is quite concerned about you and says that you are not looking well at all. He told me he offered you £7 a week to go and stay in Rathcormick for five or six weeks and drive a tractor for him. He doesn’t mind about driving the tractor, but he feels if you had that definite job it would keep you out in the air and would do you a lot of good. Maud also said she’d see you had good meals and try to build you up a bit. I think you ought to do this and not bother about France for this year. Elliott does not mind your going to France, but he thinks it is really foolish and you come back jaded. I wish you would do this, it is for your good and when Elliott was interested enough in you to suggest this, I think you should agree with him. As I say, don’t think he wants you just for the sake of driving the tractor, he doesn’t. It is your health he is concerned with and I think you would be wise to accept his proposal with thanks, rather than go against him. He does feel a certain responsibility for you and when you don’t ever take his advice, he can’t help losing interest in you. I hope you will do as I ask you. You are very young and with a little guidance from Elliott you would do better and I know he will always help you if you co-operate.
I did as my mother asked me, put travel out of my mind, and went to stay and work in Rathcormick for a couple of months. I worked the hours the labourers on the farm did and had them for company during the day; and I learned to be adept at manoeuvring the tractor and anything that might be attached to it. I brought in the hay and then I cut the silage and brought that in too. When the wheat and barley were being harvested, I followed the combine-harvester on my tractor and decanted the grain when the bin was full. I baled the straw and brought that into the barn. All of this did ‘keep me out in the air’, although whether it ‘did me a lot of good’ I am not so sure. In my own mind, a day discovering Fontainebleau or a morning admiring the frescoes of Mantegna in the Camera degli Sposi in Mantua might have been better for me; and the foreign students I could have met in such places would no doubt have been more interesting than the company I had in the farmyard. But the summer was by no means all torture. The children – all six of them – were entertaining, Maud was kind and good company, and I got to know (for the first time in my life) my brother Elliott: sixteen years my senior, he was fair-minded, reasonable and very practical, and worked ruthlessly hard at his estate-agency business. It was good of him to give me the opportunity (and to pay me well) and it was done with good intentions. None of this, however, shook me in my resolve that my life would take me along a path that was as far removed from the farming world of Rathcormick as I could possibly reach.
It wasn’t Rathcormick itself. My childhood there had been very happy and I was proud of the fact that my family had lived in the place for hundreds of years: my great (five times) grandfather first leased the farm on 28 July 1710 and we had been in continuous occupation ever since.
But animals and the dirt and discomfort of the outdoors and the constant hard and heavy labour lacked all appeal for me and I knew it.
Endnotes
1.My father’s sister, Mrs William Tyrrell of Coolcor, Carbury.
2.Of the friends I did make, several were ex-Alexandra College girls: Margaret Furlong, Meriel Hayes and Deirdre Sheppard. Elizabeth Strong from Edinburgh, but with family roots in Co. Meath, also came into my life at this time.
CHAPTER 5
ENCOUNTERS
When I was at Trinity, I met the King of Saxony. Except that the King of Saxony I thought I met was not the king at all. He was, rather, His Royal Highness Prinz Ernst Heinrich Ferdinand Franz Joseph Otto Maria Melchiades of Saxony, the youngest son of the last King of Saxony, Frederick August III, by his wife the Archduchess Louise of Austria, Princess of Tuscany.
I did not meet Prinz Ernst in the august precincts of Trinity College, which would not have been improbable; instead, I was introduced to him in the much more unlikely setting of Trim Livestock Market, the cattle sales-yard established by my late father in 1957 and managed in my Trinity days by my brothers Elliott and Raymond.
While a student, I was supported, and my fees paid, by Elliott through the family auctioneering business. In the winter and spring vacations, Elliott would offer me the opportunity of working as the auctioneer’s clerk in the cattle market and would pay me a daily wage. I was grateful for this but, at the same time, I hated the cattle market just as I hated everything about farming. But my mother would be insistent: ‘When he is good enough to offer you the work, you should show willing and go and do it,’ she would say and, on the mornings of the market, she would get me out of bed early and dispatch me off to the sales-yard.
The auction took place in a large covered building with an arena – the ring – in the centre, through which the cattle were paraded. It was encircled by tiered seats for clients, and on one side was the auctioneer’s box. This was something like an enclosed balcony overlooking the ring, with access from a door at the back of the box. The auctioneer – Elliott – was seated to one side; his clerk – me – to the other. Between the raised platforms on which we sat was a narrow gap where vendors would stand at a lower level and identify their cattle in the ring by peering through a tiny slit: they could see the proceedings but, most importantly, they could not be seen by potential purchasers. When standing there, their heads would be roughly level with my feet. As clerk, it was my job to write in a register – as the various lots came through the ring – the lot number, the name of the vendor, the breed of cattle being sold, their gender and number, and the price achieved. As the auction moved very fast, this had to be done at speed and with absolute accuracy. I was soon able to identify the various breeds – Aberdeen Angus, Shorthorn or Hereford Crossbreed – and I only rarely made an error in counting the number of cattle in a lot. The difficulty arose in getting the name of the vendor. As they stood below me squinting through the slit, I could only see the tops of their heads and, not knowing them, would have to ask them ‘What is the name, please?’ Understandably, vendors were very preoccupied and anxious as they watched their livelihood being sold within a space of minutes, and it was very difficult to get them to answer me. ‘What is the name, please?’ I would repeat, and repeat again. Elliott, trying to concentrate on conducting the auction, would become irritated by my ineffective politeness and would snap at me: ‘He’s Paudge O’Toole’ or ‘That’s Larkin, he’s here often enough for you to know him by now.’
On one day, the man who came into the box and took his stand peeping through the slit was ruddy-faced and wearing a tattered gaberdine, Wellington boots, and a much-soiled brown brimmed hat. He was as nervous as every other vendor.
‘What is the name, please?’ I said.
And then I said it again, and again.
In the meantime, Elliott’s patience was being sorely tested. Eventually, and without interrupting the bidding, he shouted across at me: ‘That’s the King of Saxony.’
The way he said it, one would have thought that royalty passed through the box every other day.
I wrote down ‘K of Saxony. 8 Hereford Cross bullocks’ in the register.
Prinz Ernst (b. 1896) had been brought up in Dresden at the Court of Saxony. He joined the army in the First World War and took part in the Battle of the Somme. In 1918 his father was forced to abdicate when Saxony became a Free State. The Prinz opposed the Nazis and, on witnessing the bombing of Dresden in 1945, he fled the city (having buried crates of the family’s treasures in a forest) to escape the advance of the Red Army. His first wife (and mother of his three sons) died in 1941 and he then married an aristocratic actress, Virginia Dulon, in 1947. That year they moved to Ireland, where he purchased a farm of about 300 acres, Coolamber, near Delvin, County Westmeath. There he lived until his death (on a visit to Germany) in 1971. The Princess Virginia stayed on in Ireland for the next thirty years and died at Coolamber in 2002.
From my art history studies, I knew vaguely that the Electors of Saxony (forebears of the kings) had assembled fabulous art collections which are housed in various museums in Dresden. Any general book on the history of art includes reproductions of such famous Dresden masterpieces as Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus, Rembrandt’s Ganymede and Vermeer’s Procuress. I also knew that the Italian painter Bernardo Bellotto had been invited by the Elector