by Joseph Hone
However, when they did start intervening on a large scale we still hadn’t the heart to part with Little Joe – and, even now, though not financially easy for us to keep him, we would try to do so, if we thought it in his interests, but we do not think it is. We feel that poor Little Joe, bandied about from home to home and knowing that his parents have not written to us more than four times in ten years, is in a bad mess psychologically, which will become increasingly worse … and that we are quite helpless to cure it. Any suggestions we make will be disregarded. Also Joe is very isolated here, there are no other small boys, only girls, and he is thrown very much on his own. He is becoming a complete lone wolf, very unco-operative, self-centred, predatory. And though he is very warm-hearted, spontaneous and gifted – he does not seem able to adapt himself to our family life. He is always obstructive and critical. WE DON’T BLAME HIM FOR THIS. He feels divided loyalties and cannot find his equilibrium. He was stammering badly when he returned from school, and that is always, I think, a sign of bad adjustment. His stammer is never permanent. He is learning from his parents quite different standards to those we use here – particularly about money and self-indulgence. In some ways he is frighteningly precocious.
We were all agreed at Annaghmakerrig that it is no good for Little Joe to stay on here and that it is bad for Peggy who has lavished on Little Joe for many years treasures of affection and solicitude which Nat and Biddy have not shown the faintest sign of recognising. Now it has definitely become too much for Peggy. She has many responsibilities and worries of her own – if Joe turns out badly it would break her heart. We have no control over his future, so we must refuse any share in responsibility.
Please, on no account, let Joe feel that we are wishing to part with him because of anything he has done. We don’t want to blame him at all. He has done his best and we are fond of him. In fact it would be much better not to mention the matter to him at all. But as these holidays have driven us to certain conclusions, regretfully and with painful deliberation we thought it fairer to let you know immediately and in writing our decision. We hope to be in Dublin for a few weeks very soon, let us meet then and discuss this more fully.
With love to Vera,
Yours, Hubert.
There is no follow-up correspondence in the file from Old Joe, aunt Olive or anyone else about this letter. In any event the parting took the shape initially of my being sent to stay for the next Easter holidays with a cousin of mine, the kindly Leland Bardwell (my grand-uncle Pat’s daughter) and her husband Michael, who had come to live in a small cottage near Maidenhall, while Hubert, Peggy and Julia went off on a holiday to Normandy. The next summer holiday I stayed with the Bardwells again in London, where they had moved to a flat on the Holloway Road, while the three Butlers went on holiday to Switzerland. This was the Butlers’ tactful way out of me, and, though the Bardwells were very kind to me, I certainly wasn’t happy with the new situation. I missed the two big houses and wondered, since by now I saw myself very much as a member of the Butler family, why I’d not been taken with them on this and the other holidays they took without me.
For some reason the Butlers must have had a change of heart since things returned to normal and I spent the next Christmas holidays, as usual, at Maidenhall and Annaghmakerrig. What made them change their minds? I don’t know. It’s certain I’d had a lucky escape, in not being abandoned again to spend the rest of my adolescence with my sad, impoverished parents, or my pernickety grandfather, or marooned with some unknown guardians or foster parents in County Cork or in England.
EIGHT
For what it’s worth – after all, this isn’t a life-or-death story – can one make any judgment yet as to whether my minders behaved particularly insensitively? Or was I often understandably charged with being a wilful difficult thieving selfish greedy arrogant boastful boy?
Probably both – they were sometimes foolish, I was often difficult. There is no emotional science in the past. Years later there can be little certainty as to precisely what and why and how things happened: the details have dissolved with the death of the minders, and into the cloudy drifts of memory with the elderly subject of the minding. And if one hopes to get closer to the truth by writing it down, there are other pitfalls. There is the possibility that my account here may be subtly or blatantly biased, knowingly or unknowingly slanted. It’s the flaw in all memoirs. In writing of any of the people with whom one was closely involved, there can of course be crucial omissions, downright lies or tactful readjustments in the tale, which those concerned are no longer there to point out. And, if they were there, and did so, they might still be wrong, slanting or forgetting crucial things themselves.
The real point is whether or not I would have been better or worse off, a happier or unhappier person, if I’d been brought up by my own parents instead of the Butlers. Given the impoverished, drinky, irresponsible situation with Nat and Biddy, I think there can be no contest there – I was infinitely better off being brought up by the Butlers. So the next question might be, what was the quality and amount of their love for me? For it’s that which really shapes the way we see ourselves as children – then, now and afterwards, whether or not we see ourselves in later life as happy rather than unhappy people. Had I been brought up by my real parents it’s certain I would have ended up truly unhappy. That I didn’t was entirely due to the Butlers’ care and love.
So what was the quality and amount of that love? Peggy’s for me was generous in quantity, for she was a highly emotional woman, but often critical in quality. Her love was not unconditional. She could be openly critical about people and their relationships. Just as she was wonderfully helpful, kind and understanding with those ill-favoured by nature or down on their luck, she rarely minced words about failings in people who should have known better. In this, as in everything else, she was high-principled and so could be brusquely condemnatory, as befitted her Scots-Victorian Tunbridge Wells background. I have taken from Peggy much of her plain speaking – to my advantage in my need for truth telling (reacting against my minders’ lies and evasions when I was a child), but just as often to my cost in relationships with others.
I have sometimes been openly critical of those I have loved, as Peggy was critical with me. ‘Faithful are the wounds of a friend’ she used to say, criticizing me after I’d done or said something untoward. Yet perhaps even more important than her love was her honesty to me. Peggy gave me the clear sense of what was good behaviour, and what in the longer term lay in wait for you if you continued to behave selfishly, stupidly or badly – not juvenile punishments but adult unhappiness, loss, despair.
Hubert’s love for me was always difficult to tell. He lived mostly on cloud nine, with his intellectual concerns. I think he found it difficult to love but I don’t think I suffered from it. Had Hubert been more of an emotional father to me, with interests in my line of things as a boy – model trains, sports, cricket – would I have been less difficult as a child? Yes, quite possibly. On the other hand I might have found an emotional Hubert difficult to handle, embarrassing, as I sometimes found Peggy’s intense show of feelings towards me.
In any case, one must deal with things as they were and Hubert as a distant surrogate father was far better for me than poor Nat’s sad, shove-ha’penny paternity would have been. I can’t see Hubert as a fly in my childhood ointment. For a start he was part of my coming to books in his big library, and even if I read very few of them when I was young, he showed me indirectly the huge importance of books, their stories and myriad ideas. Besides, Hubert’s lack of emotional or critical involvement with me was a restful thing. I could sit by the fire with him, when Peggy was away, in happy silent lamplight, he with his Serbo-Croatian texts, me with my cricket book, an account of the MCC in Australia, 1932-33. But as we have seen when Hubert put pen to paper about Little Joe, he could be very active and critical about me. He, like Peggy, lived the moral life, though he did this mostly on the typewriter – his approach was intellectual, her
s intuitive. The chalk-and-cheese marriage, which came to work so well ‘Les extrèmes se touchent’.
To return to the fray of wider judgment about my early life, I wonder if there can ever be a fair balance sheet here for the reader to judge? Kingsley, for example, would very likely have a different slant on it – that in denying him the physical things he wanted of me I teased him, for the sake of foody treats in the Hibernian Hotel and racy trips up the Wicklow mountains. And I may have got it wrong about other people. Angela McLeod may not have been an ice maiden but simply found me a crashing bore, a moony suitor who barely knew one end of a horse from another – and didn’t like her dogs. There are other scenes I may have slanted in my favour. Major Wormell, for example, was right to call me a blackguard and beat the hell out of me, not because I was thieving his drinks, which I wasn’t, but because I was party to a dishonest scheme in phoning Charlie Culley in his study with answers to the Latin exam paper. I could be an unreliable narrator. For that’s the flaw in most factual accounts – there is more possibility of truth in fiction than in fact, for in fiction one can get to the heart of the matter, display hidden thoughts and feelings – the shabby secrets, the frustrated love or whatever – of the protagonists, in the moment, as these emotions actually occur. Let me return, however, to the file of letters.
When I was nearly fourteen, it at last dawned on my grandfather what Hubert had seen long before: Sandford Park was no longer suitable for me. So he set himself to various schemes and ideas for my further education, and singled out St Columba’s College for me, a public school (the only one in the Republic) up in the Dublin mountains. He writes to Hubert sometime in 1951:
Dear Hubert
Sowby, the Warden of St Columba’s, is very keen about getting me to write a history of the school. I feel tired enough, but I have considered the suggestion and yesterday I went to see the proposed publisher who does not think it a very promising business proposition; it might be possible if I did it gratis. Well, that is out of the question, but it has occurred to me that St Columba’s might pay me for the work in the shape of educating Little Joe on a scholarship basis or a really large reduction in the fees.
They certainly would not pay me cash, but an extra boy doesn’t make much difference – I mean I would gain more than they would lose, so the Warden might consider it.
The question is: shall I put this proposition? Is St Columba’s the right school for Joe? On this I seek your advice and Peggy’s, asking you to bear in mind that when he is seventeen or eighteen he will have to go out in the world. Should he not go to a school where the other boys’ parents are in the same position as he will be, where the education is entirely practical? My means will not allow me to support him beyond seventeen or eighteen, even with home and clothes, unless manna falls from heaven.
There is no good pretending it is otherwise. If I were to die tomorrow, Vera I hope would be able to carry on Joe’s education on a modest basis for a few years, but after that there would be nothing – what there is must go to my own children. Sally [my aunt] especially has to be considered, as she could never earn a living which would give her anything like the life she has been accustomed to, and to which she has a right of assurance, so far as I can assure it.
St Columba is not of course a school for the rich and idle classes, but most of the boys have well-off parents, and go on to Trinity, which Joe could not do unless he got a scholarship and this I don’t think one should count on.
Yrs,
Joe Hone.
Old Joe, as usual, is first of all pondering money and barter deals here, before any considerations as to the suitability of the school for me. Interesting, too, are his remarks about Sally, that he must try to assure ‘the life she has been accustomed to’, by implication a moneyed life he has so far provided. For the first time in his letters he lets the cat out of the bag, suggesting that his family life was relatively well heeled. And this of course was not a fact he ever wanted to reveal. All sorts, besides my father, might have been at his door at once.
In fact Sally had not had any pampered, moneyed life. She had been working for her keep in England right through the war, as a secretary with Bomber Harris in his High Wycombe bunker and afterwards as a cipher clerk at Station X, the top-secret Enigma decoding operation at Bletchley Park. This my grandfather would not have known, believing she was just a secretary in some run of the mill war-effort institution. None the less Sally would have to be financed, dowried in the traditional manner, for entry into the marriage arena. On the other hand, to finance my future education he is considering writing what would have been a long history (the school was founded in 1842) of St Columba’s College – or else getting me into the bicycle-mending business. Poor Old Joe, beset with problems, some of his own making, since, even at this point in the early 1950s, he was not that poor and could well have afforded (as he subsequently did, if only for one year) to pay the very reasonable fees at St Columba’s.
Before a final decision about my future schooling was made there was still a good deal of footling letters between Hubert and my grandfather about a choice of school. There are letters from Christ’s Hospital school in Horsham, Sussex; from Portora in Northern Ireland, and one from A.S. Neill, the head of the famous (or infamous) progressive Summerhill School in Suffolk. But it seems Neill didn’t think me difficult or progressive enough for Summerhill – he writes to Hubert that he has no place for me. So there are frustrated, even angry responses from my grandfather over it all, as is clear in a letter to Hubert sometime towards the end of 1950:
Dear Hubert,
I was at St Columba’s the other day where I saw the new Warden, a young Englishman. He seemed to think it would be almost impossible for a boy arriving in England from Ireland at Joe’s age to get into any school whatever, from County Council (owing to his age being beyond eleven) to Eton!
Austin Clarke [the well-known Irish poet] who had his boys at Sandford Park, says they learnt nothing there, and there is no order or discipline, so he took his boys away. I dare say Sandford Park has done more harm to Little Joe than a few weeks with his parents in England … By all accounts the Harcourt Street school [the High School] is good for getting boys to work … My ‘psychological guess’ about his ‘psychological mess’ is that he has an innate tendency to idleness, as Nat has among the male Hones.
This was written before I saw you today. I am sorry I vented my spleen on you, but the incoherence of life – and of my own life – has pressed on me of late. Peggy being ill, there can be no question of your decision now, but I was irritated by your talk of psychological problems and solutions, when the commonsense issue was so plain and so insoluble.
I can see how Hubert, with his liberal ethic, would still be pondering psychological solutions for me, while Old Joe, with his right-wing views, would have been annoyed by such solutions, favouring the severely practical: ‘Bring on the broken bicycles for Little Joe!’ he might have said to Hubert, venting more spleen. ‘Or the carpenter’s shop. Or even the Hong Kong police!’
The first view of St Columba’s College, as one came up the winding drive through the parkland, was (and still is) attractive: a pleasing, white-stuccoed Georgian house, set well up in the hills with a splendid view down over the city and Dublin Bay. But behind the house, more or less unseen, lurked something very different – a number of dark, heavy granite neo-gothic Victorian buildings; a Puginesque chapel, cloisters, a long dining hall and dormitory above, a longer hall across the lawn. Another world, not Ireland.
St Columba’s in the early 1950s was in some ways even more of an anomaly in the Republic than Major Wormell’s Union-Jack-waving Sandford Park. Though this wasn’t immediately obvious. St Columba’s didn’t need to emphasize its Protestant Empire ethos, its muscular Christianity, its ideals of service to the King over the water. This was implicit. It lay all over the place, in the huge Victorian scholastic shadow that Dr Arnold had cast, even across the Irish sea, in the mid-nineteenth century: an ethos confiden
tly enshrined at St Columba’s a hundred years later – in hymns ancient and modern, on brass plaques in the chapel naming old boys killed in the Great War, and on the much longer list of names in the cricket pavilion declaring the players of the First XI, the lists going back eighty years or more. ‘Play up, play the game!’ The Great Game of defending the North-West Frontier from the Ruskies and stamping out any restlessness among the Irish natives.
To be fair, St Columba’s had been founded originally in 1842 not to put down the native Irish but to save them from the perils of their Catholic faith – and to feed them from soup kitchens when the Irish Famine came in the late 1840s. It was a proselytizing foundation, started by two fervent British evangelicals, the Reverend Dr Sewell and the Reverend Maunsell, who only a few years into their Irish evangelizing mission fell out, so that the Reverend Sewell left in a huff, went back to England and founded the sister school to St Columba’s, Radley College near Oxford, in order to be entirely free to implement his low-church Protestant gospels. The hard shadow of all these punishing Victorian beliefs lay behind the pleasant Georgian house.
I arrived at St Columba’s in the autumn term of 1952, all kitted out with the usual public-school prisoner’s clothes and baggage, packed in an exotically labelled trunk (hotels in Lake Garda, Mentone, Portofino) of my grandfather’s. There was the regulation kit I had to have: a horrid roughscratchy herringbone best suit, flannel suit for ordinary, a short black gown, a white surplice, dried muddy rugby boots ex-Sandford Park, two ties, three this, four that and six of the other – and an old tuck box, belonging to my uncle Pat for which my grandfather had given him half a crown. I was ready, but not very willing.