Wicked Little Joe

by Joseph Hone

  Later he lived in one of the two fine Hone family houses in Killiney, on the coast, south of Dublin. He was a man of wide and fascinating friendships – with Joyce, Yeats, George Moore, Max Beerbohm, Augustus John, the poets d’Annunzio and Frédéric Mistral and many others; above all a man lucky enough to marry a good and beautiful American woman, Vera.

  But all this bounty had latterly eroded for Old Joe, starting with the financial depression of the early 1930s and his increasing problems with Nat, which turned my grandfather into a fusspot: nervous, panicky, feverishly listing his declining assets on the backs of old envelopes.

  His was rather the story of many well-to-do Edwardian gentlemen who, having been given a large sum of inherited capital in the early 1900s, lived well on it thereafter, but on an ever-reducing interest, since such gentlemen rarely had to earn money.

  In my grandfather’s case he couldn’t have earned money in any ordinary way of life, at least. He might have continued to work in publishing, or taken on some undemanding academic job, or earned money from his books. But his books on philosophers, on Swift and his biographies on Yeats and George Moore, were not the sort to spin any real money for him, and early on he had lost half his shirt in publishing with the dubious Mr Reynolds from Liverpool.

  I think a major factor in Old Joe’s life was that he had an underlying melancholic nature. So when things started to go downhill for him financially in the early thirties, these glooms reared up for him and he came to fear the worst; fears which my father’s difficult, spendthrift behaviour at Oxford and in Dublin throughout the 1930s amply confirmed for him. Eventually Old Joe had not the fizz to get himself out of his glooms. A lazy man, as he admitted in one of his letters to Hubert, his mind cloud high among even loftier philosophies.

  With me he was always very ready to come down to earth, in the blunt matter of pounds, shillings and pence. In a drawer at Maidenhall, some years ago, I found a letter he’d written him to me while I was in Dudgeon’s dreadful Sandford Park. Old Joe’s worried spirit rises up at me forcefully as I type the letter out now:

  Feb 13th, 1950.

  Dear Little Joe

  I am not satisfied with the reports I get from your school. You will have to work much harder, and also get over your untidiness and carelessness, or I shall have to remove you to a much severer school. In the last account I had there was a charge of £2.11.0 for school books and I wrote to ask Mr Dudgeon what happened to the books when you had done with them. Now I write to tell you that these books are my property and that you must keep them in good condition, so that when they are no longer needed by you, they can be disposed of to the other boys coming along and the amount credited to me. I forbid you to sell them yourself. Mr Dudgeon tells me you are very careless about your books.

  It is essential that you learn habits of industry and tidiness, for you will have to begin to make your own living in a few years time and no one will want to give employment to an idle and careless young man. You must not think that you will have me, or the Butlers, or your parents to fall back on for your support.

  I shall come to see you presently and expect to find you in a sensible frame of mind about these matters and to get a better report from Mr Dudgeon. If I do not, I shall have to consider sending you to a house where you will have to work to make up for lost time.

  Yrs, J. Hone.

  This is a typical letter of my grandfather’s. He seems blind to the fact (though his friend the poet Austen Clarke had already told him) that Sandford Park was a dreadful place, so my learning ‘habits of industry and tidiness’ – indeed my learning anything there – was unlikely under Dudgeon’s beady, sadistic gaze. Instead my grandfather worries about the future resale of my tattered old copies of Durrell & Fawdry’s Mathematics and Kennedy’s Latin Grammar. On the other hand, to excuse my grandfather’s miserly, threatening attitude in the letter, he was an old and put-upon man at the time, with little direct and no legal responsibility for me.

  One can go on endlessly with caveats and excuses for someone’s behaviour. The fact is people have a bias in their temperament towards one characteristic or another, and Old Joe’s leaning allowed him to keep his hand well away from his pocket. And since, before his death in 1959, he left an estate valued at nearly forty thousand pounds (maybe ten times that in today’s money) he might have extracted some more ready cash from the estate before he died and been less parsimonious with himself and with Vera.

  Vera hung on for nearly ten years after my grandfather’s death, first in the Dublin house at Winton Road, then, through the good offices of the Butlers, as a paying guest with the local rector, Canon Smyth and his wife, in Kells near Maidenhall, where she lived in the front room of the large, gloomy and chilly rectory. Finally, when she could no longer look after herself, she came to a small nursing home run by kind nuns near the seafront south of Dublin in Blackrock, where her son David and his wife Rosemary, not far away, paid her every attention. I saw Vera rarely, living as I was then with my wife Jacky in London and then New York. But that Vera was a kind and generous woman there is no doubt, bailing Nat out with secret cheques and parcels of old clothes and shoes, and me, now and then, with very welcome cheques before I had regular work as a producer with the BBC in 1963.

  I’ve wondered what she thought about after Old Joe’s death – pondering things in those long years in the isolated rectory, legs crossed like a contortionist’s, in a chair against the small fire: the high cheekbones gone skeletal, one finger pensively against her lips, cigarette smoke swirling around from the drafty windows. Dreams of a long-ago woman? Beautiful, innocent, but confident: and so commemorated by the painter Orpen in half a dozen wonderful portraits. A young woman, orphaned, but taken to Belle Époque Paris by the famous actress, her rich aunt Julia Marlowe, to Maxims no doubt, and the opera, and to buy huge flowery hats and fashionable clothes on the rue St Honoré. And meeting the gauntly handsome young Joe there; and a few years later married with a curtain ring bought from a local haberdashers by Beatty Glenavy, to seal their secret eight-in-the-morning wedding in a suburban Dublin church.

  Her early years have the air of a glittering romantic novel. Latterly, the book became tattered and tarnished, in large part I think by the endlessly worrying antics of her eldest son, my father Nat. Nat become the prodigal son who only returned home for another pair of old shoes, a mackintosh of his father’s and the cash to get him back as soon as possible on the mail boat to England. All this must have been a long depressing horror for Vera. Though again, one might make some excuses for Nat in that he was stricken by TB just before the war and even in this he was given the best chance of recovery by his aunt Julia, who arranged and paid for him to go to a Swiss sanatorium high up in the mountains in 1939. My uncle David sent me a letter from aunt Julia to Vera some years ago. It’s evidence of how, with her money and influence, she tried to set Nat to rights – a chance which he didn’t make best use of:

  Hotel Beau-Rivage, Lausanne. 17 September, 1939.

  Dear Vera,

  I enclose a first letter from Nat. He seems content with all the arrangements we have made for him. We have sent him the money which he will send to Rome for his new passport. The Irish Legation is doing this for him – and he will be relieved to have this new passport so he can move about when the time comes as he desires. No doubt he has already written to you about everything. He seemed content and even pleased altogether with his prospects and his ability to get well. He has a strong belief that he will get well and he must be encouraged in that belief. The doctor says he may never be quite robust as before but will be able to do office work at least. Don’t worry about him. He can come and see me whenever he likes for a day or two – which prospect seemed to encourage him too.

  Love to you and Sally and David and Joe. I understand your problems. I know you will be able to manage them. Patience and endurance will do much and you have both shown yourselves equal to these necessities before, and will do so again.

  Yours affecti
onately,

  Julia.

  It’s indicative of Nat’s hypocrisy that he gets an Irish passport, but strenuously denies me one fifteen years later, thus forcing me (as he hopes) to do military service in Britain. And Nat did get well. Well enough, on his return to Biddy in England, to father another four children, without having a penny to support them, and so abandon them.

  And what of my aunt Sally and her bookshop husband Stanley? My saviours when I’d left St Columba’s College in 1953 with no prospects, when they gave me a room in their Hampstead house, a start in the world with work (and an education) in Stanley’s Beauchamp Bookshop. Stanley lived until the early 1990s. He had a dodgy heart, greatly improved by a bypass operation, which gave him renewed vigour for three or four years. But his heart finally did for him while he was doing the washing up with Sally one evening. He might have preferred to go out inspecting a rare old vellum-bound volume, though there is surely more merit in going out after helping your wife with a dishcloth. And this end was appropriate, for Stanley was a classic homebody, loved his pipe-and-slippers comforts, his food, his wine and his wife.

  Sally lived on for nearly ten years, alone in the Hampstead flat they’d moved to, then up to a small restored alms house in Derbyshire near her daughter Susan and her family who paid her every attention. Finally, when she could no longer cope by herself, she went to a care home nearby. I drove up to see her quite often in her last years. She became progressively more muddled, annoyed and panic-stricken. I asked her several times (as I had before when she was entirely clear-headed) about her wartime work as a cipher clerk at Bletchley Park; but her lips remained sealed. In her cloudy mind now, where only old memories held any sway, the war was still on. I like to think that sometimes she remembered the war and took pride in recalling her time back in that Nissen hut at Bletchley, helping decode the German Enigma naval messages of U-boat dispositions in the Atlantic, thus saving vital Allied armament supplies and fuel tankers from America, struggling across storm-tossed seas, as her own mind was then. Sally had done the state some service, and the same and more for me. Like Stanley, when she died she was cremated, and her ashes joined his in the graveyard of Hampstead parish church, a church she had loved.

  Hubert died in January 1991, as old as the century; a long life that would have been longer but for a botched prostate operation in a Dublin hospital where, after he was left waiting for several hours on a trolley outside the operating theatre, the anaesthetic wore off halfway through the procedure, waking him, screaming in pain. A subsequent operation left him in discomfort and further pain, with catheters and rubber bags for the rest of his life; a situation he bore with his usual uncomplaining stoicism. Back at Maidenhall he wrote as much as he could under the circumstances, rewriting or expanding earlier magazine articles about the Balkans, the Holocaust and Irish History, published in three collections by the Lilliput Press in Mullingar and Dublin. A fourth and last volume of his essays, In the Land of Nod, appeared after his death in 1995.

  In preparing these collections he was helped as always by Peggy, with editing by Antony Farrell of Lilliput. Antony first came across essays by Hubert in old magazines in the early 1980s and was so taken by them that he’d gone down to Maidenhall to meet Hubert and subsequently helped him unearth and edit scores of his forgotten articles. Lilliput published the first volume, Escape from the Anthill, in 1985.

  This collection was widely and enthusiastically reviewed in Ireland, and the three subsequent volumes found much wider acclaim, with publication in England, North America and France. There were literary prizes and other public attentions from all sides. Hubert, in the last five years of his life, having been a largely unknown and then an almost forgotten literary figure in Ireland, became famous, mentioned as one with Swift, Chekhov and Orwell. As Neal Acherson wrote of him: ‘His fame began to spread across his native Ireland and then across the world. But by the time of his death, readers throughout Europe and America were asking in amazement why he had not been part of their common culture before.’

  All this formed a wonderful late renaissance – for Hubert, his family, friends and readers. He took the acclaim, this sudden late and loud justification of all his old social and religious writings about Ireland, and his explosive unearthings about the bloody fate of Balkan and other minorities during the war, in essays, articles and letters to The Irish Times, which the public had previously ignored or sneered at, or for which he’d been vilified – Hubert took his fame as he’d taken most things in his life, without fuss, never saying (though I hope he thought it) that it was no more than his due. A few years before he died he asked me to be his literary executor. I was no longer irresponsible Little Joe.

  But the story of my association, for the span of this memoir, should stay with my Little Joe times with him. Here, as with my grandfather, Hubert seems to have somewhat failed to find any reasonable answer to my problems, in that he sees only drastic solutions to them – by farming me out once more, in effect abandoning me, as my parents had done.

  A letter from him, in the Little Joe file, is written to an old friend, Bob French, dated 26 January 1950, when I was almost thirteen:

  Dear Bob

  Peggy says I should not bother you but I am taking the risk. It is about Little Joe Hone. You know his background and some of his problems. And you have an interest in homeless people. We undertook some years ago to look after him till his parents took over, but underlined a hundred times that under no circumstances could we share responsibility for him with Nat and Biddy. In the past two years they have been seeing a good deal of him, we less. For Joe’s sake we wished the break to be as gradual as possible, but break there must be.

  Now it has been decided, wisely I think, to send Joe to school in England. It will mean however that unless some family in England can, in his holidays, be persuaded to take the same interest in him that we have taken here, he will be dependent on Nat and Biddy. Do you know of any such family or can you suggest how they can be found?

  I don’t think it will be wholly to Joe’s disadvantage if we fade out of the picture, except as friends. Our household isn’t the right one for him, even if we had the right to decide anything about him. Peggy has however taken enormous pains with him (so have I for that matter) and he has had a good start. But now that he is older we begin to fear things will go wrong. Also we have done our bit. We are busy people with many problems of our own and he is in no way our responsibility as was made clear to us from the start.

  This sounds cold hearted, but we shall always feel warmly towards Little Joe himself, and will co-operate to secure a good arrangement for his future. Any family, who would look after him, would have to have a guarantee of noninterference from Nat and Biddy, such as we failed to secure. I believe under pressure from me and the grandparents they might give this.

  Do, Bob, give your mind to this problem, exasperating as you may find it and don’t hold it against me that I have asked you … He is lively and intelligent and has great charm. He is very easily influenced for good or bad and worth influencing … I have no doubt that there are many families who would be glad to give him a home, problems and all. But how does one find them?

  There is no reply in the file to this letter, though I’m sure Bob French sent one – he was a conscientious man – probably saying he had no real ideas about farming-out families in England, since two months later there is a further letter from Hubert, on the same family-searching theme, to his friend Alan Cameron, Elizabeth Bowen’s husband:

  April 10th 1950.

  Dear Alan

  This is a supplement to my letter to Elizabeth to catch a later post – about Joe. Peggy and I would be most grateful if you would find out what hope he has of getting Joe into Ardingley. From your accounts it would suit him admirably. You know his circumstances. He is now 13, has been with us continuously until about three years ago. Since then his parents, who live in Battersea, have had him for occasional holidays, and as it has become quite impossible for us to s
hare responsibility for him with them we are looking around for some other arrangement.

  We do not think his parents are at all likely to be able to look after him permanently – they have five other children, none of whom they have been able to bring up themselves. I think I can find a family in Sussex, who would look after him in the holidays, and we believe it would be better for him to be in England on a new basis. There are no boys around here of his own age and I believe English circumstances would suit him better. I would get from his parents some ‘non-intervention’ or ‘qualified intervention’ pact. His grandparents pay for his schooling, so they have bargaining power and would take my advice.

  Joe is a very lively intelligent boy, well-grown and highly social. It seems to be probable that he has inherited more than a share of the great family talents. As you know they’ve been artists, actors, writers in the family for several generations, some of rare quality.

  I think Joe’s main failings, his instability of temperament, his rather predatory, egotistic nature, are at least partly due to his sense of insecurity. I offered to be his guardian but his parents did not wish to surrender any control – with the result that he probably has the feeling that he belongs nowhere. We shall always, of course, befriend him, wherever he is.

  Love to you both again,

  Hubert.

  Despite Hubert’s avowal of continuing friendly relations with me, there is an air of subdued desperation in these letters – to get me off the Butlers’ hands. This keenness is surely evidenced by his writing a very favourable prospectus of my characteristics for possible buyers – ‘a well-grown’ boy and so on. He might well be preparing to auction me, as one would a bullock or a slave. There is no reply from Alan Cameron to Hubert’s last letter, nor any other mention of either Ardingley (whatever sort of school or institution that was), or of any family in Sussex that Hubert thinks he can send me to. And no mention was ever made to me at the time of my being packed off to any new school or family in England. I would have remembered if there had been; I would have been devastated. Did Hubert really think I would go happily to some institution or strange family in England?