Wicked Little Joe

by Joseph Hone

  But in 1958 Antony tried to come to terms with his abandonment and perhaps set his disquiet at some rest. He had known about his twin Camillus and feeling, understandably, that he’d like to meet him, that this might help him find some anchor in his life, had found out where Camillus and Pamela lived in Chelsea and had turned up on their doorstep, announcing to Camillus, who opened the door, ‘I’m your twin brother.’

  Sensation! Camillus had no idea he had a twin brother. Pamela had never told him. Indeed she had originally told Camillus nothing of his real family, saying that his father had been a colonial sugar planter who had died of a fever. In fact Pamela was thinking of her own father here, who had been a sugar planter in Australia and had then been a bank manager up-country before being demoted to a clerk in another bank. Mr Banks in Mary Poppins is surely an idealized version of her father, a longed-for conventional paterfamilias since, in reality, her father had died suddenly when she was seven, after a long association with the bottle. Mary Poppins didn’t so much come down to earth beneath a parrot-headed umbrella, but as an improving fiction straight out of her own disrupted childhood.

  And Pamela’s fictional gifts encouraged her to invent in reality, so that Camillus only discovered who he really was in his early teens, when he had found his old ration book in a drawer with the name HONE–TRAVERS on it. Who was the Hone?

  When he met his twin Antony, the plot thickened, or rather liquefied, for the two of them at once set out on the town, for some days, around the Chelsea pubs. Pamela was not amused. She had had difficulties enough already with Camillus, largely no doubt consequent on her inventing a father for him and not telling him who he really was. To have told the truth might have made things easier for both of them.

  The truth, however, never had a very firm root in Pamela’s nature. As with Tony Guthrie letting drama leak into his real life over Annaghmakerrig, Pamela had let fantasy flood into hers and, like Tony, she had some very good reasons. Pamela, first and foremost, was a fairytale storyteller, a fantasist to the tip of Mary Poppins’s parrot-headed umbrella. Like her creation, Pamela’s imagination took her on fabulous aerial journeys, to the stars and down over London town, landing with her cornucopia of a carpet bag to look after the eager but unsettled Banks children. Like Carroll with Alice and Barrie with Peter Pan, Pamela found herself in possession of a universal figure, a magic nanny who has roused the wonder and delight of generations of children. The problem was that Pamela had not the nannying and mothering skills of her creation. Rather the opposite. She had her cake with Mary Poppins and wanted to eat it – with Camillus. As a letter from her to Hubert in January 1959 shows, her life with Camillus was no fairy-tale.

  My dear Hubert,

  I brooded long on your letter and was indeed grateful for all the details. And today came Joe’s letter, which pleased me very much for it was so mannerly and manly. At first I want to say that I think Camillus’s problems are far and away more serious than those you tell me as regards the others, for in addition to all the boasting, ‘plushiness’ you speak of in Joe, C (at times) has a complete disbelief … in everything …

  His present attitude towards the world is one of cynicism – taken up in order that the world might reject him and therefore give him the opportunity of wholeheartedly rejecting it … Today I have been in bed, tired and not well and he came in and talked – I am the only person he really opens up to and then it is to pour out all his negative stuff. This is part of his cruelty, but I feel I must bear it with him for it is backed with unhappiness. He said ‘The best thing you could have done was to write to m’tutor and say you were not prepared to pay any more fees and then I needn’t go back to Oxford.’ I protested that it was not right for me to do that – that he was again leaning on me to live his life for him, that if he really wished that he himself must write. But he would not face that. And went on to ask what was the use of it, he wasn’t interested in life there, what indeed was the use of anything, life had no meaning, etc., etc.

  I spoke of National Service and he said that although the ten weeks square bashing might be hard – after that he would probably like it. ‘Why hard? You know I live in myself, nothing touches me, what does it matter if it is hard? I wouldn’t notice it!’ Etc. etc. I put up the constructive thing and he cleverly demolishes it. But he knows that in hurting me he is really hurting himself and so do I, and I suffer for him …

  My heart aches over him … I read him large chunks of your letter, also Joe’s. He said he was quite willing to meet the others … And there is something else that must be clear to all the children – C. is legally adopted. This, unlike marriage, is something that cannot be undone … It will be clear to the others that he is my son. C gets very annoyed if anybody speaks to him of me as ‘Pamela’ instead of ‘your mother’. Somewhere he values this. He says again and again to me ‘Well, I’m your son and you’ve got to bear with it!’ and he knows I do not want anything else.

  He, as well as I, didn’t think highly of Antony’s behaviour last year … I will write to Joe and ask him to come and see me. In any case I would much like to meet him, especially if he wants to be a writer … As to the suggestion that C should see Nat, he was not enthusiastic … Biddy would be the worst shock, I think, for C loves children and home and homey things and is always appalled at people hurting children. But Biddy will lie herself out of it all …

  Another problem – the three that came after him. He knows about them but I do not know if the others do and they are bound to find out. Indeed, probably best, for then they will not wonder why only C was adopted, though in fact they have all been cast out and I don’t want C to feel alone in it … He will not share himself, nor make a real relationship anywhere … and I put this down to his parents’ early rejection, which I have worked for nearly 20 years to make up to him. What he suffers, I suffer double … I think he has the stuff in him, but not the application. If he could only find something that seemed to him worthwhile. Till recently, it was money, but that seems to be waning … He has a £150 a year allowance, which must cover clothes, or some of them, but he goes about with holes in his shoes and uncut hair … At the moment I am letting it be so, in the hope that he will learn. I have run to his assistance too often. He must feel what it is like not to have me do so.

  So, no more … The waste appals me, so much energy expended on nothing. If only he would offer me more constructive thought I would feel less dammed up, physically and mentally. But perhaps it will pass. So many parents I know are anxious. Thank you again for writing to me so well and frankly. Love to you both and I’ll write to Joe tomorrow.

  Pamela.

  A heartrending letter. One can see how Pamela didn’t lack the motherly impulse. Just the opposite. It was so strong in her that she foolishly adopted Camillus against the firm advice of her closest friends, as Valerie Lawson recounts in her fine biography. Her friends well knew that Pamela didn’t have the happy nappy nursery temperament for motherhood. That was no fault of Pamela’s. The fault lay in her believing she had the mothering temperament and going ahead regardless. But then she had originally been an actress in Australia and was a highly imaginative writer. So it was understandable that, without a secure family background of her own, husbandless and loverless, she should invent a real family, as she had the fictional Banks family – a father for Camillus, an imagined husband and motherhood for herself. And if not actual motherhood, then she would be the magic nanny herself. If she had invented Mary Poppins, then she could be Mary Poppins. Why not? The victim in all this was Camillus. He wasn’t a character in a fairy-tale.

  On the other hand, had she not adopted Camillus he would likely have been sent off to the crowded, impoverished cottage in south Kilkenny with the other two, Geraldine and Antony. Would he have fared better there? Perhaps at least he would have known who his real parents and family were; Pamela’s not talking about this surely created a large part of his subsequent problems. Perhaps not. Pamela, with her undivided attention, love, patience
, her imaginative responses to his problems, and her money, gave Camillus many practical and priceless things that he would never have had from the Hone family.

  In any case Pamela was not to be denied in adopting Camillus. Despite her fantasy life and her mysticism among the stars and with Indian and other gurus, there was another side to her: Pamela was a steely, very controlling person. She got what she wanted.

  It’s interesting, too, how she says in the letter that Camillus’s meeting Biddy would be ‘the worst shock’, and that Biddy would ‘lie her way out of it all …’ Presumably Pamela means that Biddy would pretend that she had nothing to do with abandoning us, that it was all Nat’s doing.

  I did go and see Pamela in her Chelsea house, and stayed there, the idea being that, in meeting me, Camillus would steady himself. I don’t know that he did, or that I helped him any, for I saw very little of him in the two or three weeks I spent there up in a top bedroom. I was out in the day – that was my Harrods second-hand book department job – and he was out at night, on the town or in one or other of the private houses in Mayfair that catered for gambling then. I remember thinking, when I did see him, that he was very sophisticated, assured and intelligent, more so than me. And richer. Apart from his hundred-and-fifty-pound allowance he seemed to make quite a success of his gambling. I remember in the small hours one morning hearing a to-do in the hall. Looking down the stairwell I could just see the two of them, Camillus gesticulating, then saying to Pamela, ‘You think I don’t earn any money!’ and then his throwing a snowfall of those old white five-pound notes up in the air.

  On an evening, in the hope that Camillus would join us, Pamela and I sat in her first-floor drawing-room chatting rather warily, over drinks that she equally warily mixed from a cupboard on the landing: fifty-fifty, sweet and dry vermouth. Pamela was fluffy, grey-haired, laden with gold bangles and a lovely jade necklace – small and fragile, but very keen-eyed. She was a tough one. She was an artist. And she had the application. She lived to be ninety-six and left well over two million pounds.

  I met her once more by chance, twenty years later, when we were both asked to the Kilkenny Arts Festival to speak in Kilkenny Castle; me about one of my novels, she to entertain a group of children about fairy tales and Mary Poppins, simultaneously so that neither of us heard the other talk. Needless to say she had an audience of hundreds and I about twenty. She gave me a lift back to Dublin in a huge limo that her publishers had laid on for her and, on parting at the Shelbourne Hotel where she was staying, I signed my novel for her on the roof of the limo: ‘For Pamela, with love.’ Looking at the inscription, then across at me, she said briskly, ‘Love? You should never write that to someone unless you mean it.’ Of course she was right. I didn’t love her. But I learnt that from her – I never wrote the word ‘love’ again in any book dedication unless I meant it.

  There is a final coda to my connection, or rather non-connection, with Pamela. Years on, when threatened with foreclosure on our cottage mortgage, which meant all of us would have been evicted from the place, I wrote to Pamela asking for a loan, two or three thousand pounds, which I would make a legal agreement to repay from my next royalties or from an advance payment on my next book. There was no reply, not a murmur, not even an old white five-pound note. As it turned out the day – and the cottage – was saved. Jacky rustled up some money of her own, and I had a good advance for my next novel from Sinclair-Stevenson and Pan Books. She was a tough one all right, that little old lady of Cherry Tree Lane.

  Finally there are siblings to account for: Sheelagh and her twin Michael – born in Oxford in July 1941 (Michael died eighteen months later), and the last one, Patrick, born in February 1944, though I didn’t learn of any of these names and dates until long afterwards. The story of these three is the toughest part of the Nat and Biddy story, and the most perplexing. First of all, as a child, I didn’t know I had these two younger siblings, let alone three. They had never been mentioned, by my real parents, grandparents or the Butlers. They had been erased from the record. Until one morning in the summer of 1966, in my BBC office, I had a phone call. ‘Hello, is that Joe Hone?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Hello! I’m Sheelagh, your sister.’

  A north country accent. I thought someone was playing a joke on me. But it was true. Sheelagh lived in Cheshire, she said, and would like to meet me. We made a lunch date at the BBC for the following week. I waited for her in the foyer of Broadcasting House, rather on tenterhooks. Eventually a tall, blonde young woman in a white summery dress and high heels came in, startlingly attractive, looking very like the movie star Kim Novak. All eyes followed her to the reception desk. It must be Kim Novak, I thought, coming in for a movie interview. But it wasn’t. It was Sheelagh, for the receptionist pointed me out on the bench and she walked easily towards me, a fresh snowy dream of a woman, the never-known sister.

  We talked over lunch, and at least some of the ‘How on earth?’ questions were answered then. She, and Michael before he died, and later Patrick, had been brought up in what I gathered was something of a baby farm in Wilmslow, Cheshire, by a Mrs Trevor, always a ‘Mrs’, though Sheelagh had never known any man in the house. Sheelagh was twenty-four when I first met her, married with one child. Mrs Trevor had told her that she, Michael and Patrick had been adopted as babies from parents in the slums of Manchester. Sheelagh, in her teens, had come to feel there was something phoney about Mrs Trevor’s explanation of her background. Indeed, some months before she met me, this had been confirmed for her when, just like Camillus, she had found her old ration book in a drawer, with the name TREVOR–HONE on the cover. And, just like Camillus, she had asked her ‘mother’ who the Hone was. Mrs Trevor must have said that the Hones were the Manchester slum parents.

  Sheelagh wasn’t convinced; before this, she had overheard Mrs Trevor, with someone in the house, speaking of Ireland, and so she had the idea that there was something Irish about her. So she had rung directory enquiries from a friend’s house and asked for the names of any Hones in the Irish telephone directory. There were only three, my grandparents’ Dublin number, my uncle David’s and my cousin Oliver Hone’s. She picked Oliver and rang him up, speaking to his wife Muriel. Sheelagh asked if she might be part of the Dublin Hone family. ‘Oh,’ said Muriel, ‘yes, you must be. But you should contact your older brother, Joe Hone, at the BBC. He’ll tell you all about your family.’

  So she rang me, and, when she came down to London, she told me something of herself, as I did of myself, or as much as we had time for, since I was recording a programme that afternoon. Sheelagh came down again a few months later and stayed with Jacky and me for a night in our flat in Holborn. We all learnt some more but not much. It was a hurried visit, since we were preparing to leave for New York and the UN where I was to take up work as a producer in their radio and television department. We left early in 1967. I had Sheelagh’s address. We’d be in touch.

  When we came back from New York two years later I tried telephoning her. But Sheelagh had moved, I’d no idea where, and I lost touch with her for nearly forty years. It wasn’t until writing this memoir in the summer of 2006 that I tried to get in touch with her again. So I wrote to my brother Antony’s ex-wife, the actress Frances White, and struck lucky. Frances did know about Sheelagh, but not of her whereabouts now. She told me that she’d become good friends with Sheelagh ten years before, after her marriage with Antony had dissolved, though they hadn’t been in touch for three or four years, not since Sheelagh had gone out to live in Spain. However, my writing to Frances prompted her to make enquiries, and within a week she came back to me saying she had traced her. Sheelagh had sold her house in Spain over a year before and had returned to England, and Frances had her new address and phone number for me. Sheelagh was living in the village of Lostock, outside Bolton in Lancashire. I phoned her. She was surprised, but calm.

  Apart from the north country tones, her voice had exactly the same timbre as my sister Geraldine’s. We made a date to meet and then I drove up to see h
er on a boiling July day. I surprised her at eleven o’clock. She was standing in the neat back garden of her new Barratt Homes maisonette, her skin bathed in golden light. She looked just like a taller version of Geraldine. Tousled blonde hair, bronzed, very trim in white tie-waisted cotton trousers and T-shirt, looking fifteen years younger than her sixty-five years. A dream again, such as I’d seen when I’d first met her in the foyer of Broadcasting House forty years before. An older Kim Novak? No, this was much better. This was my real sister, Sheelagh.

  It’s strange to look at a more-or-less complete stranger and know she is your sister. Absolute unreality, before she embraced me. Inside, in the neat living room, Sheelagh took up the talk at once, fluently, openly, as if we’d seen each other the week before and not forty years ago, talk of where and how she and I had been brought up, and what had happened to us later, talk way into the long hot afternoon.

  She told me much more of her own upbringing, first of all of Mrs Trevor: ‘a dog’ as she said of her, and a liar, who had died in her mid-forties, of a brain tumour. ‘In her mid-forties?’ I asked. ‘Surely she must have been older when she died? Mid-forties? That would have made her a teenager, when she took you over.’ ‘Yes, she was a teenager when she took me over. She was nineteen when I arrived on the scene.’

  I was astonished. So Nat and Biddy had given Sheelagh – and her twin Michael, since he must have been with her, though Sheelagh doesn’t remember him – to a teenager, and had followed them up by abandoning the last child Patrick to Mrs Trevor as well several years later: to some sort of baby farm run by a ‘dog’ and a liar.