A Singular Country

  Now then. It is presently one fine day and your man His Nibs is out viewing and counting the cattle in a distant field. The sun is warm on the face. Your wrens chirping are flitting to and fro. Primroses and violets are glowing jewel like in yellow and purple and the shadows of the hedgerows. And suddenly your man hears what he thinks is a clap of thunder. Now I can tell you here and now it’s not. Your man takes off his cap and scratches his head in wonderment for there’s not a trace of a storm or a cloud this day in the length and breadth of the sky. He goes about his business. Strolling to the lake where the swans glide. Walking over the soft turf. The day is like any other. But when he returns and climbs the front steps of the big house and opens the great oak door into his entrance hall he trips over a plaster cornice in smithereens. He takes off his cap and looks up. The roof beams are hanging askew, just as further remnants of plaster plummet down to hit him in his left, monocled eye. And upon this utterly clement, peaceful day he knows the fatal moment has come.

  Now don’t for a moment feel sorry for him. Feel sorry for the ruddy upper floors of the house. Wasn’t your man already this long time of an evening having his meals down in the cellar kitchen by the stove and there munching a few chunks of beef taken from his big bowl of hot potatoes while last week’s socks hung drying over the hot water pipes. The remaining retainers in the farm force, Sean, Paddy and Mick, would be out by the stove in the tack-room, caps still on in the Irish tradition while you eat, and themselves also comfortably digging into the boiled spuds with them floating in a bit of milk made golden with a great gob of melted butter. Now shielded by the kitchen ceiling from your immediate inclemencies, and while having a decent meal, your man is thinking it over that an entrance hall wasn’t that vital. Sure anytime he liked he could enter the generous sized door that led in from the stable yard. And in any event since his conversation had got distinctly monosyllabic and was now consisting mostly of abrupt grunts, and the damp had long ago stuck all his visiting cards together, hardly a soul was recently coming to call upon him. And certainly no talkative Americans would dare, in fear of continued disappearance, approach up his lane. Plus seeing that there was now your actual grass growing up out of his cap and a spare blade or two actually to be seen coming out from behind his left ear. Always a sure sign to any one of his fellow Protestant worshippers standing behind him in chapel that he’d finally gone totally, absolutely, homegrown indigenous. With his double barrelled surname the only alien British thing about him left. And for those people whose clipped vowels are still cutting rapier sharp through the Celtic air and whose destinations are Ascot, Henley and Wimbledon come June and whose drawing room drink is gin and tonic, this is very much an off putting sight in one regarded previously as of their ilk.

  Everybody now all over the parish and beyond has heard what has happened to your man’s king post. And you’d think that the time had come for His Nibs, of the grassy ear and the fallen down entrance hall, to be putting his mind to salvaging at least in a financial way what he could from the disaster. And be dancing about inviting the more aggressive of your antique dealers to rush in where his previous friends of the ascendancy now gravely fear to tread. But not a bit of it. The front gate that you passed previously has had its big chain twice more wrapped around its rungs and is padlocked. And there’s not a trace of a sign of an antique dealer in his gent’s natty suiting making offers to your man room by room for the objets d’art, the gilt mirrors, the plethora of console tables, the early George III giltwood mirrors, the Regency sidetables, not to mention the candelabra, silverware, and porcelain and delphware from all kinds of distant dynasties and them bunch of old bound volumes you’ve got there unread packing the walls and taking up the space in that big library.

  The truth of the matter is, your delapsing man in your delapsing mansion was no materialist. And never was. And them Georgian gilt mirrors reflecting the rest of the now dusty, damp furnishings and hanging still resplendent all over the brocade walls and adorning above the mantel pieces of this great house, will meet another and different fate. Which is to be left right where they are. For your usually mild mannered man would take a shotgun to you should anything of this gracefully decaying past be disturbed in this house. Yet to the non pushy predator wandering near just to have a peek, if he did not ask you later to have a cup of tea, he would at least invite you to go in. And to use the servant’s entrance from the stableyard and warn you of the falling masonry, ceiling plaster, rotted floors and roof beams. But at least you’d get a chance to peruse this once grand place before it would all crumble to join, as His Nibs would, the soil again.

  But now he himself, before he got bopped in the skull with a falling joist, has moved into a groom’s quarters in the stableyard where your simple comforts were still to be had with the plain panelled walls upon which tack and saddles hang. A cot and a few wool blankets. A nice little wood stove in the middle of the room. Ah but back in the big house, your man’s coat and cap, untouched collecting dust these many months, are still left hanging in the corridor leading off to the grand entrance hall. The main staircase impassable upwards is now in a state of collapse so you would have no trouble coming down it pretty fast. One now gains entrance to the upper floors by a servants’ back stairs. For unbelievably a hardy Bridget and Bridie are still hanging out in the drier parts of their attic quarters where above their heads remain a few of the slates intact on the roof. For they’d rather not live out in a horse box in the stableyard, and with nowhere else to go, they will finally go down with this sinking ship. But as you’d imagine in a religious humane country like Ireland a contingent of nuns from the convent in the nearby town finally came out to rescue them.

  The meadows and parklands are still out there stretching as they always did to the plantation of trees on the horizon. But even here too one can see the dilapidations as the boughs of branches broken from the ancient oaks form their contorted shapes on the land and the cattle come to trample the turf to mud as they stand scratching and rubbing on the splintered sharp tips of the fallen timber. The pot holes in the exit drive, are now great ruts which can wrench a wheel from a vehicle. The front gates strain on the chain locking them as they teeter further over. The gate lodge with the tree growing through its roof now has its doors torn off and windows broken by passing vandals. And back at the big house a dissonant strain of music is heard reverberating. It is nearly the last chord to be ever sounded on the concert grand piano in the drawing room. For the weight of the large Regency giltwood and verre églomise over-mantel mirror aseat on the chimney piece has finally loosened itself from its moorings in the wall and has crashed face down on the keyboard. And in so doing has also knocked over a pair of George III ormolu and white marble king’s vase candelabra which go toppling to crash upon the flower decorated silk Heriz rug. And never mind what it did to the delicate gilt leaves and ornament of the Louis XVI white marble and ormolu astronomical mantel timepiece now stopped ticking for all time. Plus at that same exact moment too, unquestionably in sympathy, a group of late eighteenth century lock pistols chose to fall from where they have been long mounted on the brocaded wall. And let me tell you, with the little people the fairies loose and running all over this tumbling down house and now upending everything in sight as they usually do, it becomes no place where any serious connoisseur collector of your better antiques could avoid feeling sick to his stomach before he has his apoplectically hysterical heart attack. And as time marches on and in his same mood of neutrality your man His Nibs is out in the stable yard in his little cosy groom’s cottage, a bit of old cabbage boiling with the potatoes in the black iron pot suspended over the embers of the turf fire, his boots off, legs stretched out and his feet propped up on a log while the damp evaporates from his socks with an anciently sweaty fume. And caring not a damn that another chord reaches his ears as another section of the ceiling plasterwork plummets on to the concert grand piano’s ivory keys.

  Ah now I know what you’re thinking, you are thinking such
falling down places with an occupant such as Your Nibs in it are the extreme exception rather than the usual rule and are not to be found up at the rutted end of every overgrown boreen all over the country. Instead you’d be thinking that your overwhelmed descending member of the Anglo Irish ascendancy would be removing the slates and lead off the roof, the chimney pieces out of the rooms, the chandeliers off the ceilings and, along with the furnishing contents, filling up the backs of lorries and whipping them into the antique dealers and auction emporiums to flog them for every penny they can get. And you’d be right. And this sort would with the proceeds, build themselves a bijou bungalow to which their entrance drive would conspicuously lead. And in which, at the cocktail hour, they would serve their gin drinks. And invite friends like themselves to play bridge on Thursdays. And there’d be no Bridget, Bridie and Dymphna left there lurking in the attics, polishing, cleaning, cooking and scrubbing and who would have to be later rescued by the nuns. But instead ensconced, and adding to the bungalow blight, are these unsentimental uninspired folk desirous of their daily little comforts. Who would strip Ireland of her treasures, and peddle these to the commercially marauding stranger.

  Ah but we’re not quite finished yet with the annals of the big country house. There’d be your other type and variety of persons who have found a method of keeping roofs on, walls from falling and your objets d’art and antique furnishings and paintings intact as well as keeping even better than potatoes, broccoli and Brussels sprouts steaming on their plates. These hombres and women folk have come to curious terms with not only the preservation of the family seat but with the neat trick of themselves remaining seated more than ever decently comfortably in it. What they do is to sell these vast houses and their parklands to your foreigner. And then by god under codicil make the arrangement with the new owner to remain therein put, as your cook and butler, descended now into the basement to take up their servants’ duties. Now then, the new and generally highly charming owner has for a good long stretch of time each year to be back in his native country making the big decisions which make the money to provide upkeep for his newly acquired pile. And upon each such departure of the new owner to attend to his business, the previous occupants of the stately manse take off their servants’ uniforms, remove from their damp quarters in the basement and plant themselves right back up in their previous, and much drier upstairs apartments. Once again residing in their former grandness and strutting about in jodhpurs and cravats, they immediately get a Bridget and Dymphna out from the town to do this and do that and don’t forget to genuflect. Indeed you’ll never see anything like it the way they now throw their weight about and get not a little bit stroppy with the outside staff, plus issue invitations to all their old gentry pals to come dine on the wine cellar and kitchen largesse of the presently absentee landlord.

  Now this switch from master to servant and back again from servant to master, convenient as the arrangement may be for both parties, does not always operate without your occasional grievously and often fatal embarrassing incident. I mean to say, here you have your Frenchman, Italian, German or immensely rich Spaniard flying back to Ireland from your hectic board meetings in Paris, Rome, Frankfurt or Madrid and ready to collapse for a deep long soak in a hot bath far from the stresses of these busy European cities. And ruddy bloody hell, would you believe it, your butler and cook just removed back to below stairs have used up every ounce of the hot water for their own leisurely baths. Plus while you were this time lengthy away have also depleted the wine cellar of your very best burgundy, vintage champagne and Napoleon brandy. But worse and much worse even than the inclemencies presently raging outside your shuttered dining room, is that your butler and cook down in the basement have just following your return and the arrival of your glamorously chic guests from Paris, been getting tipsy in an Irish manner you would not believe. Of course as might be expected in your high powered way of life, you’ve invited your very top drawer haute couture designers, industrial magnates, and jet setting social luminaries to get away from it all in each other’s scintillating company and luxuriate in your sprawling thirty two bedroom mansion this weekend. At least the candles are already lit in the dining room and the smoky fire has been got to ignite by exercising your lungs blowing on it. And now you hear your butler and cook Stephen and Gretchen both approaching with the victuals along the long dark corridor where by god they do, within your hearing, be letting off a loud bit of steam. And there you all sit famished in your finery and transplanted from Paris, waiting for the food and you as host being dismissive about your acquiring such a grand house so ruddy bloody cheaply. Which your guests have no trouble believing as they await already shivering out of their wits with teeth chattering from the ice cold baths they are too embarrassed to say they have, like you also, just attempted. But such physical discomfort is nothing compared to the social discomfort which is about to befall. Your erstwhile Gretchen and Stephen, respectively Gretch and Steve as they are now called and formerly lord and lady of the manor are raising their voices in the hall. The vein of such shouting being to do with caste and class. Especially their social class and their previous entitlements and your social class and your present assumed presumptions as the new incumbent. You may not hear words like impostor, nouveau riche, upstart and parvenue. But by god you will hear these former country house owners spouting off as to how grand they once were at their London débutante balls, and local fox hunting shindigs and how certainly even in their socially reduced circumstances, remained a lot grander than the folk to whom they now had the demeaned duty of presently lugging and serving the spuds and artichokes brought over from Paris out of season. Of course old Steve, as your butler, is the distinct lesser of this evening’s evil for he has been, as a long time lush, happily down the cellars sampling the plethora of wines and cigars from early afternoon and only interrupted when he took a bottle of champagne up to quaff in his bath. And following which he then repaired to the front east drawing room in his satin bathrobe to, glass in hand, beseat himself on your George III giltwood open armchair, sampling a dram or two of your armagnac as he mildly regrets the price at which he sold you the objets d’art he formerly owned. Now don’t forget that old Gretch the wife now the cook in the kitchen is only just a short way along the basement corridor from the wine cellar and has been constantly repairing there for the rum, sherry and whiskey she requires added to the various dishes she’s been exotically concocting. And of course she too takes a sampling swalick from her bevy of bottles all now standing nearly empty and hidden under draped dishtowels. Nor forget that these former owner occupiers have enduringly hard stomachs and throats. And there they now stand the pair of them mortally fractured out of their minds at the pantry door and totally smashed senseless with the eyes in their heads revolving like celestial globes of no particular description as they make their swaying efforts to balance the cauldrons of soup and stew they each bear.

  Of course any foreigner attracted to Ireland for any length of time would be a person of some pleasant sensitivity and tolerance but now you as the new pasha sit with your mouth open in both hunger and horror as your guests, aghast, reach for their napkins. And you wait till it is the very last second before you jump up in your effort to stop old Steve from pitching forward crashing with his tureen of soup splashing in every direction over the dining room floor. Not that any of this awful stuff, into which old Gretch has mistakenly dumped a jar of marmalade and two bottles of ketchup, is going to taste any good anyway. However, old Gretch as she now loses her balance, makes a grab for Steve’s arms and drops her own armful of drunkenly prepared ingredients. While her husband, suddenly yanked forward, trips and sends flying the soup splattering over the dining room table. And your folk from Paris, although saved from having to sample this stodgy emulsion, find that their napkins held over their evening wear are no protection from this wave of bright beet-coloured liquid. And they now witness poor old Steve upon his hands and knees crawling through Gretchen’s stew to escape betw
een some lady’s knees under the dining room table. Lesson enough that your Anglo Irish landed gentry in trying their hand at a little cooking and butlering revert to being as fecklessly inept as Bridget, Bridie and Dymphna ever were and simply have not got their hearts in it in ministering to their masters.

  Ah but now as the modern Ireland emerges where everything or anything is for sale or rent, there is yet another ilk of your great country house inhabitant who not only are still around and continuing to own their stately piles but who are even rubbing a few coins together. These sophisticates of your gentry folk are possessed surprisingly of a certain business expertise. And they simply advertise in your stylish glossy magazines abroad. Either renting out for the seasons of fishing, shooting or fox hunting, or for a stretch of the warmer summer months. Retaining a most favoured room or two, the country house owner locks up his private papers and either moves to Spain or to a not too distant outhouse on the estate. From where, sad to say, the owner’s wife with high powered binoculars peers with resentment at the paying intruder having the solitary pleasure of her pleasure gardens. And it is not always some rich fat old chocolate munching battleaxe from your Park Avenue in New York who is out of a morning on the garden paths ignoring the roses. But often one finds a genial and kindly old lady glad of the space and the grand dignity of moving among gleaming antiques and ancestral portraits. And at the prices charged, who could resent such a dear. But alas, more times it is your face lifted hard bitten bitch who is out sneering at your weeds bursting up all over the pleasure gardens or at the algae green stale water in the ice cold outdoor swimming pool. And of course indoors she is shouting for service from the household staff who are hiding quietly out of sight in the most distant bedrooms.