The Fox's Walk Page 9

  After a moment, my father turned off the engine and got out of the car. Standing in the stagnant mud of the ditch, he cursed as he heaved his weight against the bonnet of the Sunbeam. It did not move. After a moment, he returned to the car and disengaged the gear. Now the motorcar responded to his pressure, but only for as long as he strained against it. Each time he let go to return to the drivers seat, it sank back into the soft mud. He knew, I knew, and the farmer knew that sooner or later he would have to ask for help. I flicked a glance at the farmer. His face was utterly expressionless as he struck a match and lit his pipe. Drawing on the tobacco, he leaned on the gate and seemed to give the evening sky the same amount of attention as he did my straining parent.

  In the end, of course, help was requested and given. But the comedy was not quite over. The combined strength of the two men easily pushed the Sunbeam back onto the road. The farmer reopened the gate to give my father more room to turn; Father backed up, ground the gears, and stalled. Now he had to get out again, reach under the drivers seat for the handle, return to the front of the car, and crank the engine until it again started. I sank down in the seat and tried to disappear; the farmer, still holding the gate, still expressionless, permitted himself a couple of slow, thoughtful nods.

  Nothing was said as we drove back to Ballydavid. As soon as we were out of sight of the farmer, my father pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and mopped his face. When he had replaced it he glanced at me and looked mildly surprised. I felt as though I had changed since he had last seen me and not for the better, but he said nothing.

  When we had turned into the avenue at Ballydavid, Father stopped the motorcar and opened the door. Fortunately, he had not got out completely before we began to roll slowly backward, and he angrily wrenched the brake into place. For a moment, I considered asking if I could walk the rest of the way, but, seeing his scowl, I thought better of it. He walked around the Sunbeam, inspecting it. The rear did not engage his attention for long, but when he got to the front he crouched by the engine grill. I stretched myself to my full height and saw that he was wiping the muddy evidence of his adventure off the chrome and mudguards with his pocket handkerchief. When he got back in the motorcar his face was again crimson; this time he wiped his brow with the sleeve of his jacket. I remained completely still and silent, although I was uncomfortable. Since my legs were not long enough to reach the floor, I had to brace myself with my hands in order not to slip about on the seat. And for some time I had needed to urinate.

  Father sat for a moment before he set off again, and we drove up the remainder of the avenue at a dignified speed that did not require the changing of gears. An anxious group of women stood on the veranda—Aunt Katie, Grandmother, and Bridie—and, to one side, a stern-faced O’Neill. Mother was, I think, lying down and unaware that her elder child had been misplaced. A dark cloud heavy with rain had formed over most of the sky, although the horizon was pale and light; the dark sky and a low strong wind announced a gale coming in from the Adantic. I imagined, and I think the distraught women on the veranda did also, myself alone on the darkened strand, battered by the storm wind, and drenched by the rain. Father and O’Neill, I am fairly sure, were preoccupied with the welfare of the Sunbeam.

  The women and O’Neill were presumably reassured: the women by the top of my head visible over the dashboard through the windscreen, O’Neill by the lack of immediately visible dents on the Sunbeam. As a collective sigh of relief was emitted, Father drew up in front of the house and braked too abruptly, spraying a shower of gravel at the feet of his audience and throwing me from my insecure perch on the front seat against the polished wood of the dashboard.

  UNCLE SAINT WAS DEAD but the war went on. In trenches stretching from the English Channel to the Swiss border, Allied and German soldiers faced each other; behind four hundred miles of barbed wire troops dug into mud.

  During the Boer War, Major John McBride had raised an Irish Brigade to fight on the Boer side against the British; Sir Roger Casement now attempted to raise another Irish Brigade from the prisoner-of-war camps in Germany. At the beginning of December 1914, the German authorities began to separate Irish prisoners of war from their English comrades. The Irish prisoners were taken from their various camps and assembled in one large group at Limburg. Many of them had come from the Sennelager camp, where for some time they had been softened up by the Germans with speeches and promises of improved conditions: fewer rules, better food, Mass every morning. Suspicious and possibly mystified by the historical and political references made by their now curiously placatory captors, the Irish prisoners responded in a memorandum that they did not wish to avail themselves of these concessions unless their fellow prisoners also benefited, “as, in addition to being Irish Catholics, we have the honour to be British soldiers.” Nothing subsequent appears to have altered this position, and their suspicion of German motives extended to Casement and to his attempts to recruit them to fight for Irish independence.

  From the beginning, Casement faced a disillusioning task. The Irish prisoners of war were at first bewildered by and then antagonistic to his proposals. He himself was discouraged by a report in the Times in which Germany, while making peaceful overtures to the United States, omitted Ireland from its list of small nations who should be free to decide their destinies when the war was over.

  The reluctance of the prisoners to change sides was not a reflection on Casements powers of persuasion or a result of his Protestant origins and former career in the British diplomatic service. Two Irish priests brought from the Irish College in Rome had no better luck; and when an Irish-speaking priest sent from America took a more aggressive approach, there were complaints from the prisoners and talk of a boycott of his services. Casements initial speech to a group of NCOs produced only two volunteers, and it was obvious even to the idealistic and self-deluding Casement that neither was of sterling character. His second visit in January 1915 was even more discouraging: he was jeered and booed by the Irish prisoners. Never short of courage, Casement returned to the camp every day of his stay at Limburg, but contented himself in following around Father Crotty, the more sympathetic of the two priests who had come from Rome.

  In the spring, Casement sent Adler Christensen back to the United States. Some time before, Christensen had been involved in a scandal, referred to but never specified—almost certainly of a homosexual nature. It had been forgiven by the generous and pliable Casement, although the scandal must have made even more awkward his life in Berlin. One imagines that whatever sadness Casement felt at parting with Christensen, it was diluted by exhausted relief.

  The formation of the Irish Brigade brought no consolation. Eventually fifty-two men were recruited and given privileges and smart uniforms designed by Casement. Their fellow prisoners resented the rewards of their treachery, well aware that most of the recruits had signed on for the comforts and benefits that went with belonging to the Brigade. The soldiers of his new brigade did not rise to Casement’s imagined ideal; they drank, and they got into fights with their fellow prisoners, particularly the French and Russians, and eventually—since they were free to go to beer gardens—with German soldiers who also despised them. By August, the discouraged and increasingly ill Casement was considering returning to the United States. Instead he was joined in Germany by Robert Monteith.

  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 w
ith, 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.

  Chapter 4

  UNCLE 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.