Wicked Little Joe Read online

  For whatever reason, for my mother it was a remarkable attachment. Nat must often have been an impossibly difficult husband – using her, financially and emotionally; depressed, work-shy, a failure, the gilded youth become a very black sheep. And though he repressed all this, in Peter’s Bar, with slow pints of bitter, the Telegraph crossword puzzle, the racing pages, shove ha’penny, soused herrings and ‘tec novels, my mother must have been well aware of, and suffered from, his bitter disquiet. It’s clear that with Nat she was a loving and tenacious woman.

  But what of us, the seven children, born and farmed out every year? Not much loving tenacity in my mother there. Or were the children forced on her by my father? Or the produce of drinky nights together? Or the result of my mother’s Catholic upbringing and ignorance of family planning? Hardly. She was a student nurse and rarely went to church. And one of her younger brothers was a salesman for the London Rubber Company – in short, for Durex contraceptives.

  I imagine the reason for each of us seven children was a mix of all these factors, and perhaps I have no right to criticize here. Procreative urges are many and varied, the concern only of the couple. But to farm the product out, one after the other, abandoning each child to unhappiness, among strangers, mewling bundles thrown out, orphans of the storm – that’s another matter.

  Orphans of the storm … On one level my whole family business has something of the air of a wicked fairy story, the babies cursed at birth, so that they had to be abandoned in the Evil Forest. But on another level it can only be seen as sheer crass irresponsibility on the part of our parents. Perhaps there’s some way for reason in between? Well, there is one reason – chronic poverty. Which would seem a very good reason for not having so many children.

  However, there was one blameless circumstance in my father’s life which may help explain his decline and fall. A year before the war he got tuberculosis, which led to isolation wards in England, a stay in a Swiss mountain sanatorium in 1940 (arranged and paid for by aunt Julia, then living in a grand hotel in Lausanne with her bevy of Pekinese dogs) and an operation to remove half of one of his lungs. This incapacity must have been a major factor in curtailing his boisterous golden youth, and equally a reason for his sad depressive life afterwards. But it was a disease that didn’t deter his sexual potency. (It may indeed have increased it, as evidenced by the four subsequent children he fathered, year in, year out, from 1940 onwards.)

  But to be fair Nat’s problems of nature and nurture, with which he might have come to live reasonably, included the destruction of the hopes he surely had by this tuberculosis; the then general fatality of the disease had given him a death sentence in 1939, so that he lived the rest of his short life on death row. And so it’s perhaps insensitive of me to be too critical of my father’s behaviour. I’ve not taken proper account of the medical and psychological horrors he must have undergone in the long twenty-year course of his disease before he died of it (and cancer) in 1959. Did my grandfather take these horrors into account in dealing with his son? He must have done; he was an intelligent and sensitive man. But his way of dealing with Nat’s continuous health problems and difficult behaviour was to retreat, to protect himself behind a show of fatalistic irony. And that’s understandable. We protect ourselves from hurt and the insoluble in whatever way we can. This distancing stance which my grandfather came to take about Nat is well evidenced – is curtly summed up – in a letter to Peggy Butler, in April 1942:

  I hope all’s well with you. Someone told me Hubert was in Cork. Biddy had another child, a boy. Nat had a bad go of bronchitis (probably pneumonic) and lost his job in the brewery. We had to lend them money, a good deal, to tide them over. I hope it will.

  Biddy has another child. (The boy was Michael, as I learnt years afterwards, who, born in 1941, died eighteen months later. A mystery boy, of whom more later.)

  Meanwhile the pub-haunting Nat found a job with a brewery – work which, given his drinky character, was surely a bad career move. A touch of comedy. But then pneumonic bronchitis disconnects him from the brewery, and yet my grandfather no doubt has to sell a good whack of that São Paulo Tramway stock to keep my parents afloat. The letter reflects a typical episode in the Hone family tragicomedy. But more tragedy than comedy. I can only read this letter with sadness, for my grandfather, my father, mother and children.

  Now it’s time for the two major players in my early life to make their proper entrance: Hubert and Peggy Butler, of Maidenhall, County Kilkenny. Hubert was from the old Anglo-Irish Butler family, ‘minor gentry’ as he described his family, but distantly related to the Dukes of Ormonde, who had lived for hundreds of years in splendour at Kilkenny Castle. Hubert’s grandfather was a local rector and his own father, a retiring conservative country gentleman, farmed some five hundred acres six miles south of the city, near the village of Bennettsbridge.

  But Hubert was very different from his conventional family – a questioning boy, with great academic gifts who went to Charterhouse and, in 1918, on a scholarship, to St John’s, Oxford, reading first Maths and then Classics: a young man in the early 1920s of liberal views – indeed heretical views as far as his Unionist family was concerned – including support for Irish nationalism; a man who, as the historian Roy Foster said of him years later, ‘… could not see a boat safely moored without wanting to rock it’.

  This tendency to rock the boat – not at home or socially, for he was very conventional in these fields – led him throughout his long life, in his journalism, essays and letters to the papers, to ferret out awkward truths, political, historical and religious, in Ireland and elsewhere in Europe. He became a lie hunter, successfully exposing the liars. And of course this did him no good at all with right-thinking people everywhere, especially in Ireland, concerned with avoiding ‘trouble’, quite happy to be accomplices with the liars, and indeed with murderers and war criminals. For having gone to Vienna after the Anschluss, there with the Quakers to help get Jews out of the country, he came particularly to sympathize with their subsequent fate and that of other European minorities. He made it his business after the war to search out some of their persecutors, war criminals who had gone to ground, most notably in Yugoslavia where from Zagreb in the late 1940s he followed the trail of Artukovic, the brutal Home Affairs Minister in Pavelic’s Nazi puppet regime in Croatia; Artukovic, who, with priests and prelates in the Catholic Church, had been responsible for the forced conversion and more often murder of some 750,000 Orthodox Serbs in Croatia during the war.

  It was a trail that led him to Ireland, where Artukovic, with the help of a Vatican escape line, had found sanctuary in a Galway monastery, and afterwards lived comfortably with his family in a Dublin suburb for a year, before getting a visa for America.

  Hubert was the first to publicize this religious holocaust outside Yugoslavia in articles and letters to the papers – and he made a very public exposure of it all in 1951 at a meeting of the Irish Foreign Affairs Society in Dublin at which, unknown to Hubert, the Irish Papal Nuncio was present. Hubert began to speak of how appallingly the Catholic Church had behaved in wartime Croatia. The Nuncio, naturally enough, got up and left. There was a front page scandal about it all in the Irish papers next day: INSULT TO NUNCIO!

  These truths, as they were, did not go down at all well in the Holy Catholic Ireland of the early 1950s. Hubert was ostracized by his community, kicked out of the Kilkenny Archaeological Society (which he had re-established in 1940 after a lapse of over fifty years), denied milk by the local creamery and libelously condemned by a drunken member of the Kilkenny City Council as being a disgrace to the County of Kilkenny and a Red to boot.

  The Irish Special Branch took an interest; the local village sergeant was asked to get on his bike and keep a watch on the front gates of Maidenhall. It was thought Hubert might do a runner to Moscow. Years later, when the Special Branch papers on the investigation somehow leaked out, a memo from one of the detectives to the head of the service said there was no communist t
aint in the man at all, that he was simply an apple grower, bee keeper and market gardener.

  As indeed he was. And it was as ‘market gardener’ that he described himself on identity forms. And it was as this and bee keeper and apple grower that I knew him in my early years at Maidenhall, and not as a latter-day Orwell and Swift with whom he was later compared when his forgotten essays in small magazines were published as books, in Ireland, by Antony Farrell’s adventurous Lilliput Press, in the last decade of his life.

  All this came years later. For me – I see the natural man, at home in Maidenhall, moving through the seasons, far from the terrible lies and murderers. A morning in late summer, perhaps, fifty years ago: he sees the warm day coming up outside, no wind. Ideal for his purposes. And a few hours later I see him again, a tall, slightly awkward figure, an old pair of flannels, belted with an older tweed tie, a ragged honey-smeared green flannel shirt buttoned to the wrists, gloves, smoker bellows in hand, a felt hat and bee veil. He’s dabbing furiously at one of the dozen beehives below the front lawn.

  The sun is hot, the bees angry. I can hear their distant outraged hum from the safety of the porch. And half an hour later Hubert is digging out the small square honeycombs from their waxy beds in the hive, and the larger frames in the other hives.

  And then it’s the next day and the frames are in the oak-barreled honey separator in the pantry, the handle turning. The honey is spinning out inside, the whole room dripping with honey. And I have the smell – the thick sweet smell. Hubert’s turning the handle, I’m turning it, we’re all turning it throughout the day, and the next day bottling it.

  And as the year, that particular year, begins to turn, falling into September, it’s apple time. The risen fruit – red-cheeked, yellow, orange, brown. The early Worcesters and James Grieve, the Conference pears in the walled garden, the Coxes in the high orchard. The chip baskets to get ready in the basement, the pickers to pick, me to be persuaded to join in. I can smell those Maidenhall apples now, the tart-sweet odours, a day taken out of time, where he lives again, and is about to storm the orchard.

  Winter. The drawing-room. He is in the high-back red chair by the fire. Legs crossed, slippers, winter. He’s older now. The face longer, thinner, sculpted, eyes a paler blue. Gazing at the fire a moment. Returning to his book. A book on the Irish Saints. His face like one.

  And in an earlier winter – I’m about twelve. The two of us are out in the yard stables, with the big cross-cut saw. Hubert is feeling suddenly energetic and I’ve been press-ganged again. There’s been a gale, trees down in the wood. There’s a big pile of wet branches behind us. We start off at quite a pace. But soon the teeth are getting stuck in the wet wood. The saw wrenched out – fumbled in again, and stuck again. I say ‘It’s pretty useless, isn’t it? Let’s stop.’ The rain is pelting down outside. But there is his annoyed determination then. ‘No, let’s go on.’ Another minute or two. The cross-cut sticks again. Another five minutes and we pack it in. Rain. Rain and wind. Hubert returns to the drawing-room fire, to a journal in Serbo-Croat, then switches to a text in Gaelic, a commentary on the Irish Saints. I go and get the tea. Peggy is away. The house is empty. No TV then, or radio. No electricity. Lamplight. And after the tea Hubert switches his reading again, reaching for a long shelf of French books to his left. Picks one out at random, starts to read it straightaway. I see the spine. It’s Maupassant’s La Maison Tellier.

  He glides through the three very different languages so deftly that they might all be the one to him. He hears Archbishop Stepinac, Saint Columcille and the chatter of the girls in Madame Tellier’s establishment – all in their original tongues. Where most of us see through a glass darkly in other languages, Hubert sees the light clearly in more than half a dozen of them.

  Another winter. We children are up on the top floor playroom, at lessons – of a vague sort – with Miss Goulding, the awful ogreish yellow-haired governess. There is a big red felt screen by the door. Suddenly, heavy footsteps charge up the stairs. The door flies open, the screen falls with a great crash. And Hubert is there, thundering in stage left, vengeful, fire-breathing, a figure in a pantomime come to save the hero and heroine from the wicked witch. ‘How dare you tell the children not to speak to the maids, Miss Goulding! How dare you say it was vulgar to speak to them! You will take your notice immediately!’

  Uproar! Joy! No more lessons. Miss Goulding leaves that afternoon. Hubert has promoted his liberal ethic in a most palpable way.

  Spring, years later. I’ve come into the drawing-room. Hubert is sitting at the desk by the window. But he’s not writing. He’s lost to the world, gazing down over the lawn, the valley, across the river to the mountains beyond, the Blackstairs and Mount Leinster half hidden in cloud. Hearing me he gets up suddenly, energetic again. It’s spring, and it’s daffodil-picking time, lush gold carpets of them, all over the lower lawn, but planted in various patterns, circles or huge letters spelling out people’s initials. Picked, they must be counted and bunched in dozens for the country market in Kilkenny. ‘Joe, we need help with the daffodils.’ I am not too keen. The stalks, greasy with sap, will get my hands all sticky and why not leave the daffodils nicely on the lawn where they are? ‘Oh, Joe, do stop talking rot.’

  Spring turning to summer, and Hubert abandons Archbishop Stepinac, Saint Columcille and Madame Tellier. For the bees and their hives are to be loaded onto a lorry and taken up to the gorse and wild flowers on the mountains across the valley.

  And another summer and we’re all out on the upper lawn, having tea under the big maple tree by the swing and the tennis court. Hubert, with his felt hat – which he wore in the most unnecessary circumstances and lost when it was needed – is leaning across the table looking at some papers which James Delahanty, the very literate Kilkenny ironmonger, has passed to him. Peggy and her daughter Julia are poised on chairs, in summer dresses, talking to the novelist Ben Kiely. The scene is frozen suddenly. The papers stay halfway up in Hubert’s hand, the voices are unheard. The dappled sunlit patterns through the maple leaves are stilled. It’s high summer, set in amber now, at Maidenhall under the maple tree, by the swing next to the tennis court.

  Autumn and rumours of fruit once more, and Hubert is togged out again in his old flannels, felt hat and bee veil, a cloud of furious bees about his head, and there is the smell of burning corrugated paper from the bellows smoker. And the oak-barrelled honey separator must be got up from the basement once more. And now he’s turning the handle, and I’m turning it, the honey spinning out. And a week later there are autumn storms, and Hubert is happy as ever with nature – a few more trees fallen by the river, more wet wood to be cut for the winter. He’ll be looking for me again with that damn great cross-cut saw.

  I was often an unwilling participant in the natural life of Maidenhall. So, too, as it turns out, was Hubert in his early years there. I learnt afterwards of how he fell out with his family, his formidable mother particularly and elder sister, and in later years blamed this on his feelings of being ‘dumped’ as he put it, aged eight, at Bigshotte Reyles, a prep school in Berkshire. He was devastated, thinking his parents had given him away. So it’s strange that he didn’t forecast or afterwards seem to notice my own unhappiness at the dreadful Sandford Park School in Dublin, where I was dumped, aged eight, in 1945. Hubert would have had influence with my grandfather in removing me from it. But by then he and my grandfather were absorbed with the financial aspects of my upbringing rather than with my feelings.

  It’s likely that both men, like many other men of their generation, were emotionally maimed by their prep schools, as I very nearly was. Hubert (like my grandfather) wrote very little about his childhood, or his personal feelings generally. It was as if both of them, as a result of their early boarding-school horrors, feared to unearth that sort or any sort of emotional problem in their later lives. Something awful had happened to them behind the bicycle shed or in the housemaster’s study which had frozen their hearts, so that afterwards in the
ir lives they concentrated on philosophical dictionaries, apple growing and the fate of the orthodox Serbs in wartime Croatia.

  But for Hubert, at least, going up to St John’s College, Oxford in 1918 was clearly an academic and social liberation, in that he met his match intellectually, and, in Tony Guthrie, a fellow student at the College, his first mature friend. And more importantly a year or two later he met Tony’s sister, Peggy Guthrie, visiting her brother from their home in Tunbridge Wells. Peggy, though she was only sixteen, took to Hubert at once, and forever after, though they didn’t marry until 1930. It was a lifelong love for her and, in a different way, for Hubert – for they were very different people. Yet in their lives together they convincingly proved that the chalk and the cheese can get along fine, if they come to understand why they are both very different, and appreciate that, and take strength from it.

  If Hubert was very unorthodox intellectual chalk, Peggy was intuitive, a whole cheeseboard of different flavours. Yeats spoke well of the sort of love I think they shared: ‘In wise love each divines the high secret self of the other, and, refusing to believe in the mere daily self, creates a mirror where the lover or beloved sees an image to copy in daily life.’ On a more mundane level – and perhaps a more important ingredient in a long and, on most levels, a happy marriage – they never ceased to ‘pull together’, for their own and even more for the common good. ‘Are you pulling with me, or against me?’ the hero asks the heroine at the end of Mary Webb’s Precious Bane. This was a question neither of them, I think, ever had to ask.

  Although they were very different people in character, they were equally unconventional – Hubert intellectually, in his rocking of every comfy boat, Peggy intuitively, in her whole attitude to life as it was and should not be. It was the key to her character, her impatience with the expected in a character that was always unexpected, without ever this being a shallow showy-off business. No time, for this fine, sharp-featured, six-foot-tall, vigorous commanding woman, for show in this most serious and exciting business of living.