Unlikely Rebels (6 page)

In her reminiscences, Nellie recalls that there were some really attractive girls at Alexandra but that:

… bone of their bone was the strongest snobbery I have ever come across. It was kneaded into them from their earliest days … They surrounded you the first day asking ‘what's your father?' If he had a profession, then you were accepted and since ours was a lawyer, we passed that hurdle. Not so lucky were the very nicely-dressed children of a fashionable draper of Grafton Street, and others, also drapers, of Georges Street.
[7]

The Lord Lieutenant's children attended the school and were, Nellie recalled, ‘the recipients of the slavish attention of the headmistress'.
[8]
However, when one of the drapers' children indulged in trivial horseplay and was being corrected in front of the other children, a reference was made to ‘little shopkeepers' children', with an added comment that such was all you could expect from them. The next day their mother told the headmistress what she thought of such denigration and withdrew her children from the school.

Even worse was Nellie's description of the ‘Clergymen's Daughters' School'. In retrospect, their treatment angered Nellie more than that of the drapers' daughters, perhaps because of her maternal grandfather, the Rev. Robert Nathaniel Burton. She observed that they came from warm, rural backgrounds but that after a few months at this offshoot of Alexandra College they showed an obvious deterioration in their appearance. Their grooming worsened, and chapped hands told of an unsuitable diet or poor heating, or both. They were accommodated in a large grey house next to the school, paid for by some form of subsidy. Even their food and the way it was served was demeaning:

Their luncheon consisted of thick chunks of white bakers loaf. This was thrown in an open laundry basket and dumped in the hall. The children came and just took a piece and went to the playground to eat it, as other children displayed dainties beside them. I always felt sorry for them and noted that they herded together looking shabbily dressed and unloved.
[9]

It might be thought that Nellie and Ada took a rather subjective, sour view of this educational experience, but Sidney, who came after them, is equally graphic and condemnatory. She described scathingly the very moulding that Gabriel abhorred:

There the children were not educated at all – they were just processed so as to manufacture English children of the upper classes. You were trained to look down upon the people of Ireland and all other countries as ‘natives'. Every language but English was ‘a jargon' and so you spoke all foreign languages with a Mayfair accent to show how much you held them in contempt … History was ‘a rubber stamp' whose chief or only content was lists of English monarchs, along with their battles, conquests, dates of birth and dates of death. As for Irish history – whenever I hear anyone saying ‘Who Fears to Speak of '98?' I feel that a great many of our generation could have answered that question by saying ‘Every single teacher in the school where I was taught.
'
It was a well-kept secret in my school that we lived in Ireland, or had any history of our own at all.
[10]

A particularly unpleasant aspect of the college for Sidney was the snobbery of both staff and pupils. She reiterates what Nellie also despised. On her first day she was subjected to the customary interrogation by her classmates to gauge her admissibility to their elite companionship. There were three determining criteria: her father's profession, where she lived and where she spent her holidays. The legal profession and Temple Villas passed muster. Greystones was suitably select and suggested no lack of wealth, which would have been the kiss of death, socially speaking. Pulling down the blinds and retreating to the back of the house would have merited a very low grade with these strict social judges. The final requirement of the inquisition was to describe one's coat of arms. Having vaulted the other hurdles, Sidney went along with this ‘test', while despising it. She would not be patronised. Deciding that ‘coat of arms' probably meant ‘family crest', she described an embossed design on the doors of a safe in her father's office. ‘Ours is a lion and a unicorn,' she said. Other past pupils have spoken of this aspect of Alexandra, but not Kate, perhaps because she was more scholarly than her sisters.

Nellie was removed from Alexandra College in her early teens and promoted within the household to a rank equivalent to Junior Assistant Housekeeper, given such tasks as supervising the larder and helping to host both her mother's formal ‘at homes' and her father's much less formal entertainment of his evening guests. There were three pantries at Temple Villas: one off the scullery for the servants, one for the family's food (for which Nellie possessed the key) and one for the fine china and cut glass.

One of Nellie's duties was to ‘cut the rashers'. Each morning, she laid the side of bacon, skin side down, on the table to carve out the ribs and slices. These rashers were then given to Essie, the cook. Nellie also had to make the coffee, called ‘drip' coffee – and it was slow to prepare. Ground coffee was packed into a strainer in the lid of the coffee pot. Boiling water was then poured onto the coffee, and it was left standing on the great kitchen range to keep it warm. She also made the butter pats and graduated into cake-making and desserts. She loved the friendly atmosphere in the kitchen and happily, for the time being, settled into her post, the purpose of which seemed to be to lighten Essie's load.

Nellie ruefully reflected over the years that she was taken from school sooner than the others because she was considered to have less ability. The remembered remark of one of the servants, possibly trying to echo Isabella, was ‘Miss Nellie, you're very dull of apprehension.'
[11]
It rankled. Nellie argued that she gave her attention only to what attracted her, and that approach does not, admittedly, lead to a rounded education. There were certainly no sighs from her when she said goodbye to Alexandra as she had found its class consciousness particularly unacceptable and recalled that the students were not so much taught there as allotted material to learn themselves.

Nellie has left us a detailed description of her mother's afternoon receptions. The drawing room was locked except on visiting days and held the grandest furnishings of the house. The Gifford children had rarely, if ever, been inside the sanctum of the drawing room until their teenage years. The missionaries of the Church of Ireland, where the Giffords had their pew, brought back from their missions beautiful treasures of fine workmanship, carved and painted figurines, which stood on the mantelpiece and on a small table inside the door. The treasured ornaments had been bought by Isabella at missionary sales, and the mantelpiece and table containing them were dusted only by Nellie.

There was a silver salver in the hall on which callers placed their visiting cards. On these were embossed their names and addresses and, in a lower corner, the hours and days on which
they
would be ‘at home' – usually 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. An order would have been sent up to the nursery forbidding ‘games' during these hours and asking that the children be kept quiet. The receptions were held twice a month in winter but less often in summer. Bridget kept the nursery as quiet as possible on these occasions. The children could not see the hall from the high landing, but they could hear the knocks on the door and knew that the maid was dressed up for the occasion in black, with a white cap, apron and cuffs. Each caller, almost all matrons with grown-up, or growing-up, offspring, were representatives of their families. Their own visiting card was carried in a neat, often valuable, card case. They also deposited a separate card for each grown-up member of their family.

The guests knew the protocol. They stayed just long enough, as a rule, to sip a cup of tea, with a small slice of cake or a scone. The conversation had to do with their private affairs, mostly about their children and especially about their young sons. The room in which they chatted was a display area, swept and cleaned by the servants after their departure for the next visiting day and then locked.

Nellie's other duty was to hand round tea to the guests, a task, she argued, not as simple as it sounded. Victorian dresses covered even the instep, and these heavy, flowing skirts had to be negotiated carefully. A minute cup of tea was brought to the visitor, and she was offered the options of cream and lump sugar, the latter supplied with a pair of tongs. On a second trip the choice of cake or scone was made.

The guests were usually dressed in dolmans, short, padded capes which reached below the waist and were decorated with jet beads. There was a slit on each side for the arms. A de rigueur bonnet was perched on top of the head, held by narrow ribbons and festooned with a veil, through which Nellie was often kissed. She was not expected to converse with the guests unless spoken to. However, she did hear snippets of conversation which obviously intrigued her, and one, which she found appalling, helped to shape her attitude to life. A visitor was describing where her teenage son had been drafted with his regiment: ‘It's called The White Man's Grave.
'
To Nellie, the woman seemed to say this with a smirk, as if she were describing a trip to the circus. Nellie knew the lad, because he had been at school with one of her brothers. She remembered him as pleasant, socially easy, a singer of Percy French's songs. He was tall and well built, with just a little of the shyness of youth. Why, she thought, should a young lad just finished school have to face death in some outlandish place? He did, in fact, find his death in service, but even before that Nellie resolved that, if ever she could, she would prevent such a fate in a far-off land for her young contemporaries. She was realistic enough, however, to realise her relative powerlessness to change things.

Other similar conversations irked her. Everyone seemed to have someone at war. Some of the boys saw getting away from the High School, St Andrew's and the other boys' schools as an adventure. Such schools were supplying likely crops of recruits for the officer class. One particular description of training especially nauseated her. The training yard, she was told, was flooded with blood – or what looked like blood – to condition the young men to war.

A cousin returned from the Boer War regaled them with war stories in a conversational way. His family was not poor, but neither were they very well off, and this, rather than any empirical zeal, was often the reason why young men enlisted. Nellie found it difficult to accept his descriptions of cold-blooded deeds, including the brutal killing of defenceless people. She was particularly horrified at the killing of an old woman at her home: she had not been taught at Alexandra College that, just as you cannot make omelettes without cracking eggs, so you do not build an empire without cracking heads. Tudor and Cromwellian savagery in Ireland had not been on the school curriculum. Nellie knew, however, that this young man was telling the truth. He had been given orders, and those orders could not be questioned. Nellie made a vow that no one would ever make her stand idly by if someone's home, or their life, was threatened.

In a much lighter vein were the visits of the Yeats family to Frederick Gifford. John B. Yeats had been a barrister but enjoyed little success and instead explored his artistic gifts. He took a studio on the South Circular Road, and Temple Villas was a halfway house between the studio and the Yeats' residence in Dundrum. They visited frequently; sometimes John B. was on his own and sometimes he was accompanied by one of his sons, Jack or William, or by both of them. They were entertained in the dining room and, though this room was not as precious as Isabella's drawing room, nevertheless the number of the children allowed to fraternise with these visitors was controlled.

Nellie paints a cosy scene: the two senior men are smoking pipes. There is a warm coal fire and a decanter of whiskey on the table. Because it is winter, she has brought lemon and boiling water to make ‘hot toddy'. She puts a spoon in each of the big cut-glass tumblers so that the hot water will not crack the crystal, and she has provided scones and small cakes. The lawyer and the artist have both law and art in common. They swap memories of legal incidents. Frederick rises to fill his guests' glasses, and Willie wanders over to the sideboard to take some grapes. Nellie, meanwhile, waits for her chance to ask Jack for a contribution to the magazine produced by the young Giffords. He never refuses. But she gets more than that for her culinary care of them. She is about to learn the art of back-scratching and that corruption lurks everywhere: as well as their magazine, the accomplished Giffords also ran the family Bedlam Sketching Club and invited the Yeats visitors to judge their competitions. Nellie's unique approach to this activity, given that she had no talent, was to cover her blank paper with pencil, then smudging it all over with her thumb to produce large areas of differing greys, finally taking a rubber to create curved shapes here and there; the resulting whirls of grey and white she would call
Sunset on the Lake
or something equally vague. She knew she was the least accomplished artist in the family. Why, then, was she awarded a prize by these, her talented judges? Sultana scones and hot toddy are the answer. Her brothers and sisters, fellow competitors in the Bedlam Sketching Club, withdrew, and it collapsed. They could sketch, they said, but they could not bake. When Sidney Gifford met John B. Yeats years afterwards in New York where he had settled, he enquired after ‘the cook'. She thought at first he meant Essie, but it turned out that he was still remembering Nellie and her scones.
[12]

Sidney also recalled her father's visitors and remembered John B. Yeats as a brilliant conversationalist, with charm and kindliness lighting up the flow of words in his pleasant speaking voice. She remembered too his absent-mindedness, thinking he was in his own house and stuffing keys left lying about into his pockets.
[13]
Frederick must have missed this agreeable companionship when John B. went to America in 1908.