The Boy Behind the Curtain

by Tim Winton

  I never planned to be in Ireland, the opportunity arose by chance. I was home in Perth one evening in 1987 when a stranger phoned to offer me a few months’ residence in his castle in County Offaly. He’d read about me having been granted a travel bursary and thought I might enjoy the experience. I tried to explain that the Marten Bequest probably wouldn’t run to the renting of gothic castles, but the caller went on to say his pile was a ruin; what he was really offering was the Gate Lodge and its library of rare books and first editions, somewhere to live and work for a while. I’d have the place to myself for half a year, all I needed to do was kick in some money for the power and heating – how did that sound? To me it sounded preposterous, but I accepted his generous offer and I’ve been here all winter with my wife and small son, and now it’s spring and we’re already mentally getting ready to leave.

  Leap is a vivid place. That’s what stays in my mind as I go through the accountancy of settling up, shedding paperbacks and heavy coats and boots that will be no use in Greece, our next destination. While I gather I have Irish ancestry somewhere on my mother’s side I certainly don’t feel any Celtic pull. But I like strong places. This has been an exceptionally damp one, strange as well.

  Each morning after breakfast I gather my writing kit, pull on my wellies and make the short climb to Spencer’s Cottage. The Gate Lodge is a snug and comfortably renovated place, but the bothy at the crest of the hill is a far more rustic affair. In the mornings its stone floors are like the bottom of a freshly drained swimming pool, and despite the coats of whitewash I’ve given the inside, the walls are going back to the creeping shades of green that greeted me when I first arrived. For the past few months the kitchen at Spencer’s has been my workroom. At the beginning of every day I light a fire in the hearth, straighten the damp-curling pages of the novel I’m writing and wait a few minutes until things dry out a little. Spencer was a gardener at the estate, and from his front door you can see his former master’s domain, from the Gate Lodge pressed up against the old estate walls to the ruined stables, the roofless gothic wing and the castle keep looming over it all.

  I’m conscious that everything I see from here is named and storied, not just the wells and wishing trees and cryptic dirt mounds, but every hedge, it seems, every wood and boreen. All of it heavy with a past that’s palpable and rich, moving in its way, even if it doesn’t quite mean anything to me personally.

  When the mixture of turf, coal, larch and oak burns hot enough to cheer the room a bit, I sit at the little deal table and get down to the daily business of coaxing a thousand words out of the ether. There are Aboriginal bark paintings on the wall, first editions of Randolph Stow on the spindle chair by the fire, all the property of the estate’s Australian owner, Peter Bartlett. A former diplomat who seems to be in London one day and Chicago the next, he has amassed quite a collection in his travels. The Gate Lodge is packed with art and books. Above our bed there’s a framed letter in James Joyce’s hand, on the sidetable a rare edition of Yeats.

  The words come steadily, as they have since Paris when the story began to feel as if it wanted to be told. In January and February when the weather was bitter, the work was arduous; the words presented themselves faithfully enough, but the cold made them hard to form on the page. My hands ached, the paper was boggy. Some mornings I headed uphill to Spencer’s in sleet or snow. One day my wife arrived at the door in a flap, too breathless to do anything more than point back toward the Gate Lodge where the chimney burnt bright orange against the grey sky like the flare of an offshore gas platform. This year we’ve seen our first snow, exper­ienced our first chimney fire, and come to understand the virtue of the wellington boot. And all the time I’m writing about hot, flyblown places like Geraldton, Margaret River and Perth in another hemisphere. I spend half the day in two places at once, which is to say no place at all. But whenever my concentration lapses, or I need to step behind the stone barn for a pee, my eye will be drawn to the castle and there’s no mistaking where I am.

  The sight of Leap is not neutral. This month the keep has an uncanny sheen to it, not so much a result of the turning of the season as the work of the glazing team who’ve finally finished up and gone. For the first time in sixty years or more, the tower has glass in its windows and this has confounded the local rooks and jackdaws which have been roosting in the mighty hulk for untold generations, wheeling and swooping through its many orifices without obstruction. For a few weeks now we’ve been collecting their broken bodies from the grounds, and new blood smears show up daily, like spring blossoms. The windows are too high to wipe clean, so the stains remain. We bag the birds and bin them with a wry acceptance. It’s a macabre domestic routine, but we’ve been here long enough to find it bizzarely fitting. Leap is like that; you can’t look at the place without feeling ensnared by it. The estate is probably more entangled in myths than it is in rampant ivy, but even if you’re entirely ignorant of its past the castle evinces a brooding presence, the sort that leans on you a little. Like all strong places it will, I imagine, leave a mark on me. It’s certainly had a peculiar effect on others over the years.

  In Dance of the Quick and the Dead, a frothy compendium of horrors he published in 1936, Sacheverell Sitwell said: ‘The intensity of this strange place exceeds in its details anything that the most dramatic mind could design,’ and the excitable Sacheverell should know. When he wasn’t being charmed by Oswald Mosley’s fascist prognostications he spent his considerable leisure time chasing spooks and poltergeists. His accounts and many others by ectoplasmic enthusiasts like him line the shelves of the Gate Lodge at Leap. They’re tosh of course, but there’s no question that the castle has been a troubled place.

  The initial keep at Leap is said to have been built by the O’Carrolls in 1380 to guard the pass from the Slieve Bloom Mountains into Tipperary. It was consolidated and extended as a tower house in the 1500s and over the centuries gothic wings were added. Redoubts of this sort often have spotty histories, but the O’Carrolls were a rugged lot and Leap’s annals are particularly lurid. Mercenaries murdered rather than paid, prisoners thrown from the battlements. Rivals were poisoned and awkward family members bricked into the tower walls forever. The family’s most legendary assassination was a fratricide. In 1532 Teige O’Carroll murdered his brother Thaddeus in the chapel of the great hall. Thaddeus, a priest, was reportedly before the altar saying mass as he was dispatched, and thereafter that chamber was known as ‘the Bloody Chapel’.

  When I arrived at Leap that room, the size of a dance hall, was knee-deep in twigs and nesting detritus. Rooks whirred from its darkest corners. Wind howled through the open windows and rain misted through in eddies; it was like something out of a Monk Lewis shocker. The room has been cleaned out in recent months, but it’s still not a pleasant place in which to linger. In one corner there’s an alcove you need to approach with care to avoid stumbling over a precipice, because the trapdoor that once covered it is long gone. The gap in the floor drops away to the oubliette, a dungeon into which unsuspecting victims were pitched and left to die. In the late nineteeth century, three cartloads of bones were removed from it and buried in consecrated ground. According to local chroniclers, ‘bits of several old watches were found among the remains’.

  I’ve spent a good deal of time in the castle keep. On fine afternoons I sit out on the battlements and when the rain mists in across the valley I poke about in the halls and chambers below. And I don’t mind admitting that on its day the place can give me the yips. Perhaps because it’s open to the sky, the gothic wing seems more melancholy than eerie. We probably shouldn’t even go in there, it’s the least stable part of the castle, but my little boy and I spend hours clambering through its vine-snarls, marvelling at the ash trees that have twisted their way up through its windows. He also loves the nook on the second floor of the keep that features a rudimentary toilet. We take turns sending imaginary ‘parcels’ to the yard below, putting the long-lost O’Carroll pigs into a frenzy. The on
ly place I find myself hurrying through at all times of the day is the spiral staircase. Even with its new electric lighting it’s both cold and close, an uncomfortable place in which to be alone.

  So I admit that there’s a distinct atmosphere about Leap. All the gothic tropes are present and accounted for, and of course locals have been in my ear about its legion of ghouls and ghosts since the day I arrived. There’s no doubting it’s been the scene of many horrors, and those that can be verified are lurid enough, but I’m impatient with all the breathless mythmaking, the buffing of the place’s reputation as some kind of occult hotspot. Ireland seems haunted enough without succubi and shrieking shades.

  Lots of Leap’s tall stories have taken on the treacherous smoothness of the tale too often told. All the kinks of plausibility have been ironed out of them; they begin to sound like every other spook account you’ve heard. Many have their origins in real events and characters, and like so many stories of the ‘weird and unnatural’ they’re what gossip turns into. People hereabouts are fervent storytellers and brilliant embroiderers. Most of them have been hearing and telling stories about Leap since infancy and they spin yarns with an unsettling combination of peasant guile and gullibility. The place and its legends have had a long roster of enthusiastic promoters over the years – including Daisy Bates who was born in nearby Roscrea and is said to have told stories of the castle’s spectres – though few tale spinners were as influential as Mildred Darby, the mistress of the house in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

  It seems odd but also oddly fitting that so much of Leap’s paranormal reputation should have been burnished so faithfully by a hardy no-nonsense Protestant of some education. In fact the castle was an anti-papist stronghold from 1649, when Jonathon Darby, a Cromwellian soldier, was granted it for services rendered. Two hundred years later his descendant and namesake, John Nelson Darby, was one of the founders of the austere evangelical sect the Plymouth Brethren. Having concluded that the advent of the telegraph was a signal that the End of Days was imminent, J.N. inspired the apocalyptic obsessions that have kept many fundamentalists busy for a century and more. Despite, or perhaps because of, having married into such a family, Mildred Darby was a keen dabbler in the occult and wrote febrile accounts of having seen the famous ‘Elemental’ with her own eyes. Writing as Andrew Merry in the Occult Review in 1909, she claimed: ‘The thing was about the size of a sheep. Thin, guanting, shadowy . . . its face was human, to be more accurate inhuman. Its lust in its eyes which seemed half decomposed in black cavities stared into mine.’ And so on.

  Leap soon outgrew its local reputation and was often spoken of as ‘the most haunted castle in the British Isles’. This seems to have become a source of pride to the locals. In the pubs and front rooms hereabouts they remain eager to tell of their own encounters, which invariably entail things seen at a distance – an unexplained illumination, a pale figure in the field beneath the Hanging Tree, an unholy stink by the well – but rarely require the witness to have actually been on the premises. The closer to closing time these tales are told, the less truly felt and more high-toned they sound. They seem to be drawn from a universal pool. Mostly I’m reasonably sure the locals are just engaging in their favourite entertainment – getting drunk and frightening themselves half to death – but most of them are genuinely wary of the place and plenty believe it’s cursed. I’ve heard eerie accounts from sober women, Legion of Mary types, whose stories feel like burdens rather than party treats. I’ve met people who swear they wouldn’t set foot in the place in a million years. And I have to admit I’ve seen and heard some things in the past few months that I’m not sure I can explain. Like the time all the taps came on in the Gate Lodge. All of them simultaneously, in the wee hours. And the time our son reported hearing voices in the roof space. People, he said, were laughing and farting up there half the night. The former was genuinely unsettling. But the latter sounded to me like a regular family haunting.

  But not all Leap stories are about ghosts. The seancer Mrs Darby also wrote an account of the Sunday in 1922 when the IRA bombed and burned her home to a ruin. She wasn’t there, as it happens, but Richard Dawkins, the caretaker, was. Until a few years ago the rebel who led the eleven-man ‘raid’ was reportedly living just down the road. I’ve spoken with people who claim to be the children and grandchildren of the bombers. All of them are keen to see the castle restored ‘to bring life back to the area’. Many played around the grounds and in the ruins as children – but never at night – and though the castle was thoroughly looted soon after the bombing, they were forbidden to take anything from the site. Earlier this year, my son’s little friends from a nearby farm found two candles that had been burned in the newly renovated tower for Saint Brigid’s Day. They showed me the stubs and asked if they could keep them. They were melted candles – no odds to me. I sent the kids home but they were soon back. Their father had forbidden the candles to be brought into the house. ‘Daddy says there’s the divils in em,’ one said. Maybe it was their father’s way of making sure they didn’t get light-fingered. If not, one wonders who the Republicans thought they were burning down in ’22, the Proddies or the Divil himself. I guess they weren’t too keen on that distinction, then or now. In any case the Darbys never lived at Leap again. Its care fell to the gardener, Spencer, whose cottage I work in every day and whose personal effects were still in the place when I arrived.

  In January the little bothy was a reeking ruin. Joe Sullivan, the Banagher builder who’s helping restore and remodel the castle for Peter Bartlett, helped me clean the hovel out and patch it up for a work space. There’s supposed to be a secret tunnel linking castle and cottage, but I’ve never looked for it, perhaps for fear of finding it. Anyhow, I have a novel to finish.

  But in the afternoons I have a kid to amuse, too, and in recent weeks there’s always been something going on at the castle, more tractors and machinery to entertain him with, more glint-eyed men in cloth caps for him to pester. Some days we watch the cellars being emptied of rubble. Other times we stand in the freshly timbered gallery and watch Joe swing huge beams through the curves of the vaulted ceiling. For two days, as trucks backed in and tipped loads of blue metal at our feet, we helped rebuild the driveway, spreading the gravel with rakes as the rain slanted in from the west. It was as chaotic and frenetic as a military operation, and we were an unlikely outfit – a few genuine labourers, a couple of visitors from London, the kid and me – like a bunch of rogues building a runway for a landing that sounded too fanciful even for Leap. But the word was, Peter Bartlett was flying in from somewhere. He was having a party for his fortieth birthday. Guests were coming from all over and they couldn’t be expected to wade through 100 metres of mud and builder’s sand in order to reach the threshold.

  Peter bought the castle in 1974, as he tells it, ‘for the price of a house in Nollamara’, a working-class suburb of Perth. His mother was an O’Bannon, a name common in the annals of the Leap, and he said he felt connected to the building the moment he saw it. Once the first stage of restoration is complete in a few months’ time, he’ll take up residence in the keep. Garrulous and indefatigable, he’s a generous and passionate man, the kind of livewire who can hold forth eloquently on any subject until all hours. More than once, having heard him fall suddenly silent in the middle of a sentence, I’ve looked across the fireside to see him canted back in his wing chair fast asleep, with a mug of tea still balanced on his knee and a half-eaten slice of soda bread clamped in his fist. He speaks of ‘bringing positive feelings’ to Leap, of ‘healing’ it by living well here and having others live happily around him. He says he’s not bothered about the ghosts, though he’s taken the trouble to have a kind of multi-faith exorcism of sorts conducted. He plans to fill the place with books and art, friends and music, and for a week, using a tractor and a hay trailer, Joe and I have been ferrying antiques, Persian rugs, candelabra and crates of books up from a storage shed near Lissanerin.

  Peter
is a man of antic impulses and infectious energy. He’s a maker of friends, a midwife to the friendships of others. ‘I want,’ he says, ‘to make people’s dreams a reality.’ He’s consumed by the notion of continuing Leap’s story and changing its course for the better, and it looks as if he’s likely to do both. On his birthday the castle keep was full of music for the first time in more than sixty years. Visitors flew in from several time zones. Friends drove down from Dublin, from Birr and Banagher, from Kinnitty and Roscrea, and locals from farms and hamlets all across the valley came walking down the drive, many for the first time. From its front steps to the battlements overhead, the castle was lit up like a paddle-steamer. Many pints were poured and drunk in its freshly swept halls. Poems were recited, telegrams read aloud. It was like a cross between a country wedding and a grand-final shindig. Strangers locked arms and danced and laughed and sang. Guests traded songs in friendly rivalry. Called upon to sing ‘Waltzing Matilda’ I made a hash of it. The party went on until the early hours and I never heard a ghost joke all night. It was a fine and happy occasion and before dawn it had produced several new Leap stories, some of them louche indeed.