The Other Irish Travellers Storyville

How does a whole community know when it's time to just go away?

That their faces don't fit?

That they are not wanted?

When my father and his brothers and sisters were young,

here in County Mayo in the West of Ireland,

the world they belonged to was vanishing.

But not everyone agreed to vanish with it.

I asked them how they saw themselves but even as children,

they each had a different story.

My loyalties were all absolutely 100% for England.

My country wasn't really Ireland, you see.

We were rather like the steam packet company.

Our mother would put British and Irish as nationality in guest books.

That was her answer whenever she had to declare it.

I was denounced once for rebel talk

and asked defiantly by my mother, "Have you no loyalty?" And I said,

"Yes, I have loyalty but loyalty to Ireland!"

Can you read that?

Can you see it, Ted?

My loyalties were all to England but I know that I'm Irish.

You were different anyway because you were a Protestant.

Is that the eight there?

That's the eight, yes.

Yes, that's perfect, 1718.

You can easily see it now.

'These are my streets.

'Suburban London is where I grew up and it's probably where I belong.'

'But as a child I dreamt I was Irish.

'I didn't want to live in an endless English suburb.

'I was named after Celtic warriors and I wanted to have my father's

'vivid Irish childhood.'

'Though this is where he lives now,

'he'd prefer you thought of him as a man of the fields and bogs.'

-Hi, darling.

-Ready?

'But I began to sense that there was another side to our history.

'In spite of my Irish name, we were the bad guys in the Irish storybook.

'We were the offensive toffs.'

Ireland had got rid of people like us -

landed Protestants who spoke with English accents.

As my father was growing up, one by one,

the Anglo-Irish families were being ejected.

It was a polite version of ethnic cleansing.

My aunts and uncles went back with me to the West of Ireland

to tell me about their childhood in the 1930s.

My father is a city of London computer boffin. He is 83.

It was a very comfortable life, really.

The only thing we didn't have was a car and a telephone

and electric light.

Look at the poor old gate lodge falling down.

Losing its plaster all over the place.

My Uncle Richard is a poet.

Ireland and its bitter history has been his subject.

When we entered those gates,

it was like an embrace.

Possessive and jealous by turns.

An intense surge

of excitement and joy.

My cousins are the only one-time Anglo-Irish family

still around here farming their own land.

We looked down this great green cathedral.

We were still holding a fort,

a kind of outpost of the British Empire.

A kind of forlorn, last-survivor feeling.

Surrounded by people who were different.

When I first came to Milford aged seven I was told that

Ancient Irish Princes married their demesnes -

that's the house and land.

I wondered if my father had wanted

to marry the house when he was young.

Here we are, the grand old entrance.

-The Rangoon prints.

-Yes.

Richard gave the house its own voice -

the voice of the Anglo-Irish -

full of dread, in his poem about his own birth upstairs in the house.

The house speaks as Richard is emerging from his mother.

'I'd been expecting death by absentee owner's decay

'or fire from a rebel match.

'Too many old relations I'd seen die in the same bedroom.

'Made me scared to watch.

'And then your birth cry came

'piercing through wall behind wall.

'The sun transfigured all of us.'

The first relation to live in the house was an English soldier.

The Irish rebelled in 1641

and Britain's New Model Army came to re-conquer the Catholic colony

for Britain and for Protestants.

It was the best fighting force in Europe. Led by Oliver Cromwell,

it crushed all opposition swiftly and ruthlessly.

But to secure long-term control in the decades that followed,

officers were settled around the country.

My ancestor identified the land,

claimed it under the Adventurer's Act, and set up home

over 300 years ago, in 1691.

-Hi, Chris, hi, Richard, how are you?

-Hello.

My Aunt Mary arrived a few hours before her brothers.

She is the eldest of the children to grow up in the house.

She became an artist.

'Once an imperial garrison drank here to a king.

'Now the toast is republican.'

There he is! Who do you think that is, Chris?

Robert Miller, who acquired Milford, don't you think?

But there was doubt raised in the 19th century about that.

The first Robert Miller was a cornet.

-He was only a cornet.

-In the cavalry.

A cornet was as junior as you could be, really.

-I thought he was a quartermaster general.

-Yeah.

That's how he came to have amassed something of a fortune.

Well, I think he obtained it because it was a wild part of the country

and it was very easy to acquire an estate.

Well, he certainly landed on his feet.

The life of the Irish gentry involved a lot of hunting,

shooting and fishing

and quite often killing each other in duels.

With Kitchener To Khartum. Hm.

When Ireland got independence from Britain in 1921,

my great grandfather, Tom Ormsby,

like seven generations of his family before him,

was a retired British army officer, being the gentleman

with his wife Lucy at Milford.

A year later a civil war started.

The Ormsbys waited at home while the news spread of Anglo-Irish houses

everywhere being torched by the IRA.

I asked a neighbour, Francis Cunnorne,

about the family in the civil war.

Famously, Anglo-Irishmen spent life getting drunk and riding horses.

But Good Tom, as my great grandfather was known,

was extremely pious.

But when his daughter Betty

fell madly in love with a real Irishman, William Murphy,

it was hard to forget 300 years of history.

At least the boy was a Protestant - but not the type with acres, he was

the type whose family had converted a hundred or so years earlier.

My father had come up in the world through education.

He'd passed this very, very stiff exam which covered

the whole of the British Empire.

William, my grandfather, went to Ireland's Protestant university,

Trinity College Dublin, and got into the British Colonial Service.

He lived in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka,

enjoying the life the Anglo-Irish ascendency

had aspired to for centuries.

He didn't need to dwell on his own background.

He didn't talk about his family at all

because he had married into landed gentry.

As a family we were snobbish socially.

We were the Ormsby Bowen Millers and our father was

the mayor of Colombo and so on, so we needn't be ashamed of being

Murphy, even if it was the commonest name in Ireland

and three pubs out of four had Edward Murphy or Mary Murphy

written above the door.

We were the Lindsay Murphys.

Our mother wanted Billy to hyphenate his name.

I think her aunts made her feel like this, that

Murphy was a very common name and couldn't Billy change it?

Common was code for Catholic.

Billy Murphy was a Catholic name.

In Ireland's permeable sort of apartheid,

with luck and application, converts too could prosper in

the English system, just like the proper Anglo-Irish.

Like Arthur Wellesley,

the First Duke of Wellington

and Richard Bourke, Viceroy of India.

However, the ancestral Prots didn't have Irish accents,

which William did.

With the wrong name and accent you were never allowed to forget it.

My mother's aunts were very blue-blooded.

They didn't like the idea of their dear little niece meeting

a man called Murphy on the street.

A man whose name couldn't be found in any of the books.

The books being Debrett's Peerage or Burke's Landed Gentry of Ireland.

But the aunts weren't giving out the jobs in the Empire.

William was preoccupied with creating naval bases in the Pacific

and my grandmother was thrilled to discover that, as the mayor's wife,

she had power

She built a school and a hospital.

They had five children.

Daddy told us that it was

so well ruled that it would probably last for a thousand years whereas

the Roman Empire had collapsed

after about five or six hundred due to its corruption.

While William ruled, Betty got an MBE

and the children played on the officer's beach with their nannies.

But the idyll was short-lived for colonial children.

I didn't want to leave Ceylon but my parents said it was time we went

because in those days, when you reached the age of nine,

you were supposed to get out of Ceylon or you'd die

or get a disease or die or something if you were white.

The belief of the civil service of the Empire was that it was very

bad for children after approaching puberty and they must be sent home.

The boys must be sent to boarding school to be properly educated

so they could grow up to rule the world when our father retired

and the girls must be got out of that climate

before they reach puberty too soon.

So when Mary was nine and my father was seven

they were sent back to live with their grandparents in Ireland.

Their grandfather Good Tom was now a rector.

Their grandmother Lucy collected folklore and had artistic ambitions.

Granny let me run quite wild.

For instance, I didn't wear any underwear.

I just pulled on my shorts and a shirt and a jersey.

-Nobody supervised us at all.

-One day Granny came to me and said,

"I'm sorry, Chris, but I've got a letter from your mother.

"You're going to have to wear underpants!"

And I was scandalised and I said, "What for?" And she said,

"Your mother insists and I'm afraid I've got to do it."

Their grandmother Lucy had little regard for discipline.

Granny's side, they were in the wilds of Connemara.

Artistic and mischievous.

Full of romance, as she called it.

As Richard said, "In the lake of our heart we were islands where

"wild asses galloped in the wind."

This was the Ireland I wanted to be part of when I was a child.

She was rather irresponsible, in a way.

She encouraged people to go against whatever it was you were

supposed to be doing, you know.

Their grandmother Lucy was swept up in the ideas of the poet Yeats

and romantic Ireland.

Connemara, where she came from, symbolised all it stood for -

the place where Ireland could unite around the Celtic myths

and everyone could be poets instead of warriors.

The Protestants like Yeats and Synge had dreamt a future for them all

and more than anything, Lucy wanted the children to be part of it.

So a battle for the soul of the family took place within

the marriage of the children's grandmother and grandfather.

He was an unromantic Ormsby.

The Ormsbys were all hard-headed soldiers

with not an ounce of romance.

I don't think it was an extremely happy marriage

as they were very different.

Hello!

Hello, Mary, how are you today?

Nice to see your dogs.

As a former colonel he valued discipline rather highly.

But Granny was encouraging us in practical jokes

such as making papier mache turds

which we would then place on the stair carpet

where Grandfather would spot it going up the stairs

and goggle over it with his monocle and say,

"Lucy! Lucy! One of your dogs!"

Not very helpful really. I hated it

because I adored my mother and

I knew I wouldn't see either parent for two years.

Just Christopher and me.

'My own darling and lost, precious Mumsy, I don't want Gran to see that

'I have been crying, so I have taken this letter upstairs with me.

'I shall miss you in bed tonight but I shall bring your photo

'and I have your surprise to look forward to.

'I hope you don't get malaria.

'Kiss, kiss, kiss. Hug, hug, hug.

'Your own Mary.'

The winter was a particularly wet one.

Lo and behold,

the ceilings in all the old houses started falling down.

I actually thought, "Why can't we have a ceiling fall down?"

I saw a place where I thought

the ceiling looked a bit cracked and wonky

so I got a great big pole and I jiggled it

and I jiggled away and a great, big chunk came down.

'The schoolroom ceiling fell in!

'Poor Neno was there, but he wasn't hurt.

'John Welsh said the drawing room ceiling would fall down too,

'and the study and Grandfather's bedroom.

'Do come home soon.'

'Dearest Betty, things here have been very upset

'and your mother has been worrying herself greatly.

'Due to the loss on Milford, I have insufficient funds to meet

'the overhead charges.

'And as the dogs were not well

'and the ceiling fell down it is very difficult to know what to say

'or to keep off the subject of dogs, ceilings, or finance.

'It is very unfortunate how everything has gone wrong

'just at this time.'

Everything was indeed going wrong.

There was a threat to the house itself.

In 1933 the new leader Eamon de Valera had been swept to power,

promising to strip the underused Anglo-Irish estates

of their remaining land.

Milford had received a Compulsory Purchase Order.

The house would be left with nothing, not even the home farm.

The government was intent on righting ancient wrongs

and was going to turn the tables on the old Protestant Ascendancy...

Whether they like it or not, it becomes law over their heads.

..which had grabbed all land from their ancestors.

Grandfather went up to Dublin in a panic at the idea that

Milford was going to be nationalised.

The estate was no longer a rich man's establishment.

The Land Commission had already whittled it down

from 17,000 acres to under 500.

But Tom Ormsby wanted to keep the home farm in the family.

His appeal argued that he would farm his gentleman's demesne with

all the vigour of any other farmer, providing food for Ireland

and jobs on the land.

It worked.

Only half of the home farm went

and the family set out to exploit

the remaining 220 acres of useable land.

He wanted to farm and try and make it pay,

which it had never done in the past.

And the Ormsbys did nothing for generation after

generation except go into the army

and draw income from their landed property in the west of Ireland.

There had always been, an income.

Do it yourself farming wasn't going to be easy.

Most Anglo-Irish looked at their options

and decided to take their chances in England.

He works terribly hard.

And they are the only people in Mayo now of the old places

because everyone else has gone.

Hollymount went when Bloomfield went, I think.

And the Killdays across the way and then there was Hollymount house.

They're all gone completely now. It's so sad.

Just as everyone else was leaving,

Betty realised, with the situation as it was,

she had to come back from Ceylon.

She arrived with her three youngest children

and settled the family in Milford's East Wing.

She sank all of William's savings into fixing it up.

Financially, it was a very bad move

because he didn't even own the house.

That was her decision for her own wishes.

It was a derelict ancestral demesne house miles from anywhere

without even a motorcar.

Betty knew that Milford would follow the male line.

Her brother would inherit

and the money they had put in could never be recouped.

For the Murphys, the commitment was irrevocable.

Milford was always this magical Shangri La in the background

that we all aspired to go back to and felt we had sprung from.

It was a demesne house, you see.

We were somebody.

My grandmother was very alert to how much class mattered.

The move to Milford would ensure her children became ladies and gents,

as she put it, which was easily worth all the money they had.

William remained, alone in Ceylon.

Liz was four-years-old when they all arrived.

The first time I saw Milford,

I walked in the front door and there were rabbits laid in braces

all the way from the front door to the bottom of the stairs

on both sides of the hall because my grandfather had been shooting.

The place was always overrun with rabbits,

so things were always being killed.

Edward was the fifth child and he was two.

There was 150 acres of woodland for shooting and

the activities of having a good shoot

was more important than farming.

My mother really organised us like a disciplined little regiment.

We had daily tasks and one thing and another.

Bells were rung at different times for classes

and then there were ructions if the four o'clock bell

for starting class after tea,

we were all out in the woods and just didn't appear.

What was your accent?

Oh, absolutely straight whatever the accent was that my parents had,

except when we were playing with country people

and then we could be as Irish as you please.

But not in the house.

So two accents?

We didn't have two accents, we had two "us"s.

We were with the children outside, and then at home

we were just how our parents wanted us to be, without accents.

I mean, after all, there you were as a two-year-old toddler

and I had just been born.

Standing with your bucket and spade in the pleasure ground saying,

-ENGLISH ACCENT:

-Bucket...

-IRISH ACCENT:

-Bucket...

unable to understand which was the right name

-for the toy you had in your hand.

-Well, that's true.

And you came back from the Joyce's and said to daddy,

"I'm tired, God help me."

I've never heard that.

It has always been instilled in us

that we should remember that

we are gentlemen and we should behave like gentlemen.

And they were called Master Christopher, Master Richard,

Miss Mary, Miss Elizabeth and Master Edward,

so you called them that.

Chris and I did not feel happy being called Master but, from up above,

they were corrected if they were caught not calling us Master.

Many Anglo-Irish didn't allow their children

to see their Irish neighbours at all.

I wasn't encouraged to have friends

among the townspeople when I was a child.

My mother was very dubious

and she said, "Are you sure, are they clean?"

I can remember her saying, you know,

"Be careful when you accept a drink or something.

"Just make sure that the glass has been washed."

Yes, well, we played with the Catholics,

they were the most fun we had with the country children.

There was John and there was Willie

and there was Kathleen, Nancy and Joe and Barbara

and my eldest brother was reared with my granny.

My Mum would go out and open the gate

and you'd go out and open that and you'd stand there and just wave.

'Barefoot, a child skips from my heart

'to touch the wrought, obsequious latch of lip service,

'taking you in-between double gates

'to reach beyond the ruts -

'your mother's peerless place.'

Your father's actual job was what?

He worked as a labourer in the big house and he worked very hard.

He had to work on a Sunday as well.

And the money wasn't much in those days, you know?

We had our own turf and everything like that

and our own cow and all that

and we used to make the churning and have our own butter and vegetables.

So we were very happy there.

And the rosary was said every night.

You were not allowed to go out or go to bed

without the rosary being said.

The poor girls got paid nothing.

I mean, Kathleen got paid £36 a year...

..for working 12 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Kathleen was the parlour maid,

dressed up in a black and white apron and all that. Oh, yeah.

We had cats and one of the cats spewed on the bed or something

and the cat got severely beaten for spewing on the bed

and so the wretched maid that beat the cat,

we chased her round the garden with sticks.

If you look at it in the context of what was happening in England,

it wasn't quite as ghastly as it seems now, us looking back on it.

One wonders how one could have been like that?

How one? We weren't grinding the faces of the poor at Milford.

We had maids who only what?

-They got £12 a year pay.

-£14.

-Half a crown a week.

And they walked up barefoot from their cottages to work for us.

-Yeah.

-Yeah.

-What do you call that?

And they used that loo down there, outside.

-An earth closet.

-Yes.

And what did they get for Christmas?

They got material to make a uniform to wear.

-And if anything disappeared they were accused of stealing.

-Yes.

Awful thieves, they were called.

One did give them one's old clothes and shoes and things.

So kind we were. You know.

There was the great divide between Catholics and Protestants.

Like you would say a black and white wedding is called

a mixed marriage today,

Protestant-Catholic was known as a mixed marriage.

There were rhymes.

Father, Father, I killed a cat

Great sin that, sir Great sin that

Father, Father, a Protestant cat

No sin that, sir. No sin that.

One was in an extraordinary position, really, living at Milford

because although we weren't well off, we were infinitely well off,

better off than everybody else.

You were conscious of the fact that you lived in a house

that your family had lived in since, erm,

the end of the 17th century, and that you were somehow or another

established and you were different anyway because you were a Protestant.

Britain and the Anglo-Irish Protestants were

a fixation for de Valera, the Irish leader,

who at the height of the Depression said,

"Burn everything English except their coal."

And he defaulted on a debt to the British government.

The British retaliated with duties on Irish beef,

and it wasn't long before the economy stalled.

Whoever could get a job elsewhere emigrated.

Those who stayed were so poor some died without ever seeing a doctor.

The children's grandmother Lucy ran a clinic from the kitchen.

There was no district nurse, there was no National Health.

If there was ever an accident in the night or in the day,

a baby fell into the fire, something like that,

they all came round to the house.

Granny, she did a huge amount of nursing,

but we couldn't come if there was anything infectious.

And people constantly died, children did,

because there was so little medicine.

Up at the top of this tree was a place where you could sit down

and you could look over the pigeon park, the swallow park,

the deer park, the rest of the wood

and all these huge fields that make up present-day Milford.

I would sit there and think, "This is just a magical place,"

the sunlit parkland all around.

It was at home, it was everything.

The lime avenue and the bumblebees,

and the primrose woods and the bluebell woods and the bog.

It was, it was paradise.

We were quite rough children.

Irish boys were much rougher than the English boys.

It was a totally new experience for me when I went there.

I was always quite glad to get away

because I was always the one who was sort of scapegoat.

We found, if you rolled down the bank in a black car tyre,

you could get a terrific kick and feel frightfully sick and dizzy.

We particularly enjoyed doing it to visiting children.

It was all very strange, all very foreign to me,

cos I never did that sort of thing at home.

One day, Christopher set off with a magnifying glass

to see what he could do.

It was actually raining at the time.

Flaming now.

It's that tinder at the very top of the seed that goes.

He set fire to the whole bog.

I was a pyromaniac.

After I'd burned it, it stayed, all those old plants

stayed as blackened carcasses for 30 or 40 years.

The fire roared across the land, consuming all the plants

and animals in its path, until it met a drainage ditch,

which saved the house.

I think it was tough for my mother. She couldn't cope.

I had to help her because they were all so wild.

And there were too many children.

Courtney, Kenny's mother, was always shocked

at Mum having five children,

as if she was almost becoming a tinker having five children.

My grandmother tried to create order.

She helped her parents, held prayers and played the piano every morning.

But she couldn't stop the children fighting

or Christopher's goat from jumping through the window.

And then the boys went to prep school.

-Was that a relief?

-Yeah!

Mummy was of the impression

that girls should be brought up at home with governesses.

And boys?

Oh, they must go to the best schools

and the money was to be spent on their schooling.

My father always had a chip on his shoulder

that as an old boy of Tipperary Grammar School,

he didn't have the connections and the pull

and the class and the standing

of any of his colleagues in the Civil Service,

who were all English public school boys

and he didn't want his sons to suffer this disadvantage

of being Irish school boys.

We wouldn't be cold-shouldered by the English toffs

for being Irish bumpkins like he'd felt.

They chose Canterbury Cathedral Choir School because along with

a religious education, it offered scholarships to its choristers.

Even so, William spent half of what he earned

on public schools for his boys.

Everyone did it, to stop the drift into Irishness.

The difference!

It utterly changes the future course of a life.

I always, particularly at school, missed Ireland.

I used to take a sod of turf in the study in Canterbury,

and make the smell fill the room and I would breathe it,

and sigh with nostalgia.

-It was a strange thing.

-Yeah.

This business...this pretence of going backwards and forwards,

and being British in a country that wasn't England.

It was very confusing, I think.

I think the situation would have been better if the Anglo-Irish families

had just sent their children to school in Ireland

and considered they were Irish and got on with it, you know.

When Chris borrowed a copy

of Dan Breen's My Fight For Ireland's Freedom,

Mummy confiscated it, found it and was shocked.

-Did she burn it?

-It was traitorous.

-We never had any inkling of that.

-That was a terrible thing to have...

Well, when I became an ardent Irish nationalist my mother said to me,

"Have you no loyalty?"

And I said, "Yes. For Ireland."

That shut her up.

It was difficult being two things.

British and Irish.

You see, I had none of that, there was never any question.

My loyalties were absolutely

100% for the army and England at that stage, you see.

My country wasn't really Ireland, you see, which is very strange.

What did you think your nationality was?

Oh, I was absolutely certain that I was Irish.

But being Irish, one...

didn't have any political sense of being Irish.

One was Irish, you belonged to Ireland

but you owed all your allegiance to England.

I didn't vote in an election until I was about...

28 or something, because I didn't really belong anywhere.

In the background there was always that sort of feeling,

that criticism of Ireland.

Dreadful people, pigs in the parlour,

bog trotters, what have you.

Claiming independence from the Great British Empire!

English condescension was part of life.

If you were called Murphy...

you were the star of jokes, a dimwit, hilarious!

My grandfather William had to represent Britain,

so he pretended he didn't notice.

Meanwhile at home, my father was singing rebel ballads

and re-imagining old battles fought with picks and hoes.

Everyone felt the strain.

Every Sunday we used to sit in that nursery and have to write

a letter to our father and that was a sort of bore of Sunday.

Writing to somebody one only saw only once in a blue moon.

"My darling son, everyday I go for a walk on the Galle Face

"and it is beautifully fresh on the seafront,

"but I often wish you and Richard were with me.

"Are you really thinking of going in for my kind of work?

"It is a very hard thing to do, at first, at any rate,

"and I was very lonely when I first came to Ceylon.

"Now I am lonely again, because you are all at home.

"Your own Dad."

Well, the fact was it wasn't a very grand house, was it?

They lived in a kind of a... well, like the Murphys were.

I used to think,

"My God, are we ever going to get to the end of this avenue?"

It went on and on, and there was that house sitting down,

with no view, surrounded by trees and everything was damp and muddy.

It hadn't got a river. It hadn't got a lake.

It hadn't got hunting. It hadn't got good land.

It had a bog which was beautiful, but not at all valuable.

I was very envious of other people's lakes and rivers,

but I loved the place.

We did realise that there was a financial inferiority there

that we would have to make good in our lives, if we were to keep up.

The Brownes of Breaghwy were obviously more than equal

because they had so much money.

And they had big, big hunters.

Our mother hated the subject of money.

She thought money was not nice.

It was the genteel Edwardian young lady in her...

..that wanted to have sufficient money, but not to think about it.

That was not nice, not done.

My great grandmother didn't give money or the lack of it

much thought at all.

Granny was great at making clothes.

She used to make me party dresses

to go to Breaghwy and to go to the Sligos.

Wearing these pink frilly dresses, pink organdie, lovely colour, pink.

She was very good at colour, and they had no end of frills.

But my dear, she never finished anything.

It was all the style, but not the finishing off.

And it was full of pins!

And I was simply terrified it was going to fall to pieces at the party!

It wasn't the sort of thing Betty found at all funny.

She just wanted us to be upper class. She was ambitious.

She'd much rather we'd married ladies and gentlemen than married oiks.

But there were few gentlemen to go round.

No tennis parties, not many luncheons.

"Why would you want to go there?" She used to ask me.

"Everyone's gone."

# Sure a little bit of Heaven fell from out the sky one day

# And nestled in the ocean in a spot so far away

# And when the angels found it Sure it looked so sweet and fair... #

The Protestant gentry were leaving the country.

The Catholic country people were leaving the country.

Fine old buildings everywhere were roofless, covered in ivy.

Ireland in the '30s was somewhat degenerate,

it was going downhill.

# And when they had it finished

# Sure they called it Ireland. #

"We are, as it were, taking the strain..."

When the war started, Betty brought the children back from England,

to be home schooled.

We did listen to the Home Service every day of life...

Christopher! You're supposed to be listening, not yakking.

We must look very reverent.

# We'll meet again Don't know where, don't know when! #

We must remain silent if we're supposed to be listening, Chris!

RADIO: "..has burst the storm of ruthless and unceasing war."

Outside Milford there was no war,

there was only what was called an emergency.

Mummy's idea was that we mustn't think that we were neutral.

We at Milford were imperialists. We supported the war effort.

To Betty's horror, the first bomb of the war was an IRA one,

in London's Oxford Street.

WHIZZING AND EXPLOSIONS

Plenty of people in Ireland seemed pleased that the English

were at last getting their comeuppance,

with German bombs providing the punishment.

In neutral Ireland, the family's problems of loyalty

and allegiance were greater than ever.

Ireland's neutrality was a disgrace to my father and my mother.

We never wanted to identify with the neutrality of Ireland.

Their uncle Jack and all their male cousins

had volunteered and were fighting for the British.

De Valera's priority was self sufficiency.

In the country of sheep and cattle, there wasn't enough food.

My mother said we must grow things, so I grew onions.

I think something awful happened to the crop

because I never, ever remember harvesting the onions.

Bless de Valera and Sean MacEntee

For they gave us black bread and a half ounce of tea.

Granny was a tea-aholic.

A half ounce of tea a week got her nowhere

so she used to gather lime flowers and make lime tea,

but the lime flowers weren't sufficient,

so she went out and cut off great sprays, whole branches,

and cooked them till they were crisp.

Gradually the shortages grew more severe.

The family were thrown back on their own resources,

which to the children seemed like entering

a forgotten world of legend.

To eke out the meagre supplies of oil and candles that we had,

I made rush lights.

But I quite enjoyed the shortages,

being self-sufficient and the idea that we grew our own wheat,

we made our own bread and killed our own pigs and made our own bacon.

We had our own hens. I kept goats.

And I ground the flour for the bread that Kathleen Joyce baked for us.

And I like the fact this was grown at Milford,

was it ground at Milford and it was baked at Milford.

And that we didn't have electricity, cos I thought it was more romantic.

It was terribly lonely in Milford

and the loneliness was part of the poetry of the place.

Romance.

And part of the intensity of the emotion we felt for each other

which, of course, could turn into anger, at very little provocation.

"One year at home under my flagging roof during the war,

"Learning and Love made peace.

"Like a bone setting weaver's warp and woof,

"your heart and mind were shuttled into place."

I realised this had been a blissfully happy time.

CHILDREN SHOUT

In April 1942, the change came.

Everything shifted when their uncle died fighting in the war.

One doesn't know that all sorts of turbulences are going to happen.

That a war's going to come and Uncle Jack is going to get killed and then

six months later, his father dies because he couldn't get over it,

his only son.

Now Lucy and Betty were left at Milford without any men.

I remember grandfather's funeral.

He lay in the house for two or three days

while all the locals came and visited him in the drawing room.

Then he went to Kilmaine on the back of a cart pulled by Freckles,

his favourite horse, the horse that did all his ploughing.

And then Betty heard that my grandfather was being promoted,

but only if she went with him,

and the War Office wouldn't allow the children to go too.

So there was a stark choice to be made.

She left the East Wing, sent the children to boarding schools

in England and abandoned the attempt to root her family in Ireland.

She never lived there again.

The separation, the disappointment

and the turmoil put her in hospital for three months.

But for William, things were looking up.

His promotion led to him succeeding the former King of England,

the Duke of Windsor, as Governor of the Bahamas.

It would be the crowning moment of his career.

He took the whole thing very seriously

because he believed in the monarchy as he believed in God, you know.

There was God and then there was the king.

And then there was the governor.

People who were ambitious brought up their children

to believe in order to get on in the world, you've got to leave Ireland.

There is no future here.

You'd go to seed, it's a poor country, you'd be wasting your time.

Their parents packed their trunks, said their farewells

and embarked on a convoy across the Atlantic.

Christopher and Richard were back at Canterbury.

In April 1942, Archbishop Temple was enthroned at Canterbury.

Our parents heard the BBC broadcast with us singing on the ship.

My feeling about the place began to change when our mother had

left it and the East Wing seemed less and less to belong to us.

I did feel the loss.

We had had this wonderful life,

and to be deprived of that was a shock.

I did feel I needed to escape.

I was sitting on those stairs there thinking,

"I wish I could go to art school or university or something.

"I'm not doing anything."

I either had to go and join up in the army or the navy or get married.

-And your mother?

-Oh, couldn't get me married quick enough!

There wasn't any alternative. Grandfather was dead.

My mother was going abroad.

There was no home for the children, there was nothing.

Having got married, I had a home for everybody to come to.

We were sent to school in England.

Mother went off with Father, which was a big blow to my life

because now I was left with no parents.

She put the fun and glory of being a governor's wife first.

She put my father first.

But that was a terribly hard decision for my mother.

Choosing between the lesser of two evils.

How do you decide what to do?

Who are you going to be with? Who do you really owe yourself to?

Your parents, your husband, your children,

and they're all pulling in opposite directions.

She liked service, my mother.

And she wanted to carry on with her good work,

she was an empire builder and she hadn't got a big enough canvas,

or wouldn't have had in Ireland, to work on.

Who do you think that is, Chris?

The daughter of the Galloping Major,

and I taught myself a song from the Blue Lady's Songbook.

And I sang it, it went...

# Hush every breeze Let nothing move

# My Delia sings, sings of love. #

Mary and her second husband looked after the whole family.

She continues painting and exhibits in the North of England,

where she lives near her daughter in Cumbria.

My father restored a 13th century castle

in County Galway, near Milford.

He lived in six different countries and brought up six children.

Aged 70, Richard went to join his daughter in South Africa.

He's now in Sri Lanka, not far from Colombo where he lived as a child.

He's still writing.

At the end of the war, Liz rejoined her parents in Rhodesia,

where her father, now Sir William,

was the Governor-General of the Central African Federation.

She has since then lived in London, Singapore and Switzerland.

Edward also followed his parents to Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe,

and after a lifetime farming there,

has returned with his wife to Ireland,

where they grow and sell flowers.

At Milford, Good Tom's great grandson is still farming the land.

And I live in London, still imagining that I'm Irish.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd