Wicked Little Joe Read online

  And again, in September 1945:

  We are faced with great difficulties as Nat may come back. Biddy is said to have left him definitely. Enough of that, but as you know it will be risky to have the child with us if Nat is here.

  And again in June 1946:

  I am afraid a hornet’s nest has been stirred up by this planning for Little Joe. Nat arrived here Friday evening unannounced … He said he had come over to see about the child, in view of my letter … He had enquired in London about ordinary private schools … I suppose the vague idea was that he and Biddy cd. get some money into their fingers if any change was made … I am not giving him any money for Little Joe or for himself, beyond his fare back, which I must, as it is quite impossible here – he drives us all to distraction. I don’t mean he is rowdy, but it is the utter sense of futility that is produced.

  And again, with more anguish, in a letter to Peggy in March 1950:

  Thank you for your kind letter abt. the child. May I write to you in two or three days’ time? Nat is over here. I can’t tell you the whole story in a letter – it is dreadful. But it is about Biddy and I am to pay the piper as usual, but this time not … He is talking about taking the child to England and putting him to work (Nat hasn’t a penny or a job at the moment). This is of course to play on Vera’s feelings abt. Little Joe, so as to induce us to part with money. It is hell – no amnesty for us in the Holy Year … I wish I could see you and Hubert but you could do nothing – no one can. I cannot write to you of Nat’s visit, of all that was said and of all that we heard. I just have to give my memory of it a respite.

  And with more anguish still, later that same month, to Peggy:

  Of course you are quite right and it is obvious common sense to keep Little Joe here for the Easter holidays. Don’t think we did not argue that. But Nat made it a point that the only chance of getting Biddy back was that he should be able to say Little Joe would come over … I did not bring Nat over here, and if you knew the pity, anger and dread with which he fills me when I see him, you would understand my weakness. It is our tempers that get frayed. Had he not got this conditional promise from me he wd. have stayed on here, and I could have gone mad. It was a disaster that he was able to borrow money to get here.

  I have always felt, and think I’ve said it to you, that Nat was the tragic figure in all this history, not the children nor his wife tho’ she had much to complain of … My conscience tortures me because when Nat showed the first signs of lack of conscience and disregard for others, coupled with bad habits, I did not insist that he should go out into the world and have no further dependence on us, and so perhaps realise that the world was not made for him. It was the only chance the poor fellow had, and I knew it, but I lacked the courage and was too indolent.

  Yes, my father was a tragic figure.

  TWO

  If my grandfather was always writing at a kitchen table, Nat was always sitting at the end of a bar – alone with a pint of bitter, a packet of Players and The Daily Telegraph open at the crossword. I can hardly see him in any other position, usually at Peter’s Montpellier Bar in Cheltenham, where he and my mother Biddy had unaccountably come to live when they left London in the late 1940s.

  Nat spent most of the pub’s opening hours here, his thin dark hair slicked down with water, a faraway expression set off, alarmingly, by the same startling pale-blue eyes as his father, always wearing the same sick-coloured tweed jacket, carefully creased pre-war flannels, brown shoes of a similar age, holes in the soles, but carefully tended, polished every morning. And always – his proudest possession I think – the same faded lightning-striped Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve tie. A tie so long used that the beery pub airs had acted on it like starch, and I saw it once in his bedroom practically standing up by itself against the back of a chair.

  Nat was as much part of the fixtures and fittings of Peter’s Bar as the slate shove-ha’penny board (a game he played so often in pubs that he never lost), the beer-pull labels for Bass and Worthington Pale Ale and the stale sandwiches under a glass dome. I see him querying the odd crossword clue with Peter the landlord, a big, bear-like, bearded nautical man who had sunk a few German pocket battleships, I gathered, in the war.

  Here Nat would eke out his languid, gentlemanly days, fingering his top lip, carefully pacing his cigarettes and pints of bitter, one of each every forty-five minutes or thereabouts, so that his money allocated for that morning would last from twelve until the two-thirty closing time. Then he would go home to a snack of strongly soused herrings and onions, prepared the previous day for him by my mother, with heels of white bread, before drowsing the afternoon away in bed, reading ‘tec novels.

  At six he would stroll out again, down the faded Georgian glories of Landsdowne Crescent where they had a third-floor cold-water flat, buying the Cheltenham Echo at the Montpellier corner for the racing results to see what he might have won or lost, for he was a passionate follower of the turf, not at any racecourse (that would have been too costly) but via the racing pages and the bookie’s runner who came into Peter’s Bar every morning. Now I think of it he may have chosen to leave London and live in Cheltenham for its great racing traditions and its excellent off-course betting and credit facilities, in the shape of its many bookie’s runners, with their hot tips for the two-thirty.

  At half past six my mother would meet him at Peter’s Bar, having finished work as a filing clerk at Walker Crossweller, a firm that made bathroom fittings in the Cheltenham suburbs. He would buy her a pint of bitter – with her money. For, as I soon learnt, all his beer and cigarettes and racing debts – along with the food and rent for the flat – were paid for out of my mother’s wages packet, handed over to him every Friday when they met at Peter’s Bar. I remember the exact sums she got – nine pounds a week to start with, then ten pounds after a few years and finally, before she left the firm ten years later, eleven pounds a week. She would keep only a pound or two for herself.

  Apart from being paid for delivering flyers around Cheltenham for the local Tory party at election time, the only money my father received was from his father in Dublin – meagre, most unwilling cheques which soon dried up, and afterwards secret cheques from his loving mother, Vera, which he cashed with Peter, so allowing himself a pint and a cigarette every thirty minutes instead of forty-five – and some rash bets on outsiders at the races. Though Old Joe was sometimes prepared to give money to Nat in kind. On his being asked by my mother for cash to buy Nat a pair of shoes – winter coming on, his one other pair down to their last – my uncle David remembers being told to look under Old Joe’s bed, where he found a pair of cracked Edwardian dancing pumps, which were laboriously parcelled up and sent, second class, to Cheltenham.

  My father, since he was strictly a one-outfit man, had trouble with his clothes. After the war, he came on one of his visits to dun money from his parents, then living at Ballyorney House beyond Enniskerry in the Wicklow mountains. At that time they employed a smiling, round-faced, mischievous, lank-haired little dwarf of a man, Johnny, as chef and general factotum. My grandfather – always anxious to get rid of his son as soon as possible – gave Johnny cash for Nat’s ticket on the mailboat back to England, and charged him with making sure Nat got on it. A mistake, for Johnny was as partial to the drink as Nat. The two of them drank away the ticket money in Dun Laoghaire bars so that penniless now and fearing – or unable – to return home, they put up for the night in a boarding house. But with no money for the bill next morning, Johnny set out with Nat’s suit, overcoat and shoes, hocked them and returned with the money to settle the account.

  It can’t have occurred to them in their befuddled state that Nat, apart from his shirt and socks (for some reason he never wore underclothes – penury, bravado, hygiene?), had now been left almost naked, trapped in the boarding house. A blanket and a taxi were negotiated. They got home. History doesn’t relate my grandfather’s reaction on their return. But it can well be imagined.

  My father was
the mother of all remittance men.

  But considering he was good-looking, charming, intelligent, had been to Radley and (briefly) to New College, Oxford and had been left ten thousand pounds when he was twenty-one by a rich bachelor cousin, William Hone, whose fortune had come to him as a bookmaker (discreetly no doubt since he lived in one of London’s most elegantly respectable addresses, at Albany, Picadilly), one may wonder at Nat’s later come-down. Or not wonder. Such a silver-spoon-in-the-mouth background, in a wilful, suddenly rich, free-spending young man-about-London-and-Dublin in the 1930s would seem a good recipe for a possible fall. And so it was for Nat.

  How had all this come about? Well, that Nat had his glory days there is no doubt, though of what exactly he got up to in those days I learnt only a few details, then or after he died in 1959 aged forty-six. These matters were never spoken of by my grandparents or the Butlers. A pall – an appalled pall – of silence surrounded Nat’s doings in young adult life. I heard only vague accounts from my uncle David and from friends of Nat who I met years later. One friend of his (who later became a director of the Shell Oil Company) was a student with him at New College in the early 1930s. He told me how Nat was often absent from the college, taking a hire car to London to restaurants and nightclubs several evenings a week and climbing over the high college wall on his return, for which he was soon sent down. Though not before he had run over someone in Oxford on his motorcycle, resulting in serious injuries to both, with Nat breaking his jaw in several places, which must have accounted for the unnerving, palpitating movement of one cheek like a stranded fish when he was annoyed.

  These Oxford high jinks might be seen as par for the course among the gilded youth at the University between the wars, except that Nat had some demon in him that always pushed him a mad stage farther. On returning to Dublin in the mid-thirties, when General O’Duffy’s Nazi-inclined Blueshirts were out and about recruiting, Nat became a camp follower of the movement, patrolling the Dublin cocktail bars carrying a loaded .45 revolver under his coat, where he once blasted the tops off the brandy and Benedictine bottles in the Wicklow Hotel; target practice for the real thing in the Spanish Civil War to fight for Franco, a campaign frustrated when the plane he was piloting never made it beyond Biarritz, where he and the others of his bibulous Irish Brigade spent a few days attacking the Champagne at the Imperial Palace Hotel instead of the Republicans.

  Yes, some devil came to possess my father. But in one crucial matter at least I should thank this demon in him, for without his irresponsible behaviour I would never have come to write this book – since I wouldn’t have been abandoned as a child, or have taken all the great advantages I did from the Butler family, and there would have been none of all these concerned letters from my minders and I would probably have led a pretty awful life with my parents.

  Nat’s sad demons probably started with his good looks and his great charm; though when I came to know him there was little enough of this latter left. Several people described it to me later as a ‘fatal charm’. The cliché in his case proved to be almost literally true. Nat had always got what he wanted, with the usual whims and tantrums of childhood indulged by nannies and servants in the household of his parents who, it’s clear from the Beerbohm cartoon, knew little or nothing about either conceiving or bringing up children.

  Nat was partly brought up by my grandfather’s elder sister, my great-aunt Olive, who lived at Lime Hill, a lovely parkland Georgian house near Malahide outside Dublin. Olive was a most kindly, motherly, well-off woman, who, childless herself, took Nat under her wing. He spent a lot of his childhood with her and her stockbroker husband, George Symes. Here, as surrogate son to Olive, he found loving affection and no doubt traded on this. So for him there was initially a ‘farming out’, as there later was for me more formally with the Butlers – and so no doubt a feeling of parental abandonment that, mixed with his quick intellect and charm and a great whack of money too soon in his life, led him around to those Dublin cocktail bars with a loaded .45 revolver.

  And afterwards, in 1936, to a meeting with my mother Biddy, Bridget Anthony, and marriage to her on 30 August of that year – at the registry office in Plymouth of all inexplicable places, since they had no connections with the town. And since I was born in the following February 1937, Biddy was three months’ pregnant when she married Nat. A shotgun marriage, in order to legitimize my birth? A holiday in Cornwall and spur-of-the-moment decision to confirm their love affair? Possibly both.

  In any case my mother Biddy would have gone along with anything Nat suggested. She was gentle and yielding by nature. And in this, and her clear skin and fine hands, long delicate fingers and country-blue eyes, she was an attractive woman. Her mind was intuitive, untutored, but with veins of a strong native intelligence running through it. A free and independent spirit showed few traces of what must have been an impoverished Catholic upbringing and education in the wilds of 1920s rural Ireland. She had an innate sense of style, a quiet charm, an ability to get on with literally anyone. She was her own woman, except with Nat, who in many ways was her undoing.

  Her gentleness, delicacy and non-confrontational character played into his hands. He came to use her. She became a put-upon woman. So in the end her marriage with Nat defeated her and, in her last years when she was still only in her forties, she took to drink and sad confusions.

  Nat met Biddy in the King’s Head and Eight Bells, a Chelsea pub on the river. Meetings anywhere else than in a pub were a sore trial for Nat. Biddy was about twenty, studying to be a nurse in London at the time. She was from a widespread family of Anthonys in south Kilkenny (a cousin ran the large inn on the main road through the village of Piltown). She was the second-oldest of some dozen or more children. I’m not certain of the exact number or how many survived, for several died early and I met very few of them. Certainly, a great number of children – aunts and uncles to me, but difficult to keep track of afterwards. My maternal grandparents were clearly better at the family game than my paternal grandparents.

  My mother’s Anthonys lived in a small whitewashed cottage outside the village. It must have been crowded. My mother’s father, from what little I knew of him, for I can’t remember ever meeting him, did little if any work. (I heard years afterwards from my sister Geraldine that he suffered from serious depression – which didn’t stop him fathering a dozen or more children). My grandfather writes of him to Hubert in 1955 in the light of the Hone family having ‘very varied temperaments’:

  And then there is Joe’s mother’s family to be taken into consideration. I understand that Mr Anthony, the grandfather, has leant entirely for material support upon his wife and children for many years. Oh dear, oh dear, it is frightful. If Little Joe can’t help himself who is going to help him?

  It seems there was a tendency on both sides of my family for the men to rely entirely on the women.

  I visited the Anthony cottage only twice, with my mother when I was about eleven. I found the visits embarrassing. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I helped out once at the inn, filling bottles with porter from a barrel and a semi-automatic filler, six weighted spigots and a corking machine. On another occasion I went out shooting with a cousin with a .22 rifle. On another day, my mother and I and an older and well-off Scots friend of hers, Ian McCorkadale (who I learnt years later had been her lover) went to the Commercial Hotel in Clonmel, where all three of us spent the afternoon in the lounge, gin and tonics for them, the local cider for me.

  That’s all I remember. Or want to remember?

  The discreditable fact is that I looked down on the Anthonys, their small cottage and generally impoverished set-up. All were light years from the people, the large country houses and gracious vistas, the maids and gardeners, the libraries and theatre goings-on of my other homes – with the Butlers and the Guthries at Maidenhall (which was only thirty miles up the road from Piltown), at Annaghmakerrig and at Old Joe’s successive attractive houses in and around Dublin.

  I was
a child of two utterly different worlds, and never the twain did meet. Except by that initial chance meeting between my parents in the King’s Head and Eight Bells in 1936.

  For Nat and Biddy this meeting was the start of what seems to me to have been either a lifelong love affair between them or a union based on poverty-stricken inertia. A bit of both probably. I can see no other reasons for my mother sticking with Nat, for their practical life together was unhappy and one of almost continual crises. True, my mother left Nat several times, as is clear from my grandfather’s letter to the Butlers in which I was used as a decoy by my father to lure Biddy back. And she left him again in 1950, for there is a letter from my great-aunt Olive to Hubert dated 1 May of that year:

  Nat came over here in a great state about Biddy having left him and wanting still to get her back, and you have to admit that if there is to be any prospect of a home for the children in the future it would have to be with their parents, who are considerably younger than myself or Joe or Vera … Nat said ‘He had better come over to me, and it may influence Biddy to return to me.’ … I went out to Enniskerry the next day and heard there that Nat had pressed the (same) point with his father, as his only hope.

  On one or other, or all of these occasions, I think my mother took up with her older married Scots friend, Ian McCorkadale, for on the first occasion there is a letter from her to Hubert from a prep school in Perthshire where she was housekeeping. In any event she returned to Nat. Ian’s wife may have caused trouble. Or did Biddy come to feel guilty about leaving Nat, knowing he would not survive without her? Nat certainly needed her. And perhaps poverty made sex their one certain joy, which might help explain the seven children they had in almost successive years from 1937 onwards. Their penury, their endless struggle for survival, left them nothing reliable except each other.