Wicked Little Joe

by Joseph Hone

  ELEVEN

  When I got back from Yugoslavia at the end of 1955, I had my Irish passport. I was an Irish citizen, and so I didn’t have to do any square bashing or, indeed, the Russian interpreter’s course. Though with my time in Yugoslavia, a fair smattering of Serbo-Croatian and my experiences with the sly Petar and the mysterious Mr Radovic, I was probably well qualified now for entry into the Russian course – and from there, into the British Secret Service.

  But the only thing I really wanted was to get into the picture business. For the moment, however, I could see no way in. First of all I needed a union ticket. So I made enquiries, back in London, staying with my aunt Sally and Stanley in Hampstead again, with the Association of Cinematograph Technicians in Soho Square. I had hoped for an appointment with Anthony Asquith, the well-known movie director, then president of the ACT. But for some reason he wasn’t available. Instead I saw a minion, a superior Cockney clerk, not unlike Peter Sellers’s later incarnation of the finicky shop floor steward in I’m All Right, Jack, who made the situation interestingly clear to me: I couldn’t join the union without first working in the industry, and I couldn’t work in the industry without first getting a union card. As neat a catch as that later Catch 22. This ACT union card became a sort of Holy Grail for me in the next few years.

  I was once again at a very loose end. I went over to Dublin to stay with my grandparents, who had moved from their lovely house in the Wicklow mountains to their last residence, an attractive red-brick Victorian town house in Winton Road, just off Leeson Park. My grandfather, with his double specs perched on forehead and nose, smoking and groaning with the dachshunds over his cheque stubs, was not altogether pleased to see me. He doubtless foresaw that, with my out-of-work arrival, I would shortly be a further drain on his bank account. Whether because of this or because he was now genuinely well disposed towards me (or both perhaps) he got me a job.

  Old Joe was a friend of Dr Arnold Marsh, the well-known Irish educationist and retired headmaster of Newtown, the notable Quaker School in Waterford, notable for at least one reason in that it was only one of a pair of co-educational schools in Ireland at the time. There were girls at Newtown … Dr Marsh had been asked out of retirement to take charge of the other Quaker co-educational school in Ireland, thirty miles north of Dublin: Drogheda Grammar School, a smaller but equally notable eighteenth-century foundation.

  I took the train up to Drogheda for an appointment with Dr Marsh, an appointment, as he had indicated on the telephone, as an English teacher and housemaster with the junior boys. It didn’t immediately strike me that with only four ‘O’ Levels and having left St Columba’s in some disgrace only two years before I was ill-qualified for any serious teaching job. Of course in those days, and perhaps especially in Ireland, educational qualifications were not the be-all and end-all of matters scholastic. Indeed, with Mr Carpenter at Sandford Park, I’d had first-hand experience of the sometimes rather happy-go-lucky academic attitude in some Irish schools then. So I hoped that, with a bit of front and a tactful silence about my academic qualifications, I would get by.

  Dr Marsh was a busy, genial, lively man in his seventies, with a great frothy shock of white hair and twinkly eyes. We met in his rather chaotic study off the main hall, which was beautifully Georgian, with a stuccoed ceiling and a black and white chequerboard marble floor. The spring term was starting in a week’s time and Dr Marsh was busy with a hundred things, papers piled up on his desk, telephone ringing. He made no enquiries into my educational qualifications. Instead he asked what I’d been doing since I’d left St Columba’s. I had worked in my uncle’s London bookshop, spent two months in Yugoslavia. I had learnt quite a bit of Serbo-Croatian. ‘Oh,’ he interrupted, ‘something of a linguist then?’ ‘Well, something there, yes.’ ‘And French, of course, you know French.’ ‘Well, yes, something there, too.’ ‘Good. Because I’ll need you to teach French to the junior class.’ ‘Yes, of course.’ ‘And English, History, Geography – and Latin as well.’ ‘Latin … I see,’ I said, with some doubt.

  ‘But I understand from your grandfather that you got honours in Latin at Sandford Park in your Inter exam?’ ‘Well, yes, I did.’ ‘So Latin here will be no trouble for you.’ ‘No. No. I shouldn’t think so.’ ‘Good. And you’ll be housemaster in the junior boys’ dorm. Four pounds a week, board and lodging included. Would that suit?’ ‘Yes. Yes, certainly.’

  He stood up. ‘Of course there’s no corporal punishment here. Just detention now and then, by tending the vegetables or cleaning out the pigsty in the back yard. But there is one thing I’d like to ask of you. Being a co-educational school we sometimes have a little trouble, the older boys and girls …’ ‘Yes?’ I was eager to hear the worst. ‘Yes. Holding hands in the corridors. I want you to keep an eye out for that, Joseph. And discourage it.’ ‘Of course, certainly. Of course.’

  Holding hands in the corridors … And no beatings. This was clearly a very much happier situation than at Sandford Park and St Columba’s. Here the liberal ethic was being very properly interpreted. Why, I was only to discourage the holding of hands. Dr March gave me my return rail fare – three or four half crowns, I remember, for which he rustled and jangled absentmindedly about in his pockets, and I took the train back to Dublin in an excellent mood. At eighteen, in the space of a twenty-minute interview, I had graduated scholastically, skipping ‘A’ Levels and a university degree, to the position of fully fledged teacher and housemaster. G.K. White and the Reverend F. Martin Argyle would have been astonished at my sudden academic rise, and no doubt derisive of Dr Marsh’s easy-going recruiting methods.

  But neither White nor Argyle was a Quaker. And that was a key point about Dr Marsh – he was a dedicated Quaker, and Quakers took a much more sensible attitude in their dealings with young lives – a kindlier and broader attitude than any of the traditional schools of the time. With the Quakers, book learning and exams were not the main point of school life; the rounded formation of character was more important, the aim to let young lives breathe, in their own way, to their own ends, be it carpentry or bicycle mending. Or, as I came to see at Drogheda Grammar, tending the cabbages in the back garden or cleaning out the pigsty.

  Despite such Quaker leniencies in the educational field, it strikes me now, as it must have struck Dr Marsh then, that he was taking a risk in employing someone with no teaching qualifications whatsoever. Of course, he knew my grandfather, who must have vouched for me, but I think the real reason may have been different. Dr Marsh had that supreme teaching qualification: he was a kind man, with a great sympathy for the young, an understanding of where their real gifts lay. Furthermore, he had an intuitive knowledge of what their real problems and hopes were; how they could be unhappy, with a difficult family background, homesickness or whatever; and how their ill-discipline, foolishness or lack of academic interest was often a consequence of this. I think that, given his sharp intuitions, he may have sensed some of these same sympathetic qualities in me, and perhaps he sensed my own schooldays’ unhappiness – so that, barely out of school myself, I would be resolutely on the side of the pupils, not the examination boards. Perhaps it’s glib to say that Dr Marsh, though very much the busy and efficient headmaster in all matters of school detail, was a child at heart. But I think he was. And I suppose I was too, and he recognized this, and perhaps liked that in me.

  But to return to that train journey back to Dublin. Other more realistic and worrying thoughts must have struck me. I had expected to teach only English. Now it was French, History and Geography as well. And Latin … I had certainly jumped a few academic hurdles with startling speed. But in a week’s time I was actually going to be in the firing line – confronted by a dozen or so possibly unruly boys and girls, some of whom might know French and Latin better than I did. Still – if I could pretend successively to be a painter, a poet, a writer, a movie star with Mr Rossen and a spy with Mr Radovic, I could equally well pretend to be a schoolteacher. On with the motley!


  In the event I found teaching remarkably easy. The pupils were eleven-and twelve-year-olds; a dozen of them, friendly, not unruly, and bright in many ways other than academically. I was brighter than them in that field, except in French and Latin. I got round the French problem by more or less cutting out the grammar altogether and by digging out instead a translation from a book we’d done in Froggy Bertin’s Sandford Park French class, La Belle Nivernaise, a children’s story of a family on a barge on the Nivernais-Rhone canal in the early 1900s. I got more copies of the book in Dublin and distributed them to the children, secreting my English translation I had in the high sloping desk at the end of the long room where we had our lessons. Off we went on every French class, up and down that delightful French canal with the little heroine, chapter by chapter, the pupils stumbling in their English through the French text, me correcting them from my crib. Sometimes, in order to show serious hard work, I would write up sentences on the blackboard in French, and then, with a flourish, the perfect English translation underneath.

  I did the same thing with the Latin classes – keeping well clear of the grammar and sticking to the text I knew from little Mr Carpenter’s classes at Sandford Park, and accordingly had the hidden crib for Caesar’s Gallic Wars: ‘All Gaul is quartered equally in three parts,’ and so forth. When attention flagged I livened up the story by making a drama of it, like Asterix, embroidering the battles with the Gauls, dancing round my desk, with sword and spear play and an imaginary shield. It all went down a treat.

  In English I kept clear of Shakespeare, which I’d never managed at school, and instead got them all Penguin copies of Animal Farm from which each pupil read a page. We really got into the story of the worthy old workhorse Boxer and the wicked porkers, which I treated straight, as a pure fable, without delving into its political undertones. They hugely enjoyed it.

  All except one boy, who didn’t enjoy any of the lessons, a tousle-headed, rather grimy boy who sighed and groaned in the back row. I mentioned this problem pupil to Dr Marsh. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘that’s Stephen Pearce. Don’t worry – he has no use for book learning. But he’s good at lots of other things. Particularly dealing with the pigs in the back yard. That’s his passion. Just send him out to the pigs at the start of each class. He’ll be more than grateful to you.’ Which I duly did.

  ‘All right then, Stephen, off to the pigs!’ I said jovially, arriving at each class. And he jumped for joy, running off to tend the pigs. Indeed Stephen was good at other things. He became a very fine and commercially successful potter after he left school. Stephen would likely have been crucified in any other Irish school, by beatings, dull pedants, detention and exams. As it was, left to his own piggy devices and unencumbered by dull scholasticism, he was happy and found himself in his later career. What a very sensible school Drogheda Grammar was.

  Upstairs in the junior dorm I had a little room at one end, where I could look along two rows of iron bedsteads, six to either side – just like the dorm in Jean Vigo’s movie Zero de Conduite. I would patrol the roost of an evening. ‘Lights out, boys! And no talking.’ ‘Please, Sir, can’t we have another five minutes?’ ‘No, Naismith.’ ‘Oh, please, Sir!’ ‘Please, Sir – tell us that story you started the other night, the one about the greedy boy who fell into a lake of marshmallows and sticky chocolate.’ ‘Go on, Sir!’ ‘Please, Sir!’ So I recounted and elaborated on the prize-winning story I’d written for wispy Mr Sheehan’s English class at Sandford Park. The lights didn’t go out until well after time.

  Thinking of Zero de Conduite again, I see now how, at Drogheda Grammar, in class and out of it, I was doing more or less exactly what the jolly, waggish, Chaplinesque teacher who followed the woman with nice ankles had been doing in that film. In another way I was aping schoolteacher Kingsley Scott and his Jacques Tati vagaries. I was mimicking school teaching. But I’d no alternative. The pupils enjoyed it, and so did I.

  Then, towards the end of term, the great moment came. On a weekend when I was down with my grandparents in Dublin, my grandfather said he’d been chatting to Michael Killanin, the journalist and Irish peer from County Galway, at the Kildare Street Club, and had mentioned that he had a grandson who was keen to work in films; had Michael got any ideas about getting such work? Well, he had. He was producing a film in the west of Ireland, starting that spring, with someone called John Ford directing it. And if I went to the company production office, in the mews behind Michael Killanin’s house in Landsdowne Road near the rugby ground, and presented myself to the production manager next Saturday morning, there might be an opening for me of some sort, maybe as an assistant director.

  The great John Ford … I had certainly heard of him, and I soon found out what he was up to in Ireland. He was coming over to repeat (as the producers hoped) the success of The Quiet Man, in a trio of films inspired by similarly ‘authentic Irish’ material: a rebel Civil War story, The Rising of the Moon, based on a play by Lady Gregory; a pastoral tragedy about an old Galway poteen maker from a story by Frank O’Connor, The Majesty of the Law; and a farce based on Percy French’s famous narrow-gauge West Clare Railway, A Minute’s Wait.

  I went round to the mews next Saturday morning only to find a dozen other hopefuls hanging round the back door that led into the production office. The door was locked and repeated knockings led to nothing. I left, until the crowd had disappeared, then returned, shinned up the wall, dropped into the yard and was in the production office. Two or three small smart men in blue suits and rimless specs were barking down the telephone to London and Hollywood. They paused in their machinations, surprised.

  ‘I’m Joe Hone,’ I said. ‘Lord Killanin sent me. He said if I saw the production manager he might have something on the technical side for me on this film.’ Brows beetled. Silence. ‘I’m Teddy Joseph, the production manager,’ the smallest of the three men finally spoke up acidly. ‘How did you get in here?’ ‘The door was locked, so I shinned up the wall.’ Silence again. I supposed this athleticism may have impressed them, showed a proper initiative. ‘All right, we do have a job as it happens,’ Teddy Joseph said. Within minutes I was offered the post of third assistant director to the Master at a salary of ten pounds a week plus overtime. I had literally broken into movies. Ten days later, the term at Drogheda Grammar having ended, I was with the rest of the unit on the train to Galway.

  At this time in the mid-fifties John Ford seemed to have been in pictures forever. His first big film, The Iron Horse, he’d made in the mid-twenties, but for ten years before that, with his brother, he’d turned out innumerable two-reelers: Westerns and other frontier films. He was contemporary with all the early greats – D.W. Griffith, Chaplin, Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford – and his later movies, Stagecoach particularly, were generally considered among the most notable the cinema had produced. John Ford was a legend.

  But in Ireland, as a result of The Quiet Man and his Galway ancestry, he was a living God. Ford was deeply if sentimentally fond of Ireland. His ancestors had been famine exiles and, understandably, he regarded Ireland as his own lost estate, feeling its history of British oppression, poverty and suffering as a personal affront that he was duty-bound to commemorate in his work whenever possible – particularly in his Irish films. In the land of his fathers, even more than in Hollywood, he was a man not to be crossed, I was warned; being an Irish Protestant – the faith of the oppressor – I should best keep out of his way. This advice seemed incompatible with my job as one of Ford’s assistants, which at that point I naively saw as a business of my looking through the camera and discussing the merits of the view with Ford. I soon learnt otherwise: I was to be the dogsbody of the unit, there to keep the rubbernecks at bay and get the boss a cup of coffee.

  The first location on the O’Connor story, The Majesty of the Law, was in and around a little thatched cottage near Oughterard in the middle of Galway – a wild and beautiful landscape. We were up early on the first day’s shooting: a lovely blue morning in April, the small hills a patchw
ork of various greens, the skies away to the west moist with running clouds. The light was peculiarly intense, yet varied, such as one only gets on Atlantic coasts, coming and going in brilliant spurts of colour and sudden shadow. John Ford arrived later at the head of a big cavalcade of American cars, completely the star of the show, stepping into what might have been a stage set for his Irish vision – the lone traditional turf-cutter’s whitewashed cottage, the green hills of Ireland. Off we went, with Bob Krasker, the Australian cameraman who had photographed The Third Man, lining up the first shots with the boss instead of me. All the same, there was no doubt about it, I was in the picture business now. And in at the top with the great John Ford.

  So why this long urge to get behind the silver screen? It had started at school when I was ten or eleven, at the Sandford cinema where we boarders were allowed to go to the first house on Saturday nights, but only with Dudgeon’s approval of the show and if our conduct during the week had merited this glittering reward. This last proviso explained my somewhat curtailed attendance. All the same I managed to chalk up quite a score of films at the Sandford, different from the weekly Western or gangster movies – films that appealed to me in some deeper way: Johnny McQueen’s two-day-long pursuit, betrayal and inevitable death in Odd Man Out, Harry Lime’s similar nemesis in The Third Man, the doomed nature of happiness in Brief Encounter. These themes of trust and consequent disaster at the hands of a vindictive or uncomprehending world seemed very relevant to my own family and school circumstances. I fell in love with heroic failure. I came to believe that Martins should never have killed his best friend Harry Lime in the Vienna sewers, and that the girl gives him all he deserves by walking past him in that last long shot in the municipal cemetery about which Graham Greene had such doubts and Carol Reed was so sure of.