Wicked Little Joe

by Joseph Hone

  There were still questions to be answered. First, how did Nat and Biddy meet the nineteen-year-old Mrs Trevor? There is no record of her in any of the Hone family letters, and Sheelagh doesn’t know. Oxford, where the twins were born, is a long way from Wilmslow, in Cheshire. But Sheelagh remembered one clue. She had heard, somehow, that Nat had had a job in a Manchester department store early in the war, presumably with Biddy and the twins there as well. Did they meet Mrs Trevor then? In a pub? And unloaded the twins on her? This is possible, since it ties in with Mrs Trevor telling Sheelagh that she’d been adopted from a Manchester slum family. Was this slum family Nat and Biddy and the twins, penniless and possibly living in slum conditions? If so this gives a Dickensian twist to the tale, knowing what the Manchester slums must have been like in the early 1940s. But then, if one adds to this the death of Sheelagh’s twin Michael, at eighteen months, we are moving into the rich melodrama of East Lynne, and the last despairing words there: ‘Dead! And … never called me mother.’

  But why and where did Michael die? And where is he buried? I suppose I could search through the Cheshire or Lancashire county records for a death certificate. But I don’t feel inclined. I do feel inclined to say that the fate of these three children, at the hands of Nat and Biddy, is one of the most heartless things I’ve ever heard of.

  Sheelagh had a child with her first husband, but they divorced and she remarried. She had three more children with her second husband before that marriage, too, ran out of steam. The man never paid for the family’s keep, and not a penny for Sheelagh. So she saved up ten pounds, hid the notes under the living-room carpet and left early one morning with the three children back up north, to her homelands around Wilmslow and Manchester. The children have all done well. Jonathan, her first born, is a solicitor, and married with children, in Devon. Sheelagh’s other three children, from her second marriage, have succeeded in their various ways, including her daughter Sally, a lovely girl whom I met later that day in Lostock, an IT consultant who lives just up the road from Sheelagh.

  Sheelagh, having bought the house near Málaga, lived there for two years, but missed her family and friends and came back to Lostock and the bijou residence, where I met her. Despite the obvious emotional pain and the other material difficulties consequent on Nat and Biddy’s abandoning her, Sheelagh is now a calm, balanced, beautiful woman.

  There is still Patrick to account for, the last of the children to have been given away by Nat and Biddy, in February 1944, two-and-a-half years after Sheelagh and Michael had been unloaded on Mrs Trevor. But Patrick got on better with Mrs Trevor than Sheelagh did. When Sheelagh married her first husband in her early twenties, Myles Martin, whose father ran a garage, Patrick became absorbed in motor cars; to such an extent that, though he’d done little work at school, he decided in his late teens that he wanted to be an engineer, sat four ‘A’ Levels in nine months, got into Leeds University and took a good engineering degree.

  In his early twenties, Patrick went to Norway on a holiday with three of his mates – flirting with delicious blonde girls no doubt. Patrick married one of them later, and went to live in Oslo and had children. Knowing of his Hone background by now, and hating everything he’d heard of it, he changed his name by deed poll to Trevor, with no Hone in it, wanting nothing to do with what he found out about his real family.

  Subsequently, with the oil-drilling boom of the 1970s and 1980s, Patrick travelled the world, from North-Sea oil rigs to Far-Eastern jungles, earning a lot of money. But his marriage failed and he lives alone now, Sheelagh told me, as something of a recluse on a Norwegian fjord, in a cliff house filled with good furniture, silk tapestries and fine Japanese paintings.

  I, and most of my brothers and sisters, have survived and done reasonably well in life. But we have not managed much emotional security, in ourselves or in our marriages. This can largely be laid at Nat and Biddy’s door. Larkin’s poem comes particularly to mind: it might have been written for me and my siblings: ‘They fuck you up, your Mum and Dad …’ Of course millions of other children, whole continents of them, have had far worse upbringings. The point is that, given our backgrounds, none of us should have had these painful starts and difficult lives.

  Are there any final conjectures I can make about our parents, which might explain why they abandoned all their seven children? Biddy came from a poor but loving Irish country cottage background. Her misfortune was that, like so many other young Irish women of similar background in those times (and later), she went to London in 1936 as a rural innocent, to train as a nurse; when she met Nat she was all too readily seduced by his good looks, charm and sophistication – and his money. Nat was clearly in charge at the beginning, and was a very different creature then; the confident but careless scion of a cultured and moneyed Dublin family. Naturally intelligent, he’d also had the best possible education, and when he was twenty-one a lot of money of his own, from his rich Hone cousin in Albany, Piccadilly. In short, Nat had every possible advantage. Except a crucial one: his parents, Old Joe and Vera, though with no lack of affection, concern and effort had, like many parents of that generation, no idea how to love him. Nat, wilful and spoilt, had not the temperament or good sense to settle for conventional parental affection. He needed a much fuller, unquestioned emotional connection.

  As a result he remained a spoilt child, searching for a love he felt he’d been denied, but which Biddy readily supplied, becoming his very willing lover and camp follower. Their relationship became make do, with no real foundations, and the situation collapsed when TB struck Nat down in 1939, and he realized he wasn’t going to be up to managing himself, let alone an increasing family. Minus half a lung, with the bacteria no doubt lurking in the other, he must have felt that death was waiting for him just round the corner, since there was no real cure for tuberculosis in those days.

  So he lost all sense of responsibility and felt he might as well fling the sexual dice about before he died, in a further careless legacy of three more children. He forgot any ideas of sensible survival: his only survival lay in Biddy – his attachment at all costs to a woman who he knew loved him unconditionally and would therefore cater for him financially, emotionally, and sexually. From this came the irresponsibility of having three more children they knew they couldn’t support. These children, like the earlier four, had to be thrown out as well. There was only room for one child in the family, and that was Nat.

  Biddy, though, must have been at fault as well. Where was her maternal instinct? Quite lost, I think, in thrall to Nat, for how else could she have continued to conceive children she knew would soon have to be abandoned? The whole business wasn’t about their not using contraceptives, or failing to keep to the monthly rhythm method of avoiding pregnancy. They could have used both methods. No, it was a total failure of conscience and imagination that set Nat and Biddy out on producing children they couldn’t support, and in their not seeing the sad and difficult futures to which they were condemning us all. On the other hand, would it have been better if none of us had been born? Hardly. For most of us existence of any sort is surely better than non-existence.

  For symmetry in this ending about my brothers and sisters, I considered visiting Patrick on his Norwegian fjord. But why extend the pain by reminding him again of the family unhappiness? Pain enough for him already. And for me as well. I’ve found something, in writing this last chapter and other parts of my story, in having to unearth and face the unhappy reality of what happened to us children. I’ve found something I’ve avoided facing in any detail all my life: the real pain of it all.

  Well, I’ve faced it now, and I don’t feel any the better for it. I wrote at the beginning of this memoir how, in my early seventies, I would surely be immune from any possible hurt I might suffer from unpleasant discoveries I might make in these letters, and through delving into my own past and that of my family. I was wrong. The wounds of my own abandonment, healed over happier years, have opened again. Though I acknowledge them now, they ar
e no easier to bear. Rather the opposite: I’ve come to realize the full sadness of it all, for me and my siblings – and that makes the wounds more painful. So Patrick meanwhile must remain the brother I have never met, in a real family I never had.

  Nearly every life, though, has its compensations, in the living and the luck of it, and I have had a great deal of both. There have been many happy things for me. So I’ll see if I can get hold of the last survivor of my minders and mentors on the phone now, Kingsley Scott. He has a flat in Marrakesh; but he should be back in Dublin for the summer. Meanwhile I’ll remember my fine fast schoolboy trips with him, winding up the Dublin mountains in his red MG, and our lamb chop and claret lunches in the Hibernian, and I will put on one of the Piaf tapes he gave me years ago, and smoke a Gitane.

  ALSO BY JOSEPH HONE

  FICTION

  The Private Sector

  The Sixth Directorate

  The Paris Trap

  The Flowers of the Forest

  The Valley of the Fox

  Summer Hill

  Return to Summer Hill

  Firesong

  TRAVEL

  The Dancing Waiters

  Gone Tomorrow

  Children of the Country: Coast to Coast Across Africa

  Duck Soup in the Black Sea

  Copyright

  First published 2009 by

  THE LILLIPUT PRESS

  62–63 Sitric Road, Arbour Hill Dublin 7, Ireland

  www.lilliputpress.ie

  Copyright © Joseph Hone, 2009

  ISBN 978 1 84351 147 2 (print)

  ISBN 978 1 84351 243 1 (ebook)

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the publisher.

  The author gratefully acknowledges his several residencies at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmakerrig whilst writing this memoir.

  The Lilliput Press receives financial assistance from An Chomhairle Ealaíon / The Arts Council of Ireland.

  A CIP record for this title is available from The British Library.

  Set in 11 pt on 16 pt Caslon by Marsha Swan