On the whole I had an idyllic childhood at Barmeath. I enjoyed the company of my mother, my grandparents and especially my much older siblings, though they were seldom around.
My grandfather, in his 70s and never too keen on working (somehow he managed never to have a proper job all his life, unless you count killing Germans in the First World War) asked a neighbour to run the small farm at Barmeath. Bruce Dean and his wife, Margo, were close family friends and Bruce already ran the estate at Slane Castle as well as his own Co Meath farm on the Boyne. He came over once a week and stayed to lunch. He was partial to a bottle of Double Diamond to wash down whatever plain cooking was on offer but put on a brave face when I took up home brewing.
Anyway, it became apparent that having a cow, a bull and a dairy was not strictly necessary as milk, cream and butter could be bought for ready money, even in Dunleer. Bruce arranged for the bull to be sold. He asked my grandfather to take it out of the field and put it in a loose box from where the purchaser could load it on a trailer.
The difficulty of getting a temperamental bull out of a field, to which he seemed attached, into a loose box into which he definitely did not want to go, remains with me. The bull charged around as if he was the star turn in a corrida. Eventually he was coaxed into the top farmyard. Then he tried to escape back to his field and only Mrs McGinn’s valour, blocking the exit and whooping like a Cherokee, cut off his exit. From that day on any apparently simple proposition, but which is in fact fraught with difficulty, was referred to as “put bull in box”. I say it under my breath often at committee meetings.
I will never write a memoir about my childhood. I’d have to strip my soul bare, unless it were to be a cheesy cop-out. Annabel Goff (Walled Gardens, 1989) and Homan Potterton (Rathcormick, 2002) are outstandingly successful examples of the genre. Somehow I had forgotten Woodbrook by David Thomson that I read soon after it was published in 1974. I was reminded of it when Mr and Mrs Dog-Lover sent it to me after our lunch at the Merrion and I’m looking forward to immersing myself in rural Ireland in the 1930s again.
This memoir, acknowledged as a masterpiece, grew out of two great loves – for Woodbrook and for Phoebe, his pupil. In it he builds up a delicately lyrical picture of a gentle pre-war society, of Irish history and troubled Anglo-Irish relations, and of a delightful family. Above all, his story reverberates with the enchantment of falling in love and with the desolation of bereavement. (Back cover, Vintage, 2002.)
The Spectator reviewer wrote: “it remains with one long after the story is told, a haunting sadness, a memory and a dream”.
I recommend all three, although the parallels between Annabel Goff’s childhood and my own are painful.