolteacher friend of the Butlers who had come to stay at Maidenhall in the late 1940s when he had taken a first post at Kilkenny College teaching French. Though I don’t remember it, I had met Kingsley some years before at Annaghmakerrig, where he had come up to give French lessons to the Fitzsimon boys who lived then at the back end of the big house. Kingsley told me years later how he had first seen me walking down the main staircase in a glow of lamplight, and had immediately been taken by ‘the vision of this unknown boy’. Auden writes, in a memoir of his own and other authors’ schoolday reminiscences, of how
the authors remember at least one master with pleasure and gratitude, either because he stimulated their minds or because he treated them like human beings … Many boys, too, can remember some adult, neither a schoolmaster nor a relative, who took an interest in them and taught them something not in the school curriculum. Behind this interest there is usually an element of homosexual feeling, sublimated or overt … The corresponding figure in my life … was a practising homosexual … He made advances, which I rejected … Instead of dropping me, however, he continued to give me books and write me long letters full of encouraging criticism of my juvenile verses. I owe him a great deal.
Other than that I wrote nothing literary for him to criticize then, this almost exactly describes my subsequent relationship with Kingsley. And I owe him a great deal. Without his friendship and his literary interests, I might not have taken up any literary interests or come to write books myself. I might have become a hulky shot-putt champion, or a professional cricketer, or just dawdled round the Dublin bars after I’d left school – becoming the sort of person my father was, a possibility that the Butlers, given my earlier haun
ts round the Bennettsbridge pubs, obviously feared.
Yet Kingsley’s influence formed only a further and more serious part of my literary education, since I’d already been spellbound as a child by Peggy’s dramatic readings and found a passion for boys’ adventure stories once I could read myself. I’d sensed, too, the huge importance of books, unread, in Hubert’s large library, and, if not literature, I had absorbed from Tony Guthrie in Annaghmakerrig what Henry James considered the essential in fiction – ‘Dramatize, dramatize, dramatize!’
But Kingsley gave me something else – access to classic modern French books and the forbidden Henry Miller novels, and so an early entry into adult life. But initially the great thing for me about Kingsley, when he came up to teach in Dublin at St Andrew’s College, another and better Protestant boys’ school, and I was still marooned in the horrors of Sandford Park, was that, vouched for by the Butlers, he started taking me out on Sundays for meals downtown at the Dolphin or the Hibernian hotels, or to the Old Red Bank or Bentley’s fish restaurant in Molesworth Street. My early doings with Kingsley had nothing to do with literature, but in typical greedy schoolboy fashion had everything to do with good food that I had never known in the repulsive Sandford Park meals. With Kingsley I came to taste the best of Dublin food and wine, thick pea soup and sizzling steaks cooked over the charcoal grill at the Dolphin; spring-minted lamb and carafes of claret at the Hibernian. Kingsley was relatively wealthy. His father had been a Dublin wine merchant who had died early, as had his mother, when Kingsley was in his early twenties at Trinity College a few years before. He was an only child.
I was about thirteen when, precocious and very ready for fine foods and adult company, I made this sudden entrée to sophisticated, expensive big-city life, arriving in the grand hotels, porters and waiters hovering attentively round us; for Kingsley, on his own, was a regular patron of these hotels and restaurants. Kingsley was moody. In his schoolmaster mode he tended to be fidgety, abrupt, contrary, either a bit of a pedantic stickler or a fumbler in the mind. Gangly, absent-minded, pipe-in-air – here he was Monsieur Hulot. But out and about in the city he was more Gregory Peck – tall and handsome in a craggy-featured way, with a wry smile and good tweed sports jackets from Kevin and Howlin. He did in fact look a bit like the Hollywood star and was sometimes taken for him by other diners, who gazed over at him admiringly as we savoured the sole bonne femme and sipped the Vouvray.
If I liked the food I thrived just as much in Kingsley’s red MG sports car, on speedy wind-blown trips up the Wicklow mountains and visits to the first-run picture houses in the city after the Sunday lunches – stall seats at the Adelphi or the Theatre Royal, where in those days there was a dazzling variety show on Sunday afternoons, with Scots comics, short-skirted, sequinned-bodiced dancing girls, conjurers, crooners, Joe Loss and his big band, as well as the movie: three hours of solid entertainment, with ice creams at half time – a bonanza of glamorous afternoons.
There was only one problem in all this happy Sunday high life: Kingsley was in love with me, and I didn’t return the suit. I just took the food and drink and the flashy motor trips up the mountains. This sounds discreditable. Yet I wasn’t trifling with his affections, since I didn’t know the nature of them at first. I saw him simply as a generous uncle, just as I had earlier seen my mother’s lover Ian McCorkadale. I was unaware of homosexuality since, though there had been every other sort of untoward behaviour at Sandford Park, there was, surprisingly, never any of that at the school; and Kingsley never made more than the vaguest physical advances towards me. It was only a year or so later that I realized the nature of his feelings for me, and when I did I continued to take the food and drink and the picture shows – because they were freely offered and because I longed for these happy Sunday releases from the horrors of Sandford Park. It might be said that I should not have taken the sole bonne femme, the Vouvray and the ice creams. I should have withdrawn. I leave that argument open. But it’s an argument that takes little account of schoolboy deprivation – and simple greed. And there is the other point that, finding my responses unsatisfactory in that department, Kingsley could have dropped me, which he didn’t – which is why I owe him a great deal.
No doubt for Kingsley it was a frustrating relationship. Yet this perhaps was a dilemma based in his own idealism, in that what he really wanted was a romantic relationship with an adolescent boy, but with one who would never grow up – the Peter Pan attraction. He wanted a happy balance between the carnal and the virginal, but was faced with the likely problem that with the vision, the beauty, the ideal, there may well come an irresistible longing for the sex; just as with nothing but sex in a relationship one may well come to wish for the ideal. This perhaps creates a frisson of excitement for some homosexuals in riding Browning’s ‘giddy line midway, the dangerous edge of things’. But it was not for me.
What was for me later were some of the books he had in his little top-floor bedroom at St Andrew’s, in Clyde Road, where I usually went back with him after the Sunday outings. The many translated French novels – Gide, Camus and so on, along with Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn and some volumes of Havelock Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex. Kingsley didn’t push these books on me; I just found them out on the shelves, browsed in them when he was downstairs on some school duty, and borrowed some of them.
My initial interest in these seriously literary French books was not very worthy. I was tempted by what I saw as exotic and hoped would be sexy in them, which didn’t turn out to be the case, not even with the two Tropics which I had to skim through repeatedly to find anything exciting. On the other hand Gide’s books roused, or just confirmed, rebellious feelings in me, particularly his paean to sensuous freedom in his Fruits of the Earth. His fierce advocacy, addressed to a young man, of complete freedom from all bourgeois confines showed me how restrictive the conventions of my own background were, and how the prohibitions and cruelties of Sandford Park were even more imprisoning.
Gide, in Fruits of the Earth, passionately urges every young man to escape all such conventions and diktats. I’d been doing quite a bit of this already, and Gide encouraged me in this path – all the more since it was a direction underwritten by the highest literary authority: as was proclaimed on the covers of his books, Gide had recently won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Along with these literary introductions Kingsley, as a passionate Francophile, gave me something else just as important: a first taste of France – in his Gitanes, through his big record player, with the voices of Piaf, Trenet and Molouji drifting over the shouts of the rough boys playing in the school backyard.
Years later, when I first saw Jean Vigo’s bitter indictment of prep school life in his movie Zero de Conduite, I was straight back in the horrors of Sandford Park, even down to the famous dormitory sleepwalking scene in the picture, which more or less paralleled what I had witnessed at Sandford Park with Thompson, the lonely boy walking down the dormitory in his cubs outfit. But Zero de Conduite also brought me straight back to Kingsley, whom I immediately recognized in the figure of the waggish, humane young teacher who mimics Chaplin’s waddling walk and leads the Sunday crocodile of boys off at a sudden tangent – pursuing an attractive woman in a fur with nice ankles.
Nought for conduct. And lessons. That was me. But again, as I had already seen with Tony Guthrie’s unconventional theatricals at Annaghmakerrig, I saw, through Kingsley, that getting nought for conduct and being beaten regularly by the sadist Dudgeon was not the final measure of all schooldays’ life, and need not be a measure of anything in real life; that there was another world out there – seen through Kingsley, his risqué books, his pungent smokes and the throbbing bal-musette music – a world where the exotic and forbidden were not forbidden, where there were no exams or beatings, a world which one could embrace à la Gide, tasting fruits which would not have been recommended by any of my minders or teachers. At the very least it was a turning, which might lead me to
girls with nice ankles.
Years afterwards when I was over in Dublin, long after Kingsley had left St Andrew’s and the school itself had moved, I would walk round to Clyde Road and look up at the high window where I had smoked Gitanes and listened to Piaf and thumbed through the Tropics looking for the juicy bits. But now there was more to that little rooftop room – it held an aura almost of sanctity for me, the gilded tomb of youth.
However, to return to the continuing discussions of ‘What to do with Little Joe’. There now comes a bombshell of a letter from Hubert to my grandfather, early in January 1950:
Dear Joe
We had a discussion about Little Joe at Xmas at Annaghmakerrig, and we were all of us agreed, Mrs Guthrie, Tony and myself that under present conditions it is not wise to prolong the relationship with Little Joe, and that it should be dissolved by degrees in a way that will not be hurtful or harmful to him. We are truly upset about this, Peggy in particular, but we see no way out and think that in the end it will be best for Joe. It is not his fault, we want to be quite clear about that, and that, as friends of his, we shall always feel affection and interest in him. But Nat and Biddy have in the past few years made the situation impossible for us, or perhaps it would be fairer to say they have complicated rather than eased a relationship that in any case would have been difficult.
I did several years ago explain to you all, with what I thought at the time brutal candour, that we could never share responsibility for Joe with his parents – and I had years before explained the same thing to Nat and Biddy. Either I was to have guardianship of Joe or else Joe must be with us not as a member of the family but as a child-guest we sometimes have. We couldn’t take responsibility without having authority. They refused us the authority and of course have never attempted to keep the terms of the written agreement – or even tried to explain their reasons for failing to do so.