I Read the News Today, Oh Boy

by Paul Howard

  ‘There weren’t terribly many cars on the road in Ireland at that point,’ remembered Neale. ‘There were a few parents who had Ford Anglias and that kind of thing. But then, solemnly, every morning, this incredibly expensive Rolls Royce would come up the avenue, driven by a chauffeur. And then – it was like seeing Lady Penelope arrive in Thunderbirds – sitting on the back seat, there was this very small boy with a big mop of blond hair and a cap that was two sizes too big for him, propped up on his ears. And when school was over, the car would be back again and he’d disappear.’

  Tara had barely opened a textbook in his ten years. But he’d learned enough at Port Regis to know that he never wanted to see the inside of a classroom again. Persuading him into the car each morning usually involved some kind of fight, filled with expletives. ‘He told me that he never, ever wanted to go to school,’ recalled his wife, Nicki, ‘and that every morning was the same. The driver at Luggala was called Hamilton. He used to throw him, kicking and swearing, into the car without his clothes on and Tara had to dress in the back of the car on the way to school.’

  Not surprisingly, the little boy with the blond, Prince Valiant haircut and the air of a young royal was a figure of fascination for his fellow students. The Guinness family’s wealth and louche reputation went before him.

  ‘We knew that when he left school, it was to go back to this fairyland castle,’ said Neale. ‘They were living in a world divorced from everyone else. You know, you’d come around the lake and you’d look down at this house and it was like where Snow White lived. And, of course, there were the stories about what they got up to in there. The parties and all that. That was 1950s Ireland, remember. Half the stories were probably made up. But it was still another world.’

  Michael Steen, another pupil who attended St Stephen’s at the same time, remembered being invited to fancy-dress parties at Luggala. ‘The invitation would arrive and there would be a coronet on the envelope,’ he said. ‘I had a sense, even at that age, that they were fancier than us. I remember I dressed up as a jockey and I felt like a fish out of water. Everyone else seemed to be in velvet. They were a curious, effete lot, really – unconventional even by bourgeois standards.

  ‘I had my first glass of wine at Luggala at the age of maybe ten or eleven. I wasn’t expecting it. I was having lunch in the dining room. The butler asked if I wanted some of this stuff out of a carafe. I thought it was raspberry juice until I had a gulp of it. It wouldn’t have happened anywhere else. They just lived by different standards.’

  Physically, Tara stood out, too. ‘He looked like a boy soprano, or a cherub,’ said Gordon Ledbetter, who was probably his closest friend during his time at St Stephen’s. ‘Although he didn’t fight like a cherub. I remember having a wrestling match with him once – at least I remember the suffocation I almost suffered. But he was very blond. He had a very straight fringe and his hair was fairly thick at the back. I remember that Brodie, the headmaster, never approved of anyone having hair like that at the back, but he was prepared to overlook it in his case, given who he was.’

  Towards the end of his first summer term at St Stephen’s, Tara entered the school’s annual poetry competition – the Kolkhorst Poetry Prize – with an eight-line verse called ‘The Old Stage Coach’, inspired by a ghost story about a headless coachman that he liked to tell Lucy Hill.

  When on the spooky stage coach road,

  The stage coach used to go.

  The bandits used to hold it up

  And blood it used to flow.

  But now the coach is very old,

  The roof has fallen in.

  The floor is beginning to mould.

  And the doors are in the bin.

  The poem failed to win. But the 1955 school annual reported that it was one of two entries to receive a commendation from the competition’s judge, the poet John Betjeman, who was an old friend of both Reverend Brodie, from their time at Oxford, and of Oonagh, from their days as Bright Young People on the London social scene.

  Tara’s unconventional background kept him at a slight remove from the rest of his classmates, according to Neale Webb. But he also had a deadpan, aristocratic wit that he’d probably picked up in his mother’s drawing room. ‘I remember once I told him that I’d climbed Djouce Mountain the previous weekend. I didn’t realize that the Guinness family actually owned part of it. Tara was only ten but he had this wonderfully dry sense of humour. He said to me, “Trespassers will be prosecuted!”’

  •

  The Christmas of 1955 was a happy one for Oonagh and her family. Tara made his stage debut in the school production of Emil and the Detectives, playing the role of a child detective, while Robert Kee was celebrating the success of his new book, A Sign of the Times, a darkly comic, post-apocalyptic novel that was widely praised by the literary critics. Oonagh lovingly pasted many of his rave reviews into her photo album.

  The festive season at Luggala was made even more memorable by the presence of Brendan Behan and his new wife, Beatrice, at the dinner table. The couple were enjoying their first and – as it turned out – final days of happily married life together, before Brendan became a famous celebrity in America the following year. At Luggala that Christmas, there were signs that his drinking was already out of control. One night, he was wandering around the narrow first-floor landing of the house, singing ‘Adeste Fideles’, when he fell head-first over a bannister and down the short curving stairwell that led to the servants’ quarters. Cis Leonard and Maura Byrne, two housemaids, discovered him there, but they couldn’t open the door fully because his legs were wedged against it and he was too drunk to be woken. ‘We had to reach him from the other side of the house,’ Maura remembered. ‘It took the butler and a footman to lift him out.’

  The following day, the Behans were driven back to Dublin in Oonagh’s chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce. Oonagh wasn’t the type to judge. But Brendan, who had badly gashed his forehead in the fall, was embarrassed by his behaviour in front of Tara and Garech, as well as Caroline, Lucian and the rest of the Luggala set. A few days later, he composed a short verse called ‘Beannacht an Nua-bhlian’, or ‘New Year Greeting’, namechecking Tara, Garech and Oonagh, which he sent to the house by way of apology.

  It seemed there was rarely a dull day in the Luggala of Tara’s childhood. A few weeks later, towards the end of January 1956, his half-brother, Gay Kindersley, arrived at the house one night, having eloped with his fiancée, Magsie Wakefield. The couple had met six months earlier, in the south of France, aboard the yacht of a mutual friend. At the time, Gay was making a name for himself as a horse trainer and amateur jockey, having used his Guinness inheritance to purchase an 85-acre farm near Dorking in Surrey, as well as Priam Lodge, a training establishment not far from Epsom. He was preparing to ride his horse, Sandymount, in the 1956 Grand National at Aintree when, on a whim, he asked Magsie to marry him at Kempton Park that January.

  But his family – or at least his father’s side – were far from thrilled by the news. Philip disapproved of the match, as did Gay’s stepmother, Valsie. Gay’s fiancée was the daughter of a jobbing character actor named Hugh Wakefield and the family were – much to the horror of the Kindersleys – members of the aspirant middle class.

  The trouble came to the boil a week after Gay and Magsie announced their engagement, when they invited their two sets of in-laws for Sunday lunch. ‘I was discussing hunting,’ Gay recalled. ‘My father, with utter disdain, said, “Do you actually hunt yourself, Mr Wakefield?” It was an extraordinary thing. Embarrassing. I just wanted to squirm under the table.’

  Over dessert, in front of the couple, Valsie told the Wakefields that she and her husband did not consider Magsie a suitable choice of wife for Gay. The following day, after drinking two bottles of wine with lunch at the Savoy, Gay and Magsie made up their minds to get married in defiance of Philip and Valsie’s wishes. And they decided to do it in the magical surroundings of Luggala. On 24 January 1956, on a night of heavy snowfall, th
ey flew to Ireland and into the welcoming embrace of Oonagh. She promised to help them make the wedding arrangements the following day, little knowing what the night had in store for them.

  Shortly after midnight, the house caught fire. The blaze started in Garech’s bedroom, probably due to faulty electrical wiring. The house staff roused Tara, Gay, Magsie, Oonagh and Robert from their beds and they managed to get outside. Very quickly, Luggala was engulfed in flames.

  Members of the family and house staff attempted to bring the fire under control against the incongruous background noise of champagne corks popping due to the heat in the cellar. Tara, Garech and Gay helped form a human chain to ferry buckets of water from a stream at the back of the house, while other servants risked their lives to carry paintings, furniture and other valuables out of the house and onto the front lawn. Patrick Cummins, the butler, braved suffocating smoke to rescue Philip de László’s portrait of Oonagh from the wall of the drawing room.

  Newspaper photographs showed the snow-covered lawn in front of Luggala strewn with treasures pulled from the house. ‘Her Ladyship,’ the Daily Mail reported, ‘with long blonde hair in a scarf, and a mink coat over her nightdress, sat on an old oak dining chair directing operations.’

  The fire brigade arrived on the scene too late to save the house. By the time the blaze was put out at ten o’clock in the morning, the main block of Luggala, containing the dining room, the drawing room and bedrooms – the very soul of Oonagh’s house – was completely destroyed. Her bohemian idyll, her hideaway in the Wicklow Mountains where she had retreated with her children after the failure of her second marriage, was now a smouldering ruin.

  There was still a wedding to organize. The entire party, their faces blackened with smoke, decamped to the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin, where, after making several phone calls, Gay discovered that quickie marriages weren’t possible under Irish law. Oonagh, perhaps enjoying some measure of revenge over Philip following the wartime custody case, took Gay and Magsie to Paris, where she was confident she could arrange matters quickly with the help of her friends in the British Embassy. That didn’t work out either, so they flew to London, where Gay and Magsie were eventually married at Caxton Hall, on a snowy day, in the company of Oonagh and two of her friends, as well as Tara and Garech, wearing matching grey duffle coats.

  The ceremony lasted eight minutes. There were no flowers, no photographs, and, according to the newspapers, no smiles. Philip knew nothing about the marriage of his eldest son until he was informed by a reporter from the Daily Express. ‘My son went to stay with his mother in Ireland at the beginning of the week,’ he told the newspaper, publicly admonishing Oonagh for her role in the intrigue. ‘I didn’t even know he was back in the country.’

  •

  It was decided that Tara should board at St Stephen’s while Luggala was being rebuilt. Oonagh went to live in Paris, although she returned regularly to see how the work was progressing. In a column for Tatler magazine, Lord Kilbracken recalled visiting his old friend in the spring of 1956, while construction was underway. Oonagh had taken Tara out of school for the day. Patrick Cummins, still immaculately turned out in a morning suit, informed the visitor: ‘They are at present taking tea in the cowshed.’

  For the first seven months of 1956, a communal dormitory at St Stephen’s became eleven-year-old Tara’s main home. It allowed his school friends to get to know him as something other than the pampered young prince who arrived in and out of their lives each day in the back of his mother’s Rolls Royce. Preternaturally precocious, with his mother’s disregard for social norms and taboos, he introduced some of his classmates to the pleasures of cigarettes.

  ‘I ended up smoking quite a lot,’ said Michael Steen. ‘We all did. We used to sit out on the window ledge, this line of little boys, with a twenty-foot drop to the ground below us, smoking Wills Woodbines. And it was Tara who supplied us with the cigarettes. He always seemed to have enormous amounts of money.’

  He liked to be the first to own the latest toy. It would remain an aspect of his personality right into adulthood. Some of his classmates remembered the state-of-the-art cine-camera with which he recorded the nightly hijinks in the first-floor dormitory.

  ‘Around the time that he boarded,’ said Michael, ‘discipline had started to break down in the school. We used to tiptoe downstairs at night – we could hear Brodie snoring – and we’d help ourselves to his food.’

  For Tara, it was perfectly normal. He’d never been told what time to go to bed and he was well used to helping himself from the fridge in the middle of the night.

  ‘He was a real ringleader,’ said Neale Webb. ‘You’d hear the stories about him being pretty wild – by the standards of the time, I suppose. I remember one fine moonlit night, Tara running around the school lawn in his pyjamas for a dare. He was fearless like that. Another time, he got hold of a ladder from somewhere and climbed up it and started banging on the windows of the first-floor dorms. And I remember we all had to sit through a lecture on discipline afterwards.’

  One day in the final weeks of the school term, with a certain inevitability, Tara walked out of St Stephen’s just as his brother had bolted from Bryanston. He made it as far as Bray, a seaside resort, some fourteen miles away, which had happy childhood associations for him. In the years before their parents divorced, it was where Dom occasionally brought Tara and Garech as a weekend treat, to enjoy McCarthy’s famous ice cream. For a boy of just eleven, it was no small achievement to get so far. Garech thinks it’s likely that Tara took his lead in phoning for a taxi. ‘He clearly learned the trick from me,’ he said, ‘because I was quite a bit older than he was when I discovered that you could actually escape these prisons.’

  The Gardai found Tara on the seafront and drove him back to school. But he didn’t return at the start of the following term and he wasn’t there in October that year, when one of his friends, Philip Brodie – the son of the headmaster – was killed while apparently playing with his father’s shotgun. The Reverend Brodie never recovered from the shock of his death. Seven years later, the school closed its doors for good.

  By the age of eleven, Tara was socially years ahead of his peers. Penny Cuthbertson, who would later marry Tara’s cousin, Desmond Guinness, recalled meeting him for the first time in the summer of 1956. ‘It was in a house called Cludy,’ she said, ‘which belonged to the Waddington family, on the River Boyne, just outside Drogheda. It was a kind of teenage party and Tara was by far the youngest there. I still have this memory of him, sitting on the stairs, looking incredibly sweet and announcing that he’d given up smoking – this is at age eleven – and that he’d given up drinking as well. I mean, talk about sophisticated. And there we all were, slightly older – thirteen or fourteen, most of us were – sitting on the stairs, looking at him with our mouths agape.’

  The work to rebuild Luggala continued throughout 1956 and into the spring of 1957. Once it was finished, Oonagh hired John Hill – the brother of the painter Derek Hill and the uncle of Tara’s childhood friend, Lucy – to decorate it. He chose to emphasize the house’s warm and romantic character, especially through the use of thick carpets and colourful wallpapers. The walls of Oonagh’s famous drawing room were covered with a distinctively patterned wallpaper called Gothic Lily, which was originally designed by Augustus Pugin in the nineteenth century for the Palace of Westminster, though Oonagh chose purple rather than the original blue colour to match the heather in the valley.

  The work was completed just over a year after the fire. In March 1957, around his twelfth birthday, Tara and his mother moved back into Luggala. But by then, much had changed. The house was the same, but Oonagh’s life was very different. Her relationship with Robert Kee had foundered during the year she spent exiled from her home. Within twelve months of returning to Luggala, lonely and all too aware of the fact that she was now in her middle years, she attempted to fill the void in her life by marrying a man she barely knew. In fact, as it later transpired,
she didn’t know him at all.

  For Tara, and for everybody else, the atmosphere around Oonaghland was about to change for the worse.

  4: THE TROUBLE WITH MIGUEL

  Tara was growing up fast – considerably faster than other children of his age. In March 1957, he turned twelve, but his exposure to the adult world had given him an emotional and intellectual maturity of a boy way beyond his years. Lucy Hill, who was still being flown from London to Ireland for weekend play dates at Luggala, recalled the precise moment when she felt their two young lives diverge: ‘He said to me one day, “Oh, your hair looks really pretty,” and I remember being surprised and having this sudden sense that he’d grown up and that this was something different to the innocent childhood friendship we’d had together.’

  Dressed in velvet suits, he suddenly seemed like a young adult to Lucy, rather than a child who was just comfortable around grown-ups. While other boys of his age and background were poring over their textbooks and preparing for public school, Tara was chaperoning his mother around the world, moving between Wicklow, London, Paris, New York, Venice and the south of France, absorbing lessons of a different kind.

  ‘He got a grasp on the world pretty quickly,’ she remembered. ‘But it caused a sadness in him, I think, not having the same boundaries that other children had. He had a sensitivity about him and what I came to recognize later as a sadness. He said to me once, while he was still quite young – I remember we were having a pillow fight at the time; it was in London – he said, “People only like me because of my money.” He said that to me several times, in fact. So he grew up with this sadness which not everyone would have noticed.’

  Dom still entertained the fantasy that Tara would one day attend Eton, just as he had done. But, at twelve years old, his youngest son had made up his mind that he was finished with school. Dom insisted that if this was the case, then he should have a full-time tutor. The gaps in Tara’s education would come to be filled by a young English writer with whom Oonagh formed a platonic friendship after her break-up with Robert Kee. His name was Derek Lindsay, although he was more popularly known by his undergraduate nickname of Deacon, because of the priestly solemnity of his manner.