Wicked Little Joe Read online

  And here is another key to her: her attack; her energy; in and for life and with people. She was quite exceptional in this. A tremendous getter-on with things, no footling about, an endless organizer, a real touch of the dictator. She could be ruthless – she played tennis in a quite merciless manner. But she could as quickly switch into a Victorian Mad Hatter’s tea-party mode, as on picnics by the river when we were children at Maidenhall, where things were turned on their head and moral lessons given: virtues made of horseflies, rain, forgetting the butter. She once said to me, when I was about nine and complained of the latter: ‘What a treat for you, Joe – bread with no butter!’

  And in her latter years, in her eighties, when she was often wheelchair-bound, she never ceased her original and busy approach to her many schemes. For her, as for her brother Tony Guthrie in his theatre work, it was ever a matter of ‘Rise above! On, on …’

  Like her brother, Peggy was dramatic, and sometimes explosively so, in word and deed. So that being with her could be a hair-raising experience, as it was equally for outsiders, even total strangers, usually public servants and such like, who had no idea that there was a real thunderflash in the post for them or coming down the telephone – that they were shortly to be at the cutting edge of her performance, her anger risen at some ignorant, fatuous or self-serving behaviour of theirs. Though she was absolutely no fool, she made a habit of rushing in where angels would never have dared tread. Like Hubert, but in a different abrasively verbal way, she was a great upsetter of applecarts so that her friends – and enemies, for she had quite a few – came to keep such vehicles well off the road and out of her way.

  She was the enemy of every sort of ‘humbug’ – a favourite word of hers – old-fashioned, smacking of Tunbridge Wells and the Edwardian era into which she was born, both town and period equally hated. It was another part of her originality that, coming from this stuffy formal Empire background (and no doubt in reaction to it) she was passionately pro-Ireland and the Irish; sometimes rashly so. I doubt there was ever a better example of someone being ‘More Irish than the Irish themselves’.

  She was equally modern in her other views: artistic, social and moral; always taking surprisingly advanced positions whether the matter was personal, among her family, with friends or in the public domain. She could be cruel in this way, with servants or with others who couldn’t or wouldn’t deign to reply. But her intuitive realism about people could hit the nail right on the head. Once, in a rather long-winded account of troubles I was having with a woman, she cut my cackle and said simply ‘Joe, if you are blackmailable – you will be blackmailed.’

  Some of us, if we’re lucky, mellow with age. More usually we move from vivid youthful left to grumpy-grey right. Peggy did neither. She was always ‘advanced’. Age seemed only to sharpen her critical claws against the fuddy-duddies. For her it was always the new, right up to the end. I read her an Anita Brookner novel some months before she died. She admired things in it, but found it generally too formal and ‘expected’. She would have preferred Trainspotting I felt.

  Of course she had a youthful background in this modernity, in the London of the 1920s where she studied painting at the Regent Street Polytechnic, and, in many of her oils and drawings of that period and later, showed herself to be a painter of great talent and technical ability. Indeed it’s clear that she could have made a successful career, as her brother did in theatre, as an artist or designer. She was intensely cosmopolitan, loved the concerts, art galleries, theatres and cinemas of big-city life.

  She largely gave up these big-city stimulations and any of her own possible careers when she and Hubert came to live at Maidenhall in 1941. It was a real sacrifice for her; and a great benefit for Hubert, who was tone deaf and barely interested in the arts. Peggy, in the rural peace of Maidenhall, organized the household and became the anchor for his work. And if Hubert benefited so did the local community, for whom she did many fine things – helping organize the Country Market in Kilkenny in the 1950s, creating the Butler modern art gallery in the castle and getting the Kilkenny Arts Week going. None of which would have happened, given the reactionary nature of Irish rural officials at the time, without her tweaking innumerable council, corporate and clerical beards.

  There was no element of do-goodery in her involvement in these local affairs. She, like Hubert, simply brought the virtue of what one might call Protestant private judgment to these neighbourhood matters.

  And I was a beneficiary of Hubert and Peggy’s unorthodoxies and fearless outspeaking – and their scoldings. Of course I suffered these, in rows with Hubert over the cross-cut saw, and with Peggy, often enough – for example on my once cooking an omelette with butter, not margarine. ‘Joe, what extravagance! You either have it this way, or not at all.’

  But even fighting over the cooker I benefited, for I would not have dared to reply to her thus but for her constant forthright and candid example. I got that sturdy, if sometimes abrasive, attitude from Peggy.

  More importantly, I also got wonderful gifts of language from her, in her dramatic readings to us as children and from her own vividly descriptive, laconic and original use of words – the idea that words, if you adventured with them, were magic weapons, could be powerfully evocative, hilarious or killing things. And that to be unorthodox and creative with them was the road to salvation. To be a painter, as she was, or a novelist as I became, though not of course something to be made anything of in public, was of the essence.

  Peggy gave me the excitement of words and some of the bare-faced confidence to write books. Peggy had a great deal of bare-faced confidence. She could put people’s backs up very quickly. But some of us emerged from the encounter with stronger backs. It was sink or swim with Peggy.

  But there was another, largely hidden side to her. At heart she was a hugely understanding person. The sympathy of real concern – immediately in heartfelt words, or later down a telephone or in a letter. It was her greatest quality – the quick and genuine interest she took in people of every sort and background, their lives, problems. Her advice, when she gave it, was usually right and sometimes extreme. She could be coldly dispassionate here, in a manner that could be daunting.

  However, if she could be dryly objective, she was far more a woman of intense emotion. This was cramped, ‘bitten back’, largely for lack of that channel of artistic expression through which her brother Tony so vividly expressed himself in theatre. Her own frustrated gifts and emotions led now and then to outbursts of cruelty, her talent twisted and hurtful. High-handed, imperious, naturally gifted, psychologically astute, fearless – and to be feared. A treader-on-toes.

  Because one knew how often she was treading on her own toes, in frustration or unhappiness, you could understand the arrogance and scoldings and know of her great warmth beneath the cold. Impatient, inspiring and infuriating – she was all of a piece.

  Peggy was an extraordinary mother to be landed with. How different from my real mother Biddy, in her transparency, simplicity and gentleness. And Hubert, with his high-minded pondering of ancient Serbo-Croatian texts light years away from my father’s mental efforts: studying the Telegraph crossword puzzle, the racing forecasts and playing shove-ha’penny in Peter’s Bar.

  So here – apart from the minor players of headmasters, housemasters, a doctor-psychiatrist, uncles and aunts, well-meaning friends and acquaintances of my grandparents and the Butlers – here are the major players, all of them: stars, spear carriers, understudies, seemingly anxious to shine in the melodrama, ‘The Saving of Little Joe’, that real cracker of a play.

  THREE

  Since I was the first parcel in the Pass the Parcel game that my parents forced on their children, my grandfather, unaware of the other babies to follow on his doorstep, moved me on fairly carefully. In 1939, aged two-and-a-half, I was lucky to land up with Peggy and Hubert Butler, who wanted a companion for their daughter Julia, eighteen months older than me.

  The Butlers then looked after me, w
ith a small board fee of fifteen shillings a week paid by my grandfather. Initially Peggy would have liked to adopt me legally, but my parents wouldn’t agree to this. So the matter of my status with the Butlers was left in abeyance for a year or two. But as I grew up, it understandably became a vital issue for Peggy and Hubert and thus a main bone of contention between them, my parents and grandparents: which of the trio was to have authority over me? And was I meanwhile to be just a paying guest with the Butlers (as other children were at Maidenhall then and later), or a full member of the family, as I was clearly becoming with every month that passed? The matter was never resolved. And my betwixt-and-between position with the Butlers and my own family was to continue indefinitely, to the detriment of all concerned.

  For of course my parents never took me back. They didn’t have the money to support themselves, let alone me or the six other children who followed. And my grandparents, Joe and Vera, were too old and infirm to deal with me on a permanent basis. So the Butlers were left holding the baby, though by now the baby was growing into a difficult, obstreperous little boy.

  Nat, with Biddy on the sidelines in wartime London at that point, did nothing to help resolve this issue of my future. From the evidence in the file Nat wasn’t in any direct touch with his parents or the Butlers during the war (except for one notably fraught occasion when Hubert went to see them in London in 1942, of which more later) and he simply didn’t reply to any letters on the subject of my future. One reason for this, I think, was that having spent all his cousin’s ten-thousand-pound legacy on high living, and then having contracted tuberculosis just before the war and lost half a lung, my father was a semi-invalid and saw the welfare of his progeny as a secondary issue. Realizing that he was going to need Biddy to look after him, he was anxious not to have her dilute her efforts in this by having to care for any of their children.

  But for me, at that point, there were the beginnings of a life in two very different worlds. Since Hubert Butler’s father was still alive – as a somewhat disturbed old man living at Maidenhall in the south – I was first taken north with the Butlers to live an Annaghmakerrig in County Monaghan. This was the family house of Peggy’s mother, Norah Power, before she married Dr Guthrie, an Edinburgh physician who had moved his practice to Tunbridge Wells. But on his early death in 1929, Mrs Guthrie, partly blind, returned to live at Annaghmakerrig. Peggy and Tony had spent their childhood holidays here, and loved the place, and after their father died the house in Tunbridge Wells was sold and Annaghmakerrig became the Guthrie family home.

  By the time I arrived there, late in 1939, old Mrs Guthrie – Mrs G as she was always called – lived there with her tiny tidy Yorkshire nurse-companion, Miss Worby, known as Bunty, with a fair deal of help inside and outside the big house, in those days also a working farm and forestry estate.

  Annaghmakerrig is a lovely, winding-corridored, secret-cubby-holed, mid-Victorian house, with many variously angled roofs and rounded gable ends in the Dutch manner, set on a hill in rhododendron-blooming grounds, overlooking a big lake, and surrounded by pine forests. A touch of Bavaria. In winter one expected snow and glittering ice on the lake. Indeed that is my first memory of Annaghmakerrig, during the icy snowbound winter of 1940: a horse pulling a big wooden sleigh drawing up at the front door steps; and being pushed about, with other children, on nursery chairs over the frozen lake, while the adults skated around us. And later summers there, playing in a wooden Wendy house on the front lawn under the big sycamore tree – a little house called Rosebud.

  Afterwards, living at Maidenhall, we children only went to Annaghmakerrig for Christmas and summer holidays, so we especially looked forward to our visits there. I’m a little surprised at this, for Annaghmakerrig then was a household where a formal order prevailed, very different from the informal, workaday world I came to know later at Maidenhall. At Annaghmakerrig there was a precise Victorian manner of things, a nineteenth-century air and ethos, serenely but strictly maintained in the house and on the estate – an almost feudal world, which continued there for fifty years after Queen Victoria had died. The house and its inhabitants were imbued with things and thoughts Victorian: the heavy drapes and furnishings, red-andgilt bound copies of Punch and the Illustrated London News in the morning room, paintings of farm animals and bewhiskered nineteenth-century military ancestors; an impression permeated especially by the Protestant work ethic, where pleasure was always to be earned, where it was not merely incidental, chanced-on in pursuit of some much more serious goal.

  And yet the pleasure for us children there was often incidental and unearned. It lay all around us – through the winding corridors, endless rooms and attics of the house and about the wider estate. And when Bob Burns, Mrs G’s chauffeur, met us at Newbliss off the Dundalk train in the immaculate leather-smelling green Austin 12 and the house finally reared up across the lake over the last hill, I always felt a thrill of pleasure, thinking of the impending adventures and surprises.

  I was lucky indeed, living there in my early years and afterwards at Maidenhall, unaware of my real background, of my grandfather in Dublin coming to fear every knock on the door; the postman as stork, delivering another baby; of my mother, an office slave, filing papers nine to five, and of my father holding up four ale bars in London and Cheltenham.

  Annaghmakerrig, moated by lakes, remotely distant beyond its three avenues, inviolate behind its fir-clad hills, boggy fields and small brackish canals, was a dream kingdom, a view of the exotic over that last hill. Once up the steps and into the big hall, the smell of Aladdin oil lamps and candle wax for this was the only form of lighting in the house until the 1950s.

  Settled and secure, the house offered both mystery and comfort – the soft-carpeted, lamplit rooms warmed by log fires, where pools of rose-gold light ran away into shadowy spaces, down long corridors into ghost-haunted nooks and crannies, hidden rooms filled with novelties, secrets. In winter the house was clearly divided between light and dark, just as the seasons of our visits were equally extreme, divided into either midwinter or midsummer holidays. We children never knew the place in its rehearsal seasons of spring and autumn. For us the curtain was always about to rise on Christmas or the summer play was in full swing.

  Winter was the more obviously exciting, with its central drama of Christmas. But the teasing prelude was almost as good. Dumb Crambo and charades – getting dressed up in the hall from boxes of Victorian finery and tat. Children’s parties: musical chairs to the dance of ‘The Dashing White Sergeant’ from the cabinet gramophone; ‘Oranges and Lemons say the Bells of Saint Clements’, the procession through a pair of arched arms where you were trapped on the last words of ‘Here comes a candle to light you to bed, here – comes – a – chopper – to – chop – off – YOUR HEAD!’

  And then the long woolly stocking at the end of the bed on Christmas morning, waking early in the dark, the thrill of touching its bulky folds, but resisting until dawn; simple wartime stocking fillers, with pencils and sharpeners, a notebook, a torch, an apple in the toe. The thrill was in the earlier unknowing. And later the opening of the proper presents, that evening round the tall fir tree in the study at the end of the hall, the magic of the candles all over it, the intoxicating smell of melting wax and warmed fir needles. And finally the heart-stopping moment when the labelled brown-paper parcels – the presents piled round the tree – could be set upon and fiercely unwrapped. The brown paper and every bit of string had to be kept, afterwards to be folded and the string wound up in balls, by Mrs Guthrie.

  If Christmas at Annaghmakerrig, with its silks of Araby in the charades, its décor of tinsel and coloured streamers, its warm perfumes of wax, fir and almond-cake icing, had a touch of A Thousand and One Nights, our summer holidays were straight out of Swallows and Amazons. The drama moved from the house to the lake – a windblown watery theatre: boating, bathing, fishing, picnicking.

  There were two heavy rowing boats and big crayfish under the stones in the shallow water by the boath
ouse. To avoid what I understood to be their fierce pincers I soon learnt to swim, surging away as quickly as possible into deeper waters. Again, the spaces of the lake, like those of the house, always beckoned: an equal invitation to promote our fantasies. For the lake was silent and private then, a water which we children could make over entirely in our own adventurous images, living Ransome’s book in reality, or creating our own fictions, as explorers and cartographers, making for secret waters, compassing the island on stakes, the prow of the boat pushing through a carpet of water lilies there; or daringly swimming beneath them, seeing the tangle of their long slimy stems sinking from the sunlit surface into the greeny-black depths – the sudden fear of sinking too far, of drowning in the forested underworld, those realms of the big fish that had snatched at the legs of Jeremy Fisher.

  Life at Annaghmakerrig made the heart beat faster. My own real family, or what little I knew of it, faded into the background. Instead, at Maidenhall and Annaghmakerrig, I found two much more engaging families. And in Tony Guthrie, a father figure.

  By the time I arrived at Annaghmakerrig late in 1939 Tony was the well-known theatre producer and administrator of the Old Vic and Sadler’s Wells in London. And during the next few years, up on holidays from Maidenhall, Tony and his wife Judy would come over from London for a few days, and always at Christmas, and then there would be the real drama, for me and the other children staying in the house.

  Dressed up for charades, waiting in the hall before making our entrances into the drawing-room – Tony or Peggy or her great friend Ailish Fitzsimon directing us, to see that we made our entrances at exactly the right moment. And although we children knew nothing of real theatre then, there was a theatrical heightening of reality, a mood of sudden invention flooding the staid Victorian house, with Tony master of the revels, alchemist in the dross-to-gold department.