a terrific time. I am going to Florence on Friday just to see a friend.’ This was a handsome upper-class young Florentine, Carlo Olivieri, who lived with his mother on the Lungarno and whose father was an admiral in the Italian navy. I had met him in France two years previously and the friendship continued – mainly through correspondence – for a number of years but we have, unfortunately, long since lost touch.
Carlo, I recall, introduced me to the novels, in French, of Julien Green but I found them too difficult and his recommendation that I read Andre Gide’s Les Faux Monnayeurs (also in French) struck more of a chord with me.
The year I went to Morocco, and in the absence of Saxon and Diana driving me there, I hitch-hiked through France, crossed the Pyrenees, and then travelled down the east coast of Spain to Algeciras, where I took the ferry to what I thought would be Tangier but turned out to be Ceuta, the Spanish enclave on the north coast of Africa. From there, it was a bus the fifty or so kilometres to Tangier, where I found a room in a seedy hotel in the medina. I stayed for a week or so and then took a bus down to Fez and on to Meknès. I had an introduction (through Carlo Olivieri) to an American living in Rabat, and I went and stayed with him for a few days. This was the nearest I came to witnessing the decadent expatriate Morocco that was so notorious. There was an ‘atmosphere’ in the American’s house: Arab boys seemed to come and go as they pleased and make themselves very much at home. I neither saw nor experienced anything but I was uneasy. (I was only 20 at the time.) I wanted to move on.
As I could not face hitch-hiking all the way back to Paris, I telegraphed my friend Speer Ogle in Dublin and asked him to lend me the train fare and wire it to me in Rabat, which he did; and so I got to Paris, but I was still without a sou in my pocket. I was not in the least concerned as it was in my head (someone must have told me so) that, if stranded abroad, all one had to do was to go to one’s embassy and demand to be repatriated. So, cleaning myself up as best I could, I made my way to the Irish Embassy on the Avenue Foch. There I was seen by a young diplomat who quickly disabused me of the notion that I might be sent home to Ireland free of charge. But seeing perhaps a look of panic on my face, he delved into his trouser pocket and pulled out a wad of notes. Peeling a few of them away, he handed them to me. ‘I’m not supposed to do this and please don’t mention that I did so,’ he said, ‘but I myself (not the Embassy) can lend you some Francs and you can send them back to me when you get home. Would that help?’ In my mind, I can still see the way he took out the notes and handed them to me but I have no clear memory of who he was. Inexplicably, however, the name Campbell comes into my mind, and with some investigation, I find that a John Campbell was a junior diplomat in the Paris Embassy in the 1960s (he married a French wife in 1964). Ten years my senior (it transpires), it must have been he who helped me. If it was he, his subsequent career took him as Ambassador to China, to Portugal and to Germany, worthy rewards in my view for a man who had made a kindly gesture towards a foolish 20-year-old.
Eventually, I got home. And then it was back to the dull days of Trinity, a very small circle of friends2 and not a lot of fun.
There was only one of my Trinity summers when I did not get away. When my plans for doing so were already well advanced, my mother wrote to me (18 May 1965):
Elliott and Maud were here last night. You know, Elliott is quite concerned about you and says that you are not looking well at all. He told me he offered you £7 a week to go and stay in Rathcormick for five or six weeks and drive a tractor for him. He doesn’t mind about driving the tractor, but he feels if you had that definite job it would keep you out in the air and would do you a lot of good. Maud also said she’d see you had good meals and try to build you up a bit. I think you ought to do this and not bother about France for this year. Elliott does not mind your going to France, but he thinks it is really foolish and you come back jaded. I wish you would do this, it is for your good and when Elliott was interested enough in you to suggest this, I think you should agree with him. As I say, don’t think he wants you just for the sake of driving the tractor, he doesn’t. It is your health he is concerned with and I think you would be wise to accept his proposal with thanks, rather than go against him. He does feel a certain responsibility for you and when you don’t ever take his advice, he can’t help losing interest in you. I hope you will do as I ask you. You are very young and with a little guidance from Elliott you would do better and I know he will always help you if you co-operate.
I did as my mother asked me, put travel out of my mind, and went to stay and work in Rathcormick for a couple of months. I worked the hours the labourers on the farm did and had them for company during the day; and I learned to be adept at manoeuvring the tractor and anything that might be attached to it. I brought in the hay and then I cut the silage and brought that in too. When the wheat and barley were being harvested, I followed the combine-harvester on my tractor and decanted the grain when the bin was full. I baled the straw and brought that into the barn. All of this did ‘keep me out in the air’, although whether it ‘did me a lot of good’ I am not so sure. In my own mind, a day discovering Fontainebleau or a morning admiring the frescoes of Mantegna in the Camera degli Sposi in Mantua might have been better for me; and the foreign students I could have met in such places would no doubt have been more interesting than the company I had in the farmyard. But the summer was by no means all torture. The children – all six of them – were entertaining, Maud was kind and good company, and I got to know (for the first time in my life) my brother Elliott: sixteen years my senior, he was fair-minded, reasonable and very practical, and worked ruthlessly hard at his estate-agency business. It was good of him to give me the opportunity (and to pay me well) and it was done with good intentions. None of this, however, shook me in my resolve that my life would take me along a path that was as far removed from the farming world of Rathcormick as I could possibly reach.
It wasn’t Rathcormick itself. My childhood there had been very happy and I was proud of the fact that my family had lived in the place for hundreds of years: my great (five times) grandfather first leased the farm on 28 July 1710 and we had been in continuous occupation ever since.
But animals and the dirt and discomfort of the outdoors and the constant hard and heavy labour lacked all appeal for me and I knew it.
Endnotes
1.My father’s sister, Mrs William Tyrrell of Coolcor, Carbury.
2.Of the friends I did make, several were ex-Alexandra College girls: Margaret Furlong, Meriel Hayes and Deirdre Sheppard. Elizabeth Strong from Edinburgh, but with family roots in Co. Meath, also came into my life at this time.
CHAPTER 5
ENCOUNTERS
When I was at Trinity, I met the King of Saxony. Except that the King of Saxony I thought I met was not the king at all. He was, rather, His Royal Highness Prinz Ernst Heinrich Ferdinand Franz Joseph Otto Maria Melchiades of Saxony, the youngest son of the last King of Saxony, Frederick August III, by his wife the Archduchess Louise of Austria, Princess of Tuscany.
I did not meet Prinz Ernst in the august precincts of Trinity College, which would not have been improbable; instead, I was introduced to him in the much more unlikely setting of Trim Livestock Market, the cattle sales-yard established by my late father in 1957 and managed in my Trinity days by my brothers Elliott and Raymond.
While a student, I was supported, and my fees paid, by Elliott through the family auctioneering business. In the winter and spring vacations, Elliott would offer me the opportunity of working as the auctioneer’s clerk in the cattle market and would pay me a daily wage. I was grateful for this but, at the same time, I hated the cattle market just as I hated everything about farming. But my mother would be insistent: ‘When he is good enough to offer you the work, you should show willing and go and do it,’ she would say and, on the mornings of the market, she would get me out of bed early and dispatch me off to the sales-yard.
The auction took place in a large covered building with an arena
