A Boy in the Big House

I didn’t have many conversations with Bill Bagwell, our neighbour in Tipperary. I was a shy teenager and he, it seemed to me, was an equally shy old man. But one thing he told me made a deep impression: in his own teens, he had stood on his parents’ lawn and watched while IRA gunmen burnt down their house.

It was not a unique experience: between 1919 and 1923 over 250 families in Ireland suffered the same fate. This was in part a form of ethnic cleansing, since the ‘big house’ symbolized the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, and in part revenge for the activities of the Black and Tans and the Auxiliaries. So savage were these supplementary police forces, made up largely of British ex-soldiers, that even the people they were supposed to protect were appalled by them. This is the backdrop to Terence de Vere White’s 1961 novel Prenez Garde – which is not to say that it is a grim read. Alongside the masterfully orchestrated tension there is a great deal of humour, including possibly the funniest description of a rugby match ever written. The narrator, Brian Allen, is a precocious 9-year-old who lives with his parents in a village a few miles north of Dublin. As the book begins, their small Anglo-Irish community has yet to experience the Troubles at first hand but views the future with foreboding. As Brian understands it, victory for the Republicans would mean

no job in court for my father, no King, no Queen, no Prince of Wales, no visits to Dublin to buy Christmas presents and have tea at Mitchells in Grafton Street. Everything would be given up to men in black hats and trench coats with badges in their buttonholes and cigarettes behind their ears.

Brian, however, has a more pressing concern: the arrival of a new governess. Young, pretty and vivacious, Miss Morris captivates everyone she meets. Brian falls instantly in love with her but finds to his chagrin that she has little interest in teaching and is constantly disappearing off to dinner parties and tennis parties. He is dismayed, too, by the interest she attracts from men, including his father. Her chief suitors are Lord Swords, the middle-aged local grandee, and George Wain, a brash young Englishman. While Swords seems merely boring, Wain’s mysterious behaviour and the fact that he carries a gun convince Brian that he is a Black and Tan from whom Miss Morris must be protected. Despite this, the boy cannot resist the lure of rides in Wain’s sports car or the small bribes he gives him to take Miss Morris messages. There are obvious parallels here with L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between (see SF no. 78), though Prenez Garde’s political dimension makes it far more than an imitation. Like Hartley’s Leo Colston, Brian is a solitary child in an adult world – he has no siblings and is forbidden to play with the village children – and he picks up undercurrents he cannot make sense of. The book takes its title from the phrase his elders use when discussing subjects considered unsuitable for his ears: ‘Prenez garde à l’enfant.’ Their precautions, though, are not always successful. Brian does not set out to eavesdrop, but he does have a knack of finding himself in places – up a tree or by an open window – where he can listen to adult conversation unobserved. All too often, however, what he hears leaves him baffled rather than enlightened. Without companions of his own age, there are only two people he feels he can discuss these matters with. One is the beautiful, refined Mrs Heber, who has no children of her own and welcomes his company; the other is Freddy, the sly local blacksmith. Brian has been forbidden to visit the forge, but he is flattered by Freddy’s interest and deference, and does his best to answer his questions about the goings-on among the gentry. It is clear to the reader, however, that Freddy’s interest is far from innocent – and that the information Brian gives him could have fatal consequences. The book’s dramatic finale is precipitated by a headline in the Irish Times which Brian reads with horror. In my boyhood, too, that paper was a vital window on the world – its arrival in the house always an event – and Terence de Vere White’s position as literary editor made him an object of awe. But it was not until many years later, when a copy of Prenez Garde surfaced from among my wife’s grandmother’s books (signed by the author ‘In remembrance of a delightful – a vintage – evening’), that I discovered him to be a novelist. I was doubly interested because I had recently read another novel involving the Black and Tans, J. G. Farrell’s Troubles (see SF no. 49). Though it has been much praised, I was disappointed by it: I found the plot unconvincing and the symbolism of the huge, decaying hotel heavy-handed. Prenez Garde proved to be in a different league altogether. De Vere White inhabits his young narrator’s mind so expertly that at times one almost forgets that the book is written by an adult. He is especially good at capturing the agonies and embarrassments of childhood, and the constantly fluctuating moods: in the course of a birthday party for Miss Morris, Brian runs the gamut of emotions from delight, confusion, humiliation and curiosity to misery, triumph and finally boredom. Brian is particularly concerned with happiness, and not just his own. ‘Grown-ups’, he observes, ‘are not as anxious to prevent unhappiness as children are.’ It is therefore up to him to keep the household on an even keel – a responsibility he feels keenly, all the more so because he recognizes how elusive happiness is. An invitation from his father to share his troubles is a case in point:

It transformed the world. But too suddenly. It should have made me wildly happy – it did in a way – but its immediate effect was to make me want to cry: because with the sense of wonderful delight was another that it would not last. And the feeling of delight made the world I knew so drab that the thought of coming back to it was quite unbearable.

This preoccupation makes him hyper-alert to adults’ moods and the goings-on in the house. The closing of a door or the fact that his father is helping in the garden is enough to tell him that all is not well between his parents. Empty bedrooms offer clues to the owners’ personalities: his gloomy Uncle Lindy’s, for instance, is impeccably tidy – ‘But even the sunlight looks sad in it.’ Lindy, a bank inspector, is a splendid comic creation. Critical of ‘anything in life that savoured of youth or freedom and pleasure’, he is for ever expecting the worst and harking back to better times. Our first sight of him is arriving at the railway station,

wearing as always the disgruntled expression of the ugly sisters in Cinderella. Whenever Uncle Lindy used anything, even a step, he gave the impression of someone who was being put upon. He was very tall and thin, dressed always in black . . . Out of his nostril grew a solitary whisker.

Brian expects Lindy to treat Miss Morris as severely as he does everyone else. When he tries to charm her instead, it is completely disorientating – ‘as if a preacher had put on a false nose in the middle of a sermon’. Brian’s inspired similes are the greatest delight of Prenez Garde. Watching the stately Mrs Heber, he wonders what would happen if she met the Queen: ‘It was hard to imagine Mrs Heber deferring to anyone. I could imagine the two ladies approaching each other like ships in the Spanish Main, neither prepared to lower her flag.’ Food and drink are a rich source of comparisons: Lord Swords looks at Miss Morris ‘as though it was a very hot day and she was a jug of lemonade’. So too are animals: Mrs Heber’s niece gives ‘a nervous smile like a puppy gives when you push a saucer at it too quickly’; a surly school porter peers at Brian and Lindy ‘through scaly eyes, like a very old dog we had once and who was put down out of kindness’. There are no clues in the novel as to what became of Brian in later life. In an accompanying note, de Vere White denies that his narrator is a self-portrait, ‘though the manners and opinions of the characters are as true to the little world of my childhood as memory can make them’. But one hopes that this delightful boy grew up to make good use of his powers of observation – as an author and literary critic, perhaps – and to find a more responsive object of his affections than his governess. De Vere White was romantically involved with two extraordinarily different writers, Dervla Murphy and Victoria Glendinning, both of whom would have given Miss Morris a run for her money. I’m not sure, though, that either would have relished comparison with a jug of lemonade.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 81 © Anthony Gardner 2024