Irish Memories

by E. Oe. Somerville; Martin Ross

Robert’s early schoolroom work at Ross was got through with the ease that may be imagined by anyone who has known his quickness in assimilating ideas and his cast-iron memory. As was the case with all the Ross children, the real interests of the day were with the workmen and the animals. The agreeability of the Galway peasant was enthralling; even to a child; the dogs were held in even higher esteem. Throughout Robert’s life dogs knew him as their friend; skilled in the lore of the affections, they recognised his gentle heart, and the devotion to him of his Gordon setter, Rose, is a thing to remember. Even of late years I have seen him hurry away when his sterner sisters thought it necessary to chastise an offending dog; the suffering of others was almost too keenly understood by him.

Reading aloud rounded off the close of those early days at Ross, Shakespeare and Walter Scott, Napier and Miss Edgeworth; the foundation of literary culture was well and truly laid, and laid with respect and enthusiasm, so that what the boy’s mind did not grasp was stored up for his later understanding, among things to be venerated, and fine diction and choice phrase were imprinted upon an ear that was ever retentive of music. Everyone who remembers his childhood remembers him singing songs and playing the piano. His ear was singularly quick, and I think it was impossible for him to sing out of tune. He learned his notes in the schoolroom, but his musical education was dropped when he went to school, as is frequently the case; throughout his life he accompanied himself on the piano by ear, with ease, if with limitations; simple as the accompaniments were, there was never a false note, and it seemed as if his hands fell on the right places without an effort.

A strange feature in his early education and in the establishment at Ross was James Tucker, an ex-hedge schoolmaster, whose long face, blue shaven chin, shabby black clothes, and gift for poetry have passed inextricably into the annals of the household. He entered it first at the time of the Famine, ostensibly to give temporary help in the management and accounts of the school which my aunt Marian had started for the tenants’ children; he remained for many years, and filled many important posts. He taught us the three R’s with rigour and perseverance, he wrote odes for our birthdays, he was controller-in-chief of the dairy; later on, when my father received the appointment of Auditor of Poor Law, under the Local Government Board, Tucker filled in the blue “abstracts” of the Auditor’s work in admirably neat columns. Robert’s recital of the multiplication table was often interrupted by wails for “Misther Tucker” and the key of the dairy, from the kitchenmaid at the foot of the schoolroom stairs, and the interruption was freely cursed, in a vindictive whisper, by the schoolmaster. Tucker was slightly eccentric, a feature for which there was always toleration and room at Ross; he entered largely into the schoolroom theatricals that sprang up as soon as Robert was old enough to whip up a company from the ranks of his brothers and sisters. The first of which there is any record is the tragedy of “Bluebeard,” adapted by him at the age of eight. As the author did not feel equal to writing it down, it was taught to the actors by word of mouth, he himself taking the title rôle. The performance took place privately in the schoolroom, an apartment discreetly placed by the authorities in a wing known as “The Offices,” beyond ken or call of the house proper. Tucker was stage manager, every servant in the house was commandeered as audience. The play met with much acceptance up to the point when Bluebeard dragged Fatima (a shrieking sister) round the room by her hair, belabouring her with a wooden sword, amid the ecstatic yells of the spectators, but at this juncture the mistress of the house interrupted the revels with paralysing suddenness. She had in vain rung the drawing-room bell for tea, she had searched and found the house mysteriously silent and empty, till the plaudits of the rescue scene drew her to the schoolroom. Players and audience broke into rout, and Robert’s first dramatic enterprise ended in disorder, and, if I mistake not, for the principals, untimely bed.

It was some years afterwards, when Robert was at Trinity, that a similar effort on his part of missionary culture ended in a like disaster. He became filled with the idea of getting up a cricket team at Ross, and in a summer vacation he collected his eleven, taught them to hold a bat, and harangued them eloquently on the laws of the game. It was unfortunate that its rules became mixed up in the minds of the players with a game of their own, called “Burnt Ball,” which closely resembles “Rounders,” and is played with a large, soft ball. In the first day of cricket things progressed slowly, and the unconverted might have been forgiven for finding the entertainment a trifle dull. A batsman at length hit a ball and ran. It was fielded by cover-point, who, bored by long inaction, had waited impatiently for his chance. In the enthusiasm of at length getting something to do, the recently learned laws of cricket were swept from the mind of cover-point, and the rules of Burnt Ball instantly reasserted themselves. He hurled the ball at the batsman, shouting: “Go out! You’re burnt!” and smote him heavily on the head.

The batsman went out, that is to say, he picked himself up and tottered from the fire zone, and neither then nor subsequently did cricket prosper at Ross.

Then, and always, Robert shared his enthusiasm with others; he gave himself to his surroundings, whether people or things, and, as afterwards, it was preferably people. He had the gift of living in the present and living every moment of it; it might have been of him that Carlyle said, “Happy men live in the present, for its bounty suffices, and wise men too, for they know its value.”

Throughout Robert’s school and college days theatricals, charades, and living pictures, written or arranged by him, continued to flourish at Ross. There remains in my memory a play, got up by him when he was about seventeen, in which he himself, despising the powers of his sisters, took the part of the heroine, with the invaluable Tucker as the lover. A tarletan dress was commandeered from the largest of the sisterhood, and in it, at the crisis of the play, he endeavoured to elope with Tucker over a clothes-horse, draped in a curtain. It was at this point that the tarletan dress, tried beyond its strength, split down the back from neck to waist; the heroine flung her lover from her, and backed off the stage with her front turned firmly to the audience, and the elopement was deferred sine die.

Those were light-hearted days, yet they were indelible in Robert’s memory, and the strength and savour of the old Galway times were in them as inextricably as the smell of the turf smoke and the bog myrtle. Nothing was conventional or stagnant, things were done on the spur of the moment, and with a total disregard for pomps and vanities, and everyone preferred good fun to a punctual dinner. Mingling with all were the poor people, with their cleverness, their good manners, and their unflagging spirits; I can see before me the carpenter painting a boat by the old boat quay, and Robert sitting on a rock, and talking to him for long tracts of the hot afternoon. At another time one could see Robert holding, with the utmost zeal and discrimination, a court of arbitration in the coach-house for the settling of an intricate and vociferous dispute between two of the tenants.

Life at Ross was of the traditional Irish kind, with many retainers at low wages, which works out as a costly establishment with nothing to show for it. A sheep a week and a cow a month were supplied by the farm, and assimilated by the household; it seemed as if with the farm produce, the abundance of dairy cows, the packed turf house, the fallen timber ready to be cut up, the fruitful garden, the game and the trout, there should have been affluence. But after all these followed the Saturday night labour bill, and the fact remains, as many Irish landlords can testify, that these free fruits of the earth are heavily paid for, that convenience is mistaken for economy, and that farming is, for the average gentleman, more of an occupation than an income.

The Famine had left its legacy of debt and a lowered rental, and further hindrances to the financial success of farm and estate were the preoccupation of my father’s life with his work as Auditor of Poor Law Unions, the enormous household waste that took toll of everything, and, last and most inveterate of all, my father’s generous and soft-hearted disposition.