The Fox's Walk (12 page)

Monteith had served in the British Army as an ordnance store conductor and had fought in the Boer War. He was realistic, competent, and experienced, qualities that Casement lacked to an unusual degree. Devoy, in New York, saw him as the ideal man to deal with Casement and the Irish Brigade. Christensen, still—but not for long—in the employ of the Clan na Gael, accompanied Monteith on his crossing to Norway. Their ship, too, was stopped by a British cruiser and boarded, then detained in the Orkneys for five days. These days allowed Christensen further scope for his dramatic talent: While Monteith moved from empty cabin to empty cabin, Christensen alternated between spreading false alarm and distracting the searchers with, one suspects, a heavy-handed performance.

Monteith revered Casement, and together they tried to raise enthusiasm and morale in the brigade. To what extent they succeeded may be judged by the reception of a later deranged scheme of Casement's. In December of 1915 Casement suggested to the German authorities that his brigade should be dispatched to help fight with the Turks in the Dardanelles—where Erskine Childers was now an officer aboard a primitive aircraft carrier, the
Ben My Chree
—but the Germans thought it unwise to give arms to such men.

 

U
NCLE SAINTHILL HAD
been killed in May. My parents, with Edward, returned to London in the middle of June, leaving me behind as part of a household incapacitated by grief. Why did they do it? At the time I looked no further for an explanation than that they didn't love me enough to take me home with them. After a while I amended this belief, deciding bitterly that they had given me to Grandmother as a pet to distract her from her mourning.

In hindsight I don't think I was completely wrong on either count. I understand now that my father thought my mother incapable of looking after me, he worried about how he himself would take care of his family, and they both probably thought it not only beneficial to me but faintly patriotic to leave me in a country where food was not rationed and where there was no danger of nighttime bombs. If so, one could applaud their prescience, for the air raids became more frequent as the war went on, and by the beginning of 1917 England was experiencing severe food shortages as the German blockade cut off shipping in an attempt to starve the island into submission. One might have admired my father's foresight were it not that he took my stunned and grieving mother back to London and almost immediately impregnated her. It might be argued that he should not bear the full blame for this pregnancy, that my mother—or possibly even Nature, desperate for male children to replace the men dead in France—might share the responsibility for this new mouth to feed. But I am a product of my times and hold the man accountable.

It was a summer of fear, sorrow, silence, and almost unbearable loneliness.

It was not unusual—indeed it was an aspect of privilege—for children, especially boys, to be separated from their parents and sent away to school. Their new circumstances would invariably be less congenial than those in which I found myself. But such children, despite bad food and cold showers, were in the company of other children. They knew why they were there; boarding school was an unpleasant but apparently necessary part of growing up. To be left behind in someone else's house at the end of a visit was not. I was afraid that the atmosphere in which we lived would not change and that I would live out my foreseeable life as an insignificant character awake alone in Sleeping Beauty's palace. I was dimly aware that the war would in time come to an end and with that end would come change, but that might be—and, in fact, was—some years in the future. And if England did not win the war, that change would be for an unimaginable worse.

I have had a better life than most. I live in congenial surroundings. My marriage, although too short, was happy. Mine would appear to be an average life affected by the time and place in history in which it has been lived. As I have told you, I am a teacher and I live in a little house on the seaside fringe of Dublin. From that you may infer that my life did not follow the conventional lines one might have expected from my upbringing. As in every life, what might have been can be no more than an educated guess. Would mine have been different if my parents had not so casually abandoned me at Ballydavid? Had I returned to England, it is not unreasonable, since my family survived the war, to assume I, too, should have done so. But it is hard for me to imagine that my untaken path would not have eventually led me back to Ireland.

Ironically, even if I had remained loyal to the privileged Anglo-Irish society to which I belonged, the circumstances of my life would be, on the surface at least, much as they now are. By the time I was grown, the world of the landowning Protestants—the world I, when I had to make a choice, instinctively, and in an instant, rejected—no longer existed.

My parents left me at Ballydavid in the summer of 1915. Seven years later the world of the Ascendancy ended. In 1922, after two ghastly and brutal years of revolutionary killing, burning, and menace on the Irish Republican side, and reprisals, often random and even more brutal, on the part of the imported-from-England Black and Tans and Auxiliaries, Ireland became a Free State. A civil war ensued. Many of the Anglo-Irish left the country; it would be hard to say whether Independence or the Civil War was the greater cause for the exodus. Certainly those whose houses were burned during the Troubles before Independence, or during the Civil War afterward, were among those who could no longer imagine a future for themselves in Ireland. Ballydavid survived, and it may have survived because one of the Republican soldiers owed me his life. At any rate the house still stands, although it no longer belongs to my family.

The Anglo-Irish who remained gradually adapted to a new way of living. Had I not thrown my lot in with that of an eleven-year-old Catholic boy after a tennis party on a hot August afternoon and, as a result, later eloped with him, there would be no perceptible difference between me and those of my contemporaries with a similar upbringing. My husband was killed in the early stages of the Second World War—it seemed inevitable: he never lost his streak of boyish recklessness and his love of adventure. But I am, even so, grateful that my marriage seems to explain the divide between me and my upbringing. Although the elopement and marriage outraged and scandalized both families and both religions, it was only one consequence of an earlier, more serious, secret, and still invisible decision. One I would not have had to make had I been taken back to London with my family.

For almost a month I wandered about the sad silent house, not knowing what to do with myself and largely unnoticed by its inhabitants. Then Grandmother and Aunt Katie began to come out of their trance. Gray-faced, they sat once more on either side of the fireplace in the drawing room.

Each afternoon, Uncle William, Aunt Katie's stepson, drove over for a largely silent visit with her. Uncle William lived alone at Ballinamona Park, maintaining the standards of domestic comfort established by Aunt Katie. He was a middle-aged man of enormous personal authority. Ballinamona Park was a perfectly run gentleman's residence, the model to which O'Neill aspired in the day to day management of Ballydavid. The stables (Patience and my mother's hunter were fed the same diet as Uncle William's horses, both of which were hunted twice a week all winter); the lawns and avenue; the fencing and drains; the cattle; and the garage were maintained along the lines of Ballinamona. Improvements and modernization were of great interest to Uncle William, and it was he who had introduced the Sunbeam into the lives of the old ladies and O'Neill.

Long silent meals were served. Both Grandmother and Aunt Katie had become thinner and older. Neither ate much, while I, afraid not to finish everything on my plate, self-consciously cut up and chewed my food as quietly as possible. Gradually the familiar rhythm of life was resumed, punctuated by Aunt Katie from time to time rising from her armchair or the dining table and leaving the room with a handkerchief to her face.

When I had been told I would be staying for a while at Ballydavid, one of the seeming (not actual, since I was powerless in the matter) inducements offered was that O'Neill would teach me to ride. Patience was already in fantasy my pony; now it seemed that she would be so in practice—at least when she wasn't between the shafts of the trap.

Riding was not as I had imagined it would be. I had dreamed of riding—like a little princess—on a calm, obedient, and docile pony. Instead there were lessons. It was O'Neill's charter to prepare me for the hunting field and to instill in me courage, a good seat, and other qualities of horsemanship that would reflect well on his stable. Unflattering comparisons to my mother's gentle hands, erect posture, and her fearlessness gave me to understand that I would never attain the standards she had set.

And my fear was not groundless; at least once during every lesson I would either slither forward on Patience's neck, over her shoulder, and headfirst onto the packed dirt surface of the paddock or, once O'Neill had started schooling me over low jumps, land rather harder on my bottom. The first time this happened I was as much surprised as I was hurt. Tears were instantaneous. Weeping was discouraged by my family and usually met with an admonition to be “a brave little soldier.” (With the maids tears were a little more effective, probably because they had no investment in building my character.) For O'Neill, tears, let alone the loud wails with which I accompanied them, were merely another way I had found to shame him and Ballydavid, on a par with my hair coming down on the hunting field, or allowing my pony to tread on a hound.

“Git up,” he would say, “and stop making a holy show of yerself.”

The first time, the shock of his lack of sympathy or concern—how would he have liked to have had to tell Grandmother he had managed to break my neck?—stopped my tears instantaneously, but thereafter most lessons ended with my sniveling into a soggy handkerchief.

I was full of regret and aware that I had made a bad deal that did me no credit. The level of desperation in every member of my family—Grandmother; Aunt Katie; my mother stunned with grief; and my father reluctantly, and without qualifications, responsible for his distraught wife, his hitherto largely unnoticed children, a military career he was socially unsuited to, and the financial pressure of a large establishment that the war and rising prices had left him unable to maintain—had encouraged them all to maneuver me into what must have seemed the only tenable position. A step that would help them all to keep going until time and changing circumstances would allow life gradually to regain its own rhythm and become normal again.

My mother had taken little active part in my abandonment. That her condition did not allow questions, appeals, or explanations was maybe the strongest reason for me to do what I was told and hope that my acquiescence would gain me favorable treatment from the less indulgent Irish side of my family.

I had also been, I soon realized, too easily seduced by the promises of material benefits and the pleasure of my new status. I had not understood that after I had enjoyed the novelty of being the pet of Ballydavid and the daughter of the house, everything would not snap back into its previous—if not comfortable, then at least familiar—mode.

What I had been offered was not insubstantial. The nursery was to be made into my own bedroom, with rearranged furniture and a pretty bedspread; I would learn to ride and have a pony; Jock would be my companion on walks; there would be lessons rather than school and a little girl nearby I could play with; and, once I could ride well enough, I could go by myself on Patience to visit her. I seem not to have been aware of my parents' and my brother's departure although I had the evidence of trunks, suitcases, and tissue paper before me, or perhaps I understood that they were leaving but not that I could not simultaneously enjoy my new privileges and go home with them. While I was contemplating Patience and my new bedroom, my father packed up Mother and Edward and took them back to England.

 

AT THE END OF JULY
, approaching the Devil's Birthday, as the anniversary of the outbreak of war was known, life at Ballydavid began again. It seemed as though the clocks again ticked, Oonagh again purred, Bridie's broom again swept the flagstones in the hall, hooves and wheels could be heard on the gravel outside the front door, the sparks flew up from the turf fire that was lit every afternoon, and the swallows once more swooped over the summer lawn in search of evening insects.

The resumption of something approaching everyday life was marked by two activities, each a futile refusal to admit the finality of an untimely death. The arrival of the artist who was to paint my uncle Sainthill's portrait occurred in the same week as I became aware that Grandmother and Aunt Katie were attempting through spiritualism to bridge the gap between this world and the next.

The painter came down from Dublin on the train. He was not a painter of the first water, and I suppose Grandmother must have been aware that his availability at short notice to paint a portrait from a photograph suggested both a lack of worldly success and a journeyman attitude toward his art. For a day or two before he arrived, he was the subject of several long discussions between Grandmother and Aunt Katie. Should he eat meals in the dining room or should he be fed separately? It was a tricky question that could not be resolved until Mr. McLeod arrived and they could see and hear him, but I think the feeling was that a painter bore the temporary status of a governess and would eat breakfast and lunch in the dining room and have his dinner on a tray in his room.

The painter, when he eventually arrived, was Scottish, with a red nose and sandy beard. Before Grandmother and Aunt Katie could withdraw to reassess the placement, he managed—I no longer remember how, but doubtless he had had years of practice—to establish that he would eat his lunch (“with a bottle of stout, if you would be so good”) in the room where he would be working and the other two meals at a location chosen by his employer, but alone.