Wicked Little Joe

by Joseph Hone

  There was much searching for answers as to what had gone wrong. Had Tony just been naive about local rural conditions? A dreamer among the raspberry canes and strawberry beds? Naive and theatrical, hoping to produce a local Carmen in a jam instead of a cigarette factory? Yes, in part. In fact the real reason for the collapse was simpler, and devastating for Tony. The local factory manager, in whom Tony had put all his trust and money, had had both hands in the till almost from the start of the enterprise. It was Tony’s discovery of this, and the exhaustion of his long months of lecturing in the States, which must have stopped his heart.

  This was not the only heartache for Tony and his relations. In his will he had left the house, with nearly all its contents, the lake and all the land to the steward, Seamus McGorman, in the innocent salt-of-the-earth belief that this local farmer who had worked the Annaghmakerrig estate for twenty years should therefore have the whole place on Tony’s death. This was a bombshell for Peggy and Hubert when they learnt of his extraordinary decision. Annaghmakerrig – family home of Peggy’s mother, Norah Power’s – had become Peggy’s family home after the death of her father Dr Guthrie in 1929, and the remaining three Guthries had moved there from Tunbridge Wells. Before that Annaghmakerrig had been Tony’s and Peggy’s holiday home, and so was filled for Peggy with indelible happy associations, and memories, of her mother, of her and Tony’s old and greatly loved nanny Becky (who still lived there way up until the 1960s), of the family servants, estate workers, neighbours, and of the lake, furniture and family portraits – all that gave heart to the beautiful place. Peggy loved Annaghmakerrig probably more than Tony did.

  I may be wrong, though. Tony had ambivalent feelings about Annaghmakerig. He loved it too, though there was a sadness in his love, evident in the interview I did with him up at the house for the BBC just two weeks before he died. I asked him what Annaghmakerrig meant to him:

  ‘We’re still here because we’re very fond of the place. It has all sorts of associations for us. And we like being here. And I think it important, if you can, to have associations with the locality, and if possible some kind of attachment to some part of the world that you regard as home. I think there’s a very great danger, in cities particularly and in the modern economy, of more and more people becoming virtually rootless. Whereas if you’ve been in a locality, as we have here, for quite a number of generations, you grow up with the neighbours. The old neighbours are now my contemporaries. I knew their parents, they knew mine. I know their children and their grandchildren.’ ‘You never felt of the place here as a burden then?’ ‘No, I’ve never felt that. I do find it expensive. But I’d rather be spending the money this way than going to the races.’ ‘Do you think that having this house in the background of your professional life – which of course has been led nearly always overseas – has this helped your professional life, in the sense that at the back of you there was this house?’ ‘Joe, I couldn’t answer that. I simply don’t know. It’s given me a feeling of continuity and that I’m working for something rather – as I think – more important than just getting on, or making money. If we had children it would be easy to understand, but since we haven’t and whatever has gone on here will end with us, well, then perhaps it is all rather sentimental and irrational.’

  The key words – ‘If we had children …’ then Tony would have surely loved the house without irrational sentimentality and of course would never have given the whole place over to the steward. But as things were and as he says, having clearly decided on this, it ‘will end with us’. It very nearly did.

  Since they had no children, Tony had years before offered the house to Julia, his niece. But he didn’t confirm this offer, knowing that Julia would inherit Maidenhall and would have enough on her hands looking after this other big house. All the Butlers then assumed that Tony, in time, would make a will allowing for some other sensible public use for the place after his death. Or if not, then, on the terms of Mrs Guthrie’s will, the house should be sold and the proceeds divided equally between Tony and Peggy. None of this was to be.

  The steward was to have it, lock, stock and barrel. And since he would be quite unable to keep up Annaghmakerrig, he would have the roof off in no time, to avoid paying rates. This whole business over the future of Annaghmakerrig created a breach and a great sadness between Tony and Peggy and Hubert.

  In the event, Hubert asked Julia – then married to Dick Crampton and living in New York – to talk to her godmother, Pamela (Mary Poppins) Travers. Pamela was then lecturing at a Radcliffe College in Boston. He suggested Julia and Tony (also in New York then) see Pamela in the hopes she might move Tony towards some sensible ideas about the future of the house. Tony agreed and he and Julia flew up to Boston for a meeting. Pamela told Tony at once that giving the whole place over to the steward was crazy. Instead, since she had experience of Yaddoo and several other artists’ colonies in America, she suggested that he turn Annaghmakerrig into an artists’ residence, first making the house at least over to the Irish State.

  Tony took this advice. Julia, particularly, did the leg work in gathering information and telling Tony how artists’ colonies were run in America, how the residents should at all meet informally at least once a day for an evening meal. So Tony changed his will at the last moment, and left the house (but none of the land which was still to go to the steward) to the Irish Minister of Finance as a residence for artists.

  Hubert writes to me in July 1971, some months after Tony’s death:

  My dear Joe

  Not much news from Annaghmakerrig. Judy has bronchitis but has guests … Peggy hates to talk of it all and so do I. We seem to have wasted much thought and even tears on it, not because we were greedy or litigious, but because AK is such a beautiful place where many were and still could be happy and it has been treated as though it was a theatrical prop made of cardboard. There has been an enormous amount in the press and on TV about the gift to the Minister of Finance, but I am dead certain that the Minister won’t accept it when in due course Judy dies and it becomes available. If Seamus has the garden and the lake and all those at AK merely have access, there will be no security against development … and I do not see how Seamus could farm it profitably, as it has never been self-supporting.

  Such muddle would seem to me inconceivable were it not for the jam factory’s collapse … its management has been incompetent beyond belief. Tony had been working himself to death for it, pouring money from these last lecture tours, and keeping it alive this way … It is horribly painful to write like this since Tony was a very old friend, my oldest, and a near genius. But he had a totally blind spot about Ireland, understood nothing whatever about it, and thought that the swift decisions, the rapid intuitions and ruthless judgement could work in Ireland as well as on the stage and could be compensation for the knowledge that long and often disillusioning co-habitation with one’s countrymen can bring …

  Surely Tony’s solicitors gave him appallingly bad advice or rather refrained from giving him good advice … They were all dazzled by Tony and hesitated to criticise him. What will happen after the Minister has refused it? It will go to Belfast University who, if they have any sense, will buy out Seamus and sell the place to Cyrus J Featherbaum of Minnesota …

  Love to you all, H.

  Hubert told me later that he thought Tony had simply had an Après-moi le déluge brainstorm about the whole business. But his remark that Tony had been treating Annaghmakerrig as a cardboard theatrical prop is equally true. Consciously or unconsciously I think Tony was directing The Guthrie Inheritance, his last great production. This might have been expected (though no less hurtful to his relatives), since theatrical drama had been at the heart of his life for fifty years. And drama for Tony always had to be unexpected, irreverent, a totally new slant on the text: umbrellas over Ophelia’s grave, an updated Troilus, set among the rival protagonists in a Ruritanian world of swirling dancers, gold-braided uniforms, Lehar and Old Vienna. His dealings over the future of
Annaghmakerrig, whether he knew it or not, fulfilled many of his theatrical precepts: ‘Discomfit the fuddy-duddies!’ ‘Set the cat among the pigeons!’ ‘Nothing boring!’ ‘Astonish us in the morning!’ as he told an actor who was being a bit dull about things in the afternoon. Well, astonish everybody he did in his will, not least the steward, who, I’m sure, couldn’t have believed his luck in inheriting five hundred acres.

  As things turned out the Minister of Finance did accept the house, and passed it on to the Irish and Northern Irish Arts Councils who have administered Annaghmakerrig successfully for the last twenty-five years as a residence for artists. The only problem was that all the land, the gardens and lawn, right up to the front doorstep, remained with the steward who thereafter had the Arts Councils over a barrel: the house was effectively inoperable without the grounds immediately surrounding it. As far as Seamus MacGorman was concerned it was pigs in the parlour – or get your cheque books out. The Arts Councils took the latter course, and vast sums of money had eventually to be paid to Seamus for the land – money which, of course, would have been far better spent nurturing budding artists. So in the end The Guthrie Inheritance was by far Tony’s most expensive production. But then, in his theatre work and in himself, he was always a man of the most expansive, unexpected and generous vision …

  I often stayed with Tony and Judy at Annaghmakerrig in my lean years in the late 1950s and early 1960s, working on scripts for Joe Losey and working for Tony too. He was a great admirer of Tarry Flynn, an early novel by the poet Patrick Kavanagh, set in Paddy’s homelands twenty-five miles east of Annaghmakerrig. We talked about filming it. ‘We’ll do it as a drama-documentary,’ he said. ‘With the local people there. And you’ll do a script.’ I did a draft treatment and he paid me fifty pounds.

  The film was never made. Staying with him a few months later I showed him another movie synopsis of mine, for a rather bigger movie – an epic indeed, Joseph and his Brothers, set among Irish emigrants in mid-nineteenth-century New York. This project took his fancy, as anything large scale and biblical usually did. ‘And I tell you what,’ he said with that sudden military twinkle in his eyes, ‘We’ll need to raise quite a bit of cash for this one – so we’ll get Richard Burton to play Joseph.’ ‘But I thought you didn’t care for working with big movie stars, Tony?’ ‘Oh, in this case we’ll make an exception. Besides, Burton used to be a fine stage actor.’ He paid me another fifty pounds and I started work on a final script. This film was never made either. No matter. It was Tony’s gesture – and the money – that mattered to me then, and he knew that. Tony was the great bohemian. He knew all the risks for anyone taking up work in the precarious world of theatre and movies, he saw that I was eager to take these risks, and he encouraged me, as Joe Losey was doing. They encouraged me again, in 1962, when they acted as referees when I applied for a job as a talks producer in BBC radio. I gave them both credit for the success of my application over some hundreds of other applicants as I heard later.

  Given all that had happened between Tony and Peggy, from great love to appalled dismay at his behaviour over the house, Tony’s funeral was going to be painful for Peggy. But she had to go. Hubert stayed behind, possibly because the whole Annaghmakerrig business had soured things so much for him with Tony. So Peggy and I drove up from Kilkenny to the house, then crawled along behind Judy’s car for the long slow two miles to the isolated hilltop church, with its circling beech trees budding in the spring wind. There were crowds in the porch and outside right onto the road. Inside, the roof was raised: ‘Abide With Me’, ‘Onwards Christian Soldiers’. Tony loved these old, tub-thumping Victorian hymns – the organ bellowing out evangelical tunes that I had sung with him and the family years before in the same church. This was his final curtain, and he might have been producing the show himself, like the last night of the Proms. ‘Rise above!’ ‘On, on!’ Indeed the service was so much him, so much was his presence felt, that, turning and looking along the Guthrie pew, I was surprised to see he wasn’t there.

  Judy hung on, ill and depressed, for only another year at Annaghmakerrig before she died. She was lost without Tony, as my mother was lost without Nat, whose death I’ve described earlier, but a native Irish toughness allowed Biddy to survive Nat by four years.

  In the early sixties Biddy had left Cheltenham and gone to live with a younger sister, married to an older man, a solicitor, I think, in a lace-curtained suburban house in Chippenham, Wiltshire, where I went to see her several times. She was vague and restless, these were not quite her sort of people though they were looking after her with kindness, if not with any great sympathy. She was not their sort of person. Biddy became ill and a few months later she was admitted to Bath General Hospital where she died within a week, in the summer of 1963, of womb cancer. I heard of her death from her sister. I didn’t go to her funeral. Why didn’t I? I think it was a feeling that I didn’t want to pay final tribute to a mother who, very good and loving as she was in other ways, had never been a mother to me.

  Before her move to Chippenham I had gone down to see her quite often in Cheltenham while she was still working for Walker Crossweller as a filing clerk at eleven pounds a week. She was living alone in a damp dark basement flat in Wellington Square, where I camped for the night on the sofa. We went out, together, to a Chinese restaurant nearby or with some of her old friends still in the town, to Peter’s Bar and the Restoration Inn. She was cheerful then, but I found empty half bottles of gin and cider flagons beneath the kitchen sink, which explained why: she drugged herself at nights and at weekends. And there were fresh bottles and flagons that she had bought for us both of us when I arrived so in the evenings we didn’t have to talk of things that were painful. The fact, for example, that she and Nat had abandoned seven children, one after the other, more or less every year from 1937 to 1944.

  Biddy had wanted to be buried with Nat, in Dublin. So I arranged for her to be flown over to Dublin, where she had her wish at Deansgrange cemetery. ‘In death they were not divided.’ Though poetic biblical phrases are hardly appropriate. Hers had been an unhappy life, redeemed only by her love for an impossible man. But does such love redeem us? Or demean us? Put it another way – my mother accepted her fate with Nat, as we seven abandoned children were left to accept ours with strangers.

  So what of my other six brothers and sisters, Geraldine, Antony, Camillus, Sheelagh, Michael and Patrick? I was brought up as a Protestant, on my father’s side of the Dublin Hone family, while Geraldine and Antony, who came after me, were brought up by Biddy’s parents, the Catholic Anthonys, in their small cottage in Piltown, south Kilkenny. Though our grandmother, Mrs Anthony, was a kind, caring and good woman, they both had a much rougher time than I did, in fairly impoverished rural circumstances, going to the local Catholic national school, short of clothes and shoes and with several other aunts and uncles living there and further relations crowding in and out – so that the two of them were pretty well waifs by the fireside.

  However, being Catholic rather saved Geraldine and Antony some years later. Our rich Hone cousin, Evie Hone, the famous stained-glass artist who had created the new east window at Eton College chapel, and who had become a Catholic convert in the 1920s, heard of their plight and arranged to pay for their education and holiday board, via a handsome sum administered by the archbishop of Dublin, Dr McQuaid. So they both went to the best Dublin Catholic boarding schools and afterwards to University College, where they took good degrees, in English and Economics. Evie also left them six thousand pounds each to see them on their way in the world. Geraldine made good use of the money when she married a fellow student, Brian McSwiney, who had done very well with a law degree. They bought a house in Dublin with her money, which laid a good foundation for them and their two children, Myles and Morgan. The marriage came apart later and Geraldine afterwards worked in the art world, for Christies in Dublin and latterly as the successful painter that she remains today.

  Antony on the other hand sadly let the mon
ey go to his head, literally, with an attachment to the bottle. He married, in England, the actress Frances White, with whom he had a bright daughter, Katherine, who, like Nat and Camillus, went to New College, Oxford. Unlike both of them she graduated with honours in Maths and is now a professor of the subject at Brunel University. However, after Antony’s marriage broke up he apparently slid downhill. He had literary gifts and worked on these sporadically, but without publishing success, so that he took to odd jobs, worked as a milkman for a time, I heard, and afterwards for an insurance company in Surrey. He was chesty and never very strong. He was the twin of Camillus, whom the unmarried, childless Pamela Travers had adopted in Dublin in 1940. Biddy had landed the two babies on my grandfather in Killiney a month or so before Pamela arrived on the scene, and Old Joe, anxious to get rid of the squirming bundles as soon as possible, had said to her, ‘Take two, they’re small.’ She didn’t. She took the stronger-looking one, Camillus, who wasn’t crying when she saw them first. But she also chose Camillus on the advice of an astrologer in California who, having pondered the twins’ birthsigns and timings, firmly recommended she take Camillus and not Antony.

  Antony died in 2005, of pneumonia and cancer in a Surrey hospital. His was the saddest of all my siblings’ lives, I think. One reason for this was that, more than Geraldine and I, he was deeply unsettled by the abandonment by his real parents and by the discovery, when it came, that Pamela had chosen his twin over him. Antony, with this ache in his heart, was unable ever to get to grips with his life and to make something of it. He reminded me of Stephen Dedalus in Joyce’s Ulysses, the ever-wandering poet in search of a father. He was a real victim of Nat and Biddy’s fecklessness.