by Iris Origo
On Communion Sundays, however, we children—not having yet been confirmed—were sent out early, to start slowly home-wards on foot. I remember the keen sense of release at coming out of the dark little church into the sunlit lane, the blackberries in the hedges and the foxgloves on the banks, the mares and foals in the fields, the sense that this sunny morning (sometimes I suppose it must have rained, but I cannot remember it) would go on and on. Then the wagonette would come rolling up behind us and we would climb in and trot home to roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. After tea, when decorous drawing-room games had been played or a Sunday story read aloud, we would gather round my grandmother at the piano and, with more enthusiasm than melody sing the familiar hymns chosen by each child in turn: ‘Abide with me’, ‘Jerusalem the golden’, ‘There is a happy land’, while outside the shadows lengthened on the lawn and the scent of tobacco-flower and cherry-pie floated in through the window, and one last riotous game of tag among the flower-beds ended the day, before we went to bed.
So each summer passed—serene, immutable, unending. Were they really so many or so long? I know that they were not, since, after 1914, I spent the greater part of the First World War in Italy with my mother and did not return to Ireland until 1918, when the shadow of ‘the Troubles’ had already fallen. It hardly matters how many they were. Green sleeping parkland, deep woods, peaches on a sunlit wall, laughter and freedom—they have been enough to fill a lifetime.
* * *
The story of the end of Desart is sadder than that of Westbrook. Like many other Anglo-Irishmen whose family had been settled there for over three centuries, my grandfather’s feelings were both profoundly Irish and intensely English, and the attempt to conciliate these two allegiances formed the tragedy of the latter part of his life. Himself a man to whom compromise came easily, he found it impossible to realise how alien it was to the Irish temperament, and he fastened his energies and his hopes on the cause of the Southern Loyalists. But the clouds were gathering. In 1909 the Home Rule Bill in the House of Lords had caused preparations for rebellion in Ulster and the muster of the Loyalists in the South. The trouble was that while the North had a strong leader in Sir Edward Carson, the landed gentry of the South had had a tendency for more than a century (in the words of Lord Midleton) ‘to concentrate on country life and to regard themselves as a British garrison’, an isolated minority, almost completely out of touch with Irish political life. The controversy went on and on and, after the struggle between Ulster and Asquith’s government had come to a head in 1913, feeling ran high on both sides. Bullets flew freely in the Dublin streets, country houses were burned, Loyalists were denounced from the pulpit, and even to be seen speaking to one of the hated British militia, the ‘Black-and-Tans’ (who, for their part, were also responsible for many outrages) was enough for a Catholic to incur a threat of excommunication.
In the mistaken belief that the real crux of the Irish question, even more than a craving for independence, was a hunger for the land, my grandfather had promptly sold his own, under the Land Act, keeping only the demesne and, up to the time of the Convention in Dublin in 1918 for the settlement of the Irish question, he still believed that some compromise might be found and Irish unity preserved. He was asked by Lord Midleton (the leader of the Southern Loyalists) to be one of the ninety-six representatives at the Convention, and attended it very conscious, as he wrote to me, of ‘how very thin the ice is’. ‘It was probably’, Lord Midleton wrote, in a tribute to the part that his friend and colleague had played, ‘the most important event of his public life … in Ireland.’ He went on to observe: ‘The spirit of compromise is virtually nonexistent, and a premium is placed on disruptive influence which is denied to constructive statesmanship. Ulster glorifies herself by a lonely furrow … After a surfeit of oratory, Desart felt that, as no other party would show its hand, we Southern Loyalists, few as we were, should make definite proposals for a separate legislature and taxation.’
To these proposals Redmond replied by expressing his willingness to serve under Carson in a National Ministry, but the premature death of the Irish leader and the backsliding of some of his colleagues caused the proposed settlement—which had won almost unanimous acceptance—to fail. ‘If Desart’s colleagues were still alive’, Lord Midleton commented, ‘they would bear testimony to the extent to which his single-mindedness and freedom from pique or prejudice contributed to the attempt. History takes little note of policy which has failed, and gives no credit in any department of life to those who have prevented evils by timely concessions.’
From that day my grandfather himself felt that any hope of reconciliation between England and Ireland was over. ‘It breaks my heart to think of it,’ he wrote to me in 1921. ‘The complete apathy in England adds to one’s despair. Football, cricket in Australia and things of that kind fill the bill for the mass of our reading public, and Ireland and Germany are only headlines to them. A half-educated population in its results is worse than an ignorant one.’
Nor did he find much more understanding in higher quarters. On his return to England—the story has been told me by one of his nephews, who had it from himself—he was sent for by the King, and went to the Palace in the belief that he would be asked to give an account of the situation in Ireland as he had left it.
“I suppose you must have had a great deal of interest to tell His Majesty,” his nephew commented.
“He never gave me a chance,” was the reply. “‘Ah, Lord Desart,’ was his cordial greeting, ‘I’m delighted to hear that you still wear nightshirts, just as I do! Can’t bear those newfangled pyjamas!’”
The rest of the conversation ran upon nightwear, entirely oblivious of the Irish question. I have always thought this a peculiarly English story.
Having done what he could, Desart was not a man to dwell upon his failure, and it was not until, in February 1922, raiders from Tipperary burned down his beloved house in a single night, that he recognised that his life, too, in Ireland had come to an end. He was in London at the time and hurried over at once to Desart by the night boat which had so often brought us all over for the holidays. On the lawn before the house there was a small heap of objects saved from the flames by a courageous and devoted housemaid, Loma. Everything else was a burned-out shell. ‘Everything of value,’ Gabba wrote to my American grandmother, ‘family history, papers, portraits, was there and has perished’—as irrevocably destroyed as his own hopes for his country. He never went back to Ireland again.
‘The wound is deep,’ he wrote to me then, ‘and there is no cure for it. The only thing is to go on and do one’s work and be as useful as one can in other spheres, but I sometimes feel I can hardly bear it—and at my age, how can one plan out a new life?’ Eventually he and Gran moved into a rather ugly, unpretentious little country house in Sussex, Hawkhurst Court, from which he could easily get up to London for his Parliamentary duties and where she could do a little gardening. I do not remember, during their years there, either of them even suggesting that they found the new life and house more restricted than that which they had once known. Only once, ten years later, when my grandmother had died and he was quite alone, one of Gabba’s letters to me re-echoed the old sorrow: ‘I can’t bear to think of Desart—it is sadness itself. All gone, all scattered—and we were so happy there.’
* * *
In the year after Desart was burned, I became engaged to be married, and the centre of my interests naturally turned to my new Italian life. Yet it was, I think, at that time—perhaps because I was growing up myself—that I fully became aware of how large a part my affection for Gabba and his for me had played through all my childhood and youth. It had been, and remained for both of us, one of the happiest relations of our lives. The bond between grandparent and grandchild can be in many ways a freer and easier one than that between parent and child. There is less responsibility, less daily friction, and above all, an absence of emotional undercurrents: both are free to make themselves agreeable—and to be
themselves. The gulf in time (in our case, of fifty-four years) may form not a barrier, but only an enrichment: each of us brought to the other (although of course his gift was the greater) glimpses of an unfamiliar and sometimes disconcerting world. From my first visit to Desart at the age of three, when he wrote for me my first poem—a little sentimental and humorous in the Victorian manner—until his last visits to us in Italy after Gran’s death, an unfailing, carefully veiled tenderness warmed and lit our friendship. In 1908, when I was six years old and my parents were spending the winter in Egypt, I stayed with him and Gran in Rutland Gardens, sharing the serene, restful routine of their daily life, which had changed so little in the thirty years of their marriage: going for little walks in the Park (and envying the fortunate children with ponies in Rotten Row), visiting an old governess of my mother’s in Trevor Square, shopping with Gran at Harrods ‘for a treat’ and, on Sundays, sometimes walking to the Round Pond with Gabba or (this was an occasion for great pride) going to church with him in my grandmother’s seat at the Temple, hearing the Christmas carols in the Round Church, and being introduced to some of his colleagues as ‘my little granddaughter’. Always, as when his own daughters were young, his return at tea-time was the culminating moment of the day. I would carefully prepare spills for his pipe, and he would teach me to play picquet or backgammon and read aloud—and still today some chapters of David Copperfield and The Rose and the Ring and Ivanhoe are enriched for me by the echoes of his voice.
Between the end of 1914 and 1918, when I was in Italy with my mother, he wrote me long weekly letters—some of which I shall quote later on—which were a deliberate attempt both to keep me in touch with the English point of view and to keep our friendship alive, but in which he also fully replied to all my childish outpourings about my troop of boy scouts, my studies, and my friends.
As the war dragged on, he wrote, ‘From a purely personal standpoint, I think I feel most the long severance from Mummy and from you. She perhaps will be much the same when we meet again, but you are at a time when every day, month and year changes your outlook and standards … You will be a different Iris when we meet, and I shall have to begin knowing you again. You may no longer think of me as an amiable elderly relation, but an obsolete old buffer out of touch with your interests and sympathies. But believe me, I shall never be that.’ In a later letter, even though at that time he was already caught up in the anxiety and strain of the Irish Convention, he returned, more seriously, to the same subject. ‘I shall have lost the child I loved so well, but perhaps find the young woman I shall love even better. Our outlooks may be different, but love is the most real thing in life, and there are certain elemental things which to old and young are equally applicable. You have too much sense of humour to allow yourself, with the different ideals of another generation, to be contemptuous of what older people think and do. It is the intolerance of the young and the want of sympathy of the old that produces much unnecessary unhappiness in family life, and I trust we may avoid it.’
Certainly, in so far as our friendship was concerned, we did. When I returned to America after the war, it was to him that I wrote about my distress when I realised how deep a rift had grown up between my mother and my American grandmother (caused by the former’s determination to take me back to Europe during the crucial years of my upbringing) and about the problems of my divided loyalties.
‘I hardly know, dear child,’ he replied, ‘what to write about all you say … In truth the situation and its difficulties can only be faced as you are doing it and I could add little or nothing to the counsel you have taken with yourself. I do not mean to pay compliments, but I think you have got from some hereditary source balance and practical common sense which will help you through difficulties, and the sympathy which will enable you to understand the views of others.’ (If indeed there was any truth in this, ‘the hereditary source’ is very apparent.) ‘I am very sorry for Mrs. Cutting, but you have divided duties, each of which you must recognise in its due proportion.’
As soon as Antonio and I became engaged, and indeed before the engagement was announced, Antonio went to London to call upon him and was asked to dine with him at the Travellers’. They liked each other from the first and came to feel a mutual affection and respect, but their conversation at this first meeting was characteristically elliptical. Antonio had expected, perhaps not unnaturally, that at some point of the evening his host would make some enquiry about his position and prospects or at least would refer to our future. But the evening passed pleasantly in talk about public affairs, farming and the recent war, with not a breath of any personal matter. Later on Gabba wrote to tell me how very much he had been attracted by his guest, but it was not until he took leave of him at the door that he made the slightest reference to the person who was the only link between them.
‘You’ll find her very extravagant in stockings!’ he said with a smile and there the conversation closed.
Gabba followed, however, with great interest all the phases of our engagement and especially the purchase of our Tuscan farm, La Foce. (‘It is intensely interesting to me. Is it a big house? is there a fine view? and what will you grow? Olives and grapes and I suppose maize. Is it country for riding and is there any shooting?’) And though he could not attend my wedding he sent me, a few days before, his blessing and his ‘high hopes’. ‘For you I hope it is all happiness both now and forwards—and it will surely not be other than a pleasant thing to you to know that all your life you have brought nothing but happiness to your loving grandfather.’
On our first visit to England, we both stayed at Rutland Gardens, Gran having made touching efforts, as I now realise, to meet modern and ‘Continental’ usage by placing a bidet in my bedroom, but our first family breakfast was marred by an unfortunate choice of subject. Antonio, still unaware that this was not Gabba’s best moment of the day, mildly observed to the table in general that the crossing on the previous afternoon had been very disagreeable, and expressed a hope that before too long the need for such journeys would be obviated by the building of the Channel Tunnel. Gabba, who was helping himself to some ham at the sideboard, turned around sharply.
“I hope I may never live to see the day!” he exploded.
Silence fell, and Gran nervously offered Antonio a scone.
Such brief outbursts of irascibility in Gabba’s later years—though plainly only a superficial matter of nerves—were disconcerting to us, being so unlike his fundamental equanimity. I think they were largely caused by a constant, nagging anxiety about his wife’s health, for she suffered from acute rheumatism and became subject to sudden, progressively severe, heart attacks. His preoccupation unfortunately took the form of scolding her for doing too much, followed by deep depression, so that we all knew that Gran’s first gasping words, as we ran to her with the smelling-salts or the capsule that checked the attack, would be “Don’t tell your grandfather!” I remember, too, wondering how it was possible that Gabba, so plainly a kind man, who loved his wife so dearly, should yet apparently grudge her (however grey with cold she might be, however tightly she pulled her cashmere shawl about her) the extra piece of coal on the fire which would have made the last hour of the evening pleasant for her. I did not yet know how many ways there are of denying what it is too frightening to admit.
During all my visits to England after my marriage I would dine once a week in Rutland Gardens, and once a week Gabba would dine instead with me, generally at a quiet table in my hotel, the Berkeley. For these occasions, knowing that it pleased him, I would prepare as carefully as for a formal party, wearing a dress of which he approved, and choosing the food and wine that he liked best, for he considered a knowledge of good wine to be a necessary part of a lady’s education. Sometimes we would then go on together to a Shakespeare play at the Old Vic, but more often we would merely sit on talking, each of us trying to choose such subjects as would interest or amuse the other. Does all this sound a little absurd and unspontaneous to members of the
present generation? I expect it does, yet I can assure them that we both looked forward to these evenings with equal pleasure; and I believe it was precisely the faint touch of formality in our relationship that prevented it, over so many years, from ever becoming stale or dull.
There were, however, strictly defined limits to the range of subjects which my grandfather considered suitable for my ears, or indeed, I presume, for those of any woman of his own class. I remember once—when I was already a married woman, and had been reading some book about Oscar Wilde—asking him, since it was he who was the King’s Proctor at the time of the poet’s trial, what his real opinion was of the whole episode. “He was a very wicked man, my dear,” was his reply.
* * *
Two years after our marriage, in 1926, Gran and Gabba celebrated their golden wedding, and that summer they were able to attend a big party at Bridgewater House, the scene of the ball at which they had first danced together fifty-five years before. But it was already plain to us all that Gran’s health was failing, and by the end of the following year even Gabba could no longer conceal his anxiety, though he still wrote of being able to ‘stave off attacks’. He admitted, however, that she was no longer able to come downstairs to give him his breakfast (a thing she had not failed to do for fifty years), and that she could no longer get about the garden ‘except on level ground’. This letter alarmed me, and I telegraphed asking if I might come to stay the following week, but before I could get there the end had come. The family was scattered, and Gerald with his wife Joycie (both of whom he dearly loved) were alone with Gabba during the terrible last two days, during most of which Gran was too exhausted to speak. He spent part of the time in writing me a long, factual account, hour by hour, of what was happening, still not without hope and retaining his usual restraint—but at the end he added, ‘I am not to talk to her. But if she passes without a word between us—oh my dear.’
