My paternal grandparents left Ireland with my father in a hurry during the Troubles. They came back to Barmeath in 1938. Hitherto my grandfather had only been there on holiday as a child.
It had been empty since Aunt Milly, as a widow, moved back to England in the 1920s. The grounds were a wilderness. The interior had deteriorated; ivy growing through the windows. Water from a spring had to be pumped up into lead lined tanks in an attic; electricity was generated by a little windmill on a tower and stored in batteries. My grandfather threw himself into fishin’ and shootin’, my grandmother into gardenin’. Fortunately labour was cheap and Barmeath was well staffed-up. In my childhood in the 1960s there were three men working on the farm and two or three live-in maids, a much depleted staff from the 1940s.
”You should write a book about it”, sycophantic friends plead, unconvincingly. I don’t need to. Anne O’Neill-Barna (real name Elaine O’Beirne Ranelagh) has done it with panache. She is a New Yorker who married an Irish clan chieftain. He was working in America but persuaded her to go back to Ireland with their three young children in the 1950s. Himself and I is a novel only because she changed all the names. It is a coruscating purview of rural Ireland in the 1950s. Published in 1958 it was banned in Ireland, in those days ruled by a theocracy, because it steps beyond the boundaries of the genre. She dares to expose the convents that took in mothers of illegitimate children, and their disposal while the hapless girls became washer-women, although she did not know the babies were sold.
Himself buys a house in Co Kildare with no electricity or water. Her account of their attempts at making it habitable is funny but as an outsider she is an acute observer and, with detachment, she assesses the great cast at her disposal impartially. It’s about time it was reprinted as there are only a couple of copies on Abebooks.