The Clonfert Conundrum

Robert, sweetly, says that long hair suits me. Hitherto he preferred my hair short. May I digress?

Abroad, those were the days, I used to get my hair cut in countries abutting the Mediterranean. Their barbers usually have the best hair, strengthened by a diet rich in olive oil. Today, actually some yesterdays ago, Sadiq cuts my hair – he is a Cypriot now living in London. Six or seven years ago Robert and I were in Bordeaux and I had my hair cut. It was quite an aggressive trim but it gave me an opportunity; to give up using shampoo. I have less dandruff and I save time in the shower as I only have to rinse my hair daily. I have also adopted other practical, beneficial economies but they come under the “too much information” heading.

In the Royal Navy sailors wore pigtails or queues and Jack Aubrey takes a swim “into the pure blue water with his long yellow hair streaming out behind him”. Patrick O’Brian hasn’t made a mistake; naval officers wore pigtails until 1805 and other ranks until circa 1820 but, as with Irish peers, The Mauritius Command is set prior to the real events in 1810. Now, let’s return to (fictional) Irish peer, Lord Clonfert – I fancy he may be an earl. Stephen Maturin records his observations in his personal cipher, ‘though it reads more like a soliloquy.

”Clonfert is more of an Irishman, with the exacerbated susceptibilities of a subject race, than I had supposed; more indeed than I gave Jack to understand. I find that as a boy he did not attend a great English public school, as did most of his kind I have known; nor did he go early to sea and thereby wash away the barrier: the first years of his nominal service were book-time, as they call the amiable cheat by which a complaisant captain places an absent child upon his muster-roll. Far from it: he was brought up almost entirely by the servants at Jenkinsville (a desolate region). Squires foster-parents too for a while, his own being so mad or so disreputable: and he seems to have sucked in the worst of both sides. On the one hand he derived his notion of himself as a lord from people who have had to cringe these many generations to hold on to the odd patch of land that is their only living: and on the other, though half belonging to them, he has been bred up to despise their religion, their language, their poverty, their manners and traditions. A conquering race, in the place of that conquest, is rarely amiable: the conquerors pay less obviously than the conquered, but perhaps in time they pay even more heavily, in the loss of the humane qualities. Hard arrogant, profit-seeking adventurers flock to the spoil, and the natives, though outwardly civil, contemplate them with a resentment mingled with contempt, while at the same time respecting the face of conquest – acknowledging their great strength. And to be divided between the two must lead to a strange confusion of sentiment. In Clonferts’s case the result of this and of other factors seems to me an uneasy awareness of his own distinction (he often mentions it), a profound uncertainty of its real value, and a conviction that to validate its claims he should be twice as tall as other men,”

Goodbye The Mauritius Command, hello Desolation Island. Three cheers for Patrick O’Brian.