Naples.’ (I wasn’t sure what all that meant.)
I admired the modest glass chandelier hanging from the ceiling in the centre of the room. ‘Oh! But it’s just from Woolworths,’ he said. ‘It’s plastic.’
He reached up and flicked the drops with his fingernail. ‘See! It doesn’t tinkle.’
It was a lesson I was later to absorb: junk can have style and, if mixed with beautiful things, can appear beautiful too. Looking together at a dark oil painting of a lake by moonlight surrounded by trees, Speer said, ‘I’ve never liked the boat on the lake. I think it takes away from the composition. I once took the picture to Old Gorry the restorer and asked him to sink it, but he couldn’t.’
The Story of San Michele by Axel Munthe was open by an armchair. ‘I’ve read it millions of times,’ said Speer. ‘San Michele is on Capri near the villa of the Emperor Tiberius. It’s a beautiful spot.’
He said ‘Tiberius’ in such a way that I was encouraged to find out more in the library.
He told me that, through Terence de Vere White,2 with whom he was friendly, he had met Compton Mackenzie, and he urged me to read Mackenzie’s novel, Sinister Street. At a later stage he gave me a present of a paperback Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin.
There was a small crucifix, with an ivory figure of Christ on a malachite cross, hanging in a corner. It looked very nice there but, nevertheless – little Protestant that I was and knowing that Speer was also Protestant – it caused me some worry, as did the framed photograph of Pope John XXIII on the mantelpiece. But, in time, Speer revealed that he had met Pope John on several occasions.
‘It was at the time of the Rome Olympics,’ he said. ‘I had a job meeting athletes and dignitaries at the airport in my car and taking them to wherever they wanted to go. One or two of them had an audience with the pope, and I went with them.’
All the furniture looked lovely to me and Speer explained that he had inherited it from his grandmother and great-aunt, who together had brought him up.
‘My father farmed in County Carlow and was devoted to my mother,’ he told me. ‘But when I was born and my mother brought me home as a baby to Kilcomney – that was the name of our place – my father told her to take me away again, as he had wanted a daughter. And so I was left with my grandmother and great-aunt in Kenilworth Square and brought up by them. I hardly knew my mother or father at all.’
This story of his background, both heartless and affecting, was as good as anything that I was reading at Trinity in the novels of Walter Scott. Early on, he told me about his younger friend Henry, a Scot who worked in the British Foreign Office, and to whom he was devoted (and would remain so for the next fifty or more years).
Over the ensuing years, the notes requesting assignations which Speer left for me at my rooms became more frequent and our friendship – which was always Platonic – deepened. He prided himself on being able to produce a full dinner of roast pheasant and all the trimmings on the Baby Belling (with no fridge) and I was sometimes treated to this. He had beautiful antique silver, old Waterford glass and lovely china, and would somehow manage to set a table (or the corner of a table) in the crowded sitting room. But mainly he would take me out to eat. Although he sometimes talked of Jammet’s, he never took me there, and a favourite, when it came to posh, was the Beaufield Mews. This was a restaurant arranged in a converted stable with a large antique shop – with a superb stock of beautiful things – above. We would look at the antiques – it did not seem like he was teaching me, but he was – and then we would dine. But more usually we went, later at night after the library in Trinity had closed, to a much more modest Indian restaurant on Leeson Street called the Golden Orient. We always ate the same thing: pakoras, followed by beef curry with poppadoms, followed by lychees and accompanied by a carafe of white wine. It was hardly gourmet. Speer liked his curry very hot and derived enormous amusement from getting the friendly waitress to say the word ‘vindaloo’ in her (very) Dublin accent.
‘It can’t be hot enough for me,’ he would insist when ordering.
‘Shur you mean a vindaloo,’ the waitress would reply over our suppressed giggles.
But Speer would want to hear it again.
‘No, I mean even hotter,’ he would say in his precise manner.
‘I’ll ask the chef,’ the waitress would say, ‘but a vindaloo is as hot as you get round here.’
Sometimes, on Sundays, we would go to lunch in a small (and to me horrid) hotel he knew in Dun Laoghaire: they had a dog there that he liked, and he was passionate about dogs. Then we would walk over Killiney Hill. More lavish Sunday expeditions involved the Downshire Arms in Blessington and a walk at the Sugarloaf. He took me to the Sunday evening promenade concerts with the Radio Eireann Symphony Orchestra conducted by Tibor Paul in the Gaiety, and he introduced me to a Christmas Messiah with Our Lady’s Choral Society in the National Stadium. When Nelson’s Pillar was blown up, he heard it on the early news and dashed down to O’Connell Street and retrieved a piece of the sculptured stone rope which had been part of the Nelson statue: he gave me a fragment.
He taught me a lot of nonsense too, which makes me laugh when I think of it today. One does not carry an umbrella in the country; no brown shoes after six o’clock; and there was something about it not being done to look out of an open window that I never fully understood and I did on occasion peek out the windows of 13 Upper Fitzwilliam Street when he was not looking. He called an apple tart an apple cake and pronounced the word ‘recipe’ as ‘receep’ (as did my elderly Aunt Isa). He struck terror into me by telling me how one must eat an oyster, warning me with frightening detail that if one ever ate an oyster that was ‘off’, one would never be able to eat an oyster again. He then explained the procedure for getting the oyster from the shell to one’s mouth and then the vital moment, allowing it to linger for a split second on the back of the tongue, when one could establish if it was ‘off’.
‘If you are in any doubt, you must spit it out immediately,’ he said, ‘even if it goes on the floor.’ It was years before I was actually able to enjoy eating oysters.
He had many deliberately old-fashioned affectations, chief among them being a veneration of Queen Elizabeth and Winston Churchill; by the same token, he maintained that Ireland had become little more than a hotbed of treachery and ‘Republicanism’. The destruction of Nelson’s Pillar was really the last straw. Although they were voiced in apparent deadly earnest, he was very amusing in enunciating his views, but I am glad to say that I knew not to take them seriously, and I did not absorb them.
I have perhaps made him sound effete, an aesthete in the manner of Evelyn Waugh’s Anthony Blanche, but he was not that in the least (and he affected to be horrified by such characters). In fact, he was not really like anyone else at all. Above all, he was enormous fun.
I was very lucky to have met him and even luckier that he took me up; and our friendship over sixty years is one of the most treasured memories from of my life.3
Endnotes
1.Mary Campion, ‘An Old Dublin Industry – Poplin’, Dublin Historical Record, vol. 19 (1963).
2.Irish novelist, biographer, and lawyer (1912–94). Literary Editor of The Irish Times, 1961–77. One-time trustee of the National Library, the Chester Beatty Library, a director of the Gate Theatre, member of the Arts Council and the Irish Academy of Letters. Professor of Literature at the RHA. Married, as his second wife, to the biographer Victoria Glendinning. Obituary by
