we called them) were known to be very game, and they would come in droves. One school dance coincided with the making in Ireland of the film Of Human Bondage with Laurence Harvey and Kim Novak. I sent Kim Novak – ‘c/o Ardmore Studios’ – an invitation to the Mountjoy dance (with a covering note saying it was from me). She replied with a charming handwritten letter to say how much she would have liked to come to the dance with me but, unfortunately, could not do so on account of her filming schedule.
There was a boy called Nick Robinson in my class and he and I were friends. He was very brainy – much brainier than me – as well as being artistic (he was always drawing clever little sketches of people). He seemed more sophisticated than the rest of us (he had been to restaurants with his father) and he had an irreverent sense of humour that I found appealing. Rather as an affectation, he took the Guardian (and had it delivered) every day in order to do the crossword: this was all the more provocative as his father was at the time (I am fairly sure) on the board, if not the actual chairman, of The Irish Times. Nick once came up with the idea of writing a hoax letter to the Guardian – which they published. In it he wrote that he had recently spotted a rare bird – ‘a black-backed ammeter’ – in Ireland and ‘he wondered if it could have been blown there, together with atomic fall-out, on winds from the South Atlantic, its usual nesting place’. We were studying physics at the time. An ammeter is an instrument for measuring electric current in amperes: although generally black, it is not a bird.
A few days later, there was published a letter in response. The correspondent, from somewhere in England – and obviously a meteorologist of sorts – pointed out that the prevailing winds at the time could not have blown either atomic fall-out or an ammeter to Ireland.
This was too hilarious for us to let it drop, and so I took up my pen. I wrote to the paper to say that ‘although I had never seen a black-backed ammeter in Ireland, I had once between the wars’ (in other words, before I was born) ‘observed in the Yeats Country of Sligo a broad white-backed ammeter’. This letter was also published.
I think I might have been secretary of the Debating Society and Nick may have been chairman. I have come across a memorandum from him (written on the writing-paper of the Hotel Taft, New York) proposing topics for debates. ‘Has the emancipation of women justified itself in practice?’ and ‘Is modern feminine fashion a thing of beauty?’ As Mountjoy was an all-boys school, these were certainly novel proposals. But Nick may have thought of them for a debate with the girls from Alexandra College whom I once invited to a debate at Mountjoy: their secretary was Margaret Furlong and meeting her in this way at this time led to a lifelong friendship.
On leaving Mountjoy, Nick and I both became solicitors’ apprentices in the same Dublin firm, Matheson, Ormsby and Prentice. As it turned out, I never progressed very far along the road to becoming a solicitor but Nick, while reading for an honours degree in Legal Science at Trinity College Dublin, stayed the course.
Endnotes
1.Apart from being a teacher, he wrote about education in Ireland in The Irish Times and elsewhere. Author of Secondary Education in Ireland, 1870–1921 (1981).
CHAPTER 2
ESCAPE
I do not know where I got the idea, when I was at Mountjoy, that I would go to France for the summer. My father had died two years previously, when I was fourteen, and life at home was no longer the same for me and I wanted to take flight (which my father would never have allowed). I could only go to France if I could find a family who would host me. Some Irish Catholic schools had links (mainly through the religious orders) with schools abroad and, in that way, pupil exchanges could be arranged, but Protestant schools – and certainly not Mountjoy – had none of those contacts. Some girls went as au pairs to foreign families (although this was still fairly novel at the time) but boys did not have that option, as child minding was the principal requirement and, at that time, boys did not do that. I got the name (probably from the French embassy) of some exchange agency and, sifting through the many opportunities advertised, came up with a fairly short list of families who would accept a boy without wanting to send a French boy back in return. I wrote off, in my best French, to several and eventually arranged to go to a family with seven children under the age of thirteen who lived and farmed in the region known as Beauce, between Paris and Orleans. I had in previous years been to summer camps in Scotland and Wales but had never been to London or indeed anywhere else, nor had I ever travelled alone (except on the train from Dublin to Kilkenny). Nevertheless, I took the mailboat to Holyhead, the overnight train (without a ‘couchette’) to Euston, the Tube to Victoria, a train to Newhaven, the ferry to Dieppe, and a final train to St Lazare in Paris: a twenty-four-hour journey. Monsieur Chassine met me there with his car, whisked me up and down the Champs Elysées and then the journey of an hour or more to ‘Semonville, par Janville, Eure et Loir’. I was fairly exhausted when I arrived, and all the more so as I found that – in spite of Mr McElligott’s teaching – I could neither speak nor understand a word of French. A meal was produced which I could not eat – the peas, in the French way, were floating in water and the lettuce was covered in oil – and then to bed.
I had not arrived at a château. Nor, indeed, had I even arrived at a house. There was none. There was a large square yard encircled by old stone farm buildings, one group of which – all at ground level – had been made into a dwelling. It was temporary, as Monsieur Chassine was later to explain: he had plans for building a house in an area to the back, which had already been arranged as a garden. My bedroom was just a corner of the large room where the two older boys slept: it had been screened off with a wardrobe and other furniture.
The farm, which was large, was entirely arable, as is Beauce in its entirety. There was not an animal in sight. Nor were there any hedges, just flat acres of wheat, barley and maize as far as the eye could see. County Meath it was not. It had been Madame Chassine’s childhood home. Monsieur Chassine, as I was to notice over the summer, was a very efficient farmer with a keen interest in being up to date, and his ambition in marrying Madame Chassine was matched by his ambition in all other aspects of his existence as well. It was that ambition which had brought me into their lives.
Although the children were all very young, Monsieur Chassine thought that they should be exposed to different worlds and experiences. As a means of achieving this, he came up with the idea of having a foreigner come and live with them. Madame Chassine (as I was to discover much later) was opposed to this and only eventually agreed, on condition that ‘the foreigner’ would not be a girl. A door, thereby, was opened for me. I suffered a bout of homesickness after about ten days – it was all so very unfamiliar – but I soon got over that. There were no plans as to what I was expected to do except, in a general way, to keep an eye on the children. (I was neither paying nor being paid for my stay.) Every afternoon, I cycled with four or five of the older ones to the public swimming pool two miles away in Janville. There the children were safe, as there was a lifeguard on duty, but in the case of any minor mishaps or fallings-out, I would intervene and attempt to make things better. In the mornings, I might dead-head the geraniums or the roses, prune the vines in the garden (having been shown how to do so), feed the rabbits which were kept in a hutch in the yard, pick the vegetables and the fruit (Madame Chassine preserved both), collect the eggs and do other simple chores, but I never had any sense that I was being made to work, because I was not. Soon, on my own initiative, I might help in the house as well – setting and clearing the table, perhaps hanging out the washing or emptying the dishwasher, a novelty in itself as I had never seen one before. As the youngest of eight myself, used to helping out and mucking in at home, none of this was any bother to me, and I enjoyed it. They spoke no English, so I was obliged to speak French as best I could from the moment I arrived. The children soon learned, amidst their laughter, to understand me and imitate me. Madame Chassine, it seemed, found that she enjoyed trying to chat to me as she went about preparing meals (as it turned out, she was a fabulous cook) and after dinner in the evenings, Monsieur Chassine would invite me into his study to listen to a record of some classical music (he was educating
