Wicked Little Joe Read online

  Ten shillings, a pound, two pounds – after a few months I had a wonderful silver hoard of money that I took out and counted every so often and gloated over like a miser – like my grandfather, I suppose, as I saw him in later years, doing the daily tot of all his worldly assets on the sofa after lunch with the two smelly dachshunds.

  It was a good feeling, this careful counting-house business in the secrecy of my bedroom. But an even better feeling was the power I felt now, a hidden power over all the abandoners, footlers and forbidders as I saw them, in my own family and the Butlers, along with the ogre Dudgeon and my other tormentors among the bully boys and some of the masters at school.

  So that, with this money, when I was back at Sandford Park again, during the next winter term, I made up for the unhappiness of it all by sneaking out of bounds in the afternoons, down the laurel drive, and out onto Ranelagh Road to the Sandford Sweeteries with their liquorice twists and bulls’ eyes, then past the drab fruiterers and down to The Elm stationers where they sold the ‘Dandy’, ‘Beano’ and ‘The Champion’. Now I could buy everything I wanted: a big double slice of vanilla ice cream at fourpence, whole bags of gob stoppers at the Sweeteries, all three comics – everything that had been beyond my reach with the ninepence pocket money I was allowed each week, pretty useless money for any extravagance since a third of it had to be kept for the collection at Sandford Church each Sunday. Before, I had six-pence a week left for any extras. Now I had silver pounds in my pocket.

  Of course the whole business was one of unconscious revenge on all the people who had arranged for my unhappy circumstances at school. Yet the stealing was motivated by something else just as important to me – a need to please my grandmother Vera, and most especially placate the mother figure in my life, Peggy. For I soon started buying them presents in the Ranelagh shops with their money, cigarettes and perfume, without realizing that this could be my undoing. It wasn’t, in the event, though these gifts aroused suspicions. What ended my successful career as a thief was that, as with so many thieves, I became overconfident.

  I had a bicycle by then, bought second hand with money I’d found, three pound notes, in the lion house on a visit to the Dublin Zoo with the Butlers – which, unclaimed after three months, I was allowed to keep. Although second hand, it seemed a splendid machine, a slightly drop-handle-barred black Humber. But it needed a few extras. A pump, a puncture repair outfit, a little saddle bag and a bell. Very conveniently a bicycle repair shop had just opened in Bennettsbridge, the village a mile away from Maidenhall. Why spend my good money (Peggy’s good money in fact) on buying these extras? I could simply take these items from the shop in the village. Conveniently again, my bicycle sprang a leak in one of the tyres on my next holiday at Maidenhall. So I wheeled it down to the repair shop straight away.

  Before I got there I knew just what I had to do – ask the rather surly new man (he wasn’t a local villager) if he could mend the puncture and, while he was away in the back of the shop, I’d help myself to the various items I needed on the shelves.

  In retrospect I can see that I had no qualms whatever about my behaviour. I wasn’t going to be caught – I had proved that already in my many robbings of the handbags – and in any case I felt it entirely natural behaviour, given my circumstances. It was in the necessary order of things for me. I somehow knew that it was sink or swim in my life, and I was swimming. I was ‘morally blind’ as Hubert described me in a subsequent letter to a doctor-psychiatrist in Dublin.

  At the bicycle shop all went exactly to plan. The man fixed the puncture in the back room while I helped myself to the things I needed, adding a pair of bicycle clips that I didn’t need since I was still in short trousers. I left the shop, my pockets filled with the plunder, and bicycled back to Maidenhall. I had just got to the front gates when the shop owner came up behind me on his own bike. Without saying anything (which is why I remember him being taciturn) he frisked me, found some of the things I’d stolen, then took me back to the village police station where the sergeant spoke to me and found some more things in my pocket and sent me back to Maidenhall. So I thought that was it and no more would be said about the matter. Certainly I wouldn’t mention it. But let Hubert take up the shock-horror story now, in a letter to Old Joe on 6 May 1946:

  My dear Joe

  Many thanks for your letter; it would certainly have been a good idea, if you could have made that arrangement with St Columba’s but an awful thing has happened and I am afraid the question of Joe’s education will have to be considered again.

  He was caught by a Bennettsbridge bicycle shop owner at our avenue gate with a number of articles which he had stolen while the man was mending his puncture. The man took him to the Guards’ barracks where he was interrogated and searched by the sergeant. More things were found. He then returned to us and spent the remainder of the day without giving us an idea that anything had happened. We knew nothing until Joe had left for school, when the owner of the shop came up and told us and I went down and interviewed the sergeant. Peggy is most terribly upset by all this. I do not mean because it is an intensely humiliating experience for us but because she is so frightfully hurt by his heartless deceit. She does not feel that there is anyone else, outside you and Vera and Olive Symes who have the slightest interest or feeling of responsibility for the child. We have both of us known that there was a bad side to his character. He has clearly had far too much licence at Sandford Park, as, till he went there, he never strayed on his own into the Bennettsbridge shops and we knew exactly what he was doing. He came back from Dublin with a good deal of money on him for which he bought rather more goods than was natural. This had been worrying us and one or two other things.

  Peggy and I feel that Joe’s is a special case requiring special treatment and that we are not qualified to cope with him. Our method of treating him as a normal child and trusting him has failed. I can see no alternative but changing his method of upbringing, even if moving him from Sandford Park does cost you more. Sally and David will surely not grudge money spent on saving Joe from going to the bad. It’s now or never.

  Do you think he had better go to Ballyorney for the week-ends? I feel sure that the companionship of servants is not good for him and he makes for them if he gets the chance.

  There have been four other children of his age during the whole of his visit staying here but, instead of playing with them, he has played his own games the whole time – e.g. he bought himself a box of chocolates, hid it in the kitchen and ate it by himself without any attempt to share it with others.

  We can’t exactly blame him, he seems impervious to influence, in fact amoral. Sandford Park has, if anything, done him harm by familiarising him with the streets. Before he went to the bicycle shop he went into a pub and bought himself a bottle of lemonade. It is unthinkable that small children of nine, staying at Maidenhall, should wander round the Bennettsbridge pubs. It has never happened before and there have been many children here.

  I will not write more, it is all too close to us to suggest any course of action. I will come up to Dublin as soon as I can. Perhaps advice could be got. My opinion at present is that Joe should go to a country boarding school where he is better supervised and out of temptation. We have not said anything to Little Joe about all this as we did not know till after he’d gone what he’d done. Please do nothing and say nothing till we have seen you. I wouldn’t have him for the week-end till we have conceived a wise plan of action. We feel it very important that Joe should realise that this time he has overstepped the mark. But it might do him more harm than good to scold him or threaten him with our withdrawal from his life.

  Love to you both and I am truly sorry to be the bearer of such very sad and disappointing news, yet it is no good making light of it. The Sergeant said that he had a perfect right to charge Joe with Petty Larceny.

  My career as a rural Oliver Twist had come to an end. Perhaps the only person who comes well out of the incident is the village sergeant for not cha
rging me with petty larceny. Hubert’s reaction seems exaggerated. There is a sense in part of his letter that he is as much concerned with Butler status in the community as with my thievery – along with the horror of a Maidenhall boy wandering round the village pubs buying bottles of pop. And then there is his phrase of my conduct as being one of ‘heartless deceit’, which seems a bit strong. He means of course deceit towards them in not admitting my sins when I returned from the interrogation at the village police station. But did Hubert really expect me to admit my sins? It’s surely a cardinal rule among miscreant schoolboys to keep mum with the authorities over their misdeeds. Was he never a schoolboy himself? In any case my ‘heartless deceit’ was directed towards the surly bicycle-shop owner, not to either of the Butlers. Rather the opposite – since in part (apart from the sweets and ice creams for myself) I was trying to appease the Butlers by stealing their money, so that I could buy perfume and cigarettes for Peggy. But that equation doesn’t seem to have occurred to Hubert. It’s interesting, too, that, given his very liberal ethic, Hubert so takes against my consorting with servants. I can certainly remember doing this in the case of the Maidenhall and Annaghmakerrig maids, and particularly with Mary, my great-aunt Olive’s cook out at Lime Hill, a roly-poly, elderly, kind-hearted woman who gave me ginger biscuits in the basement kitchen and allowed me to travel up to the dining-room in the dumb waiter. The dispossessed will naturally gravitate towards others in the same position.

  As to my grandfather’s reaction to Hubert’s alarmed letter, he takes a different line. He writes to Hubert three weeks after my ‘raid’ on the bicycle shop (as Old Joe describes it in a later letter):

  As regards Sandford Park I don’t think there is any need for panic. I saw Allt yesterday [Peter Allt was a close literary friend of my grandfather’s, a Yeats scholar who subsequently edited the Variorum edition of Yeats’s poetry], who teaches at Sandford Park and was formerly at St Columba. Dr Auchmuty [the Vice-Principal at Sandford Park] had spoken to him about Little Joe and said he was difficult and too inclined on self-emphasis and self-assertion; but he was not in any great immediate anxiety about him. Allt does not recommend Sandford Park as a permanency, however, in Joe’s case, and thinks highly of St Columba, and particularly of White, who has a ‘house’ there, and has done well with difficult boys – with one in particular, the son of a well-known man in Dublin, whom no other school was able to keep. I heard of another small boy, also a child of a well known person, who goes in for peculations, and the person who told me seemed to think that this was not uncommon in children. I will speak to Olive as you suggest, and write to you then.

  On my being marked down by Hubert as an obstreperous nine-year-old, impervious to influence and amoral, the pace of the correspondence quickens between my grandfather and Hubert and others who are now brought in – a doctor-psychiatrist, headmasters and housemasters, friends and relations and my parents in Cheltenham; all of them so far a largely hidden chorus in the wings, who have the sudden evangelical opportunity to come on stage – advisors on the wicked condition of Little Joe, now strutting over the footlights, swigging stolen bottles of pop and gobbling bulls’ eyes, with cigarettes and phials of exotic perfumes scattered about him: a Victorian melodrama where the fallen boy must be saved from his moral blindness. And so there follows a series of alarmed, scatter-shot letters between everybody, where the issue of ‘What to do with Little Joe?’ becomes a truly hot potato.

  Half a dozen plans were considered – that I should see a doctor in Dublin or go to a ‘childs’ guidance clinic’, that I should be given over to my parents in England and go to school there, that I should go to the famous (or infamous) progressive school of Summerhill, run by the dour old Scot A.S. Neill, or to Christ’s Hospital school in Horsham, or that I should be farmed out once more to friends of the Butlers who took on difficult children and had a ‘family’ of them in the wilds of County Cork. Confusions, indeed, as evidenced by a letter from grandfather to Peggy, in mid-June, 1946:

  My dear Peggy

  I am afraid a hornets’ nest has been stirred up by this planning for Little Joe. Nat arrived here Friday evening, unannounced. He had not answered my letter. He said he had come over to see about the child, in view of my letter; but has not actually seen the child yet although he was hanging about Dublin all yesterday. He had enquired about ordinary private schools in London, and done nothing about the other thing and says he is opposed to it. [What other thing? Perhaps my going to a child’s guidance clinic?]

  I suppose the idea was that he and Biddy could get some money into their fingers if any change was made. The only concrete suggestion he offered was that Little Joe should go to a farm in Wiltshire for the summer holidays where Biddy’s sister works. A decent girl, I believe. When he came back last night, at twelve o’clock, he said he had been at the passport office for Little Joe. I am not giving him any money for Little Joe or for himself (beyond his fare back, which I must, as it is the utter sense of futility that is produced) …

  Meanwhile my mother Biddy, seemingly left out in the cold over all these possible arrangements by the footling men, understandably tries to get in on the act. She writes to Peggy:

  Dear Peggy

  I was very distressed to hear about Little Joe. The first we heard about it was from Nat’s father who wrote a few weeks ago asking us to find a school for him over here. It has been very difficult to find anything as reasonable as Sandford Park so far. A friend of ours is very friendly with one of the partners in Gabbitas Thring, the scholastic agents, and he went along to see him for me last week. Any schools I have heard from them have been in the region of £35 – £40 a term. At the moment I do not know where I am about the whole thing …

  Personally, Peggy, I should love to have him at school over here because I could see more of him and see him most week ends. I can arrange to have him looked after for his holidays down in Wiltshire …

  I am afraid I cannot agree to sending Joe to a clinic over here. Bickford-Smith of Gabbitas Thring thought it unnecessary. He mentioned a case of a boy he knew who went to one of these clinics and he said the little boy was infinitely worse when he came away.

  Anyway, Peggy, would you write to me and let me know what is happening … I believe Hubert is in Dublin this week so something may be arranged between himself and Mr Hone about Joe. Mr Hone is so vague about everything and he emphasised in one letter to Nat that he did not want to be written about in the matter. But I would be most grateful, Peggy, if you would write to me and give me some idea of what is happening …

  Yours,

  Biddy.

  There is a note of desperation in this letter, which is not surprising given the vagueness of my grandfather and the vagaries of my father, which give the impression that they would both like to be shot of the whole business of Little Joe. There is no reply from Peggy to my mother in the file. But I’m sure she sent one. She was a very conscientious woman.

  The next letter to Biddy in the file is from Hubert, commending a family in County Cork, where he thinks I should go for the holidays and, implicitly, where he feels I might find a permanent home.

  Dear Biddy

  You have no doubt heard from the Hones about Mr and Mrs Allen who have offered to take Little Joe for six weeks of his holidays. Both Peggy and I, as well as Joe’s own relations in Ireland, think it would be the gravest mistake if this most generous offer was refused. I do not think it likely that it would then be repeated. Mr and Mrs Allen are connected with Newtown school and are extremely enlightened people. They know of Joe’s difficulties and his rather unsettled background, which may be in part responsible for them. They have an understanding of children and I believe that under their guidance he would get through this most unfortunate phase of dishonesty and egoism.

  A visit to England at this time, except to a very carefully selected school, would I believe be most harmful and unsettling to him and indeed criminally unwise. His case cannot be considered normal. I have never yet heard o
f a child who would be quite unmoved by a visit to the police station and start stealing from a different shop a couple of days later. Obviously his temperament requires very careful watching and handling. This I am confident that the Allens would provide and that their advice would also be worth listening to. Gabbitas Thring and his opinions are not of course worth a row of pins.

  We were surprised indeed that Nat paid a visit to Ireland on the head of this matter and made no attempt to get in touch with us. You will forgive us if we are sceptical of the good effects coming of this visit to England. If you are both capable of a sustained and fruitful interest in Joe’s future you would surely have given some signs of it in the past seven years.

  Yours sincerely,

  Hubert Butler.

  This offer from the Allens was clearly turned down, since I never went to them. Instead I was taken to see a doctor in Dublin, a Dr Eustace, who practised in the posh medical quarter of Fitzwilliam Square and (as I afterwards learnt) had an interest in psychiatry having met the master, Dr Freud, in Vienna in the 1920s. I was taken to see him by my grandmother Vera and my father Nat. The two of them left the waiting-room and I was brought in to face a small middle-aged, dark-suited figure behind a large desk in a high-ceilinged room looking out over the leafy square. I can remember very little except that at one seemingly crucial point the doctor got out a board with square and round holes and a similar number of round and square pegs. He asked me to put the pegs in the right holes. I found this ridiculously easy. And that seemed to be it. I waited to be picked up by my father. He didn’t turn up for quite a while, and when he did he smelt of beer. But let the doctor take up the story: