. . .
When my fortnight in Ireland was due, I took the mailboat from Holyhead. My first sight of the Free State – as it still was – was the slogan painted in large white letters on the jetty at Dun Laoghaire: BOYCOTT BRITISH GOODS. I mentioned this to Edward, when he met me at the landing stage; he seemed amused by it. I think we took a little train to Booterstown, to his mother’s house. During the first few days of my stay, she made a great fuss of me; nothing could be too much trouble. At the same time, she left us very much to our own devices.
Edward proved an assiduous and most considerate guide, taking me to the crypt of St Michan’s, to the Castle (an old man there told us about hearing the banshees just before the death of some leading figure), Phoenix Park, Blackrock, Dalkey and Greystones . . . Edward and I also went to see an English cat burglar who was being held in the local police station. He was a most engaging Cockney who seemed to have established very friendly relations with the gardai. He told us that he had found London rather hot for him and had crossed over to try his luck in Booterstown. He had cleared out most of St Helen’s Road before his luck ran out. I learnt later from Edward that his mother had put in a claim for a fur coat which she said had been stolen from her house; but it turned out that not only had her house, No. 23, not been burgled, but that she did not possess a fur coat. It was much about this time that she was also in trouble with the people who ran the Irish Sweepstake, for whom she acted as an agent when on her visits to England. There had been talk of fraud, which had all been hushed up. But they sacked her from the Sweep.
She told me how cruel her husband had been to her when she was still a defenceless young woman. The man was a brute; he used to beat her. She added that when she had left his house to seek safety elsewhere, he had refused to let her take her silver. I thought this very disgraceful and, rather taken with the boldness of the suggestion, I volunteered to get it back for her. It seemed to me that, as a visitor, I had nothing to lose. She gave me a detailed account of all the objects that belonged to her and where they would be placed in the doctor’s drawing-room.
There seemed no reason to delay this attempt to put matters right; we both agreed that we would get her silver back on the very next day. Edward knew the habits of the household, as well as his father’s visiting hours. We would go there when he was on his rounds; Edward would engage his aunt, who acted as his father’s housekeeper, in conversation, while I waited in the coal cellar. When the way was clear, he would give the signal, by stamping on the floor; then all I had to do was to make for the drawing-room and fill a large cloth bag provided by his mother with her silver, and then make off through the garden, climb the wall at the back, and jump on the first tram that came along (the house was on a main road). Edward would follow on in due course, keeping his aunt in her sitting-room till I had completed my part in the proceedings. It seemed an excellent plan, and all three of us were most excited by it. Edward even fished out a long-peaked old cloth cap in loud checks, saying that I was to wear it well over my face, to prevent me from being recognized, in case things went wrong. The cloth cap added a spice of danger to the whole enterprise.
We spent much of the evening planning the details of the operation for the following afternoon. It was agreed that Edward and I should travel together on a tram to the stop nearest his father’s large house. He would then go in ahead of me, while I made my way, with cloth cap and swagger bag, over the garden wall at the back. He told me where the entrance to the coal cellar was. Once inside, I should wait in the dark till he gave the signal for me to make my way quickly upstairs – I had to go past the aunt’s sitting-room, but he would have a record on very loud, and she was a bit deaf anyway; the drawing-room was at the end of the corridor. I would have to make my way back along the same corridor, then down into the garden and back over the wall, making sure there was no one in the street. I had never been given this sort of assignment in Tunbridge Wells. There was no doubt that things were rather different in the Free State, and Dublin seemed to be a place where things happened. I could hardly sleep in my excitement.
The afternoon of the following day we left the house in the highest spirits, Edward’s mother accompanying us to the front door and standing waving to wish us good luck, while we waited at the tram stop. Everything went off as planned; there was no doubt that Edward had thought it all out. I waited till he had disappeared through the front door of the large white house, an address, I think, in Lexham Gardens, in a fashionable area of Dublin, a wide street full of doctors’ plates. I got over the wall unnoticed from the street, hiding at the back of the coal cellar behind a tall pile of coal. I could hear Edward’s loud, confident voice coming from the room above; he had evidently succeeded in cornering and immobilizing his aunt, and soon there was the sound of music, played very loud. All I had to do now was to wait for the signal. I pulled the cap well over my eyes.
I had only been in the cellar a few minutes and my eyes were just getting used to the semi-darkness, so that I could make out the vague outlines of objects, when a very young, very small maid came down, carrying a scuttle and an electric torch. The light from the torch threw my cloth-capped shadow in dark silhouette against the far wall, making me look like a giant and elongating the sinister-looking cap. The girl started screaming ‘Jesus-Mary, there’s a strange man down there’, and bolted up the stairs to get help. Edward and his aunt both heard the screams at the same time, though he tried to drown them by turning up the music. Then the maid herself, shaking with terror, presented herself in the sitting-room. I rushed for the entrance of the cellar, scorched across the long garden and over the wall, abandoning both cap and bag on the lawn. Luckily a tram came by almost at once and I jumped on it while it was moving, still sweating from fright. I stayed on the tram as far as the terminus; it seemed best to get as far away as possible from the centre of the city. Then, asking passers-by how to get to Booterstown, I made my dejected way back to No. 23.
Medea had only to take one look at me, capless, bagless and still breathless, to realize that the master plan had failed hopelessly. She was not in the least bit sympathetic, would not listen to my explanations about the sudden arrival of the maid, and got very angry, saying it was typical of Edward thus to have mismanaged the whole thing. He should have known about the maid; there had always been one. Edward was just a hopeless bungler, and I was no better. How wrong it had been of her to have trusted two silly boys with a grown-up operation (Medea’s word for what in fact would have been a burglary); she should have known they would make a hash of it. I tried to point out that the arrival of the maid had not been my fault – it was one of those imponderables that might defeat the best-thought-out operation – but she would not hear me out.
Edward arrived about an hour later, having had some difficulty calming down his aunt and persuading her not to ring the police. Even so, the cap and the bag had been found. The former, an old one of Edward’s, had been recognized. The aunt was no fool; he was pretty sure that she would have realized what had been afoot. Moreover, she and her brother had found out – I don’t know how, though the doctor had long been in the habit of putting private detectives to keep a watch on his estranged wife’s house – that Edward had a schoolfriend over from England and staying at St Helen’s Road. It would not have been very difficult for them to have identified the be-capped intruder. In short, as he saw it, things looked pretty black. Nor would this be the end of it.
Extract from A Classical Education by Richard Cobb
© The Estate of Richard Cobb 1985
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