The Fox's Walk (2 page)

Tea was being prepared in the kitchen. Maggie, the cook, was standing in front
of
the large black iron stove, holding a skillet in her hands. I noticed a plate to one side, heaped with drop scones she had already made. Bridie, neatly uniformed, was waiting to carry the tea tray into the drawing room. Both women knew I was not allowed to visit the kitchen, but I had noticed that neither had much interest in enforcing rules when unwitnessed by adult members of the family. Neither really noticed me, but their lack of interest in the doings of children was different from the way I was ignored by Grandmother, or even by my mother. The maids included me, on a minor, powerless level, in whatever was going on; my presence, provided I was safe and well behaved, did not require any special acknowledgment. With my family, there was more often a feeling that I had not yet attained the right to be part of their self-contained and privileged society.

As I reached up to the china knob on the tall dark door to the drawing room, some part of me remembered my own insignificance, but I was still too excited by my discovery to contain myself. It took me a moment or two to open the door, and as I entered, my mother, having risen from her seat by the fire, was crossing the gloomy drawing room toward me. Most of the light in the room came from three long windows that looked out over the damp tennis court and fields to the river estuary. The fire, combating the cold of a rainy afternoon, was the only interior source of light; it would be another hour or two before Bridie brought in the lamps that marked the moment when I would be taken upstairs to bed.

My mother, graceful though she must have been in the sixth month of her pregnancy, looked rested and relaxed at Ballydavid in a way that she rarely did in London. She was by nature somewhat indolent and now, pregnant and in Ireland, took even longer afternoon rests than she did at home while my father was at the office. Her face still bore traces of amusement: Great-Aunt Katie often made her laugh; Grandmother, though insightful and witty, less frequently.

“Alice,” my mother said, absentmindedly surprised to see me.

I realized that I needed to justify my presence, and I tried to recount the moment of such importance that had just taken place.

“Mama, Mama, I saw a tiger on the avenue.”

I knew, of course, that I hadn't seen a tiger, but the importance of what I had experienced could not be conveyed with the words,
I saw Oonagh on the avenue.
It now seems to me—a memory recalled recently by an Etruscan mosaic of a pair of exotic, predatory animals on either side of a tree whose fruit was large and not concealed by leaves—that in one of the nursery books, a tiger standing beside a tree heavy with brightly colored oranges was smaller and less threatening than was another illustration of a large black cat with long claws and teeth, hissing with a savagely red tongue. It is possible that these illustrations may have misled me into thinking that substituting a tiger for a brindled cat was a less extreme exaggeration than it, in fact, is.

There was a sound of amusement, something a little lower and less than a laugh, from the end of the room near the fire, and I realized that Grandmother had visitors and that I had the attention of everyone in the room.
Children should be seen and not heard
was a familiar phrase in those days, the unoriginality of the remark equaled only by its sincerity. But my mother opened the door a little wider and I understood that I was meant to enter.

Grandmother and Aunt Katie were sitting in their accustomed high-backed chairs on either side of the fireplace. Sitting up straight in another chair—my mother had been sitting on the sofa beside a small and, at that stage unnoticed by me, elderly man—was a woman whose charms I could see, even at first glance, would be inexhaustible. The unrelieved, though by no means dowdy, darkness of my grandmother's and great-aunt's clothing—my mother was dressed in a loose pale blue frock and a cream silk zouave—only accentuated their guests colorful and dramatic clothing. Blue, pink, gray, and red. Her gestures, too, were dramatic. As she turned to look at me—I had the impression that she had been the one doing all the talking—the osprey feathers in her large hat waved wildly, and a gesture of her hand agitated the strings of beads around her neck. I was utterly charmed and would have been happy to sit quietly and gaze at her.

But it seemed as though I would, for a moment or two longer, be the center of attention.

“A tiger, Alice?” my grandmother asked, her manner showing more interest than I was used to receiving when I spoke. I had the impression that my presence was welcome, though not because Grandmother had suddenly discovered my true worth.

“A tiger,” she repeated. “On the avenue. Come here, Alice.”

I crossed the room, now the recipient of rather more attention than I wished.

“And what did the tiger do?” she asked when I stood in front of her.

“It sat down and scratched itself,” I said.

Adult laughter, affectionate and not too loud, made me regret having allowed myself to get so far out of my depth. After I had been introduced to Major and Mrs. Coughlan, my mother patted the sofa and I sat down beside her. She put her arm around me and drew me closer to her. I wondered why the tea tray I had seen in the kitchen had not yet arrived.

“Katie,” Grandmother said in the polite tone she used to give domestic instructions to her sister, “please tell Bridie to dust Oonagh with some Keating's Powder.”

Aunt Katie started to rise; the bell pull was on her side of the fireplace. But Grandmother waved her back to her seat.

“Later,” she said.

As though it were a signal, Mrs. Coughlan rose from her seat, and after a moment her husband got up also. Good-byes were exchanged while I stood w to one side. Aunt Katie accompanied the guests to the front door. As Mrs. Coughlan passed me, she paused.

“I hope
you
will come and see me one day,” she said.

As the door in the hall closed, Grandmother turned to my mother.

“Mary,” she said, “ring for tea.”

 

BETWEEN THE AFTERNOON
of my first memory—Oonagh and Mrs. Coughlan and the tea tray withheld until after the Coughlans' departure—and my next memory, this one not isolated but part of the jumbled montage I recall of early childhood, one chapter in the history of the world ended and another began.

The summer months of 1914 before the outbreak of war were the last moments before everything changed forever. There was no sense that the world was about to embark on the most terrible war ever fought. Instead, in London, there was an atmosphere of uncomfortable adjustment, and, in Ireland, a time of uneasy anticipation. My parents, both of course born during the long reign of Queen Victoria (by then it was unlikely there was anyone alive who could remember a time before she had ascended the throne) had adapted—happily, I think—to the freer and more worldly atmosphere of Edwardian society. Now, the popular, diplomatic, sensible, and reassuringly human king was dead; and society had once again changed, becoming a little dull with a less exuberant monarch on the throne.

In Ireland Home Rule seemed imminent; the question was when it would come and at what cost. My family waited and watched; we knew change was inevitable and hoped it would be peaceful and not immediate. Most of the Anglo-Irish tried not to think about it, and continued their lives as though their comfortable world would last forever. But there were exceptions.

Two men, both Protestant and from privileged backgrounds, felt a greater sympathy to the nationalist movement than they did loyalty to their own class and upbringing. At a glance, Roger Casement and Erskine Childers might have appeared similar. Both had served England with courage and distinction, both had received public recognition for their achievements; each loved Ireland with a patriotism intense enough to give his life in the cause of Irish independence. Both were executed: one hanged in an English prison, the other shot at a barracks in Dublin. The path each took to his patriot's grave could not have been more different.

Erskine Childers was the author of
The Riddle of the Sands,
a novel published in 1903 that has been read ever since as a literate thriller particularly attractive to anyone fond of sailing. At the time it was published it was also—and this was Childers' primary intention when he wrote it—a warning to England of her vulnerability to invasion from the North Sea should she engage in war with Germany.

Childers' wife, Molly, was an American from a good Boston family. She had been bedridden as a child and was never again to walk without a stick or to be free from pain. She adored her husband and loved sailing, and did not allow her disability to limit her more than was absolutely necessary. Childers' childhood had also, in a different way, been painful. When he was six years old, his father died of tuberculosis. His mother had chosen to conceal her husband's condition and to nurse him herself. After his death she contracted the highly infectious and, at that time, incurable disease and had to be separated from her children for the rest of her life. Erskine and his brother, Robert, were brought up by relatives in Ireland. As was usual at that time in Anglo-Irish families, the boys were educated in England. Childers served in the British Army during the Boer War and afterward became a hero in England for his gathering of the material—crucial to that country's intelligence—contained in
The Riddle of the Sands.

A forty-foot ketch, the
Asgard,
had been given to Erskine and Molly Childers by her parents as a wedding present. On a July afternoon in 1914, just before the outbreak of war, the
Asgard
beat about Dublin Bay, waiting for a signal to dock at Howth; she was so laden with guns that she drew eighteen inches more water than she usually would.

With Childers aboard the
Asgard
were 900 rifles and 25,000 rounds of ammunition, and there were a further 600 rifles aboard the
Kelpie,
an accompanying yacht. Hardly enough to arm a revolution, but that was not Childers' intention. The guns for the Irish Volunteers were intended as a show of Southern Irish nationalist strength and as an answer to the—also illegal—April landing at Larne of 30,000 rifles for the Unionist Ulster Volunteers.

The crew of the
Asgard
—apart from two Donegal fishermen, ignorant until the last moment of the purpose of the journey—were Protestants sympathetic to the Southern Irish nationalist movement. Two of them were women. Despite a difficult and potentially dangerous voyage, there was an essentially English amateurism about the whole expedition. Gordon Shephard, a pilot on leave from the newly formed Royal Flying Corps, was at least an experienced yachtsman, although his attitude to their mission at times seemed less than serious. Mary Spring Rice, an inexperienced sailor but the innovator of the gunrunning scheme, kept a diary. In it she described Shephard's tendency to sleep late in the mornings and his wish to go ashore for a decent meal. The tone of Mary Spring Rice's account of the expedition is playful, but they all—Shephard the only one not to suffer from seasickness—made the twenty-three-day voyage and, during the night and while at sea, transferred the entire cargo of rifles and boxes of ammunition from the German tug to the
Asgard.

As Childers and his tired crew strained their eyes for the signal to dock, Sir Roger Casement, in New York, waited anxiously for news of the success or failure of the
Asgard's
mission.

Roger Casement, an Anglo-Irish Protestant, had been knighted for work in South America where he had exposed, as he previously had done in the Belgian Congo, virtual slavery and other atrocities in the rubber trade. Since his resignation from the British Consular Service several years before, he, like Erskine Childers, had espoused the Irish nationalist cause.

The arms were unloaded to the waiting Volunteers at Howth on the afternoon of July 26th. On the 5th of August war was declared. On the 17th Childers received a telegram from the Admiralty telling him that his offer of service had been accepted; he left that night for London.

By then Casement, under a pseudonym and having shaved off his beard to alter his appearance, was on his way to Germany where he hoped to raise an Irish brigade to fight for Ireland against the British. With him traveled Adler Christensen, the man who was to become his nemesis.

 

THE FIRST SPRING
of the war Uncle Hubert came home on leave from China. I was seven years old. My brother Edward had, eighteen months earlier and unannounced to me, arrived to share the nursery quarters. One day he wasn't there; the next he was. As far as I can remember, I accepted his presence without question and resigned myself to the inconvenience of living in close proximity to a baby with a loud voice and demanding habits.

Uncle Hubert was an official in the Chinese Maritime Customs. Although staffed at the senior level by foreigners (over half of them British) the customs service—which was administered with extraordinary efficiency and integrity—answered to Peking. Originally the Chinese Imperial Customs, the service had been created in 1860 and, after the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, was used to collect indemnities and to provide the Ch'ing Empire with about a third of its revenues. Over the years, the Customs had become a bureaucracy that, among other things, oversaw the postal services and waterways, and played a part in foreign affairs. Contemporary reservations about the connection between the Chinese Maritime Customs and Britain's morally dubious role in the Opium Wars were not shared by Uncle Hubert's family at Ballydavid.

My uncle's job was a reserved occupation that exempted him from military service. The collection of revenues—mainly on salt—to repay a loan made in 1913 by England, France, Germany, Russia, and Japan was considered important enough to keep a young man who spoke fluent Chinese off the field of battle.

Uncle Hubert had written two letters to his mother, each telling of a death. The first he sent after the death of a baby that had lived only two weeks—the letter that announced its birth arrived after it was already dead—in the second he told her that his wife, weakened by childbirth and grief, had not been strong enough to fight off a sudden recurrence of fever. Grandmother and Aunt Katie went into mourning, although the difference in dress—both were in permanent half-mourning for their respective husbands—would have been noticeable only to those initiated into the rigid but scarcely visible rules by which we all lived. My father, who liked his wife to look pretty and welcoming, put his foot down when my mother took her black dresses out of mothballs: he saw no need for the new mother of a healthy little boy to wear mourning for a sister-in-law she had never met.