Hone Wicked Little Joe

1. Auflage 2009
ISBN: 978-1-84351-243-1
Verlag: The Lilliput Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 264 Seiten

In the summer of 1939, as a two-year-old in London, I was given away by my parents to a Chelsea friend and taken on the Irish Mail to Dublin. Thus begins this extraordinary memoir by travel writer and novelist Joseph Hone, one of eight children farmed out by impecunious and inebriate parents, who was raised at Maidenhall in County Kilkenny by the historian and essayist Hubert Butler and his wife Peggy, sister of Tyrone Guthrie of Annaghmakerrig in County Monaghan. The story is told through a cache of letters discovered on Hubert Butler's death between he and his friend 'Old Joe', Little Joe's grandfather and biographer of Yeats and George Moore, upon whom fell the financial responsibility for his grandson's upbringing. This account of Joseph Hone's childhood and youth during the 1940s and 50s in rural Ireland, among the privileged and artistic elite of his generation living down-at-heel if comfortable lives in a newly emergent state, is an enthralling reminder of the happenstance and precariousness of all our lives. Like William Trevor, Joe was boarded out at Sandford Park in Dublin and then at St Columba's, both of which he documents in loving and comic detail, gaining as much stimulation from his home environment as from the excesses and disappointments of these single-sex establishments. He writes with feeling and insight of the lives of those in his circle and beyond - his teachers and foster parents and friends - working as an assistant for John Ford during the making of The Quiet Man, and finding himself as the writer he was to become. This numinous work of autobiography and self-interrogation bears comparison with Nabokov's Speak Memory or Frank O'Connor's An Only Child. It will take its place as a classic of the genre while illuminating unknown corners of Ireland's cultural landscape.

JOE HONE is the author of eight novels, including The Private Sector, Summer Hill and Firebird, and four books of travel writing, from The Dancing Waiters to Duck Soup in the Black Sea, both of which gather material commissioned during his time as overseas correspondent for the BBC. He lived and taught in Oxfordshire in England for a number of years. He passed away in August 2016.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hone, Joseph

Leseproben

TWO

If my grandfather was always writing at a kitchen table, Nat was always sitting at the end of a bar – alone with a pint of bitter, a packet of Players and The Daily Telegraph open at the crossword. I can hardly see him in any other position, usually at Peter’s Montpellier Bar in Cheltenham, where he and my mother Biddy had unaccountably come to live when they left London in the late 1940s.

Nat spent most of the pub’s opening hours here, his thin dark hair slicked down with water, a faraway expression set off, alarmingly, by the same startling pale-blue eyes as his father, always wearing the same sick-coloured tweed jacket, carefully creased pre-war flannels, brown shoes of a similar age, holes in the soles, but carefully tended, polished every morning. And always – his proudest possession I think – the same faded lightning-striped Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve tie. A tie so long used that the beery pub airs had acted on it like starch, and I saw it once in his bedroom practically standing up by itself against the back of a chair.

Nat was as much part of the fixtures and fittings of Peter’s Bar as the slate shove-ha’penny board (a game he played so often in pubs that he never lost), the beer-pull labels for Bass and Worthington Pale Ale and the stale sandwiches under a glass dome. I see him querying the odd crossword clue with Peter the landlord, a big, bear-like, bearded nautical man who had sunk a few German pocket battleships, I gathered, in the war.

Here Nat would eke out his languid, gentlemanly days, fingering his top lip, carefully pacing his cigarettes and pints of bitter, one of each every forty-five minutes or thereabouts, so that his money allocated for that morning would last from twelve until the two-thirty closing time. Then he would go home to a snack of strongly soused herrings and onions, prepared the previous day for him by my mother, with heels of white bread, before drowsing the afternoon away in bed, reading ‘tec novels.

At six he would stroll out again, down the faded Georgian glories of Landsdowne Crescent where they had a third-floor cold-water flat, buying the Cheltenham Echo at the Montpellier corner for the racing results to see what he might have won or lost, for he was a passionate follower of the turf, not at any racecourse (that would have been too costly) but via the racing pages and the bookie’s runner who came into Peter’s Bar every morning. Now I think of it he may have chosen to leave London and live in Cheltenham for its great racing traditions and its excellent off-course betting and credit facilities, in the shape of its many bookie’s runners, with their hot tips for the two-thirty.

At half past six my mother would meet him at Peter’s Bar, having finished work as a filing clerk at Walker Crossweller, a firm that made bathroom fittings in the Cheltenham suburbs. He would buy her a pint of bitter – with her money. For, as I soon learnt, all his beer and cigarettes and racing debts – along with the food and rent for the flat – were paid for out of my mother’s wages packet, handed over to him every Friday when they met at Peter’s Bar. I remember the exact sums she got – nine pounds a week to start with, then ten pounds after a few years and finally, before she left the firm ten years later, eleven pounds a week. She would keep only a pound or two for herself.

Apart from being paid for delivering flyers around Cheltenham for the local Tory party at election time, the only money my father received was from his father in Dublin – meagre, most unwilling cheques which soon dried up, and afterwards secret cheques from his loving mother, Vera, which he cashed with Peter, so allowing himself a pint and a cigarette every thirty minutes instead of forty-five – and some rash bets on outsiders at the races. Though Old Joe was sometimes prepared to give money to Nat in kind. On his being asked by my mother for cash to buy Nat a pair of shoes – winter coming on, his one other pair down to their last – my uncle David remembers being told to look under Old Joe’s bed, where he found a pair of cracked Edwardian dancing pumps, which were laboriously parcelled up and sent, second class, to Cheltenham.

My father, since he was strictly a one-outfit man, had trouble with his clothes. After the war, he came on one of his visits to dun money from his parents, then living at Ballyorney House beyond Enniskerry in the Wicklow mountains. At that time they employed a smiling, round-faced, mischievous, lank-haired little dwarf of a man, Johnny, as chef and general factotum. My grandfather – always anxious to get rid of his son as soon as possible – gave Johnny cash for Nat’s ticket on the mailboat back to England, and charged him with making sure Nat got on it. A mistake, for Johnny was as partial to the drink as Nat. The two of them drank away the ticket money in Dun Laoghaire bars so that penniless now and fearing – or unable – to return home, they put up for the night in a boarding house. But with no money for the bill next morning, Johnny set out with Nat’s suit, overcoat and shoes, hocked them and returned with the money to settle the account.

It can’t have occurred to them in their befuddled state that Nat, apart from his shirt and socks (for some reason he never wore underclothes – penury, bravado, hygiene?), had now been left almost naked, trapped in the boarding house. A blanket and a taxi were negotiated. They got home. History doesn’t relate my grandfather’s reaction on their return. But it can well be imagined.

My father was the mother of all remittance men.

But considering he was good-looking, charming, intelligent, had been to Radley and (briefly) to New College, Oxford and had been left ten thousand pounds when he was twenty-one by a rich bachelor cousin, William Hone, whose fortune had come to him as a bookmaker (discreetly no doubt since he lived in one of London’s most elegantly respectable addresses, at Albany, Picadilly), one may wonder at Nat’s later come-down. Or not wonder. Such a silver-spoon-in-the-mouth background, in a wilful, suddenly rich, free-spending young man-about-London-and-Dublin in the 1930s would seem a good recipe for a possible fall. And so it was for Nat.

How had all this come about? Well, that Nat had his glory days there is no doubt, though of what exactly he got up to in those days I learnt only a few details, then or after he died in 1959 aged forty-six. These matters were never spoken of by my grandparents or the Butlers. A pall – an appalled pall – of silence surrounded Nat’s doings in young adult life. I heard only vague accounts from my uncle David and from friends of Nat who I met years later. One friend of his (who later became a director of the Shell Oil Company) was a student with him at New College in the early 1930s. He told me how Nat was often absent from the college, taking a hire car to London to restaurants and nightclubs several evenings a week and climbing over the high college wall on his return, for which he was soon sent down. Though not before he had run over someone in Oxford on his motorcycle, resulting in serious injuries to both, with Nat breaking his jaw in several places, which must have accounted for the unnerving, palpitating movement of one cheek like a stranded fish when he was annoyed.

These Oxford high jinks might be seen as par for the course among the gilded youth at the University between the wars, except that Nat had some demon in him that always pushed him a mad stage farther. On returning to Dublin in the mid-thirties, when General O’Duffy’s Nazi-inclined Blueshirts were out and about recruiting, Nat became a camp follower of the movement, patrolling the Dublin cocktail bars carrying a loaded .45 revolver under his coat, where he once blasted the tops off the brandy and Benedictine bottles in the Wicklow Hotel; target practice for the real thing in the Spanish Civil War to fight for Franco, a campaign frustrated when the plane he was piloting never made it beyond Biarritz, where he and the others of his bibulous Irish Brigade spent a few days attacking the Champagne at the Imperial Palace Hotel instead of the Republicans.

Yes, some devil came to possess my father. But in one crucial matter at least I should thank this demon in him, for without his irresponsible behaviour I would never have come to write this book – since I wouldn’t have been abandoned as a child, or have taken all the great advantages I did from the Butler family, and there would have been none of all these concerned letters from my minders and I would probably have led a pretty awful life with my parents.

Nat’s sad demons probably started with his good looks and his great charm; though when I came to know him there was little enough of this latter left. Several people described it to me later as a ‘fatal charm’. The cliché in his case proved to be almost literally true. Nat had always got what he wanted, with the usual whims and tantrums of childhood indulged by nannies and servants in the household of his parents who, it’s clear from the Beerbohm cartoon, knew little or nothing about either conceiving or bringing up children.

Nat was partly brought up by my grandfather’s elder sister, my great-aunt Olive, who lived at Lime Hill, a lovely parkland Georgian house near Malahide outside Dublin. Olive was a most kindly, motherly, well-off woman, who, childless herself, took Nat under her wing. He spent a...