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CHAPTER 4

FRIENDSHIPS AND FOREIGN PARTS

General studies had an advantage over honours degrees in that the end-of-year exams took place in June, and one was then free for four months until the start of the Michaelmas term in late October. I would go to London immediately term ended in June, and find myself a job (or jobs) and a place to live. I would work, and save money, for about two months and then take off for another two months hitchhiking in France, Italy, Spain and, one year, Morocco. (I had read Brideshead Revisited.) My mother had her concerns about this and wrote to me, ‘Poste Restante, Tangier’ (12 September 1968), to tell me that my Aunt Polly had come to lunch: ‘She was quite worried about you getting lifts to Morocco, said there are queer people in the world. I hope you are all right staying there – be careful, as we read so much about Dope dens etc. I know you have sense.’

It was news to me that my mother was given to reading about dope dens, but her anxieties in respect of my welfare were ill-founded. On my arrival in Morocco, I am sorry to say that the ‘Dope dens’ of Tangier eluded me. But, during these summers away from Trinity, and from Ireland, I did have a host of other experiences that enriched my life greatly. They, and the people I encountered, meld in my memory now and the chronology is hazy. One year, I got a job doing accounts (yes, accounts) in the Daily Mirror offices in Holborn; but the accounts I did were not for the Daily Mirror but for one of their weekly publications, a tabloid called Reveille. It was one of the first mainstream publications to feature photographs of glamour models – it may have been banned in Ireland on that account – but it also covered, in a saucy way, the worlds of pop and royalty. This was an office job, nine to five, but at six o’clock I would make my way to a pub nearby, where I worked as a barman until closing time at eleven o’clock. Another year, I went into Claridge’s Hotel and asked for a job, and was taken on to work in the Still Room. The hours were seven in the morning until three in the afternoon. I made Melba toast from seven till ten, crafted butter pats from ten till twelve, and brewed coffee from noon till three. I had the afternoon off and then returned at six for a second job (until eleven at night) on one of the floors. There, I was on duty in the pantry where room-service meals were put together: they came up in a lift from the kitchens and I would set up the trolleys for the waiters to take to the rooms. I never did any waiting myself and never met any of the guests. A manager took a shine to me – I think he felt that, from his point of view, I might have more to offer than Melba toast – and over the weeks that I was there he made suggestions that I should think of a career in hotel management: he could help me get a traineeship in Claridge’s if I was so inclined. I wrote and told my mother about this and she replied (on 15 August 1966): ‘You were very lucky to get a job in that good Hotel. The idea of doing “Hotel Management”? A degree in Law would be less worry and more secure.’ Another of my jobs was in some sort of small family-run printing firm. I can’t recall what I did there but when I was leaving, the owner tried to persuade me to stay on. ‘You could have a career here,’ he said, pointing out that he and his wife had no children to take on the business. But I was not tempted.

One year I rented a room in Barkston Gardens, off the Earl’s Court Road, with a sinister landlord who lived with his wife on the ground floor and always emerged into the hall to see who was entering or leaving. If I was five minutes late in paying the rent, they would send their bruiser of a son up to bang on my door and threaten me with eviction if I did not produce the cash there and then. Much superior was the accommodation I found (through friends) another year. This was in a council flat in Streatham with a ‘Mrs Hutt’ (as I shall call her). She was posh but, having fallen on hard times (hence the council flat), took various cooking jobs here and there. She had mislaid her husband and, much to her own embarrassment (and the embarrassment of everyone else), had taken an Irish navvy as a live-in lover. Her eldest son, who was in the RAF and modelled himself on the actor Leslie Phillips, did not live with her but appeared from time to time. But her second son, who was mildly mentally handicapped, did, and so did her daughter, a happy blonde twenty-something who came and went as she pleased, always with a friend or more in tow. I was happy squeezed into this ‘ménage’ although, as I was working from early morning till late at night, I was only really there on Sundays, when Mrs Hutt would cook a fabulous Sunday lunch, which we ate on our knees at five o’clock in the afternoon (having spent lunchtime in the pub down the road).

A young Australian artist whom I met, Michael Garady, lived with his friend in Rutland Mews off Exhibition Road. Once, when I was stuck for accommodation, he invited me there for a couple of weeks (his friend being away). Michael, who was handsome in a masculine way, with tousled blond curly hair and, in manner, tentative and fey, was having some success in London with his painting and was working towards an exhibition: ‘I have to finish many paintings to let the Grosvenor Gallery choose in September for the November exhibition. Unfortunately they take a long time to dry and I will need to have them finished,’ he wrote to me (on 9 August 1966). His sister, Saxon, who had never been to Europe before, was about to arrive from Australia: she would be accompanied by a girlfriend, who I think was called Diana. They arrived, Saxon a rollicking, large, good-looking blonde and Diana, petite and more mysterious. They immediately bought a Jaguar car and drove around London in whichever gear they managed to find: accustomed only to automatic transmission, they did not know, until I showed them, that you had to change gear. Without meaning to be, they were both in their own way completely and bombastically outrageous, and they had not been very long in London before they found themselves – on account of a mishap in an antique shop – in Marylebone Magistrates Court. Michael was offered the loan of a flat in Paris (84 Boulevard Rochechouart – my mother wrote to me there) and a plan was made for Saxon and Diana to drive over to stay with him, bringing me with them. And that is what happened.

On the trip over, when I mentioned that I hoped to go to Morocco, they thought that a wonderful idea and immediately offered to drive me there. They had no notion where any place was but, in the event, they returned to London in their Jaguar and I set off for Morocco on my own. A year later, Michael being away, his friend Peter Feuchtwanger invited me to stay in Rutland Mews until I found some place of my own. Peter was German, and a classical pianist and composer. He was obsessively devoted to the memory of the great Romanian pianist Clara Haskill (d.1960), and had composed a work for violin and sitar for Yehudi Menuhin and Ravi Shankar. At the time I was staying with him he was composing the music for a ballet to be staged at Covent Garden and, by way of preparation, had been allocated complimentary seats for every ballet performance. This meant ballet two or three nights a week; and on several nights, he took me with him: a car collected us and we sat in the stalls. I saw Monica Mason, Anthony Dowell and Antoinette Sibley in new ballets by Kenneth MacMillan but alas, I did not see Fonteyn and Nureyev. But the real treat came after the performances. Peter, taking me with him, went backstage to chat with the dancers in their dressing rooms, as they removed all those bandages from their exhausted feet. At Trinity, I hardly dared enter the doors of the Players Theatre, much less talk to any of the student-actors; but backstage at Covent Garden with Peter I managed to take it in my stride. A year or so after I wrote this memory, I came upon Peter’s obituary in the Daily Telegraph (28 June 2016). He had recently died aged 85. He was described as ‘the go-to teacher for many of the world’s leading concert pianists, among them Shura Cherkassky, Martha Argerich, and David Helfgott; but he himself had given up performing when he was only 20’. With sadness, and regret that I had not revived my friendship with him in my adult life, I read with some surprise ‘he is survived by his partner, the artist, Michael Garady’.

After about two months of working long hours, I would set off on my travels with the money I had saved. Hitchhiking was quite normal in those days before motorways, and some well-publicised incidents – murder, mainly – made it less attractive. Youth hostels were popular. Students from all over Europe criss-crossed France, Spain and Italy, eating sparsely, dossing down and making friendships along the way. I never encountered drugs or even excessive drinking, and my most threatening experiences (at least that I remember) involved a short-haired young woman in a Renault Dauphine who gave me a lift near Besançon, and a plump baker doing his deliveries in a van among the hills above Nice. Using the French verb profiter, they both immediately made it clear that, as they had never met an Irishman before, they would very much like to ‘profit’ by meeting one then.

I would generally stay for a week or so in Paris – finding a cheap hotel in the hinterland of St Michel – and then set off. The first year, my goal was Switzerland, where a friend from school and Trinity, Walter Lewis, was working in an hotel. I hitchhiked there, seeing the Romanesque Abbey church at Vézelay and the Well of Moses at Dijon – as well as getting sunstroke by the lake in Lausanne – on the way. Walter’s boss gave him very little time off, so I did not stay long, and then hitchhiked down to Milan. I don’t recall going to see Leonardo’s Last Supper but I do remember a Jehovah’s Witness who tried to interest me as I lingered in front of the Duomo. I got to Florence, which I was determined to do. A postcard to my mother: ‘At last, I got here. It is absolutely beautiful & mad hot. I have got rid of the friend, thank goodness’ (presumably someone I had been hitch-hiking with) ‘and am thoroughly enjoying it all now. The youth hostel here is like a mansion, with beautiful ceilings and frescoes.’ My Aunt Isa¹ had told me about Michelangelo’s David: she had been reading The Agony and the Ecstasy, the biography of Michelangelo by Irving Stone, and she made her description of the carving of the David so vivid that I absolutely had to see it.

I hitchhiked back by way of Pisa – ‘eating lots of spaghetti & enjoying myself’, according to a postcard to my mother (1 August 1963) – and the French Riviera, in Nice sleeping in an abandoned car that I found somewhere to the east of the port, and then it was back to Paris, staying for a few days with the Chassines on the way.

The following year, I went directly to Nice. I sent my mother a postcard from Vichy:

I am hitchhiking to Nice. I got one lift last night to here – 150 miles and very good. I arrived at 12 midnight having left Paris at 5.30. Altogether about 250 miles. This is a spa town like Bath only not as beautiful. My address in Nice is c/o Cooks, 5 Promenade des Anglais.

In Paris I had made friends with a very droll Swedish student of psychology who was touring by car with his uncle; but, in a very Swedish way, the uncle was three years younger than the nephew, Lars. This is a friendship that has lasted to this day, almost fifty years. Lars and I still keep in contact and over the decades he has visited me many times and in many places, and I have stayed with him on several occasions in Stockholm. Lars Fimmerstad became a noted humorous columnist on the leading Swedish newspaper, Svenska Dagbladet. Two years after meeting, we decided to combine our student summer travels and met in Rome. We stayed there for about two or three weeks, ravenously visiting every museum and church, studying the stones in the Forum and on the Appian Way, eating frugally, going to Aïda at the Baths of Caracalla, and generally having a lot of fun.

Of the relatively few of my letters which my mother saved, I have one or two from this time. ‘We went to the opera one night in the open air,' I wrote (29 July 1967). ‘It was just fantastic. Absolutely huge, with almost a thousand people on stage at any one time. They also had carriages drawn by four white horses. In another scene, there were camels. It really was a marvellous night.’

Lars is someone who sees humour in almost any situation, interpreting things with the eye of a psychologist – and a Swedish psychologist at that – so that events which on the surface appear dull become immediately entertaining. He deploys a similar approach with people. To my young Irish eyes and ears – he speaks with a perfect Oxford accent, with only occasional lapses of grammar and syntax – he often seemed totally absurd but that – as a general rule – made him very amusing company indeed. I wrote to my mother (19 July 1967): ‘Lars, the Swede, is getting a bit on my nerves – but then who wouldn’t? He tends to be a bit old-fashioned and refuses to sit beside people on the buses. Another thing, he wants to talk all the time, and I get fed up of that.’ After Rome, we hitchhiked to Naples, saw the sights and visited Pompeii, and then took the overnight ferry – sleeping on the deck – to Palermo in Sicily, where we stayed, mainly in the seaside town of Cefalù but also in Taormina.

‘It really is one of the most beautiful places I've ever been in,’ I informed my mother (27 July 1967). ‘Yesterday we saw smoke coming out of Etna. The village is high up, built into a cliff, and you get a bus down the cliff to the sea – which is very, very clear and deep. We will probably stay here until early next week and then go back to Rome. We have seen a tremendous amount.’

From Sicily, we went back to Rome. A postcard (dated 2 August 1967) of the Temple of Aesculapius in the Borghese Gardens to my mother: ‘Returned here yesterday from Sicily, where we really had 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.