Writers

Molly Keane

Mad Puppetstown (1931) County Carlow

'For houses can be as jealous as lovers and mothers, and under provocation more bitter than either. Nor do houses ever forget. What are ghosts but the remembrances they shelter?'

TIMELINE

Lifepath        
Molly Keane was born in County Kildare in 1904. Her father Walter Skrine, originally from Somerset England, and her mother, known as the ‘Poetess of the Glens’  and wrote under the name of Moira O’Neill,  had three sons and one other daughter.  They settled in County Waterford and became known as a serious hunting, fishing and church going family. Despite their position as rural gentry, Keane recalled a somewhat frugal early existence:

'Life was much more stringent then, there was no such thing as hot water or central heating. There were fires but they went out and I remember the deadly cold of the school room and the blue cold coming off the wall. I never remember a fire in my father’s library or in the dining room, although my father was perhaps a bit more warmth conscious' (1).

Her family’s lifestyle revolved around social functions connected with the annual hunting season: ‘even in riding the children were simply expected by their father to be able to ride well and stylishly, as though through some genetic inheritance’(2).  Keane’s brothers and sister were educated in England, but she attended school briefly in Dublin, and was tutored as a child by her mother and a governess. Her family’s estate was destroyed during the Irish War of Independence. Keane recalled: 

'It was a god-awful shock for my father who was a belligerent little Englishman. Everyone had warned him, had said you must come back and live in England and bring the children there, but he said  “I’d rather be shot in Ireland than live in England.”  He wouldn’t leave when they came to burn down the house' (3) .          

Keane,  who wrote under the name M. J. Farrell, described her chosen genre as ‘seventy thousand words through which the cry of hounds reverberates continuously’ (3) .  Under the anonymity of her nom de plume, Keane was able to covertly observe the Anglo-Irish society in which she was raised: ‘for a woman to read a book, let alone write one was viewed with alarm, I would have been banned from every respectable house in County Carlow’ (4). 

She took her pseudonym – M.J. Farrell,  from a public house in  County Wexford,  that she spied one day,  on the way home from a local fox hunt. Keane recalled: 'I didn’t want to be recognised as a writer. I only wanted to be good in the hunting field and to be popular at hunt balls. I was so starved of fun when I was young, and loved so much fun ' (5) . 

She married Robert ‘Bobby’ Lumley Keane, a gentleman farmer from Co. Waterford in 1938, lived at Belleville in the Blackwater Valley.  She subsequently published a novel Two Days in Aragon (1942), and witnessed the London debut of two plays, Ducks and Drakes (1942) and Treasure Hunt (1949). Her daughters Sally and Virginia were born in 1940 and 1945.  Shortly after in 1946, her husband Robert Keane died in London, due to complications from an operation. Keane remained in the Blackwater Valley until 1952 when she moved with her daughters to Ardmore, on the Waterford Coast.  

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As an adolescent, Keane was invited to stay at an  estate named Woodruff located in the heart of  ‘fox and hound’ country in County Tipperary, owned by Major Perry, an established figure hunting circles:

'I almost lived there for six of seven years, mostly in the winter months, when I hunted three days a week on horses largely provided by Woodroof [. . . ] There were so many horses in those days of the late twenties and early thirties that if you were lightweight and a moderately useful rider your fun was endless'. (1) 

In addition to providing her a respite from a dreary home life, Woodroof exposed the sheltered Keane to a more worldly and sophisticated social milieu than the conservative social circle frequented by her parents:

‘My mother disapproved of Woodroof –she was frightened by the idea of it. She belonged to the nineteenth century and didn’t change [. . . ] There was a woman there who’d been divorced and some what she would have called dirty talk which I didn’t know a thing about, but I soon found out and was rather good at. My mother was alarmingly prudish and old-fashioned in those ways. In fact everyone there was wonderfully kind to me’ (2).

Though the setting of Mad Puppetstown (1931) resembles the Carlow-Wexford borderlands, Keane's experience of Woodruff informed her novel's narrative, which is anchored in the space of a landed estate sitting as an island in a foreign landscape. The story commences in 1908,  and we find Puppetstown estate at the height of its glory with Major Chevington,  Easter’s father,  lord of the manor house. The extended family living in the estate is composed of Easter’s two cousins Evelyn and Basil, their widowed mother, Aunt Brenda, and Aunt Dicksie, a spinster.  As Keane opens her novel she provides a detailed glimpse of the social conventions, styles and manners that comprised elements of  Ascendancy  culture preceding the start of  the first world war: 

Then:-
   They said: “You naughty man!” They wore hair nets and tortoise-shell combs.       
It was more than fast to accept presents from men.
   You bought a blood four-year-old up to weight for £60.
   There was no wire.
   They talked about “the ladies” and “motor cars.” “By George!” they said, but never used Americanisms; such were not known.
   Their top boots were shorter and their spurs were worn lower down on the heel.
   You loved with passion. (3)

Life at the estate revolves around the pursuits of the landed Protestant gentry; hunting, riding and trips to the horse racing at Punchestown: ‘Puppetstown was not often dull. It was one of the houses where Sunday Afternoon is an institution, and these are seldom dull houses, because on Sunday afternoons people feel that they have been enough bored for one day, and try to go where they will be enlivened of their depression.’ (4)  In August 1914, Major Chevington is called from his estate to serve  king, country and empire: ‘The Great War had been fought for a year and more. Easter’s father was with the South Irish Horse’ (5)  The glorious facade of the house begins to crack with the news that Major Chevington has been killed in France:

All the servants at Puppetstown looked back on the days of the Major as on a golden age –a splendid time the like of which they would never see equalled again. They would tell tales of fox-hunting and racing; of days when all the quality would be gathered from the country round to ride schools over the fences at Puppetstown; of the winners the Major had bred and trained and ridden they would tell; of the wine in the cellars, the horse in the stables, the foxes in the coverts, and the notable runs they provided.(6)

With the death of   Major Chevington, the estate becomes a space of  haunted memory and  after Easter 1916,  Puppetstown begins to weather ' the little bitter, forgotten war in Ireland,’ (7) with a detached and weary resignation.  Keane drew upon the landscapes of  Munster and Leinster with their  range of hills and mountains,  to convey the atmosphere of fear and distrust which coloured the social landscape of the period:

These were the times when the fastness of Mandoran, Mooncoin and the Black Stair saw secrecy and strivings and plottings, and blood was shed quietly and wickedly, and one half of the young men of Ireland were held in a pitiless lust of cruelty, and the other half in a wanton spell of fear [. . . ] All was silence and covert looks. A word spoken and carried again could quite well mean death. (8)

Puppetstown  during the war years, becomes an isolated and vulnerable fortress, rooted in a landscape of violence and fear: ‘They were strange days for the gentry of Ireland these, strange, silent, dangerous days. The morning’s paper (and if the post was late it was because a bridge had been blown up the night before or the mail raided on its way from Dublin) might tell of a murder of a friend; or the burning of a house that had lately been like Puppetstown, careless in its wide hospitality; or, more rarely, of the capture of rebels or a successful raiding for arms.’(9) Though Puppetstown is abandoned during the war, with its childhood occupants fleeing to England and the Continent, the pull of memory and place on its heirs is a strong one.  As  the cousins Easter and Basil come of age, they find themselves out of place in British society,“ ‘England,’ Basil said (such an awful word, and his eyes were narrow flames); ‘she’s too crowded. We want a littler, wilder sort of place. We’re half-English, both of us, Easter, but we haven’t got the settled, stable drop of blood that goes down with the English. Easter, the thing is we don’t quite see the same jokes. Isn’t this a mad way to talk? My dear, don’t think me an ass, but you do laugh in the wrong places for them.’(10) Easter and the cousins decide to return to Ireland, but their arrival to Saorstát Éireann finds them  just as disoriented.  They travel to Westcommon and observe that: ‘old women in donkey carts and children playing in the dust had as good a right to the road as any motorist.’(11)  The cousins arrive at their childhood estate and are shocked at the facade that greets them:

He stopped the car before the gates of Puppetstown, and indeed they were fast locked; while through the flat windows they could see the lodge was dark as a bottle in its emptiness. The geraniums that had once been kept in green window boxes had reverted to a wild small hardiness, and their occasional flowers glimmered like lighted candlewicks against the window panes   [. . . ] the house, informed with a certain eldritch air of abiding cunning and distrust, waited for their coming. There was no smoke from any chimney and the long lines of blinded windows were like so many inturned, indifferent eyes. (12)

Entering into the front hall of   the estate, they come upon the surprised figure of Aunt Dicksie, who is suspicious of their sudden return: ‘She smelt, Easter thought, just like an old bush. How did she dare to be so unlike the graceful, useful aunt they remembered?  And was it necessary for her to wear men’s laced and hooked boots, and a long purple skirt that very nearly had a bustle?’(13)  The estate’s new servants, are not as docile and deferential as  in  Puppetstown’s  ‘Golden Years.’  Responding to a command by Easter, the new cook spits back: ‘ “God knows ye quit the place like rats when the Republic boys was in the sway. Two more years,” she prophesied, “and ye’ll be undther the grass and yer toes cocked in the grave” (she cocked her two thumbs in grisly pantomime), “and not another word more about ye –God damn ye!” (14) Aunt Dicksie believes that her niece and nephew  have arrived to usurp her, while Easter and Basil, wonder why  they ever decided to return to the dilapidated estate. However as Puppetstown undergoes a gradual renovation,  the three family members come to a realisation, which only Basil is able to fully articulate:

Well quite frankly I know you’ll say I’m mad if I tell you. But I’m so queer in my mind about houses and places. I know things. For instance people belong to houses – not the other way about –either living people or dead. (15)

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