A Story Lately Told: Coming of Age in Ireland, London, and New York

by Huston, Anjelica

  CHAPTER 8

  Anjelica riding sidesaddle in the film Sinful Davey, 1968

  Tulara Castle, on the Shannon Road, was the home of the Hemphills. Their children, Angela and Charles, were our age and we went to each other’s birthday parties. Sometimes in the summer, Peter Patrick would take Betts and us out from Galway Bay on his yacht to Bird Island. We would bring a picnic basket from Mrs. Creagh filled with tuna and chicken and sardine and tomato sandwiches, cut in triangles on sliced white bread. We’d feed the crusts to the seagulls as we left the harbor. Even in the summer, the weather was patchy, and often there were huge green-gray swells where the sea opened out.

  Peter Patrick was always in good humor and was an excellent sailor. On Bird Island you could see the whole evolution of seals, gulls, and cormorants on a landmass, white with guano, from eggs to fledglings to the adults sitting on the eggs, and the occasional sacrifice—a mass of feathers on the black rocks covered with limpets and dark blue mussels turned brown from iodine and sun. We would clamber ashore for twenty minutes to be a part of the cacophony of bird life, but the scent of fish and bird droppings was intense, and it was hard to watch the desperate efforts these creatures made to exist. The cormorant hatchlings had necks like serpents and shrieked like the devil at the encroaching seals.

  The first time we were on the boat, the problem arose of how and when to use the bucket that served as our toilet. It was situated directly under a trapdoor in the hold and was a source of much teasing and amusement. I had no intention of using the thing, God forbid; I would hold everything in until I got home. On the way back, the worst happened, and I couldn’t restrain nature’s urgent call. I sat in my soiled jeans for the next two hours back to the harbor in the skiff, then a further hour in the car. I kept as silent as the grave. When we drove through the Little House gates, it was dark. I ran upstairs, got out of my filthy jeans, put them in a brown paper bag, ran down to the river, and threw the bag in, below the second waterfall downstream, as far as I could.

  • • •

  It was 1961. Dad was gone for a long time in Reno, Nevada, during production of The Misfits. I remember turning the pages in a portfolio of publicity shots for the movie, taken by the photographer Eve Arnold. The actress was white-blond, with an expression that changed from tears to laughter on each page. In some of the pictures, she was backlit, and you could see how her cheeks were dusted with down like a ripe peach. She was beautiful from every angle. Her name was Marilyn Monroe.

  When Dad finally came home, he went out hunting on Frisco, fell off going over a stone wall, and broke his leg. He was laid out on a stretcher on the floor of the study; they were taking him to the Carmelite hospital in Galway. Although he was joking, I sensed he was in pain. They had to reset his leg. Dad loved the nuns, and they loved him too, indulging him by allowing him to sneak an Irish whiskey at bedtimes.

  Billy Pearson, Dad’s sidekick and dedicated companion, came to visit at St. Clerans. He’d get up at the dinner table and gleefully recount his and Dad’s wild adventures, the stories becoming increasingly exaggerated. Like the story of the camel race they agreed to compete in on the streets of Virginia City, Nevada. Four riders were involved, but Dad had worked out a plan whereby he was sure he could win, having arranged to have his camel trained by being taken out to the starting line, then returned to the barn and fed, twice a day before the event.

  On the day of the race, Billy was dressed in jockey silks and Dad in jodhpurs; they arrived in an antique car after a champagne breakfast in Reno, and everyone in town was three sheets to the wind. Billy’s camel started off at an angle, scattering the crowd, jumped onto the bed of a pickup truck, cleared a Thunderbird, and finally, going full tilt, disappeared into Piper’s Opera House, with Billy hanging on for dear life. Dad’s camel ran swiftly to the barn without incident. After the race, when Dad was interviewed on the radio, he declared, “Billy Pearson is an obvious disgrace to the camel-riding profession. He rode over parked cars, widows, orphans. In fact, there are camel-stunned babies scattered all over these historic hillsides—it is a scene of carnage, owing to Pearson’s shocking disregard for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. He just doesn’t belong up there on the hump of a camel.”

  There was the account of their getting shot at in a helicopter exporting pre-Columbian art, the tales of how they loved to smoke and drink and bet on horses. There was the story of a confrontation with a bunch of Mexican soldiers in Rosarita Beach, when a general drew a .45 on Dad, who responded by putting his finger in the gun barrel. Naturally, Dad and the general wound up getting drunk and singing songs together.

  On another occasion, during the filming of The Unforgiven, Billy Pearson had gone down to the location, in Durango, Mexico, to visit Dad. A new luxury golf club was opening in town and a list of international golfing celebrities had flown in for the event. Billy and Dad conjured up a plan that was extravagant, even by their high standards. They went out and bought all the Ping-Pong balls they could find and inscribed them with horrible messages such as “Go home you Yankee bastards!” And “Fuck you dirty Mexican cabrones!” Then rented a small aircraft, and while play was in progress dropped more than two thousand Ping-Pong balls on the fairway. As they described it, the joke went off brilliantly. In Dad’s words, “A triumph. Nobody could locate a golf ball. The tournament was canceled and everyone was outraged, especially Burt Lancaster, who was one of the tournament sponsors and took his golf quite seriously.”

  And there was the story of Mum and Dad’s wedding night in La Paz. And how Billy and Dad had slept in a flophouse, having secured a room for my mother in a local hotel. I suspect gambling was involved.

  • • •

  A legendary hunt across Ireland and the British Isles, the Galway Blazers was renowned for the intrepid attitude of its ranks and for the stamina and beauty of the Irish thoroughbred horses. Tony, a courageous rider who stopped at nothing, having ridden a great hunt and been at the kill, was blooded on his first time out on the field at the age of thirteen—a ritual that involved having one’s face painted with the bloody brush of the recently dismembered fox. Having come home and gone for a nap, Tony awakened to find that the blood had dried and come off on his pillow, but after a minor breakdown, he repainted his cheeks with red Magic Marker, which lasted several days, because he refused to wash it off. I was blooded the following year on my first outing on Victoria, a liver chestnut Arab Connemara cross. Sometimes, if a stone wall was too high to clear, she’d jump on top of it and then off, like a rabbit, and her hooves were so light she wouldn’t even knock down a stone.

  There was a gray gelding that ran away with me on his first outing on the hunting field, sailing over a four-foot iron gate and taking off through a wood, jumping a high double stone wall before coming to a final stop, spread-eagled and trembling on the asphalt of an icy main road. Shivering, I dismounted and began the long cold hike to locate the horsebox. When we got back to St. Clerans, I was so stiff that Betts had to thaw me out in a steaming bathtub.

  Dad was avid on the hunting field. The stone walls were high and the hunting was hell-for-leather. Newly arrived from whatever distant location, without even a ride out to exercise, he would mount up on his horse Frisco, and they’d be off and away. Dad was joint-master of the Galway Blazers, and a benefactor of the hunt; on the field he wore a “Pink” coat. It was actually a red jacket, but the original hunt-tailor’s name had been Pink, so to call it a Pink jacket was part of the protocol. The Galway Blazers comprised some forty to fifty members, a broad scattering of local riders, Anglo-Irish aristocracy, and children of the hunt members. Every year, the day after Christmas, the meet would be held at St. Clerans.

  Margaret and Mary Bodkin, in their blue uniforms with starched organza aprons, served Mrs. Creagh’s hunting breakfast on old Sheffield platters—scrambled eggs on toast, fried mushrooms, black sausage, rashers, the ubiquitous Limerick ham. Creagh would fill the hunting flasks and stirrup cups with port and cherry brandy. T
he air was always crisp, the ground was hard, and the holly, thick with red berries, twinkled with frost on Boxing Day.

  The visiting horses snorted and pawed impatiently with their hooves inside the horseboxes before they were unloaded, some whinnying with excitement. Drop-ins from other hunts, or farmers with unshod horses, were out for the sport and nothing was getting in their way. Betts called them the Lions and Tigers, and they were a good reason not to get left behind—they’d ride right over you. This was exemplified for me one day when Victoria’s girth broke and I found myself under her, sidesaddle, at full gallop. Nobody paused to give me a hand. Dad thought women looked beautiful riding sidesaddle, but it’s risky and easy for a riding habit to get tangled, and potentially dangerous if a horse rolls. Though I hadn’t really had a formal sidesaddle education, I was a good rider and Dad knew that.

  The last vehicle to unload was that of the master of foxhounds, Paddy Pickersgill, transporting the pack from Craughwell. Paddy’s two whip-ins would mount up. It was their job to keep the hounds in loose but ready formation, as Paddy rode ahead sounding the horn to gather the pack and we, three or four abreast, paced our horses at a kennel jog toward the chosen bog or covert, pastures bordered by stone walls, streams, and brackish woodland.

  As the hunt members were posted around the circumference of an area generally several miles wide, Paddy would flush the hounds through. Followers of the hunt, in cars and vans, parked along the dirt roads, ready to yell if they spotted a fox. This was often not the case, but occasionally a shout would go up if one would break away running flat out for his life, a dash of red against the green, with a white tip on the end of his brush. I always wished he’d get away.

  Commander Bill King and Anita Leslie were the parents of our friends Tarka and Leonie. Bill was fine-boned, with keen blue eyes and the straight back of a natural athlete. Awarded seven medals during the war, including both the Distinguished Service Order and the Distinguished Service Cross in 1940, he sank six ships in the Skagerrak Strait, torpedoed a Japanese submarine with eighty-nine lives lost in the Strait of Malacca, and was the only person to command a British submarine on both the first and the last day of the Second World War.

  In 1948, one year after his retirement from the navy, he married Anita. She had become an ambulance driver in the French army and had been awarded the Croix de Guerre by Charles de Gaulle. Tall and reed-thin, she spoke in round tones, towering above her husband, with hooded eyes in a heart-shaped face. They bought Oranmore Castle, a fifteenth-century Norman keep close to Galway Bay, in 1946.

  Bill King was also an avid yachtsman. He attempted solo circumnavigation on three separate occasions, the first in 1968, when, at the age of fifty-eight, he became the oldest participant in the first organized round-the-world solo yacht race. On a plywood schooner he had named the Galway Blazer II, he capsized in fifty-foot waves off the coast of South Africa but attempted the journey again the following year. Bill triumphed in 1973, when he successfully completed a final effort to sail around the world.

  Derek and Pat Le Poer Trench lived at Woodlawn, an enormous, rambling house that looked like Thornfield Hall from Jane Eyre. Derek was the secretary of the hunt, an ex-guardsman, and it was he and Pat who had asked Mum down to Galway for the horse races when she had first spotted St. Clerans. Derek’s accent was so pronounced, so heightened British upper class, it was sometimes hard to understand. He and Pat often came over to dinner at St. Clerans, and he and Dad would play backgammon before and after dinner. Betts and I would laugh because after a few vodka and tonics, the hair at the back of Derek’s head would stand on end, and his accent would become more and more exaggerated, till it was almost a bark.

  Pat Trench was always very kind to me and invited me to stay at Woodlawn a few times. Woodlawn was freezing, even in summer. I’d turn to ice between my bath and getting dressed. When I went downstairs for dinner, wearing a full layer of woolen underclothing beneath my evening gown, my hand would shake so that the spoon would tap the inside of my soup bowl. A small two-bar electric heater hummed weakly in the otherwise empty fireplace, and on the second course of dinner, Derek would invariably pronounce the room too hot and move to turn off a rung, leaving one small glowing line of radiance in the otherwise frigid dining room. “A waste of electricity.” The sheets were cold and damp when I climbed into bed.

  Derek, like so many other Anglo-Irish aristocrats, was having a terrible time making ends meet. Eventually, he and Pat closed up the top two stories of Woodlawn and took to living downstairs in the kitchen and the living room. Soon they were reduced to living in a small loft above the stables, where a few hunters of Derek’s remained that he no longer could afford to keep. Ultimately, they had to sell Woodlawn to the Land Commission.

  Lord Peter Patrick Hemphill had a soft, kind face and an infectious giggle. A fine equestrian, he was a senior steward at both the Turf Club and the National Hunt Steeplechase Committee. An active joint-master of foxhounds, he rarely missed a day out with the Blazers, mounted on a big bay horse, its flanks steaming in the frosty air. I can see Peter Patrick’s red coat sharp in the cold morning sunlight as he lifts a flask of cherry brandy to his lips, then passes it to my father. Once, I watched his wife, Lady Anne, jump her mount high through the window of a castle ruin in pursuit of a fox; a miscalculation could have meant disaster. She loved riding and hunting with a passion. She and Betty were the muscle and brains and the founders of the West Galway chapter of the Pony Club.

  The women of the hunting set exuded a thinly veiled ferocity, with their carmine nails and lips, drinking Bloody Marys, their heads thrown back in braying, smoky laughter, a cigarette smoldering between their fingertips. These were the women of the county—the exiled daughters of the British aristocracy, whose forbears had established great holdings and new titles in Ireland in the eighteenth century, under George III, and were fighting hard to hold on. And yet they were more than tolerated in modern Ireland. The Troubles did not extend to the West Country until later, in the seventies.

  Betts was a hero of mine. She never looked better than astride Kildare, her beautiful gray mare, her hair curled in a hairnet under her navy-blue velvet cap, just so. Around her throat, a perfectly tied white stock secured with the ruby-eyed gold fox pin that Dad gave her for Christmas, piercing the cotton below the knot.

  Sometimes she gave me gingersnaps and cigarettes when we were waiting in the cold coverts on our horses—Gold Flake in the yellow packet, or Players with the sailor framed by a life preserver on the cover. She was an extraordinary rider of grace and gentleness and precision. I loved to follow a few strides behind her in the field, taking on the big walls like a dance.

  Oonagh Mary Cusack Smith, whose mother hunted the Bermingham and North Galway Foxhounds, appeared at the meet on a young gelding she had just received for Christmas. One afternoon we were lined up, about to jump a section of stone wall into what we thought was just another field, when the gelding leaped over and disappeared from view. Oonagh Mary surfaced, black with mud, but we could see that the horse was sinking in the muck on the other side. From his position we could tell his back was broken. Someone ran to a farmhouse and got a shotgun to put the animal out of his misery. Oonagh Mary was distraught. Everyone agreed it was an awful thing to happen. The previous year, her mother, Molly, was taken by a confidence trickster called Goodtime Charley, who made love to her, cut the tails off all her foxhounds, and left with the family silver.

  In memory, Christabel Ampthill was a person so brilliantly composed as to almost seem a work of fiction. She must have been in her late sixties when I first saw her. A lithe and imposing creature, she had the grace and bearing of a seasoned aristocrat, and until I followed suit, she was the only member of the Galway Blazers to ride sidesaddle. She was immaculately turned out, with a beautifully pinned stock, the gleaming ebony toe of one hunting boot with its shining silver spur peeping from the hem of her blue serge riding habit.

  She wore a beaver top hat with full veil over an
impeccably coiffed chignon. Two stripes of snow-white hair ran from her temples to the nape of her neck. She spoke imperiously, and most people were afraid of her, me included. But she took a liking to me and sometimes asked me to tea at her fairy-tale Dunguaire Castle, named after the seventh-century King Guaire of Connaught, on the southeastern shore of Galway Bay near Kinvarra, surrounded by wild swans. Lady Ampthill saved many foxhounds from being destroyed after they were too old to hunt, and there were always several mangy, smelly terriers eating scraps off Wedgwood plates at her dining table.

  Notable for her part in an infamous court case in England known as “The Sponge Baby,” Lady Ampthill had filed a paternity suit against her ex-husband, even though they had been estranged for several years. She had won the case in front of a judge by claiming that when she and Lord Ampthill had guested separately at a country house on the same weekend, they had, in her words, “accidentally used the same sponge.”

  Everyone was awed by Christabel Ampthill. She was serenely brave and galloped over five-foot double stone walls with the ease of a gazelle. I never saw her falter, but because she was no longer young, the hunt members worried about the inevitable fall. One day, it happened that she did come loose after taking on a ditch; her foot caught in a stirrup, her habit tangled in the hook of the sidesaddle, and she lost her seat. Her long hair was whipping about the hocks of her mount. Betts, through some miraculous feat of her own, managed to intercept seconds before the horse took off over a big stone wall in a jump that undoubtedly would have killed Lady Ampthill. And from her position dangling below the horse’s belly, Lady Ampthill exclaimed, “I suppose I should thank you, but what a wonderful way to go!”