Mad Puppetstown – Molly Keane (1931)

My first read for this year’s Read Ireland month was Mad Puppetstown by Molly Keane, it seems I often read Molly Keane for Read Ireland month. I enjoy her books a lot, but I honestly think that this might be my favourite of hers to date. I have quoted quite extensively from the novel – apologies to those who find that tedious – I had marked so many passages, that for me, show the exquisite nature of Keane’s writing.

Mad Puppetstown is a wonderful evocation of an Irish childhood in the early twentieth century, before the First World War. On page one Molly Keane describes the world as it was – as it would have been for her. The novel begins:

“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.
The 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.
You did not trouble to keep your sense of humour ready in the background.
Love mattered.
Manners mattered.
Children mattered.
Places and dependents mattered too.
Money bought much more.
People drove about in dog-carts and pony traps.
Invitations were issued to tea.
Tea parties mattered too.
Women who powdered their faces were fast
Women who painted them – bad.
Hunting, low wages, feather boas, nipped in habit coats, curly bowlers, bunches of violets, black furs and purple hats were much in vogue.
A book called Three Weeks was both enjoyed and abused.
Champagne was a frequent drink. Women never drank whisky.”

Like poetry, I wanted to learn those lines and recite them. I was captivated immediately both by the world I found myself in, and Molly Keane’s glorious voice – her writing is always fabulous – somehow, I had forgotten how good she is.

Into what Molly Keane calls ‘those full-blooded’ days young Easter Chevington is born and raised. She is eight as the novel opens, living in her father’s country house of Mad Puppetstown with her father, Great-Aunt Dicksie, her two adored boy cousins Evelyn and Basil and their beautiful widowed mother Aunt Brenda. The children live a charmed life – running free, and slightly wild in the Irish countryside, surrounding the house. It is a way of life Molly Keane describes to absolute perfection. Easter and the boys brought up with the ways of horses, learning to shoot woodcock and snipe in the woods. Playing with Patsy; the boot boy, teasing the Peacocks in Aunt Dicksie’s garden – and tormenting the life out of O’Regan who works in the garden. It’s a joy of a childhood,with dogs, ponies and a riot of adventures.

“Out of the schoolroom window at Puppetstown you looked across flat water – where Giles, the swan, sat in immemorial calm and the dogs hunted water rats and moorhens – over the Long Acres, where young blood horses moved in a stately decorum of beauty, away to the chill breasts of the mountains yielding themselves only to the slow rapture of a sunset; thin and stark at any other time and remote as the grey women of the Sidhie that men had seen about their secret lakes. Mandoran, Mooncoin, and the Black Stair were these mountains’ lovely names and whatever was afar and unknown and remote unto themselves in the children, was joined and linked to the dispassionate ecstasy of these mountains.”

The family suffer the loss of Easter’s father during the war but are otherwise unaffected by a conflict Evelyn and Basil are thankfully too young for. Aunt Brenda – who always meant to re-marry but never did get around to it – enjoys the company of a British army Captain from the local garrison. Meanwhile, Ireland is in the grip of another war, a war forgotten by those back in England. Patsy the boot boy receives whispered orders through the window late at night – which he dare not ignore.

“Meetings by night: oaths to the darkened land sworn, signed and forgotten: drillings and revolver practice and always the romantic cup of dizzy words…”

Throughout the dark hills surrounding Mad Puppetstown men gather to whisper threat and plot – and so when violence touches the family at Mad Puppetstown, Aunt Brenda hurriedly takes her sons and niece away to England. Great-Aunt Dicksie will not be moved, refusing to surrender her family home – she bolts the doors, turns the ponies loose and settles down to living alone with just Patsy, in a house that starts to decay around her. Aunt Dicksie becomes more and more eccentric, so very lonely at first – the echoes of her family are in the very walls around her – she learns in time to live alone. Taking refuge in her garden, spending far too much of the little money she has on seeds and bulbs for her garden, she takes to wearing the old clothes from the wardrobes upstairs rather than buy new ones.

In England the cousins are educated and groomed for British society, it’s a world away from Mad Puppetstown. As Evelyn falls in love with an English society beauty, Basil starts to yearn for Ireland, and Mad Puppetstown. Easter turns twenty-one and her father’s house now belongs to her, so she and Basil decide to run away – heading back to Aunt Dicksie and the home of their childhood. However, neither Aunt Dicksie nor the house is as they remember.

I simply loved every bit of this novel – compulsively evocative – and for those who have been irritated by such things in other novels – rather less of the huntin’, fishin’, and shootin’ that was such a part of Molly Keane’s own life.