Wicked Little Joe

by Joseph Hone

  What I do remember is that – as a way of gradually withdrawing from me, no doubt – when I was in my early teens, the Butlers went for holidays to Switzerland and Normandy, and I wasn’t included, but sent to my grandparents instead. At that point I was still marooned at Sandford Park, under the ever-watchful whacker Dudgeon. Along with my grandfather, Hubert doesn’t see that many of my problems then arose not so much from my not knowing where I belonged (as far as I was concerned I belonged totally to the Butlers and Maidenhall), but from the horrors of Sandford Park, from which I should have been removed long before.

  There are other anomalies in Hubert’s attitude towards me in these two letters. If he saw me and my family as artistically gifted, might he not also have seen that, given this sort of inherited sensitivity, I was likely to suffer more than other boys from this sudden transplantation he is proposing for me? As a market gardener he would have known the damage consequent on uprooting a long-established plant from one soil and moving it abroad to a totally different earth; so it was optimistic of him to think I would flourish with some unknown family in England. In fact I don’t think he believed this; in face of his problems with me he just wanted to believe it. I think he, and certainly Peggy, must have known how much such a removal would have hurt me.

  In any case might he not have considered less drastic answers to my problems? By arranging, for example, for me to go as a boarder to Newtown, the liberal co-educational Quaker school in Waterford where, with pretty girls to hand, my problems might have been substantially eased. Like my grandfather over my schoolbooks, Hubert tends to get into a confused tizzy about me. For example, he has often said in his letters that my problems are largely due to my ‘insecurity’. Yet here he is proposing a much greater insecurity for me, overseas, in some institution or with a totally strange family.

  Hubert’s now-and-then contradictory and insensitive attitudes towards me may well stem from his own sometimes unhappy childhood, about which, in all his many writings, he wrote very little. The most spectacularly unhappy time for him, as he has written, was when, aged seven, he thought his parents had literally given him away to his prep school, Bigshotte Reyles, in Berkshire: undoubtedly a traumatic transplantation for him where, during his first term, he wandered round gawping, unable to speak, and had twice bitten off the top of Matron’s thermometer.

  This early experience of desertion came, I suspect, to chill Hubert’s adult emotions as well, so that he found it difficult to deal with me in simpler human terms, and saw the answer to my problems, ironically, only in trying to organize another exile for me. Hubert, in these two letters, seems to have forgotten the abandonment that I had suffered with my parents, and is intent here on repeating this himself by exiling me a second time. In the event I wasn’t sent away to England and Maidenhall remained my home. But it was clearly a damn close-run thing for me in the early 1950s.

  Later, in 1969 when Jacky and I and our daughter Lucy left New York and came to live in the Cotswolds, I had a much easier relationship with Hubert in my many subsequent visits to Maidenhall, both with the family and alone. I think he was as surprised as I was that I’d come to make my living out of my novels. It wasn’t that we were writers together now, sharing ideas, thinking of similar themes – our writing being so very different. But that I had survived all the rocky shoals of my childhood, which must have pleased him, and Peggy, and survived in a literary, rather than in just a workaday, nine-to-five manner. I sent them my novels as they appeared, and in starting to read one of a pair, The Sixth Directorate, Hubert writes to me in June 1975:

  My Dear Joe,

  You will wonder why I didn’t thank you ages ago for your two books, particularly the one dedicated to HM and SM (which flattered us and pleased us enormously). The reason is an embarrassing one and I hoped if I waited a few days it would not be necessary to give it – but not so! I was reading it with great pleasure and admiration – and suddenly it DISAPPEARED. We have hunted on every shelf, under every bed and sofa, even in spare rooms, in case some guest had taken it up, but not a trace. Peggy had it in the porch and then withdrew to bed with a sprained ankle and, as we didn’t lend it or have any guest who would pinch it, we can only assume that some tinker (they are encamped at MacDonald’s) took it because of its bright cover. We’re getting another copy of course, but even if, as we hope, you put in the nice inscription when you come over, it won’t be quite the same. We’re mad about it at intervals. Pace round goggling at the shelves.

  You are quite right, it isn’t my style of book, (Nor is Paradise Lost, Pilgrim’s Progress or ANY modern poet) but after the first chapter I was delighted with it. It fitted in with my mood of the moment, of looking forward to several peaceful evenings with it. As always your writing is exceedingly good and I kept meeting happy images and turns of phrase that enchanted me. What astonished me too was your knowledge and confident familiarity with subjects and places that you must have met or visited in dream or imagination. I don’t remember, for instance, that you were ever in Russia. Or were you? How otherwise, though, can you reproduce so well the streets of Moscow or Leningrad, the remote forests and changes of atmosphere – even if you had been there. I think I’d have noticed anything desperately phoney but didn’t. However, I’ll be reading the whole book soon and will say no more now …

  Love to yourself and family,

  Hubert.

  I had never been to Russia at that point. I was writing a novel, and so had researched and invented all that I needed of the country. But Hubert spoke Russian, had lived in Moscow and Leningrad, and had travelled the country before the war. So this was valued praise.

  What he doesn’t say in the letter is that without the sense of the great importance of books I had from him and his large library at Maidenhall, I’d probably never have become an author. My upbringing in a house with a large library, with Hubert always writing and reading, was for me, by some curious process of osmosis, part of my coming to write books myself.

  There is, in this letter, a typically Butlerian – but also a nicely Tolstoyan or Chekhovian – picture of life at Maidenhall: the tinkers are camped beyond the lawn, and one of them, sneaking up to the porch, and magpie-like, attracted by the bright cover of my book, has pinched it – Peggy in bed with a sprained ankle and Hubert in the drawing-room, only yards away from the porch window, but who has seen nothing of the tinker, deep in thought, pondering a cryptic Serbo-Croatian text.

  Hubert, with pneumonia, went to Auteven Hospital in Kilkenny and died there in early January 1991. I was there for the funeral. The hearse, in Irish custom, stopped on the empty winter road in front of Maidenhall for a full minute, so that the dead could take a last look at the house and lands that had been theirs. For Hubert, Maidenhall and its lands had been at the heart of his life and work. I read the lesson at the packed church, ‘Once we saw through a glass darkly, but now we see face to face …’

  Peggy didn’t come to the funeral, staying in the drawing-room with an old friend. She hated all the fuss and dreary pomp of funerals. Above all, she told me once, she hated the fraud of false green nylon grass covering the excavated grave soil, which had become the fashion at funerals by then: ‘The vegetable garden would do me, among the cabbages,’ she said.

  Peggy’s turn, not for the Maidenhall cabbage patch but for the fake green grass at Ennisnag church next to Hubert, was not to come for another five years. Five years through which, though painfully arthritic and largely wheelchair-bound, she soldiered on. More than that, with a freedom from her long concerns about Hubert, she drew together all the strands of her warrior nature – in his service, through the promotion of his work.

  And also in my service, with her continued if sometimes bossy and argumentative concern for me, combined with her very real love in many letters between us and during my many subsequent visits to Maidenhall. In chilled winters, daffodil springs, orange autumns, when sometimes, alone together in the silent house with my butter-cooked omelette suppers on trays in the
drawing-room, we had perhaps the unspoken feeling, the need to feel at least, that she was my mother and I her son.

  FIFTEEN

  Peggy would have liked more children of her own. As things turned out she had lots more of them, as paying guests at Maidenhall (for they ran the big house then as a paying concern) throughout the 1940s and 1950s. They came as a very varied mix: as brothers, the two Fitzsimon boys, Christopher and Nicky, and the two l’Estranges, Larry and John, and the two Bruns from Paris, Marc and Richard; or as a group with the four delightful Harrison sisters, or as brother and sister, Eleanor and Tommy Arkell, and the five half-Russian Lieven children – Michael, Chai, Dominic, Elena and the youngest, Anatol – the last a fine writer and journalist on Russian themes, the others all formidable academics.

  Many other children and teenagers came to stay at Maidenhall, Irish, British, French, German, Yugoslav, Swiss on exchange visits or to learn English. Some were refugees from the war, or detached children, their parents overseas serving the remnants of empire, and some few from broken homes as I had come from. And I, in the pecking order, just below Julia, was keen to keep my status up, and so resented these new arrivals as interlopers and went out into the bamboos of an evening with my defective Diana air rifle and did them imaginary damage.

  Peggy was a great organizer and taskmaster. This was a problem for some of us children at Maidenhall: her brusque commands and reprimands, the constant jobs and errands she sent us on, fetching something for her, dealing with the animals, picking the daffodils and fruit. Most of the children took to these jobs happily, a few with only fair good will. Yet there was one who was mutinous. I sulked, stole the chocolates, hid in the hayloft or up a tree in the windcharger field. Peggy checked on you if you dawdled over or postponed the set tasks – or, indeed, if you disappeared. One was rarely out of earshot of her high piercing voice: ‘Joe? Joe? Jo-o-oseph?’ A voice that could be heard way out of the house, beyond the hayloft and up to the woods. Peggy’s commands and scoldings were always a problem for me.

  Not that there was the slightest air of Maidenhall being a House of Correction (such as my grandfather was threatening to send me to). It was a happy, very active, purposeful place and Maidenhall is still the beautiful house it always was (though much improved materially), happily run by Julia and her husband Dick Crampton, and by their daughter Suzanna when her parents are back at their other home in Charlottesville, Virginia.

  Many of these children have returned to visit in their later life, and so have I. But I, no doubt, was more difficult than them in those childhood days. And I clearly remained unpromising, since Peggy’s scoldings went on way into my adult life. In 1959, when I was twenty-two, I was in Ireland with Joe Losey and his wife Patricia, helping Joe scout possible prison locations for his movie The Criminal. The three of us spent a relaxed two days at Maidenhall. But Peggy writes to me afterwards:

  Joe darling,

  We are planning to turn your room into a bathroom, so come soon and help us over arrangements. We had very nice bread and butter letters from both Loseys – please note neither too busy to be polite! A moral there, I think, for you – a postcard takes little time and less money and would have made all the difference in nice feeling both to your Granny and us. It is something you must be more grown-up about – if you are to be treated on the level of an adult you must behave like one. Either one is forced to regard you as still a schoolboy, rapacious and irresponsible but so inexperienced all is automatically forgiven, OR as an adult but a boor … Won’t refer to this again.

  Love from us both, PXX

  I was sad about losing my bedroom for a new bathroom. But fair enough about the thank-you note. I should have written one, as the Loseys had. I have few excuses, except that the Loseys had a house in Knightsbridge and a secretary to take dictated letters. I had no fixed abode. I was trying to make a go of it in the big city arts world, in theatre or the movies, where any opportunity offered in these fields had to be taken – yes, rapaciously. I had hardly any money and was camping on friends’ floors and so forth. I wonder if Peggy quite understood my precarious circumstances then.

  I was living from hand to mouth, trying to rustle up any kind of job or money, going to and fro between Dublin and London, as manager of the Envoy Theatre Company in Dublin, a job with Harrods in their second-hand book department and other temporary winter work with Heywood Hill in their Curzon Street bookshop cataloguing their rare books. Or work with Joan Littlewood out at Stratford East, building the sets with Sean Kenny for Behan’s The Hostage, and afterwards managing a season there with a Pinter play and one of our Dublin musicals, Glory Be! I was in a survival tizzy then, pretty well blind to anything but where I was to find the next meal or five-pound note. I had little time for sending thank-you notes.

  I should have made the time, however, to send one. What I question now is the harshness of her words in the letter: ‘an irresponsible schoolboy … a boor’. Equally I see now that Peggy was right in her criticisms of me. ‘Manners Maketh Man.’

  Would she have been less critical of me if I had been her son? No, Peggy could sometimes be very critical of everybody – relations, friends or anybody else conveniently to hand. She would have criticized me whether she’d been my mother or not, and one may well learn more from harsh criticism than from motherly love. ‘Faithful are the wounds of a friend,’ Peggy used to say to me, after a few good dagger thrusts. I think I would have preferred the fidelity of motherly love, although that, from my real mother Biddy with her make-do attitudes, might, given my own somewhat similar temperament, have done me no good at all. In any case, in the matter of familial support I was out on my own now, sailing in what seemed to me a very frail craft, far from port in choppy waters with no visible landfall.

  John Mortimer, in his splendid memoir Clinging to the Wreckage, takes his title from the advice of a yachting friend: ‘When your boat sinks, cling to the wreckage – then someone will come out and rescue you. Don’t try and swim for it. You’ll drown.’ Mortimer clearly didn’t take this advice: he has swum out manfully all his life, through every sort of stormy weather, waving not drowning. For me it was the opposite. I wasn’t going to cling to the wreckage. I’d seen the devils in the shipwreck of my own family. It was the deep blue sea for me.

  But Peggy’s many letters to me over the years were always much more loving than critical. I have quoted few of them here because they were almost entirely newsy – of her and Hubert’s doings at Maidenhall. I had the great good luck to share so many of their doings at the big house. I also had their love, and returned it. It was a frustrated love for all three of us, but it might have been a love in full measure had I been their real son, although real sons often have a more difficult relationship with their parents than I had with Peggy and Hubert. As it was I had some of the worst and most of the best of Peggy. She was a remarkable woman with an extraordinary mix of often contradictory characteristics: loudly energetic but a rapt and silent music lover; forthright but sometimes buttoned up; realistic, intuitive; rudely acerbic but genuinely kind. She exercised her art into old age, not with earlier so accomplished oil paintings, but with witty drawings, cartoons and poems, published together in a late book, They Speak for Themselves. Indomitable.

  She died in Auteven Hospital in Kilkenny in December 1996, aged ninety-one. She had been in the hospital several times during the previous eighteen months, with serious complaints, and I had been over to see her at Auteven and at Maidenhall when, tough as she was, she had emerged each time from the hospital. This time it seemed she really was going, and I came over to see her again. I rather failed her and went to see her once in the hospital, and then again when she was only half conscious. I held her hand for a few minutes, smiled, and there was a vague smile back. Then I left her in the hands of her real family, her daughter and grandchildren. I went out on the town in Kilkenny and then straight back home. The fact was I couldn’t face her death. Sheer funk; an unresolved problem that made me shy away from her death, as I
’d sometimes shied away from her in life. It was a sort of emotional reserve that had started many years before, when I’d first come to Maidenhall as a three-year-old and my parents had refused my adoption with the Butlers, which had resulted in my confused feelings towards her, a cauterised emotion between us – for Peggy wanting a son in someone who wasn’t her son; for me, loving feelings I couldn’t fully express because I knew she wasn’t my real mother. Circumstances stood in our way. We had always been stymied in our emotions for each other.

  And what of the dramatic mentor of my early life, Tony Guthrie? He had died years before in May 1971, of a heart attack one morning while opening the post in his study at Annaghmakerrig. It’s an apocryphal story that opening his annual income tax demand killed him. With his Scots background he was careful with money and always paid his dues. But in matters that took his fancy he could spend lavishly. This he did in the mid-1960s with the creation and costly financing of a jam factory in the old station yard of Newbliss, the local village five miles from Annaghmakerrig. This seemed to him an admirable philanthropic and economic plan, giving work for the unemployed villagers and the depressed local farmers of the time. The farmers would grow the soft fruit and the villagers would happily sweat in the factory over the boiling vats and jam jars. Indeed Irish Farmhouse Preserves did well for a few years, the company making excellent organic raspberry, strawberry and blackcurrant jam. The account at the local bank, though, showed an increasing overdraft. To keep the company afloat, Tony abandoned most of his theatre work and took to the more immediately lucrative but physically punishing American lecture circuit, giving witty and inspiring talks from Berkeley to Boston for most of the year, and pouring the dollars straight back into the jam factory. Yet still the overdraft increased. The enterprise collapsed with debts of half a million.