Unlikely Rebels (5 page)

These belts were on ropes, which Ellen played out till she thought the wearers were in far enough. Their stay in the water depended on her mood. With two or three ropes in her hands, she ran up and down on the beach shouting directions to the pupils, who were sometimes out of hearing (or pretended to be) at the other end of the ropes. When she considered someone had been long enough in the water, that swimmer was dragged in ignominiously, despite protest. ‘You've been in too long, so you have,' she would say when there were others waiting, because she did not encourage selfishness – or perhaps it was a ploy for more customers. The rope removed, it was back to the box to have the substantial bathing dress removed. The girls wore woollen bathing dresses, sometimes even stockings, and their long hair was held up by hairpins, three or four inches long, and squeezed into an elasticised waterproof cap. Properly dressed again, they emerged from their boxes, and the male watchers, young and old, stood at the cliff wall as the hair-combing began, calculating with much masculine humour how much of the ‘bun' – the hair normally seen on the Sunday parade – was, in fact, genuine. Ellen, a sort of prototype of today's lifeguards, was very committed to the prowess of her swimmers, some of whom were second-generation customers, and she freely gave advice though, ironically, she could not swim herself. The Gifford girls graduated from her academy as strong swimmers. Mixed bathing was not allowed, but Frederick had his own way of teaching his sons to swim, like many a father before and after him. Ellen's rope was all right for the girls, but the boys were dunked unceremoniously by their father into the sea and had to swim, as if by second nature, but under his watchful eye.
[10]

‘The swimmin' woman
'
Ellen (and her boxes and ropes) were part of a departing nineteenth century, but the singing minstrels' show, which came from England, was looking towards the 1900s. The company erected a covered stage and introduced to the Greystones holidaymakers a new syncopated rhythm which preceded jazz.

Not the least of the Greystones delights for the children were the establishments that hired out horse-drawn vehicles by the hour, a half day or a full day. These ‘chariots' ranged from the old-fashioned
vis-à-vis
(largely for the older generation who sat decorously opposite each other under parasols) to the wagonette, which could hold a fairly big picnic party. The favourite conveyance for the Gifford children, however, was a pony and trap which they were allowed to drive themselves. The ‘pony' could be either a donkey or a jennet, and their favourite haunt was the Glen of the Downs.

For the Gifford children, these holidays were times of freedom and wandering over the countryside, finding
fraocháns
and wild strawberries in the fields about the house where they were staying, picking blackberries to make jam which was consumed while it was still warm, getting up at dawn in the chill air to pick mushrooms and then running back home to put them on the hob upside down, with a knob of butter, before eating them. There were days in the cove with Ellen, days taking turns at driving the trap, and days when they stood and listened to the strange new music coming from America via England.
[11]

At the time the young Giffords were growing up, neither they, nor the grown-ups of their Ascendancy world, were aware of the first, faint signs of the weakening of the fabric of their society. They still held the jobs and offices, the privileges and status, much of the best land and all the great merchant houses. Those read like a roll call of the Victorian caste: Arnotts, Pims, Boyers, Kellets, Todd-Burns, Switzers, Brown and Thomas, Knowles, Eason, Elverys, Dockrells, Brookes Thomas, Sibthorpes and Findlaters. They enjoyed a trade monopoly on clothing, furniture, food, books, sports gear and building material. In Guinness' Brewery, a Catholic, no matter how excellent, could not become a No. 1 clerk. When a well-known coal-importing firm became unionised, it was discovered that there were two payrolls for the same work: Protestant employees were paid at a higher rate. Even the milk supply for the entire city was monopolised by Craigies, a Protestant Ascendancy family, except for a few small herds kept here and there.

The class cleft was particularly noticeable in Rathmines and Rathgar: the almost exclusively Protestant neighbours of the Giffords, in their fine, red-brick residences, had such occupations as surgeon, ship's captain, barrister, lieutenant colonel, professor of music and merchant. Their names were Fox, Phillips, Karmel, Stinger, Carleton, Harricks, Wallace, McNaught and Keohler. These were not the names of members of the old, dispossessed clans such as the Whelans, the Reillys, the Dalys and the MacDermotts, who, in fact, lived down the road in Plunkett's Cottages and were listed in the census as gardeners, labourers, charwomen, porters, messengers, a motor man, a packer, a stoker, a dressmaker and a coachman.
[12]
Almost exclusively listed as Catholics, many of them are shown as being illiterate. These two addresses, Palmerstown Road and Plunkett's Cottages, were a microcosm of Ireland. The descendants of the invaders had the power; the descendants of the dispossessed owned little or nothing.

Catholic Emancipation had been granted in 1829, but the slow process of educating Catholics towards upward mobility had only begun during the Giffords' childhood years. Symbolically speaking, the Gifford girls, like other Protestants down the years, eventually stepped outside their comfortable milieu and reached out a hand to the dispossessed, not only in Dublin but throughout the whole of Ireland.

Notes

Eventually the time came when some of the young Giffords were cutting themselves off from Bridget's apron strings and being moved from the nursery to make way for newer arrivals. The games they played had become far more sophisticated than being carried around the nursery in the centre of a tablecloth. Now plays were being written and performed. Gabriel and Ada were the writers and produ-cers of these dramas, and Gabriel later admitted that they gave their sister, Nellie, a number of roles from which she sustained minor cuts and bruises. In one of these plays,
The Vanishing Lady
, Nellie, placed on the top of a wardrobe in a basket, unfortunately fell off. Writing to her in the 1950s, Gabriel asked if she still had the scar where molten lead shot out of a bullet had landed on her foot. There were toy theatres too, constructed by Gabriel, and plays written especially for their cast. These three, Gabriel, Ada and Nellie, near in age, formed a close trio.

From about five years of age the Gifford children were assigned to a tutor, usually a girl of limited education. This lack of education was not important, however, since the tutor's presence was not so much educational as to free the nursery for the newer arrivals, to maintain the human assembly line, as it were, and, most of all, to keep the children occupied and out of their mother's household routine. So long as the tutor was quiet and reasonably well spoken, the children would be left in his or her hands. Once an unfortunate young male student from Trinity College took on the job as holiday work and faced half a dozen scowling youngsters who resented summer lessons. One day, when they were at their most difficult, he put his head in his hands and fled from the room, never to return.

The next stage in the children's early educational development was the choice of an establishment within easy walking distance of Temple Villas where the criterion for suitability was Isabella's assessment of how much the chosen Protestant ladies needed a boost to their limited means. Their whereabouts and availability she discovered at meetings of the Church of Ireland Missionary Society. The charitable nature of the appointment seemed to be paramount, the children's education perceived as an addendum.

The first such ‘school' (they were all small private houses) consisted of the ‘female teacher', her elderly father who had to be constrained in his garden chair with ropes and her alcoholic husband. Nellie described the teacher with compassion in later years as a ‘poverty-stricken, distracted wife' who faced ‘the desperate catastrophe she had to call her life'.
[1]
Her four pupils were allotted a small junk room which contained an old trunk full of travel books; the more popular ones, eagerly perused, were illustrated. The pupils were required to be able to recite biblical texts, but prompting seemed to be acceptable.

Either the grandfather or the husband had served in the British army, and this gave them points, as far as Isabella was concerned. As for the grandfather, he was tied up only when in the garden on fine days, presumably lest he should fall. The children were afraid of him, and he, they admitted later, of them. They did not tease him but stood at the back door looking out fearfully and hoping that the ropes that bound him were sound. There was no point in communicating their fears to their mother; they would have been told that it was all in their imagination.

The next educational experiment, as it might be called, was run by two ladies called ‘the Miss Fitts'. Their house was about ten minutes' walk from Temple Villas, and the younger and more presentable of the two sisters interviewed prospective clients. Her ‘aged' sister (for eight-year-olds this could have been anything from fifty upwards) was responsible for the ‘teaching'. In this academy the children were locked in a room whose windows, overlooking the back garden, had heavy iron bars, leaving them no chance to get away. Their learning paraphernalia consisted of a few exercise books, a hymn book and a spelling book. In winter their room had a small, open fire on which the Miss Fitts occasionally boiled potatoes. When left alone, the children would ‘test' the potatoes with the nibs of their pens. If the ink was not wholesome, at least it must not have been poisonous. There was, admittedly, an attempt at this school to teach ‘writing', but the sad state of the older sister's hand, crippled with arthritis, set wobbly headlines, and, with the heedless cruelty of the young, the children deliberately copied the wobbles. Ernest was often kept in for making such copies. The Gifford children were taught neither history nor arithmetic but were given history and ‘sums' to learn themselves. Often left alone in the locked room, they were unaware of whether their mentors were in or out of the house, although they could frequently hear the mumblings of an unseen man overhead. The end of that educational experience came one day when the snow lay heavily on the ground and the time for them to be released from their prison to make their way home was long overdue. Their mother, becoming anxious, set out to fetch them, and when she saw where they were being taught, that was the end of the Miss Fitts.

Outside of school, entrepreneurial skills began to emerge. The children had no chance, as children have nowadays, of offering to do gardening work or to deliver leaflets. But the human instinct to make money found expression, born of a chance remark made by their father. When he mentioned casually, ‘That might be worth a few pence to old Hickey,' as he handled a book he had finished reading, he opened, to use Nellie's words:

… the door of Aladdin's Cave to us money-starved children. It was a heavenly idea, and so simple. When we had cleared out all the books we thought would not be missed, we turned our energies to other ‘lines of goods' as the advertisements say. Our unpaid accomplices, the servants, thoroughly enjoyed it though ‘Yiz'll be kilt' was their firm conviction. They never gave us away, however, and we kept strictly within the law, never stepping past things quite useless.
[2]

Books considered thus unwanted having dried up, and facing a penniless future, there ensued the adventures of the boots and pheasants' feathers. Under the stairs in Temple Villas the footwear for all the family was housed. Discards were pushed towards the narrow end at the back and, thus ignored, accumulated a veneer of dust and even green mould. One of the young Gifford salespersons spotted an advertisement in a paper by somebody who actually wanted old boots and shoes. Their father sometimes received hampers of fruit or game from his country clients, and the children packed one of those hampers with the cleaned-up relics of abandoned footwear. The tram passed their door, but their entrepreneurial cunning showed itself in their decision to deceive any inquisitive observer as to what might be in the hamper. They stuck a few pheasant feathers into the wickerwork, leaving enough exposed to suggest that their burden contained game. Unfortunately, in those days, largish containers had to be left with the conductor. He was curious about the peculiar angles at which the feathers of these birds were protruding, so he pulled at one, and then another. They both came away far too easily. The young entrepreneurs took their hamper and dismounted at the next stop.

Christmas parties were sometimes given at Temple Villas for the children because Isabella considered that this was part of the required social pattern. One such party was recorded in detail by Nellie, partly because the guests included a little English boy and girl attending one of their schools, whose father was a ‘neat' Englishman who was musically inclined. The Gifford children found their guests ‘harmless', ‘strange' and ‘juiceless'. In Isabella's eyes, however, they were English and therefore beyond reproach. Her people had come to Ireland way back in the seventeenth century but, as far as she was concerned, to be English was a virtue in itself. It is interesting to see that, like their father's puzzlement as to the way English was spoken in England, so too were the children aware of a great gap between their accents and perception of things, and those of the British children. It was the old dilemma of the Anglo-Irish: the Gifford parents were unionists but though the young Giffords had, as yet, no political views, they still felt a distinct apartness from their English guests.

Isabella's flock was so extensive that her invitations were usually limited to children in the immediate neighbourhood. She excelled at preparing party dainties and even employed an entertainer. The piano being out of order on one occasion, she hired a music box with a handle so the children were all rather put out when the aforementioned little English girl, whose name was Nellie Watts, arrived with her violin and a musical score for a piano accompaniment by her father, who obviously intended to stay for the party. The children, who associated the piano with practising scales in a cold drawing room, were delighted with the music box, which required no skill, no respectful silence and no hypocritical applause. Everyone got a chance to turn the handle. It was a great success with all but the English father, who stood silently by. His daughter's violin and music sheets were quietly set aside.

The huge table was laden with food, fine china and a bonbonnière, which, like the cutlery, was solid silver. Isabella used a cookery book for party novelties, due caution being exercised not to disturb the digestions of excited children. One of these surprise dishes was poached egg on toast. It was, in fact, half a peach in a little blancmange, nesting on a bed of Madeira cake. The offended Englishman, perhaps short-sighted, but certainly a square peg in a round hole at a children's party, was at first taken in by the ‘egg' and resented the children's laughter at the success of their mother's culinary ruse. A conjuror wound up the proceedings, and the violin went home with the little violinist, unused. Whatever about the guests, Nellie and her siblings enjoyed the well-planned evening, but Isabella had to pacify Mr Watts, who felt insulted by being offered a false poached egg. This was a new, more relaxed aspect of Isabella's personality.

A little further along the road to maturity came the advent of
The Magazine.
This private endeavour appeared periodically, its editions governed by such eventualities, all unpleasant, as days too wet to go out, or measles, or some other catastrophe keeping them housebound. Once under way, however, even when the sun shone again or the spots vanished, the publication was completed. Its riches were written in old exercise books, and every edition had a new name. Ada was the genius behind their inception, with Gabriel as assistant editor. Only one edition survived into Nellie's middle years, and she describes it as bearing the proud name of
The Barrel Organ.
Isabella had contributed a poem to one edition, and John B. Yeats and his sons were often pursued, when they dropped in for a chat with Frederick Gifford, to contribute ‘stuff'. To the children, stuff was stuff, and they had no way of knowing that these contributions embraced one of Ireland's greatest painters and, many would argue, its greatest poet. These editorial gems contained poems, pictures, short stories, caricatures, ‘jokes' and a serial that picked up the threads in each issue with the curious, unchanging words ‘Now abaht that snake …
'
There were lampoons on neighbours and visiting tradesmen, but never anything like that about the servants; they were family.
The Barrel Organ
, which eventually disappeared, had a sketch of the head and shoulders of an Aran islander wearing a cap and signed by Jack B. Yeats. Yeats wrote the name ‘Mícháil' under it.
[3]
A radio commentator in later years reflected during a programme that John Millington Synge, who went to the Aran Islands on W. B. Yeats' advice, learned Gaelic from an islander called Mícháil. Had she sold this little impromptu sketch, drawn from memory, the world of art would have had another small masterpiece and Nellie some much-needed cash during some of her poorer years.

The sons of Frederick and Isabella, when they had graduated, if such is the word, from the various impecunious ladies' establishments, went on to more conventional academies. A Mrs Harden's Dames School on Ormond Road is mentioned by Gabriel. He refers also to St Andrew's School and seems to have preferred it to the High School, which was then in Harcourt Street, on the site of what is now An Garda Síochána headquarters.

Claude, Gerald Vere and Gabriel are listed in the High School address book. They were among the earliest pupils at the school, which opened in 1870. One of Gerald's classmates was W. B. Yeats.
[4]
Gabriel reflected, in later years, that although he found the Irish Protestant schools ‘slovenly' (he meant, presumably, rather loosely organised) they had distinct advantages over the British system and the Irish Catholic system, both of which ‘moulded' the pupils too much for his liking. Moreover, his Protestant Irish schools did not insist on compulsory games, which was apparently a bonus for him because he wore glasses. In fact, despite the pejorative adjective he used in his correspondence with Nellie, he made a spirited defence of the Anglo-Irish Protestant community which their educational system produced and cited names such as Hamilton, Boyle, Berkeley, Burke and Wellington. What he did not observe, however, was that most Irish Protestant schoolboys in those days were almost guaranteed careers in a commerce which was almost exclusively in the hands of their co-religionists. This was also the case with state offices under the Crown, which were the prerogative of the same elite. The Catholic schools, whose students he saw being ‘moulded', were trying to retrieve their people from the scholastic barrenness of the Penal Laws.

Kate, perhaps because she was the oldest girl, was the only one of the Gifford daughters to receive a full third-level education. She went to Alexandra College, which, in 1880, was the first women's college to prepare its girls for degrees at the Royal University, where she took an Honours BA in languages. The Catholic girls' colleges later followed this development. Kate mixed socially with her peers at venues such as the tennis club, but her sisters, who followed her to Alexandra, never settled happily there. Nellie described it as ‘the gilt-edged Alexandra School in Earlsfort Terrace'.
[5]
It was, in fact, where the gilt-edged Hilton Hotel now stands, opposite what was then the Royal College and which until recently housed some departments of University College, Dublin, and is now the National Concert Hall. The school was, Nellie says, run on ‘the conventional pattern of topnotch schools', but to Nellie and her sisters, Sidney and Ada, it was ‘a seat of misery'.
[6]
Ada did not make a big impression because, Nellie defensively argues, she was not ‘a pretty little thing', but she was, nevertheless, even in adolescence, witty, a cartoonist and a clever storyteller. She was not dressed ‘tastefully', and that did not help on her first day. What's more, being a year apart in age, the sisters were separated, so they were no support for one another. The only subject in which they seemed to shine was poetry, where their father's Gilbertian love of rhyme had been transmitted to them, as well as their mother's poetic prowess.