Footnotes Read online

  The dog gives a happy bark and skips away, looking to see if I want to play some more. I really don’t. I get out of the bush and turn for home and the dog trots with me, sometimes at my heel, sometimes far behind, or pushing past and loping ahead with eager intent. He has a white-tipped tail and he smiles as he runs, his mouth open, his teeth large and hard and sharp. He’s a beautiful dog – and at one point he disappears and although I continue to fret about ambushes, it turns out he has vanished for good. I miss him.

  Gerald spent several nights not far from here in the Abbey of Strata Florida. He must have been impressed, because ten years later, when he was fighting to become Bishop of St David’s and travelling to and from Rome, he entrusted his precious collection of books to the monks and not long after that they sold them and kept the money. Gerald’s life was full of frustrations and thwarted ambition.

  There’s not much left of the abbey now, but it remains remote and far from the concerns of our hectic world. The carved stone western doorway still stands and low ruined walls trace an outline of the grass-covered great hall. There’s an old farm next to the outer wall (although it looks deserted), and a couple of empty houses, with spiders’ webs in the windows and swifts calling in the eaves. It is nearly dark now. There’s mist in the woods on the surrounding hills and bats in the air. A car crawls past on the tiny dirt road and the driver peers out through the murk. I listen to the sound of his engine as it fades to nothing down the valley. Just to one side of the ruined abbey, next to a dying ash tree, there’s a small country church; and next to that, vanishing into the gloom, is a vast graveyard, still very much in use, many of the tombstones freshly carved, but others of immense age, scoured and featureless lumps of stone drowsing in lichen and moss. Gerald stood here once, although that was long before even one of these ancient stones was planted. He would have been talking to Baldwin, or the abbot, or walking alone, and making his plans, or composing his book, and scheming and plotting and turning over the options on St David’s, or maybe just taking the air and listening to these swifts and thinking about dinner and inhaling the extraordinary freshness of the wild Welsh night and

  Jesus

  he was a handsome man

  and what i want to know is

  how do you like your blue-eyed boy

  Mister Death

  ‌Six

  ‘Lorf? – Why, I Thought I Should ’a Died’

  ‘You were a nice woman to write with.’

  Letter from Martin Ross

  to Edith Somerville

  Edith Somerville & Violet ‘Martin’ Ross, Welshpool to Chester, June 1893

  After leaving the Abbey of Strata Florida, Gerald and Baldwin turned their horses north towards the rest of Wales, most of it at that time still under the control of Welsh princes, following the coast and keeping the mountains of Snowdonia to their right. There is a lake, Gerald tells us, hidden among these crags, where only one-eyed fish live; and another on which a floating island drifts and blows; but Gerald himself skirted around the edge of the mountains and was not able to witness any of these wonders, although he did share the story of the giant eagle that lands on the highest peak every Thursday, far above the world of man, and waits with bloodthirsty intent for the epoch-shaping battle that Merlin had prophesied would take place on that particular day of the week, even if, maddeningly, he neglected to give us the month or the year. You could have set your week’s calendar by it.

  I don’t know if the prophecy had been fulfilled by 1893, but over 700 years after Gerald had ridden this way the Irish writers Edith Œ. Somerville and Violet Martin (aka Martin Ross) were struggling up the slopes of Snowdon, silently cursing their guide and keeping an eye out for eagles. They were gathering material for a series of travel articles and a short book, which would be published two years later as Beggars on Horseback: A Riding Tour in North Wales.

  They had started their journey a few days earlier in the town of Welshpool, staying at the Royal Oak Inn, ‘with its thick walls and polished floors, and its associations of the old coaching days’, while they negotiated with shopkeepers for suitable horses. The Royal Oak still stands stolidly at the foot of the high street, but I’m sorry to say that the gas lamp on a stone pedestal that once stood just outside in the road has been removed to make room for buses and cars. There’s a fading photo of the thing in the corridor of the Royal Oak and, true to Somerville and Ross’s description, it looks like it was the one and only focus of Welshpool life, attracting the town’s loafers who ‘turned to look after us like sunflowers to the sun’. Perhaps visitors were a rarity in those days. Or maybe it was the unfamiliar sight of two young women travelling together, encumbered by safety skirts, riding habits and wide-brimmed hats, their hired horses reeling under over-stuffed holdalls, shying and zig-zagging down the high street, before galloping off to ‘the unknown and the unpronounceable’.

  Despite the skittishness of their new horses, Somerville and Ross were both entirely at home in the saddle. They rode side-saddle (that is, with both legs arranged down the same side of the horse), a feat of great strength and control that also required the rider to sit for hours with her shoulders up and straight and the bottom half of her body twisted awkwardly to one side. Not surprisingly, in later years Somerville was plagued by sciatica in her right leg, although the pain was never enough to keep her off a horse for long. Ross didn’t survive to suffer the effects of side-saddle riding, although the tumour that killed her, everyone believed, was caused by a terrible fall she had taken seventeen years before her death. Ross was short-sighted, which made every outing a peril (on the day she fell she seems to have ridden into a fence without seeing it), but – like Somerville – she was fearless.

  Anyway, I’m going to call them Edith and Martin, the latter because when Violet Martin first met Edith Somerville in Drishane, Castletownshend, Edith’s family home in south-west Ireland, there were at least two other Violets lurking among the numerous cousins and aunts, so she was dubbed ‘Martin’ to avoid confusion. And then, when they published their first book together, ‘Martin’ evolved into ‘Martin Ross’, in honour of her family home in Galway. The fact that she published her books under a masculine name (and Edith used the androgynous E. Œ. Somerville) must have helped when their bestselling Some Experiences of an Irish R.M. appeared. Many people read these tales of hunting and happy anarchy, narrated by a genial, put-upon, cigar-loving, irredeemably innocent English major working as a resident magistrate in rural Ireland, and assumed that the authors were men. Edith and Martin never hid their identities – they were well known in their lifetimes – but the publishers were probably pleased. In those days it was believed that men were less likely to read books written by women. In certain categories, I mean. Hunting, for example. And humour. It wouldn’t happen now.

  Edith was thirty-five years old in June 1893 and Martin was thirty-one. They were cousins, like almost every other member of the Anglo-Irish gentility, but they hadn’t met until the year 1886, when Edith was twenty-six and Martin twenty-three. Edith wasn’t even that interested in Martin at their first meeting. She was older, popular, busy, with a wild beauty, and she may have felt her life was already replete with five younger brothers and a sister, an eccentric mother, cousins and friends. Anyway, she was about to head off to Paris to study art. It took some effort from the more introverted Martin to get her attention, but Martin knew what she wanted. Edith ignored the first letter, sent to her in Paris in March 1886, as you can tell from the somewhat querulous tone in the second, posted on 19 May:

  My dear Edith, You know and you should blush to know that there is no reason in the world why I should write to you – but there are people to whom it interests one to write irrespective of their bad qualities and behaviour … you are a ‘popular girl’ – a sort that I have always abhorred – so bear in mind that theoretically you are in the highest degree offensive to me.

  Edith came back from Paris later that year, she and Martin met again, and before long they were vi
siting each other as often as they could, even though Martin had her own eccentric mother to attend and her own family’s crumbling big house to patch and worry over. But they exchanged dozens of long letters, written deep into the night, and one time they met, in 1887, it was Edith who suggested that they should try writing a book together. They mockingly called it ‘The Shocker’, presumably in an attempt to deflect the hilarity of Edith’s hyperactive family, who couldn’t see why anyone would want to write a book, rather than play croquet, or row in the bay, or come hunting, or photograph each other in outlandish fancy dress. Much is made of the poverty of the Anglo-Irish gentry at this time, as Ireland changed around them, living in their big old decaying houses, unable to collect any rent once the tenants stopped paying, and it’s true that several families lost their homes, or left them to rot – but, still, it doesn’t sound so bad. If you want to know what it was like, you only have to read Somerville and Ross.

  Edith and Martin were writing to make money (and who but a fool would do anything else?), because money, for them and every other unmarried Victorian woman, meant a modicum of independence. And when ‘The Shocker’ – real title An Irish Cousin – came out in 1889 they were rewarded with an instant commercial and a critical hit (‘It is very much like a dream – that I should sit down and write about a flourishing critique of the Shocker in the Athenaeum – but there it is, in black and white,’ purred Martin in a letter to Edith in September). Edith’s mother was still wringing her hands (it was all so agonizingly outré), but the rest of her family was pleased, even if they persisted in treating the whole thing as a joke. None of them seem to have recognized the deep seriousness of Edith and Martin’s ambition. Or understood how high they could fly. Perhaps we’ve all been misled by their modesty and talent for self-ridicule. Or even their sense of proportion.

  There are other reasons. For one thing, they lived the life of a class that was under siege for its unwarranted privilege, even if, by 1890, much of that privilege and wealth was draining away, and they would insist on writing about dogs and horses and hunting and the curious marriage rituals of their tribe, albeit with the most acute and all-knowing eye. And they quoted, or transcribed, the speech of their servants and the local country folk, along with the rising middle classes and their own kin, which many (especially in the early days of the Irish Republic) found insufferably patronizing, however accurately it was done, or suspected that they were being laughed at, even though they never were – it was always with. And later, when Martin died, there was the awkward fact that Edith carried on writing for both of them, communicating with Martin through a spirit medium and refusing to remove Martin’s name from the title page of any of their books … not even the ones that were written long after Martin’s death.

  Martin’s mother was impressed by An Irish Cousin. So was her son, Robert, who had shirked his responsibilities as the lord of Ross House to become a successful composer of light verse in London, playing up his Irishness for the stage. He was the author of the very popular Ballyhooly.

  All together now:

  Whililoo, hi ho, let us all enlist you know,

  For their ructions and their elements they charm me;

  We don’t care what we ate, if we drink our whisky nate,

  In the Ballyhooly Blue Ribbon Army.

  In 1893 this nonsense was rocking them in the aisles in London, while Edith and Martin were working when they could on their one truly great novel, The Real Charlotte (the three, even greater, Irish R.M. books are collections of interconnected short stories). They had also discovered a demand for travel journalism, and had been making trips to Denmark and Connemara (on a cart). Their Welsh jaunt fitted into this series: there was money to be made and they could escape the financial anxieties of home for a while.

  Edith and Martin left Welshpool abruptly (‘there are no suburbs’), breezing along ‘the white road stretching westward into the unknown’. The sun blazed from a cloudless sky, the hedgerows were soft and drowsy with dog roses and elder bushes of every shade of pink and cream, the honeysuckle flowered in thickets and intoxicating perfumes filled the air:

  The thought of them takes the pen from the paper in indolent remembrance of that first ride between the Montgomery hedgerows, while yet the horse-flies had not discovered us, and while the hold-alls lay trim and deceptive in the straps that bound them to the saddles.

  And that, if you don’t know them, is a typical Somerville and Ross moment. Beauty and laughter, and any pride of achievement, are punctured with a gleeful smile. The straps on their holdalls burst, strewing ridiculous and superfluous objects across the road, the horseflies descended in droves to devour them and their horses, ‘and the reign of suffering that ceased not till our journey’s end was fairly inaugurated’.

  I think Martin wrote most of Beggars on Horseback, while Edith sketched and painted and added her comments later. But it is hard to know, and as Edith said, the one doing the writing was usually the one who just happened to be holding the pen. Their separate thoughts, styles and impulses blended together, she wrote, like blue and yellow paints creating a perfect green. If they were apart, they would exchange episodes and ideas by post; if together, they would talk and write wherever they could. The incorrigibly modest Edith always claimed Martin was the greater writer, but there is only a slight falling off in the works she produced after Martin’s death (and Edith would simply have seen this as further proof that Martin was still involved).

  Edith was perhaps less filtered – she churned with creative energy – Martin more controlled; but both of them shared an extravagant delight in the absurdity of their fellow humans, and they raised each other to heights it is hard to imagine they would have reached on their own. Writing gave them another reason to be together, chuckling over the latest gothic sayings of the Somerville cook, wrestling with the intricacies of plot and character … but, to say it again, their laughter and self-deprecation masked serious intent. If Edith’s later books lacked some of the soaring joy of their earlier, collaborative work (but none of the dark humour), well who’s to wonder at that? ‘My share of the world’, she wrote to her brother Jack in an anguish of grief after Martin’s death, ‘has gone with Martin, and nothing can ever make that better. No one but ourselves can ever know what we were to each other.’

  Martin put it very simply in a letter to Edith in 1889: ‘Writing together is – to me at least – one of the greatest pleasures I have. To write with you doubles the triumph and enjoyment having first halved the trouble and anxiety.’

  On their first night out of Welshpool, Edith and Martin stayed at the old Cann Office Inn, where they lingered late in the gardens among ‘the peace of a hundred sleeping roses’ and Martin ‘caught one of my very finest colds in my head’. Riding on the next day under a hot and cloudless sky they decided that the landscape was very like Connemara: no trees, many sheep, and the hills ‘big and mild, with the magnanimous curves of the brows of an elephant’. You can see it all today (with a garnish of tarmac and telegraph poles); we are closer to Martin and Edith than they ever were to Gerald and his medieval wanderings, despite the horses. Most striking of all is the ease with which they ride through Wales, where women travellers rarely ventured alone, encountering (like Gerald) ‘a politeness incredible, almost unnerving’. They have no fear of outlaws or wolves. The inns are trim and well-tended. And perhaps (it’s just a thought) they expected less than we do today: they drifted through Mallwyd, where they would have stayed at the inn except a ‘weird, pig-styish smell pervaded the village’, and immediately found and checked into a popular tourist haunt, the Griffith Arms Hotel; whereas I am pulled into a lay-by, 125 hectic years later, drumming my fingers and gnashing my teeth, while my smartphone gropes to locate an elusive network signal, so I can check if the Griffith Arms still exists and then scroll through its star ratings and user comments on TripAdvisor.

  In the event, Edith and Martin galloped away from the Griffith Arms, vowing never to return (there was a sharp disag
reement over the bill), and they struggled on in sweltering heat towards ‘Dolgelly’, these days firmly re-established as the town of Dolgellau. Edith had fashioned herself a hat out of bracken and a painting rag, to keep the horseflies at bay, and Martin was delighting in calling it a puggaree. The English language was always too small for them. The first book they ever worked on together, not for publication, was a dictionary of ‘Buddh’, a glossary of the invented language used by Edith’s family when there was no adequate word in English available. Words like ‘Gub (n.) – A vague pursuing horror, the embodiment of the terror of darkness.’ Or ‘White-eye (n.) – A significant and chilling glance calculated to awake the fatuous to a sense of their folly.’

  The language of their books, including the ones produced by Edith alone, heaves and seethes with its own energy. They had both learned and spoke Gaelic, which may have been a factor. Irish writers (perhaps all non-English writers – and Edith for one never described herself as English) often loosen the bounds of the imposed language. You can hear it in Wales, too, a dissatisfaction with what’s on offer, along with a lip-smacking relish of what’s possible. The rolling momentum of the sentences. ‘… sloeblack, slow, black …’ I grew up in a family that used a large number of made-up words. Perhaps that’s normal, but I wonder if it was the influence of my Scots-Irish grandmother from Donegal, seeping down through my mother and aunts. Even when they weren’t making up words, Edith and Martin would put commonplace ones in surprising places. They are such evocative nature writers – present, watchful, joyous – but wary of overflowing into vapid effusiveness. Edith was no fan of sub-Romantic gushings and had no time at all for the then (and now) fashionable nature-mystic Richard Jefferies: all that ‘rot about Nature’ she snaps in a letter to Martin in 1891.