Wicked Little Joe Read online

  Yrs, Hubert Butler.

  Another fair and, in the circumstances, a very hospitable letter. But my mother didn’t turn up at Maidenhall. At least I have no memory of her doing so, while I have a very clear memory of my first meeting with my parents, in London, the following year. Meanwhile there is the matter, as Hubert intimates in the letter, of my proper schooling. And here my grandfather must have taken a crucial hand, for in the autumn of 1945, aged eight, I was packed off (and the phrase is literal: bags and baggage for someone who had no idea that trunks, tuck boxes, and the other bits and pieces necessary for prep school life, were, in fact, to be the chattels of exile) – packed off to a day and boarding school, Sandford Park, in Ranelagh, at that time largely a genteel late-Victorian inner suburb of south Dublin. And I was sent there, as I learnt later, quite simply because Old Joe had played cricket years before with the now elderly headmaster, A.D. Cordner, a passionate cricketer who had once played wicket keeper several times for the Gentlemen of Ireland and also, surprisingly, for Canada, though he was an upstanding Irish Protestant, so far as I know. Very upstanding, at well over six feet and large generally, so that he was known as ‘The Bull’. Though the novelist William Trevor, a pupil at Sandford Park earlier, says in an essay about the school that he was called The Bull because of the way he roared at one of the boys, called Boland.

  In the first instance my kindly great-aunt Olive (with only one leg, the other amputated as a young woman after a serious fall from an apple tree) who lived at Lime Hill, a lovely house in the north Dublin countryside near Malahide with her stockbroker husband George Symes, went to Sandford Park on a reconnaissance mission with Vera. She writes to Peggy Butler in the spring of 1945:

  Dear Peggy

  I saw Sandford Park school with Vera, but as I missed the bus into town I was too late to go all over it. However, Vera liked the dormitories and the whole place seemed well kept – surprisingly country-like for its situation and a very grand air. There is a very fine big playground so the boys have every chance to learn games, especially as the headmaster is very keen on them. He played cricket against Uncle Pat in Canada. Rather odd. I just cannot remember his name at the moment. I don’t think he has a wife. The matron gave us tea and seemed a pleasant person and we were favourably impressed altogether; more than that it’s hard to say without more knowledge. But a friend of mine tells me that it’s very well thought of and nice boys go there. They take about 16 boarders, the rest day boys – 60 in all I think.

  I know Joe understood you wanted Little Joe to go in September – and I hear from Sally [my aunt] that he is taking David [my uncle] away from St Columba’s at Christmas. I suppose he can’t manage both sets of fees. I think it’s a terrible pity to take David away so young, and if you think Little Joe could wait until the spring I might be able to induce Joe senior to leave David at St Columba’s. I will talk it over with him when we next meet. I’m glad Little Joe is settling down with you well. I hope you are both well. My love to the children.

  Yrs. ever,

  Olive Symes.

  If it was odd that the headmaster should have been playing cricket against Pat Hone (my grandfather’s younger brother) in Canada, it seems equally odd that my grandfather, for the sake of saving a little money (the fees at Columba’s then were about a hundred pounds a year, at Sandford Park about half that) should be taking his son David away from his prestigious public school in the Dublin mountains in order to finance me at the little suburban school of Sandford Park – odd in that, as he had written earlier to Hubert, his first duty was to see his daughter Sally and son David properly launched on the world, before considering me. And quite right, too. But here, it seems, he is about to deny David his later education in order to give me one. I wonder if David may have been leaving St Columba’s in any case? Or was it, as I fear more likely, that Old Joe saw that by taking David out of his school early he would thus make a saving of about fifty pounds a year when he came to pay for mine?

  The other interesting point, in the light of what happened in Sandford Park a year after I arrived there, is how far it fell from great-aunt Olive’s and my grandmother Vera’s good impressions of it. Certainly, for as long as the elderly, very decent, cricket-mad Bull Cordner was in charge, they were right to think well of it. It was a good school. Founded in 1922 as the first interdenominational school in Dublin, Sandford Park had produced fine sports teams and academic results – and some very notable old boys, like Owen Sheey Skeffington (the famously liberal and outspoken Senator and Trinity College Professor of French), William Trevor and Conor Cruise O’Brien.

  It’s true that under Bull Cordner’s benign and rather lax wartime regime the school had declined academically, if not in cricket. The Bull had no academic qualifications whatsoever and it was his view that all a boy needed to know was how to play cricket well and spell properly. So in his classes he conducted lengthy spelling bees and in the afternoons, indeed at every spare moment of the summer day, he would get all the boys togged out in their whites and onto the cricket pitch and into the nets. I remember, on my first summer term, his asking me ‘How is your cricket, Hone?’ (as though everyone had a ‘cricket’ on them, as a natural adjunct, like an arm or a leg). He was in his study overlooking the park, watching a house match. I said I had played French cricket at home with the girls at Maidenhall. ‘Oh, no, Hone,’ he said gravely. ‘Real cricket, we play real cricket here.’ He turned and looked out the window, gazing lovingly at the game, murmuring, ‘Ah, the boys in their whites, their summer whites …’ I did come to play real cricket at Sandford Park and became quite good at it. Bull Cordner was a kind man, surely the most important educational qualification for a teacher.

  The main school building was (and indeed still is, for the school survives today in a vastly improved form) a late Victorian house, rather in the mode of a grand, south-coast resort villa residence that made forceful attempts to imitate previous architectural glories in the Tudor and neo-Gothic modes. There was false half-timbering, oriel windows, stained glass in the front rooms, a false moat round the basement and various doodles and excrescences in relief wherever the architect’s imagination had got out of hand. It had been built in the 1890s by a rich Dublin builder, James Pile, as something of a country retreat. But between the wars a crop of pebbledash suburbs had grown up around it, so that it became isolated in ten acres of parkland, fine chestnut and beech trees behind barbed wire and granite walls.

  With its steep roofs, ornate eaves, spiky adornments, loud red brick and coloured windows, a big pond in front bordered by pampas grass and bulrushes with a Giverny bridge over to a bushy willow-tree island, there was a degree of fantasy about the place and its many trees, exotic shrubs and a laurel drive ending with a Gothic gate lodge. Beyond lay Ranelagh Road – a busy and forbidden main road, with shops, buses and real people. The Catholic Irish. For Sandford Park, despite its original interdenominational intents, was, apart from several Jewish boys, entirely Protestant. And so at that time in the 1940s, whether the headmaster and staff knew it or liked it or not, the school was implicitly involved in sustaining the faith of the British oppressor, along with imperial notions of class, clubs, good form and so on. More than any English counterpart the school was isolated in time and place, administrating the last rites of the faith to a small Dublin Protestant minority – in the midst of a Catholic nation that had suffered more than any from the Imperial cause. Politics and geography, more than Common Entrance, threatened the school’s existence. Dr Arnold’s lofty zeal, together with the whole muscular-Protestant-colonial ethic, had come full circle here, and the school was waging a last battle against an imagined Catholic horde, pressing forwards just outside the gates. We boys were the unknowing foot soldiers in the coming siege, potential cannon fodder, victims of a beleaguered officer belief in the efficacy of the Bible and the Birch, so that, with this carrot and stick, we would stand firm to the very last.

  I was eight when I went there. And despite the kindly Bull Cordner,
who seemed merely to preside over the school as an honorary presence, like God, I was appalled, desolate, in the weeks after my arrival. I couldn’t understand what had happened to me, except that I’d been unaccountably abandoned, simply given away like a box of apples by the Butlers, for I barely knew anything of my grandparents then and nothing of my parents. I arrived in the winter term, and in my memory of those first few years it seemed to be always winter there. The heating was minimal, with no hot water, and only a sheet and a thin blue blanket covered me on the junior dorm iron bed. I was perished with the sort of cold that not only chapped my hands permanently, made my ears blue and my nose run like an oil can, but was like a Lord of the Frost, coming inside me and making a frozen core that never thawed. I must have been literally numb, in body and spirit. My faculties seized up, a defence mechanism no doubt against the chill and loneliness, the only feelings I had then, with what was left of my mind running savagely to and fro over the unbelievable fact that I had been abandoned in this hell of utter discomfort, and was not at home in Maidenhall or Annaghmakerrig.

  I spent all my free time crowding the red-hot pot-bellied stove in the assembly hall, the old ballroom, vainly trying to push my way into the circle of larger boys who spat on the throbbing metal at intervals, creating sizzling globules, small explosions of saliva – a performance which I looked on then, not with disgust, but as an envied pastime, symbolic of good fellowship and warmth.

  Of course I see now how such physical horrors were commonplace in most boarding schools of the time – the cold and the dirt were the same in hundreds of other similar institutions. The dank, dripping washrooms in the back yard, miles away from the dormitories in the main house, where one skidded about over decades of congealed soap and human detritus; the yellowed margarine less than a varnish on the curled-up bread slices, porridge that dripped glutinously from the spoon like catarrh, the daily meat stew that was indistinguishable from vomit, the dried excrement on the lavatory seats.

  A child has few civilized standards and can make fewer comparisons. He quickly comes to believe that this is how things are everywhere in the world outside his home. It wasn’t until I was older at the school that I discovered how the headmaster and staff lived in quite a different manner, with their own food, bathrooms and oil heaters in their bedrooms. And this discovery was for me the beginning of a cunning and a passion for revolt that formed my real education at school.

  At the end of my first year, Bull Cordner died suddenly overnight in his bed in his tiny room next to our junior dormitory. It was quite unreal, like the end of a chapter in a childrens’ story. We had seen him the day before, but now, for some fictional reason, we would not see him again. There was to be a new chapter, a new headmaster. We juniors waited expectantly for the story to continue.

  What followed was a reign of terror that lasted five years – a period in my life that marked me more conclusively than any other, forcing my character abruptly and completely into ways it would never naturally have taken. The school for us boarders became an enemy-occupied country; the pupils collaborators, resisters, victims.

  The new head, Hal Dudgeon, was the science master. He’d been a skilled boxer and had fought professionally apparently, so he was known as the ‘Battling Bottle Brush’. He was a brute. But then he would have appeared to an outsider, a parent, no more than a reasoned disciplinarian, intent on sharpening things up in a school that had become somewhat lax. A school inspector would surely have commended his scrupulous attitude here; a good education demanded no less. How then could he be guilty of anything? He resorted only to the usual violence of such places at the time: he beat me with sudden impromptu severity, at the least excuse, and slowly pulled up the hair on the nape of my neck in class, as if such torture would force me to admit the three properties of water, of which I was ignorant.

  But this was only the beginning of his cruelties. We feared him because his real punishments were much more subtle. He presented an awful threat. He had that rare quality of sinister omnipresence, seen or unseen. He was fearsome in his insights and prophecies. In the way of transgression he knew what you had done, by divination, and what you were going to do before you did it. With him retribution didn’t catch up with you, it never left your side. His malign gifts were those of a Gestapo interrogator who convinces you that your friend in the resistance network has told all an hour before and that you are there merely to confirm what he has said. He used this and other methods with me and the boys – playing one boy off against another, placing informers and bribing potential Fifth Columnists – a Himmler running a network in an occupied country. So that in the next four years of his reign at the school I became adept in all the arts of concealment, subterfuge and espionage – a secret agent, the school a foreign country where I had been placed before the war, ever alert, disguised.

  Dudgeon was a very ordinary-looking man – sadists often are. Tall, thin, grey-faced, grey-suited, thin grey hair flattened down over his scalp, thin and grey and bloodless all over. But his eyes were the worst, cold blue, unmoving when he looked at you, and his rare smile was as bad, a small movement of grey flesh about the cheeks that always boded ill. He was fanatically neat in everything. In his study, while gazing at you he would slowly marshall pins on his desk as if their disruption threatened the balance of the world. He seemed to have been constructed like a machine, bit by bit, according to some perfect blueprint. It was impossible to imagine him naked or washing or even eating – for he never ate with the staff or the boys, and was, in fact, never seen in the open except on some precise school business. He knew the importance of withholding himself, knew that the unfamiliar is half the fright in fear – knew how, when you swooped on a boy, you had to do it fast and silently, from behind. He wore rubber-soled shoes and I can hear the sudden squeaks even now, as he made his final run in for me, diving out of the sun or from the darkness of the laurel drive when he would take me like a hawk by the back of your neck.

  Most boys gave up any idea of learning in the school, for we lived night and day in fear and enmity. All our behaviour was dictated by the possibility of Dudgeon’s sudden presence and his eyes hungry to punish someone. So we learnt to scan minutely any area of the school before we moved into it, never to sit in a room with only one exit, take up any exposed position, or round a corner without first peeking round it, always have an alibi. To survive was to continually dissemble. And because of this fearful atmosphere I formed no close friendships in the school then – no more than an agent will risk betrayal by making his real identity known to another spy in the network.

  The boys, thus separated from each other, were left to their lonely devices after lights out in the junior dorm, or took comfort in inanimate objects, in the secrets of their lockers or tuck boxes. Above all we found solace in the forbidden life of the suburban high street that lay beyond the laurel drive. This drab thoroughfare of sweetshops, newsagents and fruiterers full of damp cabbages was freedom for us, a glittering country over the border for which we often risked everything. It became a matter of honour to creep down the drive, usually in the late afternoon before first prep, showing ourselves like heroes under the misty street lights, before darting into a shop for some small article which we carried back as proof of time spent in a free world.

  Sometimes one or two of us boarders would try and filter into the crowd of day boys who left every afternoon at half past three. We were like desperate men in a prison break. We knew the risk. For at just that time Dudgeon would start to move hungrily about the bow window of his study that gave onto the drive, his gaze like a swivelling beam of light on the barbed wire, searching for just such hapless fools. One could be lucky and get out during an interval of his attention. But more usually the attempt ended in a scene which I was later to become familiar with in various POW Colditz movies. Dudgeon would open and shout from his window. One of the staff or a senior boy would be dispatched, chasing down the drive, and the miscreant would be dragged back by the ear, disappearing into D
udgeon’s study, a fly returned to the spider.

  William Trevor, an earlier pupil at Sandford Park, has written of Dudgeon as ‘the most appalling man I’ve ever met’. And I have often asked myself since why the very liberal Butlers and my grandfather, who was not liberal but was capable of odd bouts of feeling, allowed me to stay in this juvenile prison camp. And I can come up with no very good answer. Of course I couldn’t have written home about the horrors, since our weekly letter home was censored by Dudgeon or the duty master. But surely I must at some point in the holidays, have spoken to Peggy and Hubert of these continual cruelties? Perhaps I didn’t. Or perhaps I did and nothing was done about it. There are no family letters in the file showing evidence or knowledge of Dudgeon’s cruel behaviour or of the dreadful conditions in the school generally. It seems that, completely isolated as I was (except for those few heroic escapes down Ranelagh Road), I, like most schoolboys then, must simply have accepted the school and Dudgeon’s monstrous regime as the way things were everywhere outside my home.

  FIVE

  No doubt as a reaction against the horrors of Sandford Park and Dudgeon and my feelings of having being abandoned by the Butlers (as I’d not felt with my parents, never having known them), I started a sly process of thieving money from Peggy and my grandmother in the next year, during weekends at Ballorney, my grandparents’ house in the Wicklow mountains, and at home in Maidenhall. At first it was small sums, pennies taken from my grandmother’s handbag, and then more from Peggy’s – threepenny bits, sixpences, shillings; then, gradually more daring, florins and finally the ultimate in coined wealth, big shiny Irish half-crowns with that lovely prancing horse on them – keeping the money in a wooden pencil box I’d been given for school and hiding it under my bed.