Wheels Within Wheels (3 page)

Despite their aura of smelling-salts, Victorian women were a gallant lot – often widowed young, never helped by the state, without formal training yet indomitably resourceful when obliged to support
innumerable
children. In this case three boys and a girl died young of the
tuberculosis
that had killed their father. But my great-grandmother survived into her eighties and was affectionately remembered by my mother as a tall, thin, gracious old lady with an ineradicable Scottish accent. Regularly on Sunday afternoons she read the bible to her restive Catholic
grandchildren
before providing lavish teas at which they could eat their fill of home-made shortbread and oatcakes and honey.

My mother and her siblings were not often allowed to eat their fill. Even when my grandfather was earning £3,000 a year – which in those far days meant affluence – my grandmother obsessively rationed the children’s food. Avaricious and covetous by nature, she could not forgive her own mother for having put honour before wealth. (I have always uncharitably suspected her of becoming a Catholic simply to spite my loyally Presbyterian great-grandmother.) And her sadistic withholding of plentiful food from hungry children was probably a way of taking her revenge on her husband for his generosity (admittedly not always prudent) towards less well-off friends and relatives.

Jeff had a tight-lipped aversion to gaiety and pleasure, however innocent. As a very small child I became aware of her total lack of humour though I could not then have defined what so often made me uncomfortable in her presence. I also became aware of the animosity
she felt towards my mother, which possibly explains an odd little incident which occurred in the autumn of 1936.

Jeff wore a wig, having been afflicted by total baldness as a girl, and though it was a most superior wig it did not deceive me. Sitting on her lap one afternoon I looked into the garden and saw her black Persian cat – strangely named Zog, after the King of Albania – stalking a bird under an apple tree. Then suddenly I knew that I was about to be very wicked. I remember thinking that there should be a choice – surely I need not be wicked – yet the compulsion to hurt Jeff was so
overwhelming
that it seemed to leave no choice. I turned and touched the wig and observed, ‘That’s not real hair.’ And as I spoke I was so appalled by my cruelty that I began to shake all over.

Both my parents were present, sitting side by side in the background, and at once I glanced towards them. Yes, they had heard. My father looked grieved and my mother wrathful as she murmured
something
in his ear. Obediently he stood up, carried me out to the hall, reprimanded me sorrowfully and smacked me once very gently on the bottom. This was my first and last domestic experience of corporal punishment – if that is the right term for a chastisement that was virtually indistinguishable from a caress.

When we returned to the sitting-room Zog had caught his prey and was devouring it on the window-sill. Jeff cuddled and consoled me exaggeratedly while upbraiding my parents for treating their little innocent so harshly. I had never before heard grown-ups disagreeing openly about child-control and was fascinated by the new vistas of adult fallibility thus opened up.

Not long after this I nearly joined the angels by drinking half a bottle of neat whiskey. Had I gone on a similar binge in Lismore I would almost certainly have died. As it was, an ambulance rushed me to hospital where I recovered with a speed that ominously foreshadowed an infinite capacity for strong liquor. But the most significant aspect of my adventure was lost on me at the time. I had come upon this
half-bottle
not in the sideboard, amongst the genteel decanters of sherry and port, but at the bottom of my grandmother’s wardrobe.

Given Jeff’s views on sex, as transmitted to my mother, she must have been an insipid bed-mate. It is therefore not surprising that my
grandfather 
quietly maintained a second establishment in Paris, where his business took him with convenient regularity. Not long before his death he told my mother that five children had been born of this union – obviously his true marriage, in every sense but the legal.

At the age of forty-nine my grandfather was ‘requested to resign’ because of his hard drinking. My mother then had to return from Munich, where she had just begun to train as a singer. Her two elder brothers had already completed their education, but the younger boys had to be transferred from their Jesuit college to a free day-school. Then the Ford had to be sold, the servants dismissed, the telephone
disconnected
and the silver pawned. My grandfather could afford to go to Paris only very occasionally – when his mistress sent him the fare – and he was continually exposed to his wife’s contempt. A proud man, he felt his degradation keenly. No one then thought of alcoholism as a disease and he was very conscious of being despised. He drank even harder and borrowed more and more frantically. Meanwhile the family was being kept by his port-sodden father, who had recently inherited a comfortable income from one of the sisters amongst whom his patrimony had been divided when he embraced his kitchenmaid.

My grandfather was declared bankrupt two years after his dismissal – or ‘resignation’, as the nicer members of his family chose to call it. A year later his father died and on the way back from the funeral he paused to light his pipe, sat unsteadily on a wall by the Royal Canal, toppled over, struck his head on a stone and was drowned in eighteen inches of water. Very strangely, for the spot was nowhere near their home, my mother chanced to be passing and witnessed his body being lifted onto the pavement. He was already dead. But for the first ghastly, absurd moment what most upset her was the stench of the slimy weeds that clung to the corpse’s impeccable morning-suit. Even when bankrupt her father had remained something of a dandy.

My mother and he had been exceptionally close – hence Jeff ’s dislike of her daughter – and I heard him spoken of so often during my
childhood
that I now find it hard to believe I never knew him. Obviously father and daughter were very alike though luckily my mother’s penchant for gracious living was tempered by an awareness that one cannot live both honestly and graciously on a few hundred pounds a year. 

For both our sakes, my mother preferred me to spend more time with my paternal grandparents than with herself and Jeff. A fifteen-minute tram-ride took me from Kenilworth Park to Charleston Avenue so I could still see my mother almost daily. But though the spatial distance between the two households was slight the spiritual distance was vast.

At Charleston Avenue there was poverty, too, but it was happy-
go-lucky
rather than gloomy and self-pitying. The house was shabby, dark, damp and cramped – yet comfortable. It might have seemed less cramped had there been fewer tottering piles of books on every flat surface. The uninitiated sometimes hinted that a week spent tidily arranging these volumes would make life less inconvenient – not to say perilous – for all concerned. But the initiated knew that the volumes were already arranged to my grandfather’s satisfaction and that from amidst the seeming chaos he could at a moment’s notice produce any required work, whether on the Birds of Patagonia, the History of Printing in North Africa or the Bogotrid Sect of tenth-century Bulgaria. I remember that all
ornithological
tomes were stacked high on the first four steps of the second flight of stairs. Lord Brougham (Collected Works of) towered beside the lavatory and countless volumes of scriptural commentary had to be removed from the bed in the spare room before I could lie down.

I loved that spare room. Narrow corridors between piles of desiccated books led to the two beds and even before I could read I got high on the pungent mustiness of ancient volumes. On summer evenings I used to slip out of bed and move cautiously about the room, picking up and stroking and glancing through volume after volume, pleased if I found illustrations but not bored if I didn’t. To see and touch and smell those books filled me with content, with feelings of joy and security and richness. And also – even at four and a half – with ambition.

I perfectly understood my grandfather’s triumph when, at the end of a long day in the second-hand bookshops on the quays, he came trudging home hidden behind a pile of bargains. This, as far as he and I were concerned, was what life was all about. Therefore I have always relished The Tale of Pappa’s Trousers.

Once upon a time Granny gave her spouse enough cash to buy himself a very necessary pair of everyday trousers. (For obvious reasons he was not normally entrusted with such large sums of money.) Wearing his
Sunday suit, because he had nothing else fit to wear, he set off for wherever the cheapest men’s clothing was to be had. But unluckily his route took him onto the quays and there he chanced to notice the
ten-volume
1840 edition of Sismondi’s
Histoire des Républiques Italiennes,
elegantly bound and without a blemish. It cost considerably more than he had in his pocket, but he judged it to be a bargain and acted with a decisiveness that had it been otherwise directed might have made him a rich man. Nearby was a second-hand clothes shop where he quickly flogged his Sunday suit and bought threadbare trousers for a few shillings. The substantial balance, added to his original allowance, just about paid for Sismondi and his tram fare home. He arrived at Charleston Avenue in a state of advanced euphoria. But as he was also in his shirt-sleeves, and very nearly indecently exposed, it is not surprising that his wife failed to appreciate the
Histoire des Républiques Italiennes
in ten vols.

Not that my grandmother could afford to criticise Pappa’s obsession: her own was no less uncontrollable and, at least to me, a good deal less understandable. She played bridge, almost literally without ceasing. Naturally I found this a bore, yet I do not remember regarding as abnormal the fact that she and her cronies ate, drank and slept according to the fall of the cards. They might be retiring as I crept downstairs at 7 a.m. to play beneath the overgrown laurel bushes in the back garden. Or they might be in full cry at lunchtime, in which case Pappa and I would quietly settle down to a snack of bread and very ripe Stilton. (So ripe that it had been bought at half-price.) It was not uncommon for the cronies to sleep on divans in the sitting-room, lest their departures and returns might waste time.

Who cooked and washed up? (it was evident that nobody cleaned). I can recall no maid or daily, yet neither do I remember ever going hungry. However, the permanent state of the dining-table proved the subordinate rôle played by food in this household. It was a large table and my memory is of one sordid, crumby corner grudgingly left clear of books and journals and sheaves of notes written in Pappa’s tiny, precise hand.

Pappa – when not delivering philosophy lectures at University College Dublin – was generally understood to be writing A Book. Its subject, however, was never disclosed. My guess would be that he started several
books on diverse subjects and finished none of them for lack of mental stamina – or possibly for lack of physical stamina. As a captured Old IRA volunteer, he had been on hunger strike in England for six weeks during 1918, in a bid to have his status as a political prisoner recognised, and this effort at the age of forty-eight had permanently damaged his health. During the same period his wife had also been ‘inside’, as a leader of the women volunteers, Cumann na mBan, and a boundless nationalistic fervour was the couple’s only obvious common trait. Yet they were very happy together, each amiably tolerating the other’s foibles, and they gave my mother a taste of easy-going affection such as she had never enjoyed in her own home.

The flavour of that affection is well conveyed by the letter which Pappa wrote to my father for his twenty-first birthday, which was celebrated in Bedford jail. (My father had been sentenced to three years for concealing weapons and ammunition in his back garden.)