Mad Puppetstown

Book 225: Virago Modern Classics

by Molly Keane

Genres: General Fiction; Classics; Family Life; Magical Realism; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

In the early 1900s Easter lives with her Aunt Brenda, her cousins Evelyn and Basil, and their Great-Aunt Dicksie in an imposing country house, Puppetstown, which casts a spell over their childhood. Here they spend carefree days taunting the peacocks in Aunt Dicksie's garden, shooting snipe and woodcock, hunting, and playing with Patsy, the boot boy. But the house and its inhabitants are not immune to the 'little, bitter, forgotten war in Ireland' and when it finally touches their lives all flee to England. All except Aunt Dicksie who refuses to surrender Puppetstown's magic. She stays on with Patsy, living in a corner of the deserted house while in England the cousins are groomed for Society. But for two of them those wild, lost Puppetstown years cannot be forgotten.

Release date: May 2, 2013

Publisher: Virago

Print pages: 304

Sample

Mad Puppetstown published in 1931, was the fourth novel by the new young writer, M.J. Farrell, who had already established an avid following with her previous horsey, housey romances, starting with The Knight of the Cheerful Countenance, begun when she was seventeen, finished not long after, and, she says, best forgotten. This first book was published by Mills and Boon and had attracted the attention of the head of Collins who then published her next two novels, Young Entry and Taking Chances. This last had blown her cover. Until then, though everyone knew that M.J. Farrell was a pseudonym, her real identity was a well-kept secret.

There was speculation about this writer who was obviously not just privy to the world she wrote about but an integral part of it. She got the details right; nothing got past her; not a foible, not an affectation. She wrote with an amusement that was amusing; she wrote affectionately but pounced on base motives, dishonourable actions, mendacity and pretension. She had a kind heart and a sharp pen; and there was the glimmering of the wit that later became so evident in her writing. The huntin’ shootin’ Anglo-Irish society who had read about their own activities in Young Entry with intrigued delight were more ambivalent about Taking Chances. It was thought to be going it a bit, to be somewhat risqué and cynical. Reading it now it seems so innocuous and whimsical that one can scarcely believe this.

“One of my best friends let out that M.J. Farrell was me” says Molly Keane ruefully. There was astonished reaction: and acerbic reaction too. Yet it was not surprising that young Molly Skrine, as she was then, should be a writer, as well as a horsewoman of skill. Her father, Walter Skrine, was a fanatical horseman and rider to hounds and her mother was famous for her poetry written under the pseudonym Moira O’Neill—“the poetess of the seven glens”. Her sweet, sentimental and touching poems about the “people” of Ireland were an acceptable product of “scribbling” and caused no shivers in polite society. Not so Taking Chances.

“I’d kept the writing thing a secret really rather well until then. I hadn’t set out to be a writer. I’d really only started because when I was seventeen the doctor said there was a threat that I might have T.B. and I had to stay in bed. There was absolutely nothing to do, no-one paid me the least attention and I started to write.” She told herself stories: and the first one was The Knight etc. “An awful book, but I thought I was Shakespeare—I wrote it—and all the next books—under the name of M.J. Farrell” (a name she saw over a pub on her way home after a day’s hunting) “and no-one connected them with me. I didn’t want to be recognised as a writer. I only wanted to be good in the hunting field and to be popular at hunt balls. I was so starved of fun when I was young, and loved fun so much.”

She’d grown up in a rather isolated way in her parents’ house in County Wexford. They all had one passion in common, her parents, brothers and sister—horses and hunting—but otherwise there seemed hardly any of the normal family connections of laughter and shared pursuits. Even in riding the children were simply expected by their father to be able to ride well and stylishly, as though through some genetic inheritance. One just rode, naturally, as one walked, which made for many a terrified child. “It was extraordinary,” Molly Keane recalls, “at dinner, people would tell about some incident involving a small child shrinking at a wall, blue with terror, or taking it clinging on for dear life as though it were the most amusing thing.” Molly Keane’s brothers and sister went to school in England, which she refused to do. She was educated by governesses, by her mother, and for a while at a school outside Dublin, and as soon as she was old enough escaped to Woodrooff, a lovely house belonging to the Perry’s, where for some years she spent the greater part of her time, hunting and generally living the sort of life that her nature craved. She was a good horsewoman, so much so that she caught the eye of Snaffles, an assured and faithful recorder of the pain and pleasure of foxhunting—and no-one had a more discerning eye for a likely horse and exhilaration. His drawings of her taking a fence at speed are among the few to have survived the war, when many of his plates were destroyed in air raids.

But her life at Woodrooff was productive in other ways—it was here that she first saw how life was lived in “civilised” houses; here she met sophisticated, charming people who, best of all, liked her; here that she met those who could and would introduce her to London life; and here that she began the friendships with the children of the house, Sylvia and John Perry, which would later lead to the collaboration with John Perry on her plays, two of which had a great success in the West End. There was a great gap of decades when she ceased to write, partly as a result of the death of her husband Bobbie Keane, partly because her work seemed to go out of fashion. “Bobbie couldn’t have liked my books more. He was very sharp though and wouldn’t read them until they were published. I think he was afraid he would suggest things and influence me. He was quite right.”

She speaks with reluctance about her writing. A reticence springing from a mixture of modesty and the ethos of her class and times in which talking about oneself in any obsessive way was quite unthinkable, and in which being décontractée was and is far more acceptable than appearing to be vain or earnest. Art was a word not much used in her society, “scribbling” was an unembarrassing way to describe writing. Such debunking has its charms but it’s a difficult way of living and of thinking to transcend.

What seems to have happened with Molly Keane was that she started each novel through expediency and need, but as soon as she started, became obsessed by what she was writing and didn’t leave it until she was finished. The artistic imperative in fact, though she would anxiously eschew such namings. She was, and still is, reluctant to recognise herself as a writer, and every time, what began as a racy, lightweight novel about hunting and houses and the only way of life she knew, ended up as something more than the sum of the parts of it. Her books are, in some ways, an indictment of her own social milieu, portrayals of a vicious snobbery and genteel racism, a world where philistinism was a virtue and horses were gods and the native Irish were heard with amusement but never seen at all. And more; her books became social testimonies, accurate in their detail and made more valuable because the way of life they recorded had vanished, though their memories and effects still play a part in the Irish Zeitgeist. Indeed the privileged way of life she recorded as the ordinary daily life of great houses still pertains in atavistic pockets of Ireland; but as a whole system it vanished, as did the Raj in India after 1948 or the ancien régime with the French Revolution. In Ireland it came to an end after the Troubles and the Treaty of 1922.

What was extraordinary about Ireland of the time in which and about which M.J. Farrell was writing was that the two classes, some might say the two races, Anglo-Irish and Irish, each considered themselves to be living the “real” life of Ireland in which the others played bit parts. For the gentry, the native Irish supplied the local colour and the local labour; for the Irish the Anglo-Irish were their erstwhile masters, there by default and remaining only on sufferance, a sufferance that in Mad Puppetstown comes to an end. The two ways of life were so closely linked that to tear one from the other was to rend both almost to pieces.

Puppetstown is a large, fictitious house in County Westcommon owned by the Chevington family. Open any book on the ruined houses of Ireland, or on existing great houses, and you will find its match. It is based, as so many of Molly Keane’s creations are, on a composition of houses she knew and admired. Though by 1908 when the book opens the great period of the Irish demesne, when a house belonging to the Anglo-Irish gentry stood in thousands of acres, had ended, life still went on undisturbed in these houses. Their time was running out, but no-one within these enclaves seemed to realise it. Puppetstown was, like so many other houses, left standing in a little isolated island of fantasy, a marooned dream of tranquility and largesse with the lodge keepers at the gate there for show rather than protection.

In Mad Puppetstown we are shown the life of these houses in the sweet years before the two great upheavals of the time—the 1914 War and the Irish uprising. The two are linked in the book, as they were in life in Ireland. Indeed it was the fact that the Irish “took advantage” of England being at war with Germany to start their own war that made so many English and Anglo-Irish particularly bitter. Molly Keane conveys the sadness of the ending of that ostensibly tranquil way of life.

All the servants at Puppetstown looked back on the days of the Major as on a golden age—a splendid time the like of which they were never to see equalled again. They would tell tales of fox-hunting and racing; of days when all the quality would be gathered from the country round to ride schools over the fences at Puppetstown; of the winners the Major had bred and trained and ridden they would tell; of the wine in the cellars, the horses in the stables, the foxes in the coverts, and the notable runs they provided. They had scores of stories wherewith by contrast to darken the leaner years that followed the Major’s death and the Great War and the little bitter, forgotten war in Ireland.

This is a setting and a cast with which Molly Keane is utterly familiar. She marshals the organic throbbing life of the house, its servants, horses, stables, old Aunt Dicksie overseeing its smooth running, the delicious food; the pretty, selfish widow, sister to Major Chevington the owner of the house and mother to Basil and Evelyn the young cousins all of whom live at Puppetstown. There are the officers from the British army, in and out of the house for dinner, tea, supper, for boating, bridge and tennis. It is Somerville and Ross territory, but mapped with less of the heavy irony which they employed, less of the stiflingly patronising tone which suffuses their books. And then there is Easter Chevington, the daughter of the house, an appealingly gawky child with a secret life of her own, who sounds remarkably like Molly Keane herself, growing up with the century. It is through Easter’s acute sensual observations of her environment that Puppetstown’s atmosphere and gardens are so vividly conveyed. “Silence burnt like a still flame behind green grass.” It is these sense-memories that exert their pull on Easter when she has returned to England and all but forgotten Puppetstown.

The decay and disintegration of the way of life that seemed so true and certain to Easter as a child, happens in kilter with her personal chronology; and her gradual realisation that she cannot take her security for granted, and that the house she loves is a place of danger, synchronises with her own lack of confidence in herself. All of this has its counterpart in Molly Keane’s life, save that she did not leave to live in England.

“Today the house we lived in would count as a big house—oh lord, what is a big house?—and it was burned in the Troubles. It was a god-awful shock for my father who was a belligerent little Englishman. Everyone had warned him, had said you must come back and live in England and bring the children there, but he said ‘I’d rather be shot in Ireland than live in England.’ He wouldn’t leave when they came to burn down the house. The top man in the I.R.A. bunch who had come to burn the house down said to him, as he hopped about, shouting and threatening. ‘If you go on like that we really will have to shoot you.’ They tied up both my parents and left them sitting on the lawn outside the house.” Her father’s defiant cry is echoed in Mad Puppetstown when Basil and Evelyn, grown-up and living in England, try to explain to their English hostess why their old aunt had stayed on in the decaying Puppetstown. “She’d rather be shot there by accident than live here on purpose.”

In Mad Puppetstown the house is not burned—it is saved because old Aunt Dicksie’s glimmering presence as she flitted like a moth from room to room persuaded the Sinn Feinners waiting to fire it that it was guarded by the militia. This story too had many precedents in reality. Ballynatray House, for example, was guarded all through the Troubles by the wife of the owner (who had taken his pack of hounds for sport in England); Elizabeth Bowen gives a vivid description in Bowen’s Court of how her own house survived. “The Republicans took over the house, mined the avenues, wired the house to blow it up and then waited.” They waited for four days and, as Elizabeth Bowen says, “Even prejudice must allow they behaved like lambs, were great readers and especially were attracted to the works of Kipling. Then Aunt Sarah, vexed by a series of circumstances, drove to the house, moved in and sat down to consider what she would say to the Republicans when they came back from their daily reconnaissance. They never came back and Aunt Sarah remained convinced that it was her presence that deterred them—that, or the ‘nice feeling’ she attributed to all Irishmen. In the matter of the Troubles and Ireland and houses and behaviour on both sides no fiction could improve upon or exaggerate reality.”

The book moves in episodic fits and starts and when the whole setting decamps to England the movement of the book becomes more stilted and awkward. Basil and Evelyn go to Eton, thence to Oxford. Easter comes of age and they all grow up locked into the convention of English upper-class life. It is hard to believe how stifling the atmosphere is, especially in the country house setting of Lady Anna and her exquisitely beautiful, exquisitely boring daughter, Sarah, with whom the by now unspeakable Evelyn is in love.

The portraits of Lady Anna and her daughter Sarah are drawn with an unerring eye. They are prigs of the first water: so is Evelyn with whom Easter, alas, is in love; they are archetypically high Tory English and regard Ireland as a wild, savage and far-away country. Both Easter and Basil are far more likeable characters, more romantic, unpredictable, amusing, unconventional—they love Ireland, long for it and return home. People as representatives of a country: often in Molly Keane’s books the characteristics of the characters dovetail with what she sees as the characteristics of their country. And in her book the Irish are far more sympathetic—whether they are Anglo-Irish or native Irish—than the stolid, pedestrian, perfectly beautiful overlords. Basil and Easter seem ineffectual, but in fact act far more decisively than either Evelyn or Sarah who diminish life. Basil and Easter, insecure as they are, are on the side of passion and so, always, is Molly Keane. Her portrait of Lady Anna and her life is gently done, but it reveals the real lack of life and art in such a life; what might seem like a facade is in fact the same the whole way through; quite unlike the Irish, whether epitomised by Patsy, the servant at Puppetstown, or Easter and Basil on the other side of the social fence. The only time that Lady Anna seems to be in touch with the hidden life of dreams, emotion, yearning and spirits is in her recognition of the ghosts in her house.

It is a theme that Molly Keane returns to again and again—the way that the spirit of a house is comprised of the remnants of lives lived there. Her great friend Elizabeth Bowen, writing about her own house, Bowen’s Court, once wrote “I was not conscious of the lives of the dead there … but the unconsciousness, the unknowingness, the passivity, in which so much of those finished lives had been passed did somehow reach and enter my own. What runs on most through a family living in one place is a continuous semi-physical dream.” In many of Molly Keane’s books the spirits play even more of a role than this: and in Puppetstown itself, the whole house is animated by a spirit which resists the efforts of Basil and Easter to change it until they have found the magic route into the heart of the house via its guardian, Dicksie.

This old woman, who is, in her quiet and sometimes quaint way a memorable Keane heroine, has in effect turned Puppetstown into a hermitage; or has become an exile whilst never leaving the place she calls home. Most important of all, and most telling of metaphors, she has learnt how to survive by co-existing with the other marooned outcast, Patsy, the “pure” Irish kitchen-boy, whose terrible position in the miasma of Ireland, ripped apart by civil war, is revealed in all its pitiful and painful ambiguity. It is because he trusts in, and believes the words of his masters, and, at horrible cost, tries to protect them, that tragedy strikes. Nothing could be more ironic than this bitter twist, not of fate but of venality, which brings what Thomas Hardy called “the cruelty of circumstances” into the story and is the sign of a fine novelist. The point is never laboured. As Molly Keane peels away the layers and the wounds seep, the reader can only read on, appalled at the toils the people of the place, both the innocent and the cynical, have got themselves into. And it is, as ever, the innocents who suffer most. Like old Aunt Dicksie, Patsy learns to shift within the ruins of his life—he can do no more than be silent, collude and survive, and it seems that their hungry existence during the years of the children’s absence, in a displenished house built for luxury, has had a shriving effect. Divested of its voluptuous input, it gains, as does Aunt Dicksie, an ascetic, almost savage, quality. Many of the houses in Molly Keane’s novels are invested with this anthropomorphism. Here Puppetstown lies waiting for Basil and Easter, a new, nervous generation and, it would appear, an ultimately sterile one, rendered so by their frightened retreat into romanticism.

For they too, in an instinctive way that may be their salvation, seem to recognise that the house has been scorified. Lovely, ordinary, level-headed living is, as yet, beyond them and so they reach for a precious way of life that will leave their violence and passion undisturbed, will leave them unattached to anything other than their semblance of Irish life, on Ireland’s surface. Basil, Easter and their like will take nothing for granted in Ireland again. Those days are over. It is as though at some profound level, a level operating beyond the reach of their intelligence, they recognise that the bubble world of Puppetstown has been shaken too hard for the atmosphere ever to settle peacefully again. The new Treaty is based on qualities new enough to the Anglo-Irish—compassion and respect and finally fear. Love has always been there. It is a far cry from the arrogant takeovers of earlier days. These Anglo-Irish who gave so much and who took so much and never learnt the balance, have crept back home to roost.

Puppetstown has survived the Troubles. Only just: and not because of Basil and Easter, but because one old woman, representative of her admirable, indomitable race, kept faith with the house and the only way of life she wanted to know. Yet, in showing what happened to a great house in Ireland as its way of life perished, in writing of the demise of a civilization, Molly Keane was also pointing out the way to a new dispensation.

Polly Devlin, Somerset, 1985

THEN:—

They said: “You naughty man!” They wore hair nets and tortoise-shell combs.

It was more than fast to accept presents from men.

You bought a blood four-year-old up to weight for £60.

There was no wire.

They talked about “the ladies” and “motor-cars.” “By George!” they said, but never used Americanisms; such were not known.

Their top boots were shorter and their spurs were worn lower down on the heel.

You loved with passion.

You did not trouble to keep your sense of humour ready in the background.

Love mattered.

Manners mattered.

Children mattered.

Places and dependants mattered too.

Money bought much more.

People drove about in dog-carts and pony traps. Invitations were issued to tea.

Tea parties mattered too.

Women who powdered their faces were fast. Women who painted them—bad.

Hunting, low wages, feather boas, nipped in habit coats, curly bowlers, bunches of violets, black furs . . .