enormous amusement from getting the friendly waitress to say the word ‘vindaloo’ in her (very) Dublin accent.
‘It can’t be hot enough for me,’ he would insist when ordering.
‘Shur you mean a vindaloo,’ the waitress would reply over our suppressed giggles.
But Speer would want to hear it again.
‘No, I mean even hotter,’ he would say in his precise manner.
‘I’ll ask the chef,’ the waitress would say, ‘but a vindaloo is as hot as you get round here.’
Sometimes, on Sundays, we would go to lunch in a small (and to me horrid) hotel he knew in Dun Laoghaire: they had a dog there that he liked, and he was passionate about dogs. Then we would walk over Killiney Hill. More lavish Sunday expeditions involved the Downshire Arms in Blessington and a walk at the Sugarloaf. He took me to the Sunday evening promenade concerts with the Radio Eireann Symphony Orchestra conducted by Tibor Paul in the Gaiety, and he introduced me to a Christmas Messiah with Our Lady’s Choral Society in the National Stadium. When Nelson’s Pillar was blown up, he heard it on the early news and dashed down to O’Connell Street and retrieved a piece of the sculptured stone rope which had been part of the Nelson statue: he gave me a fragment.
He taught me a lot of nonsense too, which makes me laugh when I think of it today. One does not carry an umbrella in the country; no brown shoes after six o’clock; and there was something about it not being done to look out of an open window that I never fully understood and I did on occasion peek out the windows of 13 Upper Fitzwilliam Street when he was not looking. He called an apple tart an apple cake and pronounced the word ‘recipe’ as ‘receep’ (as did my elderly Aunt Isa). He struck terror into me by telling me how one must eat an oyster, warning me with frightening detail that if one ever ate an oyster that was ‘off’, one would never be able to eat an oyster again. He then explained the procedure for getting the oyster from the shell to one’s mouth and then the vital moment, allowing it to linger for a split second on the back of the tongue, when one could establish if it was ‘off’.
‘If you are in any doubt, you must spit it out immediately,’ he said, ‘even if it goes on the floor.’ It was years before I was actually able to enjoy eating oysters.
He had many deliberately old-fashioned affectations, chief among them being a veneration of Queen Elizabeth and Winston Churchill; by the same token, he maintained that Ireland had become little more than a hotbed of treachery and ‘Republicanism’. The destruction of Nelson’s Pillar was really the last straw. Although they were voiced in apparent deadly earnest, he was very amusing in enunciating his views, but I am glad to say that I knew not to take them seriously, and I did not absorb them.
I have perhaps made him sound effete, an aesthete in the manner of Evelyn Waugh’s Anthony Blanche, but he was not that in the least (and he affected to be horrified by such characters). In fact, he was not really like anyone else at all. Above all, he was enormous fun.
I was very lucky to have met him and even luckier that he took me up; and our friendship over sixty years is one of the most treasured memories from of my life.3
Endnotes
1.Mary Campion, ‘An Old Dublin Industry – Poplin’, Dublin Historical Record, vol. 19 (1963).
2.Irish novelist, biographer, and lawyer (1912–94). Literary Editor of The Irish Times, 1961–77. One-time trustee of the National Library, the Chester Beatty Library, a director of the Gate Theatre, member of the Arts Council and the Irish Academy of Letters. Professor of Literature at the RHA. Married, as his second wife, to the biographer Victoria Glendinning. Obituary by Maeve Binchy, The Independent, 18 June 1994.
3.Speer died in his 90th year in Rome, where he had lived for more than fifty years, on 10 December 2016 (after this account was written) and is buried, with his grandmother and great-aunt, in Mount Jerome, Dublin. Henry predeceased him by about two years.
CHAPTER 6
TIMES PAST
A few years ago, I was driving down through France, alone, and daydreaming behind the wheel as kilometre after kilometre of motorway rolled by. Suddenly I saw a sign indicating a road off to the right. ‘Janville’, it said. I swerved off without thinking.
‘This is where I was all those years ago,’ I said to myself, ‘my first time ever in France. How many years could it be?’
I calculated about forty.
I had kept up with the Chassines for a few years after my stay with them. I would write to them and I would go and visit, for a week or so, on my hitch-hiking holidays in France. I was always welcome but gradually contact was lost and it was decades since I had even sent them a Christmas card. But on this day, as I looked for the road to Semonville, I suddenly got cold feet. What was I doing? They might have forgotten me. They are probably dead. Pascal (the eldest boy) could be living there now, and with a horrid wife who would not welcome me. I tried to work out what age the parents would now be if they were still alive, and then I realised that I had no clue what age they had been when I had stayed with them. I drove cautiously, trying to remember the way, and then I recognised the exterior wall of the yard (with its postbox) running along the road. There was a car in front of me. It turned into the yard. Somewhat embarrassed, I hesitated and then followed. An attractive woman, in her fifties perhaps, neat and clean, had stepped out of the car and was holding a bag of shopping in each hand. ‘Too young to be Madame Chassine,’ I thought, ‘but too old to be Pascal’s wife either.’ I was puzzled as I got out of the car and went over to her.
‘Madame Chassine?’ I said, knowing that that would cover the possibility of her being either Madame Chassine or her daughter-in-law.
She too was puzzled.
‘‘Oui?’ she replied.
And then I saw that, young-looking though she was, it was indeed my Madame Chassine.
‘Do you recognise me?’ I asked.
She looked me up and down.
‘Non. Pas du tout.’
The French can only pronounce my name ‘o-MAN’, with no ‘H’ and the emphasis on the second syllable, and that was what the Chassines called me.
‘Je suis o-MAN,’ I said.
She let out a little shriek, dropped the shopping bags to the ground, and put her hands up to her mouth. We both stood there, silent, for a moment and then she ran over and hugged me. It was very emotional for us both and it took a few minutes for us to recover.
‘François will be thrilled to see you,’ she said. ‘Come in, come in. We have often talked about you over the years and the children have never forgotten you. None of them are here any more. They all have careers. It’s just François and me.’
I picked up the bags of shopping and went with her: through what had been the house when I was there and out to the garden. The house that Monsieur Chassine was planning in my time had been built but, of course, it was no longer new. We went into a lovely big kitchen. Madame Chassine was giddy with chatter, remembering those years long ago, as she put away the shopping.
‘François should be back soon,’ she said, glancing at the clock and looking at me again and again. When he arrived, he was puzzled by the stranger with his wife.
‘Do you not know who it is?’ she said to him.
And then we had the ‘o-MAN’ and the emotion all over again.
She quickly prepared a lovely lunch and we talked away. None of the boys had wanted to farm and all had other careers. Nor did any of them live nearby. Pascal was married here; Jean-Michel was working there; Veronique was someplace else; Marie-Silvie had three children; Françoise had four; Denis had never married. Thomas (who had been a delicate little toddler when I was there) had died young. There had been another baby after my time. It dawned on me that they were all now men and women of practically the same