by Andrew Brown
A few years later, she returned to France with her older brother, John Johnston Miller MD. He was a physician in San Jose and also served as the County Health Officer,4 a role that brought him a particular responsibility for the control of infectious diseases. He came to Europe to make a study of hospitals and public health services, and the presence of his bright sister, fluent in French, Italian and German, was a great asset. They travelled by train and bicycle for six months, before he returned to California. The following summer of 1898, Bessie was still in Belgium, where she met and fell in love with Samuel Bernal, an Irish farmer.
The long sea voyage gave Bessie ample opportunity to reflect on her changed circumstances. In the six years since she left California, she had converted to Rome, married Samuel and borne him two sons.5 The eldest, Desmond, was now two-and-one-half years, and she had left his eleven-month-old brother, Kevin, at home with their father. Her own father had died soon after her marriage, and she received the sad news on the day that she and Samuel moved into their farmhouse, Brookwatson. Even without such a loss, it seems improbable that Bessie would have been ecstatic about her new home. Having grown up in the warmth of California and New Orleans and spent languid, sun-filled months in France and Italy, the raw, damp climate of County Tipperary was bound to depress her. Her new husband was cheerful and full of dreams for their life together, but had no time for books and no knowledge of art or architecture. He was loquacious, but as happy to talk to his cattle as to converse with his wife. There was no one to share her intellectual passions, and the realities of farm life at times offended her sensibilities.
Samuel Bernal was a broad-shouldered man, with a flowing dark moustache. Five years older than Bessie, he came from Limerick, where his father had been a successful auctioneer. During Samuel’s boyhood in the 1870s, there had been a series of failed potato harvests which, while not causing a repeat of the famine of thirty years earlier, led to widespread evictions of tenant farmers and the subsequent Land Wars.6 In 1881, as a teenager, he might have seen mounted Dragoons, with sabres drawn, charge through the streets of Limerick to quell rioting. Despite the parlous state of farming, Samuel studied at the Royal Albert Agricultural College in Dublin. After graduating in 1884, he fell out with his father and showing frontier spirit of his own, Samuel sailed to Australia. He remained there for the next fourteen years, working on a sheep farm, and returned to Ireland only after his father’s death.7 Then he went to live with his older sister, Mrs Riggs Miller, who owned land near Nenagh, Co. Tipperary, a town about twenty-five miles north-east of Limerick. After his experience in Australia, Samuel was well qualified to manage his sister’s estates.
Mrs Riggs Miller was an enthusiastic traveller in her own right, and persuaded Samuel to accompany her to the fashionable Belgian summer resort of Blankenberg. While walking along the beach he was attracted by a tall, slender young woman wearing the latest fashion in long bathing dresses. To his astonishment she suddenly disappeared beneath the waves and without a second thought he rushed in to rescue her. Bessie Miller had just submerged to sit on the sandy bottom for a moment, when she found herself in the powerful arms of Samuel Bernal.8 Following such an abrupt and intimate introduction, their relationship flourished: they were engaged to be married after one month and the wedding took place in January 1900, after Bessie had been received into the Catholic Church.
In the time Sam had been away in Australia, there had been huge changes in the Irish agricultural community.9 These largely flowed from Gladstone’s second Land Act of 1881, which sought to remove some of the inherent injustices in the landlord–tenant system that had led to the state of near insurrection in rural Ireland. The Act had established rent tribunals and statutory tenure for tenants who paid the agreed fair rents. The returns on farming continued to decline through the 1880s, but the new rents fell in lockstep. As a result the landlords were the ultimate losers and by the 1890s many were keen to sell the lands they had once so ruthlessly administered. The transfer of ownership was facilitated by a government scheme to grant low interest mortgages to tenants. Sam took advantage of this system to purchase ‘Brookwatson’, a dilapidated farmhouse near Nenagh, where he planned to run his own dairy farm. He was able to buy and restore the property because Bessie had brought a considerable dowry of £1,600.
The Catholic Bernal family was unusual among the Anglo-Irish Protestant landowners of Tipperary. Sam soon established a thriving farm at Brookwatson and took particular pride in the appearance of the gardens. Bessie was sociable, she loved parties and dances, and joined the local tennis club. Friendships were forged on the basis of social class rather than religion. She and Samuel were both over thirty years old at the time of their marriage, and he was intent on a large family. Their first child, John Desmond, was born at Brookwatson on 10 May 1901. Sensing that he could become her soul-mate as well as her son, Bessie doted on the child, reading him French fairy stories, talking to him constantly, and answering his endless questions.
Desmond’s precocity astounded the passengers during the trans-Atlantic voyage. After Celtic docked in New York, he and his mother continued their stately progress westwards by train. The journey was so long and confining that it left an indelible mark on the young boy’s memory.10 He took particular delight in the friendly black stewards, who would come every night to transform the seats into bunks. Apart from a short break in Chicago, they were on the train for over a week. When Desmond finally arrived at his grandmother’s house, the Miller family was captivated by the silver-haired little boy, who talked to them, with equal ease, in English or French. For his part, the most lasting impression was to be surrounded by ladies in dresses of white, pink and blue that swept along the ground as they glided past.
The long return journey to Ireland, some weeks later, seemed less momentous. Desmond was preoccupied with the idea that he was going to receive a green pony, as a reward for his endurance, when he arrived home. He was disappointed when the mythical creature never materialized. Over the next year or so, there were fixed events and repeated rhythms that brought a pattern to his life. He would be woken each morning by the sound of milking and on running to his mother’s bedroom could watch the sun rise over the purple mountain called the Devil’s Bit. In the evening, the men would lead the horses back into the farmyard, as the sun set over the Arra Mountains. During the day, he and his constant companion, Kevin, were free to play with almost no restrictions. Their delights were ‘to play in lofts, or hay sheds, to walk down to the Holy Well to see the rushing water of the weir’. The lack of adult supervision seems staggering today, and there was at least one nearly fatal accident. The field in front of the house contained a grass-covered mound and the two boys decided to tunnel through it. After they had burrowed some distance in, the unsupported tunnel collapsed, and they were lucky to be able to claw their way out.
Desmond soon understood that his mother controlled the children and domestic staff, while his jolly father was in charge of the farm. It was through his intense relationship with his mother that Des began to realize ‘the outside world of beauty in form and language’. He constantly implored her to ‘Tell me t’ings’.11 On those occasions when he misbehaved, he asked always to be scolded in French, ‘a language of gentleness’. His father was down-to-earth and a fine man in Desmond’s estimation: ‘a good Catholic and a good husband, ruling the house and beating his children because he knew it was his duty, though it did not fit his easy and kindly nature.’12 The servants included a nurse called Daisy, who was responsible for the boys’ everyday welfare. Desmond and Kevin took their meals with her in the kitchen; the staple diet was buttered potatoes washed down with fresh milk. In a free and happy childhood, the only trauma seems to have been a trip to Dublin to have his tonsils removed. He remembered ruining his mother’s blue dress by spitting blood, after she took him from the hospital; his hurt was forgotten when they were met at Nenagh station by his father in the high trap, ‘it was dark and frosty and the horse’s heels clattered on
the stones’.
As a natural complement to his physical and social world, Desmond soon constructed a clear image of a spiritual universe.13 The family went to Mass every Sunday, and Desmond was a good boy who knew his catechism well. There was God, the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. There was the world of this life with air, earth and water, and its inhabitants (birds, beasts and fishes), and the other worlds, Heaven, Purgatory and Hell, with angels, souls of men and devils. To Desmond ‘it was very beautiful and simple’, but he did not know what to do about worms and the souls of animals. Kevin, who ‘had a raging temper and told lies’, was much less devout and enjoyed asking ‘Who made the world?’ – invariable response, ‘God made the World’ – so that he could put the defiant, supplementary question ‘Who made God?’ To this, of course, there was no satisfactory answer, and Desmond shared the family’s horror at his little brother’s wickedness.
Desmond was taught his letters and rudimentary arithmetic by a tiny nun, Sister Mary Rose, on Sundays after Mass. His formal schooling began at the age of five; the three-year-old Kevin was also judged to be ready for the experience and so would be Desmond’s constant schoolmate over the next dozen years. Their mother decided that the local Christian Brothers Academy was too crowded, and fearing lice and infectious diseases, she sent her sons to the Protestant diocesan school in Nenagh. The brothers were taught by Miss Dagg in the upstairs room, and Desmond instantly found learning exciting and particularly liked arithmetic. He was fascinated by numbers, which became like friends, each with its own character. He liked 3 the best, then 9. He thought even numbers were like girls and rather despised them. 12 was ‘awfully important’, and while 5 and 10 were too easy, 7 was a terrible puzzle–it was nobody’s relation. 11 was ‘an awfully jolly number’. He soon progressed from the kindergarten to the big school, where there were still only about twenty boys and girls, each proceeding at their own pace. Desmond soon progressed to geometry and found ‘the first lesson in Euclid wonderful even though I thought “obvious” meant “impossible”’.14
Although discipline was strict, ‘we were caned every day or oftener if we were bold’, it did nothing to quell boisterous behaviour. At lunchtimes, the masters went home to eat, and the boys would stage ‘grand fights’ in the schoolyard. These involved laying siege to buildings, using makeshift battering rams; covering fire was provided with stones and water pistols. While a lookout was always posted for a returning master, there was no disguising the collateral damage of broken windows, and afternoon canings followed with regularity.
There were two new additions to the family at Brookwatson during the year the boys started school. One was a baby sister, Geraldine (always known as Gigi) and the other was Bessie’s younger sister Laetitia (called Cuddie by the Bernal children), who came to live with them after the death of her mother. She took on the role of devoted maiden aunt, although some years before she had been engaged to a Scottish MP, Mr McLaren, who died suddenly shortly before the planned wedding. According to her brother,15 it was a blow from which she never recovered, and may explain Desmond’s observation that she took ‘God on hard terms’. She remained a Protestant and made no concession to her sister’s new religion nor to the Irish, whom she loathed for ‘their laziness, their dirt and their dishonesty’: but she was equally unable ‘to escape the charm of their language and the ingenuity of their evasions’.16
Signs of curiosity about the physical world were evident in Desmond from an early age. When Gigi was at the crawling stage, and he was therefore about seven years old, she impaled her knee on a needle, dropped on the floor. Part of the needle broke off beneath the skin, and she was taken to Limerick hospital to have it removed. Desmond was told that the surgeon had taken an X-ray photograph of Gigi’s knee in order to see exactly where the needle was. This set his imagination racing and although he did not know what an X-ray was, he reasoned that it must be an intense form of light that would illuminate structures beneath the skin. The brightest light available to him was the paraffin lamp that he was allowed to use for reading in bed. He opened a number of his books and stood them up around the lamp so that its light might be concentrated by reflection from their white pages. He then attempted to see the bones in his hand by holding his hand across a small gap between two of the books. Unfortunately he knocked one of the books over and ‘the whole affair came down with a terrific crash [and] knocked the lamp off the table’. While the glass lamp broke and its oil ran over the floor, it luckily did not catch fire; Sam Bernal, who came racing upstairs, was caught between relief and fury when he saw what had happened and administered his son ‘a very bad beating’.17
His first experiment in chemistry, undertaken at about the same age, again might have easily caused serious injury, but fortunately left only a mental impression. Desmond had read a lecture for children on ‘The chemistry of the candle’, delivered by Michael Faraday in London in the early nineteenth century. In his talk, Faraday had demonstrated how to make hydrogen gas by mixing granulated zinc with dilute sulphuric acid in a Florence flask. Desmond had no idea what all these terms meant, but persuaded his mother to write a letter to the local chemist so that he could acquire the raw materials. For the flask, he used a straw-covered Chianti bottle, which he found in a cupboard. Bessie had only one rule – no experiments in the house – so the mixing took place outside, with a tree stump serving as the benchtop. It was cold and getting dark, and he was very disappointed when absolutely nothing appeared to happen. Before going to bed, he slipped out of the back door for one more look, but it was now impossible to see: ‘Well, I thought, I must have a look at it, so I took a box of matches out of my pocket and lit a match. And as I brought the match near it there was a most magnificent explosion and everything went to blazes!’18
Desmond’s precocious talents continued to flourish: on New Year’s Day 1909 he began the first of a series of daily diaries, a form of record he would maintain with remarkable consistency as a teenager and young adult. The first volume is entitled ‘An autobiography for 1909–10 by Desmond Bernal aged eight next May’;19 its opening sentence continued the serious tone: ‘When we were going to Mass on New Year’s morning my hat fell off twice.’ The next day, we learn, he was sick after breakfast and read Black Beauty for a while, until going outside with Kevin to play hockey and Mohawk Indians with bow and arrows. Once the school term started, it is remarkable to see how many subjects he was studying and how closely his performance was monitored. There were daily scores faithfully recorded: a typical list gave him eight marks out of ten for writing, reading, spelling, arithmetic, poetry and geography, while for conduct he received a seven. There were short entries in French, but the autobiography came to an abrupt halt in March. He did include a charming poem, the first verse of which was:
I’m a mariner on the ocean
I’m a mariner on the ocean
And I make the most commotion
That ever the world did see
The Bernals had another baby daughter, Fiona, in 1908, but in a cruel realization of Bessie’s worst fears, the boys contracted whooping cough at school and Fiona succumbed to the infection. A last son, Godfrey, was born in 1910. The following summer Desmond and Kevin went to stay with friends at Royan, on the Gironde estuary, in a house surrounded by resinous pine-woods. This was an opportunity for them to improve their French, and both Sam and Bessie wanted to expand the limited perspective offered to their sons by a purely Irish upbringing. One scene from the Gironde stayed in Desmond’s memory as fresh as an oil painting:
The midnight of the full moon was the great pêche. All the peasants went out with wine in their bullock carts. The men waded in up to their necks at the head of the long net, the women to the top of their black skirts. They swept back and forwards, and gleaming writhing fish piled on to the moonlit sand. Great stingrays, turbot and the small fry that were slung into the waves again, the men and women sang songs and we went to sleep lying on the straw.20
In Desmond’s mind, that summer marke
d the end of childhood because in the early autumn he and Kevin were sent across the Irish Sea to go to school in England. While this decision was taken by Sam in order to expand his sons’ horizons, it was opposed by Bessie and Cuddie. It is easy to imagine their reasons for resisting because Desmond and Kevin were blissfully happy with life on the farm, and the boys were the centre of the women’s lives. In the sisters’ homeland there was no tradition of sending children away to school at such tender ages (Kevin was only eight years old). The school chosen was Hodder, in Lancashire, which was a preparatory school for the Jesuit college of Stonyhurst. The logic of Sam’s choice was that Hodder and Stonyhurst would provide a superior education for his sons in the Catholic tradition, at a place in England accessible from the port of Liverpool. Despite his choice of a Jesuit school, Sam’s roots were not deeply embedded in the Catholic religion. The Bernals were originally Sephardic Jews,21 who fled from Spain after two of the family were burned at the stake at Cordoba in the Inquisition of the 1650s. The earliest record of the name was an apothecary named Bernal who sailed with Columbus on his third voyage to the Americas in 1502. After fleeing Spain, the family settled in Amsterdam and some members then migrated to England. Various Bernals were successful as landowners in the West Indies and as English politicians. The Irish branch of the family was established as recently as the early nineteenth century, which is when the conversion to Catholicism took place. Desmond made his own first Communion in April 1910 and his mother wrote in her diary: ‘God bless the poor little boy. He was over-excited, very fervent, very serious. May he always remain an honest and sincere man.’