Wicked Little Joe Read online

  Tony was a transforming influence for me. It was from him, over the next few years at Annaghmakerrig, that I had the first intimations that life need not be unhappy, dull, difficult, penny-pinching; that in the stage setting of the house with its Victorian props and costumes, life could be ‘produced’ to show a much more significant, exciting side; that in Tony’s inventive hands it could be transformed into all sorts of magic, when the workaday would be banished in the cause of illusion. And just as importantly I came to see that all this make-believe world was valid (which other grown-ups were wont to deny – ‘Don’t tell lies, Joe!’) since the fun and games were promoted by this scion of the family, this giant visiting uncle.

  Tony was pushing six-foot-six in his socks. He towered over everything. Eyes narrowed in the smoke from a dangling cigarette, pondering some dramatic plan – anything, as I see it now, which would kick ordinary life in the pants, or celebrate it, or alter it entirely. There wasn’t a moment to waste in this transformation of the mundane, nothing of life that couldn’t be tinkered with, fashioned by his vital spirit into something unexpected, astonishing, spectacular. Everything was prey to his inventions. Evenings, taking to the soft-toned Blüthner piano in the drawing-room, he would sing in his high voice old ballads with exaggerated relish, a Thomas Moore melody or ‘The Skye Boat Song’. Or just as suddenly, in his quick military way, he would go to the cabinet gramophone, wind it up, put on a record and bring forth The Pirates of Penzance, annotating the songs mischievously, taking different roles, counterpointing the words in a basso profundo or an exaggeratedly high tenor voice.

  He was a man overcome with endless schemes, and fits of energetic, creative or sometimes destructive fever, whether directing us in our charades or in leading an attack on the garden scrub, with bonfires, the whole household commandeered, the grown-ups issued with bow-saws, scythes and choppers, we children the lesser spear-carriers, as the wilderness rapidly diminished, the whole tiresome business made fun, produced as vivid spectacle, like the mob scene in Coriolanus.

  ‘On, on!’ he would shout, rising up suddenly from behind a bush like a Jack-in-the-Box, with a mock-fierce smile, urging us on, prophet-like, to smite the nettles and brambles – storming the barricades of convention, in life as in theatre, gathering up every sort of hungry cat and setting them among the complacent pigeons, to propose and often to achieve the unlikely or the impossible. Like Peggy, his sister, he was another very unconventional figure from whom I took courage in my own dumb feelings of being an outsider. I was lucky. Life at Annaghmakerrig became a repertory theatre for me, a cabinet of curiosities filled with surprises that I could pick and finger and possess. A time of gifts indeed.

  On the death of Hubert’s father in 1941 the Butlers, with me, all moved south to the workaday world of Maidenhall. Though there was nothing grim or grinding about life in Maidenhall, in a house as attractive in its way as the holiday home in the north.

  If Annaghmakerrig had rumours of Victorian neo-gothic, Maidenhall was minor Irish Georgian classic. Set on another hill, the four-square, lime-washed house lay, and still lies, beyond two white gates on a rook-clamorous, tree-covered ridge overlooking sloping lawns, beehives, a chestnut-and-beech-filled parkland bordered by a tree-arched byroad, with water meadows and the river Nore beyond. On the other side of the valley sits a ruined sixteenth-century Norman castle and a much earlier Celtic round tower before the land rises again in gorse-covered green hills and distant blue mountains.

  I still see it in this way – perhaps because this was the first view I remember when I arrived at Maidenhall, seen from high up in the old nursery on the top floor, as I looked out of a small low window, wondering where I was.

  Years of the same view, through the seasons, from the same nursery window that became the playroom and then the schoolroom. Yellow daffodil springs, lush-green chestnut summers, orange autumns, dark rain-stormed winters, snow-powdered New Years. I spent a lot of time by the nursery window. This room was my world, my centre, the start of governess schooling shared with Julia and the Mosse girls, Pam and Berry, nieces of the village mill owner; and the two Fitzsimon boys, Christopher and Nicky, who sometimes stayed at Maidenhall to take lessons with us – from a succession of governesses – high up, where the rest of the house was barely known territory to me.

  Morning, noon and night – and sometimes best when it was getting dark, in the autumn, winter rushing in, a blowy wind rattling the windows, the other children gone, Julia and I roasting chestnuts in the ashes of the fire beneath the small Victorian iron grate. And then there were words in the evening from children’s books or poems, read by Peggy or by Ailish Fitzsimon, both in wonderfully clear, dark-dramatic voices:

  Up the airy mountain

  Down the rushy glen,

  We daren’t go a-hunting

  For fear of little men;

  Wee folk, good folk,

  Trooping altogether;

  Green jacket, red cap,

  And white owl’s feather …

  Or Young Lochinvar, who came out of the west; or Nesbit’s The Phoenix and the Carpet, the first proper book I remember, with the petulant Phoenix breaking from its egg in the ashes of a suburban London fireplace, so that I tried to repeat the trick in the playroom fireplace with an egg stolen from the larder, with messy, disappointing results.

  Or getting to play with the strange machine found in the playroom cupboard – a mahogany, brass-cornered box which, when you opened it, displayed on the inside of the lid groups of pink, flimsy-winged piping cherubs, gliding up towards a blue empyrean – on their way to God, I was sure. A musical box with a large selection of indented metal discs, which you pressed down onto a comb of metal bars of different musical notes, then wound the machine up and listened to the tinkly, ethereal music. ‘Ave Maria’ and ‘In a Monastery Garden’ I remember. And another disc, which played just the opposite sort of music, martial airs, military marches and ‘Goodbye Dolly Gray’. I found this machine potently evocative of something I knew not what; looking at the cherubs, hearing the music, I was carried away with these fat little infants on the wings of song.

  But the greatest thrill of all was a magic lantern, with its coloured glass slides pushed across a beam of oil light onto a sheet in the nursery-playroom, showing one heart-stopping scene after another, the progress of Little Red Riding Hood towards her awful nemesis with the Big Bad Wolf. Another collection of slides showed Royal Occasions – Queen Victoria ‘Reviewing the Fleet at Spithead’, her Diamond Jubilee and such like.

  Vision, words, music, roasted chestnuts, the nursery-playroom held everything I needed, and more. If I’d been abandoned by my real parents I never knew it. I’d been given the company of young Lochinvar, of Nesbit’s Bastable family, of Barbar on his travels and of Red Riding Hood in those eye-popping images, seen at the end of a smoky light cast by a magic eye shining on the wall of the playroom. And with this a dozen other secret rooms and attics at Annaghmakerrig and Maidenhall, full of novelties and surprises, opening into or out of life. In any case I don’t remember ever feeling that I’d been abandoned by my parents, or wondering where I was. Maidenhall was home and that was that.

  At some point I moved from the nursery-playroom to a small bedroom on the first floor. But my world was still bounded by the orbit of the house and grounds. I had no conception of a wider world beyond the gorsey blue mountains. Apart from the supplies from the local grocer, Mr Hennessy, who came down a back lane every week with a cob and a trap with a delivery of candles, tea, sugar, matches, Brasso, starch and so on, almost everything needed in the household was supplied from the small dairy farm and market garden. Fruit and vegetables, milk, cream and butter from the basement dairy with its Alfa-Laval separating machine, big oak churn, grooved butter pats and rollers, where I helped turn the whirring, pinging separator every evening with Mrs Kennedy from the village, rapt at the miracle of cream from one spout, thin milk from the other. Hams and black puddings from the pigs in the back yard, snuffling thr
ough the vegetable waste that was cooked up for them every week in a vast iron cauldron in the back yard with a bonfire beneath. Electricity from an erratic windcharger on a nearby hill, water from a deep well hidden in the woods and pumped up by a tub-thumping Croxley diesel engine.

  There was an old Morris 12 car (CMU 716) abandoned without petrol during the war, set on bricks in one of the garages, but all our transport was in the corduroy-upholstered trap, pulled by Pat the pony. A trap that, when we were older, took Julia and me rain or shine (and mostly the former) to junior school at Kilkenny College five miles north, the reins held in the gnarled fingers of Joe Devine, the elderly Maidenhall coachman with Hubert’s father, asked out of retirement, whose wind-scoured red nose always had a lengthening drip at the end which we watched intently, waiting for it to drop.

  We had a wireless in the sitting-room, but the acid batteries leaked so that it rarely worked. Entertainments at Maidenhall were almost entirely familial and non-mechanical. Arthur Ransome was the most modern author read aloud to us children every evening, from a greater store of Victorian and Edwardian children’s classics. Nesbit again, The Wouldbegoods, Five Children and It, and R.M. Ballantyne’s Coral Island – a book that, just writing the title here, gives me a tingle up the spine: seeing again those sun-struck, distant, coral waters, my living again with the three so totally liberated boys; above all diving with Peterkin in his stomach-turning free fall – hundreds of feet off the cliff into the blue lagoon – an image renewed mint fresh for me, sixty years later, and in so doing experiencing again that reading in the drawing-room and the very moment of that high-diving fall.

  Then the traditional card and board games on the round sitting-room table: Beggar-my-Neighbour and Old Maid (Peggy, to us children beforehand: ‘Make sure Miss Doughty [a pernickety house guest] isn’t left holding the Old Maid card’); and a board game, Cargoes, played with dice, each player pushing a little lead steamer round the oceans of the world from dot to dot, landing on hazards in ports which were not part of the Empire: (‘Coolies at Shanghai refuse to load cargo, miss a turn’), attacked by pirates lurking in seas not patrolled by the Royal Navy (‘Go back to Singapore’); the little ships racing across the Pacific, facing a hurricane rounding Terra del Fuego (‘Make for shelter at Port Stanley, miss a turn’), then across the Atlantic (‘Delayed at Madeira for repairs, miss two turns’), before being the first (or last) to end up at the final haven of Tilbury Docks.

  And older, reading to myself now from the store of other boys’ adventure books at Maidenhall or Annaghmakerrig – dusty, empire-glorying books from attics and playroom shelves; seduced by the covers, the gilt and gaudy pictorial boards with their Union Jacks and blood-red images of derring-do. Dusting them off so that the young lieutenant’s scarlet tunic, white pouch belt and pith helmet on the cover of Captain Brereton’s With Wolseley to Kumasi shone mint fresh, as the intrepid officer pushed through an evil mangrove swamp, service Webley at the ready. And the same author seeking revenge against the lesser breeds in his The Grip of the Mullah.

  I went in search of Prester John, too, and rose over the animal-choked plains of East Africa with Jules Verne for six weeks in his balloon, and went with him to the vast mysterious caverns in his Journey to the Centre of the Earth.

  Above all I went with Allan Quartermain to King Solomon’s Mines. And Gagool the Witchfinder afterwards was never truly dead for me. She lurked, half crushed, half alive, in a dark corner of the old laundry at Annaghmakerrig where there was a malign Victorian device, a thundering linen press that worked on huge rollers, pressed down by a moving coffin-like half-ton weight, a mangle that had caught the hideous sorceress in its rolling jaws but had not quite extinguished her evil flame.

  The magic lantern, with its thrills of Little Red Riding Hood and staid views of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee; the musical box, cherubs with pipes and lyres rising heavenwards to the tune of ‘Goodbye Dolly Gray’; the Cargoes game, where it was clear that Britannia actually did rule the waves – these were vivid Victorian worlds that kept the real world at bay for me, and the world of my real family whom I knew barely anything about.

  But as I see it now from letters in the file they and the Butlers were hard at work behind my back arguing between themselves, all of them at cross purposes with only one thing in common, it seems – to do their best for Little Joe by thinking up a future of schools and other unpleasant schemes. Knowledge of this unhappy reality, with my real family in Dublin and Cheltenham, lay in wait for me beyond the happy isles of Maidenhall and Annaghmakerrig.

  FOUR

  Long before I actually experienced my parents’ and grandparents’ sad lives in Cheltenham and Dublin there were the ever-unresolved arguments between them and the Butlers about who was to have the authority for my upbringing. And of course, even more unresolved, who was to pay: who was now paying unwillingly, who should be paying and wasn’t, who wouldn’t pay or hadn’t, who one day might pay or be made to pay, or who would certainly never pay. Arguments as confused and long-winded as a Vatican conclave.

  As to who should have this clear-cut responsibility for my upbringing there is an early letter from Hubert Butler, early in 1942, to my parents:

  Dear Nat and Biddy

  Little Joe has been with us for two years now and both for his sake and Peggy’s, and to a less extent Julia and mine, it would be better if there was more security in the relationship. He is getting to an age when sudden changes wd. be bad for him. And Peggy is becoming too fond of him and used to him, to part with him readily. A decision one way or the other should be come to soon. We do not want to adopt him … but to offer him a home for a certain period of his boyhood, and if he has to be taken away in a year or two, frankly I would prefer for Peggy’s sake that he went now. There is no question of Nat’s father or mother being able to bring him up; apart from any question of money, they would not be equal to it. But they are prepared to contribute, as long as they can, to his support with us.

  I think you will agree therefore that it is better for him to continue with us, especially as Biddy has the two children in England to look after? Our proposal does not mean that you could not see him or have him with you at times, tho’ while the war continues this is not likely to be feasible.

  This all sounds very reasonable. And indeed my parents agreed to Hubert’s suggestion that I should live with the Butlers as a member of the family for three years, and there is a letter of agreement to this effect signed by all four of them dated 1 March 1942, when I was now five:

  This is an agreement between Hubert and Peggy Butler and Nat and Biddy Hone.

  Hubert and Peggy Butler will take charge of Joe Hone for the next three years for the weekly payment of 15/- to be paid by Nat and Biddy Hone, in addition to the 15/6 weekly, plus expenses for sundries at present paid by Joe Hone (senior). If at any time, Joe Hone (senior) should be unwilling to pay his sum, Nat and Biddy will do their best to make up the amount.

  Hubert and Peggy Butler undertake in return to take charge of Joe Hone as a member of their family during the period stated, and at any time during this period to send him back to Nat and Biddy. They hope that Nat and Biddy will give them as long notice for this as possible.

  Signed: Hubert Butler

  S M Butler

  Nat Hone

  Biddy Hone

  This agreement is made without prejudice to and notwithstanding the agreement made by Nat Hone and Joe Hone (senior) that he (JH senior) would be responsible for the keep of the child while in charge of Hubert Butler.

  This agreement, too, seems reasonable enough, if my parents had stuck to their financial side of it – which of course they didn’t. So that later in the summer of 1942 Hubert went to London, among other things to deal with Nat and Biddy face to face. Clearly, when Hubert eventually ran them to earth in the Holborn bar, it was going to be an unhappy meeting, as it was suggested by a letter from Hubert to Biddy, written to her from his hotel before they finally met:

  Dear
Biddy

  I have never been so annoyed or offended in my life. One of the reasons I came over to London was to talk to you and Nat about your son Joe – as I imagine that, though you completely ignore his existence, you still have some sort of affection for him.

  I wrote to you the moment I arrived, and when I was extremely busy I went round enquiring of Nat at the High Commissioner’s office, the Free French HQ, etc. Only this morning, when I was leaving for Oxford, did I get your card. I gave up all idea of leaving and my room at the hotel, so that now I must look for another one. My friends who were expecting me had to be disappointed. At 3.30 I rang you up. I waited ‘til 3.45 and rang you again. I rang five times until I was finally rewarded by the manageress of the Holborn bar and told to ring up ‘The same time tomorrow’! I’ll see you and Nat damned first!! I consider it the most disgracefully impertinent and inconsiderate piece of cheek I have ever heard of.

  We have given your son a home for two years in our house. He has been obstreperous, difficult and often ill. My wife has sat up with him when he was ill and never spared herself looking after him. We have given him affection and care and constant thought. In return we have had 15/- a week (£1 less than we were getting for the other children we boarded). We looked after him because we were sorry for him, and counted on a certain measure of gratitude and understanding from you and Nat. (At one time you promised me cash, too, but we were not surprised, nor did we complain, when this did not turn up). Now you can’t even bother to see me, but I must telephone and wait about during an afternoon which I kept specially for you, by your own instructions.