Tipperary (47 page)

Every summer morning I rose at half past five, dressed, and set out on a walk of the nearest grounds. I walked the walls, inspecting any work in progress, and when a full circuit of the castle had been completed, I then walked through the gardens. Here I encountered a delight every day of my life, with birds, small animals, and fresh growths. When the cleaning of the gardens got under way, the journey became even more delightful, as the gardeners disclosed nooks, some of them containing classical statuary that had been long hidden by overgrowths. They found topiary, in the shapes of birds and triangles and rabbits, and two wonderful circles that led to a small, hitherto overgrown maze.

And when they had begun weeding, and had torn away grass from underfoot, they revealed excellent paths of brick in herringbone patterns, and white gravel, and in one case large round stones that made it feel like walking on cannonballs. I was inclined to think that, of all the work on the place, the garden clearances and renovations gave the greatest pleasure.

After the gardens, I went on a tour of the four sunken fences that border the house at a distance. (Some call a sunken fence a “ha-ha,” and Mother tells me that the name comes from the surprise. A sunken fence consists of a deep trench, one side of which is a vertical wall of stone. This provides excellent fencing but does not obstruct the view, and when one sees it one is inclined to say “Ha-ha!” in delight at the surprise or discovery.) And when I came back from the fourth ha-ha, I walked along the western shore of the lake, onto the graveled path that led to the bridge, and climbed the Laurel Steps (they number fifty and are overhung with laurels) up onto the Terrace. From there I surveyed the entire property, and I could see clear down to the village.

So far, the reconstruction of the outer fabric had taken precedence, with the roofs being the most important. I had teams of men build structures all along the parapets, so that shelters could be raised over existing holes in the slates. When Harney and I got down to the task of finding the best builders, we first sought roofing experts. Without a sound covering there would be no point in beginning interior work. To my surprise, it took only a matter of weeks to secure the worst damage against any kind of weather; this made us very free to consider our next steps.

After breakfast I began to walk each job, usually with Harney, sometimes with April too. As the work went on, I saw April less and less during the day; she moved from one section of the project to another, working alongside craftsmen and laborers, acting as an assistant, hauling, tugging, lifting, asking no concessions for being a woman or the owner.

I saw her with the stonemasons, the carpenters, the men on the roof—she toiled as an equal, and since her first stonemasoning experience, she had learned to cover her hair as tightly as possible. One morning over breakfast, Harney, to whom she spoke a great deal more than she did to me (but I did not invite or encourage much exchange), asked her why she chose the route of, he called it, “hard labor.” As he said, she could be sitting back, the lady of the manor, and watching us all sweat.

April looked at him as though he had said something unutterably stupid.

“This is my life,” she said, a trifle shortly. “This is what I do. I breathe. I eat. I sleep. I do this.” She said it in such a way as to close down all argument.

Later, I reflected upon her words: “This is my life.” What did she mean? Either she had been stating, “
Laboro, ergo sum
”—“I work, therefore I am” or “What I do, I am”—or she had been saying that since she had turned her back on London and won the estate, she had now embraced this as her true existence, where past and present became as one. For this I admired her further.

Usually the tour of the various sectors of work took some hours. I talked to every Master Craftsman, every foreman; I asked them questions, I established their problems, their needs. Of course I was interrupted all the time, typically by new deliveries, many of which proved flawed—either wrong materials, or inadequate to the task, or not at all what we believed we had ordered. Constantly, too, Harney and I dealt with problems among the workers. At the busiest moment of all the work, we had close to three hundred people on the estate, and the hammering and the measuring and the arguing and the whistling and the singing made it a pocket universe unto itself.

In the late afternoons (lunch occurred on the move), I conferred with the Master in charge of each area. Mr. Higgins always provided my first conference. In age, he deserved this, and more than that, he merited it in importance; to him I looked for the securing of the entire property structure, and to him I looked for apprehension of how the job would eventually turn out. He was a small man (I've observed that stonemasons can be a stocky breed) and he said little; he had a nasal speech, and a great shyness—rather than look directly at me, he rolled his eyes upward as he spoke.

At his waist he wore an enormous belt, very wide at the back, which he pulled tight when addressing a significant block of stone. Much of his work had to do with “patching” the walls, where mortar had loosened the joints of the cut-stone blocks—this puzzled him; he put it down to water damage. When he patched, he and his men chiseled out the section minutely and measured the space over and over.

As I first watched this, I became impatient; Harney stayed my tongue. And then, when I inspected the first patch—and at Mr. Higgins's invitation I climbed his ladder to look at close quarters—I could not tell where it began and ended. From the ground it seemed as if the castle wall had never changed; it was almost miraculous.

According to the Irish Georgian Society and the government of the republic, “at the beginning of the nineteenth century, a time synonymous with country house building in Ireland, there were approximately eight to ten thousand landed proprietors in a population of around 5.4 million people. Possibly around one third of these were absentee landlords who resided more or less permanently outside the country. The remainder lived in country mansions, which they had built on their core estates. It is difficult to determine with certainty how many country houses there were in the twenty-six-county area [the modern Republic of Ireland] at this time, but the number certainly ran into thousands.”

Obviously, their standards of construction and decor varied. Not every Irish Great House resembled or excelled its English, Scottish, or European counterparts—but their very existence speaks to a triumph of taste and cultural ambition. And logistics; when Charles O'Brien began to restore Tipperary Castle, at least he had the railway and an improved road network by which goods could be delivered with some safety.

He also had better luck—unlike Lord Cloncurry, who, a century earlier, had been developing his estate of Lyons House, near Dublin. The ship bringing his Italian and Greek masterpieces back to Ireland foundered and sank in Killiney Bay, a few miles from the Irish shore.

To speak of improved amenities, however, might sound like a belittling of Charles's efforts. With no telephone, he had to rely on letters and the word of those supplying him. Therefore, his courage in ordering, sight unseen, and having faith in his suppliers was considerable. Also, he had a time factor; the virtue of patience must have been his greatest requirement.

What interests me over and above the details, however, is the rise of the new Charles O'Brien. I've looked back many times through his text to see whether there's a first appearance of the emerging man. It's difficult to find.

Yes, there is a man of sensitivity in those historical and personal narratives. Yes, there is a man with the capacity to care deeply—not just for a woman with whom he has fallen in love but for his “patients.” And yes, there is a man who takes a profound interest in the world around him. Who else would have bothered to ask two farmers about their love of land—and extract such lyrical responses from them?

But the man who took over this great restoration, who supervised the taste, who hired and fired, who conducted himself as a leader—this is a different creature, long removed from the ham-fisted man at Oscar Wilde's deathbed.

Now we come to the first connection between Charles O'Brien and me.

My father, John Joe Nugent, came from a large family. He was the third of eleven children. As he often explained, in his position he had to fight every step forward, with the older siblings keeping him down and the younger ones trying to push him out of the way. A cheerful man, he liked company, especially men with memories.

When he married my mother, tongues wagged. Of different stock, a Dublin merchant family, her parents believed that she had come down in the world. She married a man without a profession (her father had been a surgeon), and she went to live in a country town.

After the wedding, she and my father made a small but curious pact. In certain arenas of her life she would continue to use her maiden name, Margery Coleman. I never knew the motive behind this. But my mother's aunt, Betty Coleman—who, in the quirks of a large family, was only a year older than my mother—told me once that it had something to do with “your mother wanting to hold on to something of what she came from.”

In many ways my mother did not fit in. Her earliest hobby had been photography—unusual, to say the least, for a girl in Ireland. She had made a study of what was happening in the field abroad. And she had saved to buy herself the best and most appropriate equipment—all of which she had in her possession when she first met my father, on a train from Waterford to Limerick.

The number and weight of the bags in her luggage caught his attention. They fell into conversation. A romance began more or less immediately, and they married within a year. My mother often told me that she would like to have had more than one child but was very happy with the one she had—which is music to a small boy's ears.

One day, when I wasn't yet ten years old, a local man got shot—by accident—on our street. My mother heard the shot and rushed out. The man lay on the pavement, bleeding heavily. He had been taking his gun off his bicycle when it went off. My mother knelt beside him and held his head up until help arrived. The man survived, and later we were told that the act of holding his head up had saved him. The bullet had lodged in his neck.

I marveled at this. Nothing as exciting had ever happened. That night, at bedtime, I asked my mother how she'd known what to do. She told me that “a dear friend” had once been shot in the neck over near Tipperary, and that a man who'd heard the shots came back, and kept her friend alive by raising his head to close the neck wound.

When that—not necessarily conclusive—evidence came back to my mind, I then recollected something else. Long before she died, my mother and I had spent many Sundays, especially in winter, sorting and cataloging—in our amateur way—her huge collection of photographs, which amounted to a minor history of photography in Ireland. Her earliest work had been on glass plates.

As I read Charles's text, I began to recall a series of photographs that she had taken in Tipperary. They showed teams of workmen and craftsmen, all photographed on the same day, at a castle. And then came the clincher, where I married Charles's text to my mother's photography.

She had taken a series of pictures that turned out to have great historic importance. Several years before I was born she had been in Dublin throughout Easter 1916.

As had Joseph Harney, and as had Charles O'Brien—who devotes a long passage of his text to that epic week.

When I first conceived this History, I made clear my awareness that I lived in an important historic period. Indeed, I knew that I was living through several moments of definition; the land agitation gave way to serious land reform, with the Wyndham Act making sure that no farmer need feel forced to be a tenant all his life. Then came the Great War, with its postponement of Home Rule for Ireland, meaning that many young men had gone to die in return for a promise that would now never be kept. In short, I lived in a country where something of importance seemed to happen every day. One day, history came to touch me directly.