Carbery / Sandford Mary Carbery's West Cork Journals

1. Auflage 1998
ISBN: 978-1-84351-302-5
Verlag: The Lilliput Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 158 Seiten

This is the remarkable journal of an Englishwoman in her early thirties abroad in Ireland, recently widowed and sole mistress of the vast neo-medieval Castle Freke overlooking a remote headland in west Cork, where she raised her young family in the company of servants, dependants and occasional visitors. Reflective and sensitive, Mary Carbery was deeply attuned to the spirit of place and to the people she lived amongst in Ross Carbery, studying Irish and taking note of local speech, folklife and customs. This journal of 1898 to 1901, previously unpublished, is an intimate record of one woman's growing attachment to an alien countryside and its inhabitants, bringing them vividly to life with the eye of a naturalist and the ear of a writer. The editor, Jeremy Sandford, describes his grandmother's life before and after the period of journal, and the fate of the Carbery family at a time of seismic political and social change. His commentary encompasses the terrible fire of 1910, and the rebuilding of the castle; the disaffection of her eldest son John, and 10th Lord Carbery - a daredevil aeronaut who sold Castle Freke in 1919 and joined the 'Happy Valley' set in Kenya; and Mary's own wanderings, writings and gentle decline at Eye Manor in the Welsh border country. A singular work, appearing in the centenary year of its inception, Mary Carbery's West Cork Journal will take its place among the minor classics of Ireland's Literary Revival.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Carbery, Mary

Sandford, Jeremy

Leseproben

INTRODUCTION

WHEN MY GRANDMOTHER, as a young woman over a hundred years ago, married Algernon, the 9th Lord Carbery, he took her to his neo-medieval castle on the south-west seaboard of County Cork.

His family claimed descent from Elystan Glodrydd, Prince of Fferlys, and the name of the castle was Castle Freke. Mary Carbery went out to West Cork from England unsuspecting that she would be so overwhelmed by its beauty. But at once she fell for it entirely.

Of her first days and her great happiness there she has left little record. But as a boy I used to sit with her at my parents’ home while she described the early days to me. She used to say that since she had left the castle she’d been a wanderer all her life. She consoled herself in her latter days by writing books. But her heart rested still in the past. Although it wasn’t until much later that I learnt the whole story, even then, in my mind, a fairytale quality attached itself to the castle.

Grandmother’s happiness was short-lived. A few years after their marriage Algernon began to sicken with consumption. Within a painfully short time he was dead. My grandmother, then in her early thirties, was left as sole mistress of this many-towered place on its hilly promontory above Ounahincha Bay, and of its many acres of woodland, moor and marsh, and of the “holy” lake of Kilkerran. Offshore the sea was studded with the islands, mostly desolate but some inhabited, still known as “Carbery’s Hundred Islands”.

A few years back I visited Castle Freke, and I found it every bit as marvellous as she’d described it. Here was the little market town of Ross Carbery, with its brightly painted houses, many of them pubs, and the grey streets that seemed too wide for them. Here was the sea tearing at the Long Strand, with the tall Atlantic waters breaking over it in foam, here the mantling woods, the sandhills and the bogs, the long drive skirting the grey marsh. And then, amidst deep woods, on a sudden eminence, with its Wagnerian terraces falling from it southward and westward towards the sea, and its many towers standing up against the sky, the castle, more beautiful than anything I could have dreamed.

As I drew nearer I saw that the face of the castle was blank, its towers shattered, and its windows empty. But this did not diminish its grandeur. Still it stood up, as romantic a sight as I had ever seen.

At the West Lodge I found someone waiting for me. It was a resident of the village, whose father had worked for my grandmother, and who himself later became steward of the ruined estate.

Knocked – knocked – ah sir, all knocked. I’ll tell YOU now, if ’twas up today, wouldn’t be allowed to do it. Ah sir, and now if you walk with me yonder, you can see it. There sir stood the castle. And there were the doors of cedar and pillars all of marble. I’ll tell you now. Yonder the bedroom of her Ladyship, and there the boudoir with the great view of the ocean. And from here you can see well nigh all the Carbery lands and demesne, the bog and the woodland, and pasture, all knocked now, all gone back.

She was far younger than you sir when she was mistress of it all. And here after her Lord had died she lived alone … I have heard that her family desired her to return to England. But she did not leave.

What were the feelings of this young woman in her castle amidst the bogs and woodland, with her husband’s ashes buried beneath the headland where she was to erect a huge cross by the sea? From other villagers I heard other stories; how she would ride endlessly the empty countryside. I thought I could fancy something of her strange solitude. Later, in the attic of Eye Manor in Herefordshire, Mary Carbery’s final home, I unexpectedly came upon her journal.

MARY CARBERY was not the first woman to write of the joys and tribulations of running that ill-fated estate. In the seventeenth century, then called Rathbarry, it had formed much of the backdrop for the diaries of Elizabeth Freke (1641–1714), sub-titled “Some Few Remembrances of my Misfortuns which have attended me in my unhappy life since I were marryed: whc was November the 14, 1671”; the diaries were edited by Mary and published in Cork in 1913. Freke, later Evans-Freke, was the family name of the Carberys. Elizabeth was another young Englishwoman, who came out as an Irishman’s bride in 1676, returning eventually in 1696; Rathbarry Castle had been bought by Captain Arthur Freke, her uncle, from Lord Barrymore, son-in-law of Richard Boyle, 1st Earl of Cork, who had “founded” Clonakilty in 1605 and settled it with a hundred Protestant English families.

Other writers too have celebrated this beautiful area of West Cork and have acquainted us with that lost world in which, as Gifford Lewis writes in her introduction to The Selected Letters of Somerville and Ross, “it is eventually borne in upon the reader that in the Anglo-Irish ‘ascendancy’ of the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth was an enormous confidence trick, shored up by faithful servants and good horsemanship”.

“Let us take Carbery and grind its bones to make our bread,” wrote Edith Somerville, Mary’s well-known literary neighbour, to Violet Martin, a.k.a. Martin Ross. The administrative district of Carbery formed the location for Some Experiences of an Irish R.M. and other works of Somerville and Ross. Drishane, Edith Somerville’s family home, was in Castletownshend, a few miles up the coast. She rode with the West Carbery Hunt. One letter tells how her sister, Hildegarde Somerville, went to a dance at Castle Freke in July 1905 and

arrived … this morning at 6.30. She then went to bed … She says it was an excellent dance. Crowds of surplus men, perfect floor, band, supper, champagne – Lady C. had ordered an army of assistant hireling waiters from Cork, & every man of them arrived blind drunk & had to be put to bed instantly! However all went well. H.’s young charges, from Edie Whitla to Loo Loo, got on first rate & had all the dancing they wanted, & H. herself said that it was very good fun. There were some very wild Easterns there – Nevill Penrose heard a man say to the girl of his heart “Blasht yer soul, where were ye hiding that I couldn’t find ye!” But all the decent people were there too; the incredibly kind Mrs Guinness had lent Bock a most lovely dress. Hand painted chiffon and silver spangles, H. says it must have cost about 20 guineas.

Mary’s journal, hitherto unpublished, gives further glimpses into this world when most of these people had little inkling that, within very few years, much of Ireland would be independent of England; or that Castle Freke estate and the employment of the many people who worked there would so soon be a thing of the past.

“IF QUEEN VICTORIA can learn Hindustani then I can learn Irish,” Mary wrote. She became entranced by the customs and history of Ireland.

She had been born in England in 1867 into the Toulmin family who lived in Childwickbury, between St Albans and Harpenden, and later at The Pré, near St Albans. She describes life up to the age of seventeen in her book Happy World, started when she was twelve but not finished until she was living in a cottage at my father’s home in 1941. Her grandfather had made a small fortune with his fleet of merchant ships. Her father preferred a life of worthy leisure with his wife and many children in the country.

Mary’s childhood included visits to local poor or sick, and to prisoners in St Albans Gaol. At one point in she falls sick and apparently nearly dies. “‘You were unconscious, to the world,’ her mother says. ‘You seemed very happy. Now and then you tried to beat time with your hand. I thought you were dying. I thought you were listening to angelic music …’” This experience led Mary to wonder if she had a musical talent. Her sister Connie in her book Happy Memories, describes how she “attended the Royal Academy of Music in London, and later won the silver medal…. At St Albans she helped to found the School of Music, and took a great interest in the Abbey choir-boys, to one of whom she gave piano lessons in The Pré and he went on to become a great organist.”

At the end of Happy World Mary appears to be a little in love with her cousin, Hugh Beaufort. At a garden party he asks her, “‘I suppose you’re too old to come up a tree for a talk? You couldn’t in that frock? What a pity! I want to ask you something. Mary …’

‘You’re wanted, sir, to make up a set,’ said the butler, and off Hugh went, full tilt, with a cloud on his usually sunny face.”

Her sister Connie wrote, “I have heard it said she was ‘the most beautiful girl in Hertfordshire’.” In 1890, at a May Ball in Cambridge, Mary met the man who was to be her husband. In November of that year they were married.

Mary and Algy passed through Folkestone on their honeymoon and later lived for a period in a villa at El Bior, above Algiers, where the climate was thought to be better for Algy’s already failing health. At that time, so we learn from a reminiscence in Mary’s journal, she was expecting her first baby. This...