Wicked Little Joe Read online

  Wicked Little Joe

  A Tale of Childhood and Youth

  Joseph Hone

  In memory of SMB and HMB and for our grandchildren – Harry, Cordelia and Jack

  For the field is full of shadows as I near the

  Shadowy coast.

  And a ghostly batsman plays to the bowling of

  A ghost.

  And I look through my tears on a soundless-

  clapping host,

  As the run-stealers flicker to and fro,

  To and fro –

  O my Hornby and my Barlow long ago!

  Francis Thompson

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  ALSO BY JOSEPH HONE

  Copyright

  ONE

  In the summer of 1939, as a two-year-old in London, I was given away by my parents to a Chelsea friend and taken on the Irish Mail to Dublin. On arrival she didn’t abandon me in the Left Luggage. That, indeed, would have been carelessness. Instead I was deposited at my grandfather’s house in Killiney next morning. He must have groaned at my arrival – he was prone to groan. With the arrival of my sister Geraldine and twin brothers, Antony and Camillus, landing on his doorstep in the two subsequent years, his groans must surely have become cries.

  These babies became like time bombs for him, to be passed on as quickly as possible among equally alarmed friends and relations. My grandfather – (known as ‘Old Joe’, so that I became ‘Little Joe’) son of a respectable, well-to-do Dublin banking, merchant and artistic family, friend and biographer of Yeats and George Moore – was reduced to the status of a baby-hawker. Literally so, for when his ‘Mary Poppins’ friend, P.L. Travers, wanting to adopt a child, came to Dublin in 1940 to inspect the goods – in this case the twins – he said to her, ‘Take two, they’re small.’

  How had all this come to pass?

  Some years ago, after my foster parents Hubert and Peggy Butler died, I was told by Bernard Meehan, the archivist of Trinity College Library in Dublin, that among literary and other papers which Hubert, the acclaimed Irish essayist and scholar, had sold to the College, there was a file about me. When I was next over I picked it up. Marked ‘Little Joe’, it was stuffed full of letters to Hubert and Peggy – with carbon copies of all Hubert’s replies – from my real parents, Nat and Biddy, my grandparents, Old Joe and Vera, from my great-aunt Olive, from Peggy’s theatre director brother Tony Guthrie, from Pamela Travers, from cousins, friends, headmasters, housemasters, a doctor-psychiatrist and others who had become involved in the seemingly all-absorbing cause of dealing with ‘Little Joe’, clearly an exceptional case, a real cracker in the difficult, troublesome boy department.

  A glance through the file was enough. I saw the wispy heads of unhappy genies emerging, and firmly closed the bottle. I didn’t want to revisit my childhood. Or at least the unhappy part of it, for it hadn’t always been unhappy. In fact I had a very lucky and stimulating upbringing with the Butlers and the Guthries, in Maidenhall and at Annaghmakerrig, two lovely book-and-theatre-dominated country houses in County Kilkenny and County Monaghan, south and north in Ireland. But my origins, and being farmed out to strangers, my Dublin schooldays, my later meetings with my real parents – all this had certainly been trying. Let those bad genies rattle their chains in the bottle.

  These days they would say I was ‘in denial’; so be it. I see no good reason why one should uncork bad times, unless a later refusal to do this has formed a ‘block’, preventing one from getting on decently with one’s life. And this has not, I think, been my case. Rather the opposite. The bad memories alone, when I touched on them – of a groaning, penny-pinching grandfather, of a sad grandmother, of irresponsible, drinky, unhappy-go-lucky parents, of my being moved from odd pillar to odder post among put-upon friends and relations; memories of a sadistic headmaster, of vomit-making school food and cold showers – all this long ago made me want to repress these shabby parts of my life, so freeing me to make something brighter of it.

  To forget a past that was sometimes as unhappy as mine seemed to me then, and now, to be a very good idea. To deny is often to survive. To dwell on the shipwreck is likely to sink with the wreckage. Besides, as far as my schooldays went, every prep-school boarding boy of my generation, lonely, with parents inevitably absent, has a horror story – more likely a dozen – to tell. A commonplace experience then. And apart from sometimes speaking of the comic side of my family and schooldays – almost as a party piece – I have never wanted to think of, or trade upon, the sadder aspects of my early life. So I thought, let the no doubt troubled child I was then stay interred in the often-troubled tomb of youth.

  On the other hand, having reached an age so distant from those times, and thus surely immune to any of its resurrected pains, I thought perhaps I owed it to myself, and as much to my minders – whose real purposes and actions I didn’t understand then, or may have wilfully misunderstood or subsequently exaggerated – to take a proper look through the file. It might well have a purely archaeological interest now.

  After all, it isn’t everyone in their early seventies who discovers a fat file containing long-hidden secrets of their childhood, reflected in letters between various intelligent, well-meaning or irresponsible people who together, in thinking they were doing their best for me, made my early life more difficult than it was already.

  But perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps, marshalling the evidence in the file and in other family letters, I may come to see the good sense of their behaviour towards me. Or perhaps the file will justify my feelings that I was badly handled by all of them?

  That’s a thought. The proof of my pudding, like revenge, could well be a dish best relished cold, as all my minders are now. I can’t hurt them. But perhaps, whether they were right or wrong in their behaviour towards me, in reading through the file and seeing their efforts on my behalf I may come to understand their confused supervision of me, as I was rarely able to do at the time.

  So why not call up those spirits from the vasty deep – the dramatis personae of my early life – as witnesses for the prosecution, adding my own defence now? Why not resurrect the minders’ view of me, and my own view of the child I was then, and how I was looked after, and see where the balance of judgment might lie?

  So last year I opened the bottle and let the first genie out. And there he was, a wispy figure emerging, my grandfather, in a letter drawn out at random, written in 1951 to Hubert Butler, an old friend of his, who lived at Maidenhall in County Kilkenny and had been in effect my foster father since 1939:

  Yes, it would be very nice for Little Joe if I could send him to Paris for a fortnight – if you could tell me how to find the money. £30 at least. But how?

  1.To make it.

  2.To save.

  3.To borrow.

  4.To beg.

  1. My productive capacity has been about £50 p/a for the last six years. I wd. be delighted if you could suggest any means by which I could bring it up to a £100. Even tho’ that wd. be but a few drops in the bucket out of which I’m pouring pints per annum. I have been spending 75% to 100% above my income. And over 20% of this has been on Little Joe’s expenses and nearly another 15% has gone to Nat [my father]. This year with tax and increasing charges for Joe I am running at a rate of at least 150% above my income. My income earned is about £1000 after income tax
and the rates on South Hill.

  (I am speaking of Vera’s money as well as mine.)

  2. There are possibilities (I admit) here. I could save about £150 p/a by cutting out cigarettes, my sub. to the Kildare St Club and such hospitalities as we offer. We could do without a servant, until Vera broke down – another £150 I suppose. Vera and I could go into petit bourgeois lodgings and tell David he will have to fend for himself henceforth. But we did tell him (when times were better) that we could see him through the architectural course. We cd. cut off all aid to Nat. But the likely result of this is that Biddy who, with me, is his only visible means of support, would leave him, and he wd. return to my doorstep. Than having him here hanging about, I wd. much rather go into lodgings (I do not say Vera would) or die. And moreover the cost of keeping him with us wd. be as much as I give him now, so this is really ruled out. So what do you suggest in this line? Cigs, etc. We are quite old and haven’t many small pleasures, and are not strong enough for golf or walks in the country.

  3. Borrowing. I have been doing this for many years at a accelerated rate. This includes of course selling investments, since the bank has to be paid back from time to time. Counting Vera’s little heritage, about a third of which has gone, she and I have enough to last us, say, eight years, without substantially altering our manner of life: this is assuming that values do not fall much further. Our capital has decreased on paper value by 15% at least in the last 4 months, since the socialists retired. And bills and taxes do not rise much further; also assuming that Little Joe is presently ‘settled’ and numerous other things. We cd. in short gamble on both being dead in eight years, for our only assets wd. then be the house we live in and the furniture. Do you advise us to resign ourselves to this course? It looks as if you were doing so. We have in the sense I have explained to you enough money to send Little Joe to Eton for 2 years. Neither of us has any expectations. I had one of £3000 but have anticipated it in purchasing this house.

  4. To beg. Where? No doubt at the end of 8 years my brother and sister, who have always been most generous wd. not let us starve, if they live and have themselves anything left. I have laid my cards on the table.

  He had indeed. Though perhaps he was hiding one or two under the table. When he died, eight years later (in that at least his forecast was correct) in 1959, he left an estate valued at nearly forty thousand pounds. Approaching half a million in today’s values I imagine.

  My grandfather’s lengthy correspondence with the Butlers largely revolved around money: how much he was to pay for my keep with them, how much he had paid, or had overpaid, or how much he had forgotten to pay, or how much he would, or could not pay. Another letter, from 1944:

  My dear Peggy

  Did you get the letter from me with the cheque? I can’t remember if I posted it. I had it in my pocket leaving here on Thursday and it was gone when I returned in the evening. I suppose I did post it but I can’t recall the act.

  My grandfather was a vague man.

  He first drove a car – I was told by my aunt Sally – on a family holiday in the 1920s, all the way from Dublin to Galway without stopping. But this was only because he didn’t know how to stop the car, which he did in the end by running straight into the hotel porch, demolishing a pillar or two and sending the porter flying.

  Old Joe. And he always seemed very old to me. I see him writing, in one or other of the four attractive houses I knew him in, usually at the kitchen table, where there was heat from the stove and so no need to waste fuel on a fire for his wife Vera in the drawing-room. A tall, thin figure stooped over dip-pen, paper, and a cut-glass inkwell – and a tumbler of well-watered Mitchell’s Green Spot whiskey to hand if it was after six o’clock. A high brow leading to a bald crown, but with streams of wispy white hair flowing out above his long ears, one or often two pairs of spectacles, one perched on wild eyebrows, the other against luminously pale-blue eyes. A tattered, ashdusted, elbows-out pullover and befuddled tie, the trousers of an old suit hitched up by another tie, slippers where the heel-ends had long since been pushed down, embedded in the insoles; a forgotten cigarette drooping from thin lips, coughing slightly, or quietly humphing and sighing, or starting to groan when he took his cheque book stubs to the dilapidated drawing-room sofa after lunch, where the two smelly dachshunds, Gretel and Hilda, were already in somnolent residence.

  Sitting at one end, he would settle his legs down over the dogs and start his count through the stubs. And then the groans. The dogs, disturbed, responded with their own moans and growls, so that soon the three of them had set up a dirge of throaty complaint, like notes from a diseased organ, each dog an organ pedal now, responding in a different plaintive key as he moved his legs here and there over them.

  Most afternoons, having read the stock market prices in The Irish Times and dealt with his cheque stubs, he would settle himself to the grim task of making a tally, on the back of the cheque book or an old envelope, of all his worldly assets. First noting the cash in his pockets, perhaps a crumpled ten-shilling note and two sixpences; then making a column of his declining stocks and shares, his São Paulo Tramway stock particularly – this last producing a bad groan, a sudden movement of his thighs and loud yelps from the dogs. Clearly São Paulo trams were going down the tubes.

  But there were other, firmer, assets to be cheered by – I saw the back of some of these cheque books and old envelopes later. They ran on the lines of: ‘Two old Victorian dining-room chairs (not needed) – ten pounds? Old brass-headed double bedstead (hardly needed) – five pounds? Clothes horse: two pounds. A good desk (but one drawer missing) in basement – ten pounds. Old dress suit, starched shirt and dancing pumps (cert. not needed) – three pounds. Old shoes and hats – two pounds? Set of Hegel’s works, (slightly foxed) – three pounds? (Possibly more).’

  And then another column – ‘This month’s liabilities’ and renewed groans: ‘Sawyers Fish Mongers – one pound seventeen and sixpence. Smyths of the Green, groceries – three pounds, ten shillings and ninepence. Mitchell’s, whiskey and cigs – two pounds fifteen shillings and tenpence. Kildare St Club sub – five pounds. School fees, Little Joe – seventeen pounds, ten shillings’. A sudden groan, anguished movement of the legs, dog yelping madly, a cacophony of outrage.

  My grandfather was worried about money. In a letter to Peggy Butler, dated March 1945:

  Dear Peggy

  Hubert says he can’t keep Little Joe at the price I am paying, and because I cause you annoyance by suggesting economies, as for instance having the child here for a few days when you went away.

  I can’t afford more. In fact I can expose my books and accounts which show that properly speaking I have never been able to afford anything, since all Little Joe’s expenses come out of capital … I cannot take the child, here, except for occasional spells. I made this clear at the very beginning when the subject was brought before you by Pamela Travers. We were not then fitted to do so, and are now even less fitted, from the point of view of physical health and nerves alone, as any doctor would testify. These seem to be facts, and I suggest we should discuss what can be done with Little Joe in their light. I could, in the meanwhile, make an estimate of the total capital I could be prepared to put aside for Little Joe, say from this summer until he is 17 or 18, when he will have to make his own living. Getting into the merchant navy might be considered, as their career starts at 14, I think, and would therefore leave more over per annum …

  Getting me off his hands and his bank balance at the earliest opportunity became a constant preoccupation of my grandfather’s. There is no correspondence relating to it in the file, but I clearly remember seeing and then being told about the brochure and admission forms which my grandfather, in the light of this last letter, must have immediately requested. It was from a merchant navy training institution for orphaned or indigenous boys, not set on dry land but on an old ship of the line, the HMS Conway, moored in Colwyn Bay, North Wales, and thus a situation ideal from my grandfather’s point of
view, in that, apart from entry at fourteen, I would be well and truly off his hands, marooned offshore on the Napoleonic Wars hulk for several years. That I somehow escaped this fate must count as one of my earliest lucky breaks.

  At the same time, this failure to transport me to Van Diemen’s Land, as it were, resulted in ever more tortuous and argumentative letters between my grandfather and the Butlers; an increasingly contentious financial correspondence between them, as if they were Rothschilds and Warburgs arguing over millions rather than two quite well-off but rather miserly families disputing the toss over a few pounds, shillings and pence. An offended tone is there from the start in the first letter I have of my grandfather’s, in 1942:

  Dear Peggy

  I’m enclosing Joe’s keep in advance for September & October, £6.10.0. I don’t know why you say I have been in arrears with payments. I have as a rule paid them in advance; once in the Kildare St Club I paid half a year in advance to Hubert. I was (in this payment) a few weeks early in paying, and now I will be a week or ten days late, with this unexpected ‘taxi’ bill. Please admit that you are wrong as to this, whatever you may think of my feelings.

  Sometimes these letters, in his attempts to straighten things out, are reduced to pure financial farce. Another letter, later in 1942:

  Dear Peggy

  I am enclosing £5.15.0 on account of Joe’s expenses to and from Ballingarry. I am not sure from yr. previous card whether I was to pay the whole £1 charged return fare from Bennettsbridge to Kilkenny, as you say the escort on the way back did not charge anything. On yr. account (or Hubert’s) it would seem that he did charge; but that the other escort (outward journey) did not. I suppose the escort (return journey) was going to you anyway, so had the benefit of the car. I am puzzled. So I send you both the account and the postcard. If I still owe you the 10/- I will add it to the November cheque. (I have paid the monthly sum for Oct. already.) Please return the account, as I keep a list of these expenses, so that my heirs, executors and assignees may see what a miser I was.