Feudal Afterglow

It is peculiarly exciting to turn a page and find a strong personal emotion exactly distilled – an emotion hitherto believed to be one’s private idiosyncrasy. Around the age of 13 most bookish children break into verse (the literary equivalent of acne) and I then wrote a ‘poem’ about corncrakes – specifically, what their crake did to me (and continued to do until farming became agribusiness and the crake was heard no more.) On p. 282 of Woodbrook David Thomson says in a few words what I failed to say in several feverishly florid verses.

Woodbrook is a longish book yet everything is said, with graceful lucidity, in the minimum number of words. When Penguin put their edition in the ‘autobiography’ category, no doubt remembering how much bookshops and libraries value unambiguous labels, they oversimplified. In truth Woodbrook belongs to no category, for it is one of those multi-layered books that demonstrate a rare skill: how to ramble to and fro, apparently at random, between past and present, without confusing the reader. In 1932 the 18-year-old David, an Oxford undergraduate reading history, arrived in the west of Ireland as summer tutor to the Kirkwoods’ daughters, Phoebe aged 11 and Tony aged 5. Since the seventeenth century Kirkwoods had been living in Woodbrook House, between the small towns of Boyle and Carrick-on-Shannon in a corner of Connaught seldom visited by outsiders. By the 1920s they ranked as impoverished Anglo-Irish gentry, a wide step down the social ladder from their aristocratic neighbours. Somehow they were surviving on precarious horse-breeding and the Major’s meagre Indian Army pension. For generations the Kirkwoods had been Indian Army and almost inevitably Mrs Kirkwood was the daughter of an Indian Army colonel. David, too, had been born in India: ‘My father and his friends could not afford the uniforms and accoutrements British Army officers had to buy nor the splendid life they were expected to lead with the help of a private income.’ As a penniless youth, addicted to country life and without material ambition, David immediately felt at home amongst the Kirkwoods – hardworking yet impractical, warmhearted, high-spirited, mildly eccentric and variously talented. The Major (Charlie) painted water-colours and spoke fluent Farsi, Arabic and Turkish. His wife Ivy was a gifted musician, and Phoebe was aiming for Trinity College Dublin. Where I grew up, in West Waterford, Indian Army (Retd) families abounded and, looking back, it surprises me that the rural Irish were so aware of the precise social niche they occupied. We were puzzled and rather shocked by their heartlessness as parents. With varying levels of regret they sacrificed their children to the needs of the Raj, shipping them home to boarding-school aged 7 or less. Thereafter grandparents and/or uncles and aunts cared for them during the holidays. David Thomson enjoyed the countryside around his grandparents’ home near Nairn, where he tried to learn Gaelic and toyed with Scottish nationalism. The year he was born – 1914 – one dear friend of mine, long since dead, was dispatched from Simla at the age of 4 to a Bognor Regis boarding-school and next met her parents in 1920. Ivy Kirkwood was left otherless at the age of 2 and met her father only twice, and then very briefly, during the next sixteen years. David scarcely mentions his parents and siblings – London-based by 1932 – but the fact that he made Woodbrook his home for ten years suggests a certain lack of mutual devotion. Or perhaps Phoebe sufficiently explains that choice – Phoebe combined with the Woodbrook way of life. David soon fell in love with Phoebe – seven years his junior – and all those Woodbrook years were suffused by a love that had to be not hidden but controlled. An unhealthy relationship, we might say. Yet this book reminds us that the in-love state, before the promotion of sexual activity for its own sake had taken over the visual and audible world of the young, could be a significant out-of-bed experience, mingling suffering and exaltation. Throughout Woodbrook the David-Phoebe romance is a powerful and poignant motif, not overtly dominant but woven into the narrative like a golden thread, needing only occasional references to keep us aware of its wondrous importance. Woodbrook House retained the afterglow of feudalism. The Kirkwoods’ farm labourers and house servants had never been paid in cash until Ivy arrived, with her strange notion of spending money on peasants hitherto content to be well-fed, adequately clothed and sheltered, and presented with occasional generous gifts. Why give them a regular wage when the Kirkwoods themselves rarely had enough cash to pay bills promptly? To David, Ivy recounted a symbolic incident. In the 1920s, when Charlie’s parents were still alive, a maid belatedly married, having served the Kirkwoods faithfully from the age of 14. Into her trousseau trunk went a Kirkwood dinner service and an ample supply of monogrammed linen. A few days later Woodbrook’s Master and Mistress, honoured guests at the wedding feast, found themselves eating off their own crested plates. David explains: ‘It did not occur to the bride to conceal what she had taken, and though the Kirkwoods were secretly startled and annoyed it would never have occurred to them to be so rude as to call attention to it.’ To the locals that transfer of property would have seemed quite acceptable; Bridie had openly appropriated what she saw as a reasonable reward for years of unpaid labour. When David first came to Ireland I was a baby, and many of perhaps Phoebe sufficiently explains that choice – Phoebe combined with the Woodbrook way of life. David soon fell in love with Phoebe – seven years his junior – and all those Woodbrook years were suffused by a love that had to be not hidden but controlled. An unhealthy relationship, we might say. Yet this book reminds us that the in-love state, before the promotion of sexual activity for its own sake had taken over the visual and audible world of the young, could be a significant out-of-bed experience, mingling suffering and exaltation. Throughout Woodbrook the David-Phoebe romance is a powerful and poignant motif, not overtly dominant but woven into the narrative like a golden thread, needing only occasional references to keep us aware of its wondrous importance. Woodbrook House retained the afterglow of feudalism. The Kirkwoods’ farm labourers and house servants had never been paid in cash until Ivy arrived, with her strange notion of spending money on peasants hitherto content to be well-fed, adequately clothed and sheltered, and presented with occasional generous gifts. Why give them a regular wage when the Kirkwoods themselves rarely had enough cash to pay bills promptly? To David, Ivy recounted a symbolic incident. In the 1920s, when Charlie’s parents were still alive, a maid belatedly married, having served the Kirkwoods faithfully from the age of 14. Into her trousseau trunk went a Kirkwood dinner service and an ample supply of monogrammed linen. A few days later Woodbrook’s Master and Mistress, honoured guests at the wedding feast, found themselves eating off their own crested plates. David explains: ‘It did not occur to the bride to conceal what she had taken, and though the Kirkwoods were secretly startled and annoyed it would never have occurred to them to be so rude as to call attention to it.’ To the locals that transfer of property would have seemed quite acceptable; Bridie had openly appropriated what she saw as a reasonable reward for years of unpaid labour. When David first came to Ireland I was a baby, and many of his descriptions resonate with my childhood memories: untarred roads, bicycles outnumbering cars by a thousand to one, the smell of carelessly trimmed oil-lamps, gleaming coal ranges and deep baths with feet like lions’ paws, butter being churned, roofs leaking, horse and donkey carts tethered along the main street during Mass on Sundays, cattle, sheep and pigs taking over the town on fair days when taciturn ‘mountainy’ men in fraying greatcoats, their womenfolk wearing black woollen shawls and hobnailed boots, came down to the valley. And the Christmas box (whiskey, port, biscuits, chocolates) from the grocer who was paid annually – unlike the butcher and baker, whose accounts were settled on the last day of each month. And then there were the rats, generating tales of hauntings as they carried potatoes upstairs to their attic nests. David only heard these frequent nocturnal bumpings as incompetently managed potatoes rolling down the stairs. I once witnessed this rodent enterprise by torchlight. Our rats nested behind the huge copper boiler in an airing-cupboard as big as the average modern  bathroom. The rural Ireland of the 1930s was much closer to the 1830s (or even the 1730s) than to contemporary Ireland – newly rich, rather brash, subservient to foreign investors and frenziedly consumerist. David would not have appreciated contemporary Ireland. Yet he might have reflected that, given a choice of extremes, too much prosperity is preferable. I can think of no other English writer who so clearly perceived the hidden emotional complexities of the Anglo-Irish/Irish relationship. During his first long vac at Woodbrook this history student came to realize how profoundly and permanently the Great Famine – an avoidable catastrophe – had changed Ireland. Eighty-five years previously the land around Woodbrook had supported thirty families, each cabin standing on its plot of two or three acres. In 1932 no trace remained of twenty-nine of those homesteads. The Maxwells and their four grown-up children, all employed by the Kirkwoods, lived in the only house still standing. Their great-grandparents had survived when all others in that little community had either died or been forced to emigrate. As the years passed, and the Maxwells’ acceptance of David increased, conversations about Ireland’s past reinforced his book-knowledge, making plain certain nuances that must forever elude the historian’s pen. I know how it works. In the summer of 1942, aged 10, I listened in awe to a neighbour, born in 1850, who as a 10-year-old had listened in awe to her grandfather recalling his adolescent terror during the Rebellion of 1798. To me that 92-year-old woman was history incarnate. In my schoolbook ’98 was a remote and boring event, like St Patrick converting the Irish to Christianity in 432 and Strongbow intervening in 1170. Then suddenly I was linked to ’98 at only one remove and it wasn’t a bit like the history book said – gallant Irish patriots versus savage English soldiers. It had been a seriously confused mess: some Irish insurgents brave, some savage; some English soldiers savage, some compassionate. That unforgettable Sunday afternoon made me realize that essentially all history was about ordinary people and therefore could never be boring, however remote. It also implanted a healthy suspicion of history’s possible abuse as propaganda. When first published, in 1974, Woodbrook caused a few eddies of unease in Ireland. Northern Ireland was then in turmoil and many of David Thomson’s readers wanted to look forward, not back. Centuries of animosity, of carefully tended grievances, formed part of the background to this new cycle of killing, maiming and intimidation. It seemed not the moment to recall those Elizabethan and Cromwellian campaigns so disturbingly brought to life in Woodbrook’s historical vignettes, made all the more harrowing by the author’s penchant for understatement. In the reign of Queen Elizabeth I genocide was the name of the game; almost 400 years before that term was invented her officials advocated in writing and carefully planned the complete extermination of the Irish. When this attempted genocide failed for lack of funding, the Penal Laws were introduced: if you can’t exterminate them all, demoralize the survivors. David Thomson is devastatingly shrewd in his analysis of exactly how demoralization worked – and didn’t work. Self-sufficient Woodbrook House lacked a wireless, and the Irish Times was delivered a day late, in the afternoon, by a cycling postman. Thus it came about that on 1 September 1939, as the Nazis invaded Poland, the Kirkwoods with David and the dogs were setting off in the back of a hired truck to spend three weeks holidaying in a primitive cabin on a tiny island off the Connemara coast. A few days later rumours of war reached them, but Kirkwoods don’t panic and they stayed on their islet until 21 September. David then went to London to be rejected by the army: too shortsighted and night-blind. Back in Woodbrook, he and the Kirkwoods tried to adapt to a new way of farming imposed by the Irish government’s Compulsory Tillage Order. Most of the pastures and meadows had to be ploughed: Woodbrook’s main economic prop was gone. In the very wet west of Ireland grazing stock flourishes but grain crops don’t – especially wheat. In fact the Kirkwoods’ way of life was already doomed when David joined the family, and much of his book is a deeply affectionate yet rrigorously unsentimental record of the last decade of a 250-year-old home. In 1942 the FOR SALE sign went up but no offer was made. David explains:

I asked Tom [Maxwell] whether he knew what it was that in the end put every buyer off. He shrugged his shoulders. Then he said simply, ‘Woodbrook belongs to us.’ He said it naturally and quietly as though the whole world knew it, as though it would cause me no surprise. Of course I knew what he meant . . . His family were living there before Cromwell put the Kirkwoods on this land.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 6 © Dervla Murphy 2005