Memoir:The cover of Eleven Houses, Christopher Fitz-Simon's sharp-eyed, sensitive memoir, shows the author aged 10 in Dunfanaghy, Co Donegal. The book tells us how he got there on a family holiday in 1944, writes Nicholas Grene
Starting from Monaghan, they had to change trains at Portadown and again at Strabane before catching the Lough Swilly bus from Letterkenny. The trip took seven hours and, because it involved crossing in and out of Northern Ireland, entailed four separate Customs searches.
Not the most comfortable or direct of journeys. But what will strike a contemporary Irish reader is the very existence of all those trains: the Great Northern Railway; the Strabane and Letterkenny Light Railway; the County Donegal Joint Committee narrow-gauge line. Even by the time of my childhood in 1950s Ireland they were almost all gone.
There is plenty of travel in Eleven Houses, by train, by bus, by bicycle - only occasionally by car, for these were the Emergency years of petrol rationing. Christopher's father, the unusually named Manners Fitz-Simon, was an Irish career officer in the British Army who was most of the time posted abroad, originally in India, then in Palestine, and during the war in North Africa; Christopher and his brother, with or without their mother, were moved about from one to another of the multiple residences of the book's title. Sometimes they stayed with relatives in Monaghan or Dublin, sometimes as paying guests at Annaghmakerrig, then still the home of the Guthries, or with Hubert and Peggy Butler in Maidenhall, Co Kilkenny.
The picture the memoir builds up is of an intriguingly variegated Ireland.
The Fitz-Simon parents themselves came from different backgrounds. His mother was from a Northern Presbyterian family. Christopher's first Irish home was the thatched cottage of his Great-Aunt Zane - infant pronunciation of Jane - in Smithborough, Co Monaghan, where he was among Loyalist Protestants. But his father was a direct descendant of Daniel O'Connell and his grandparents had been friends of Constance Markiewiecz and turned a blind eye when she hid guns near their house in Sandyford. (Manners remembered the ordeal of being kissed by the rebel Countess who had a bristly moustache.) Christopher was taken to Catholic Mass, Presbyterian service or Church of Ireland Matins, depending on which relatives he was with.
Among the 11 houses there were some big or biggish ones, such as Annaghmakerrig itself or Aviemore in Monaghan town where Christopher lodged with his uncle and aunt Killen. Though the Fitz-Simons were clearly not all that well off, there were always servants, even in the tiny Anchor Lodge Mews, in Newcastle, Co Down, where they lived for a time when Major Fitz-Simon's regiment was moved to Northern Ireland.
On the train journey taking the family from Monaghan to Newcastle, there are telling glimpses of the blitzed streets of Belfast. We are shown Ulster occupied first by the British army - "Why are soldiers always drinking tea?" - and then by the Americans who gulped down quarts of milk instead. Eleven Houses gives us a vivid sense of what it was like to live through the war years, North and South, as one island, however different and divided.
The book is written with an attractively wry grace, an understated ease. There are some splendid set-piece anecdotes, such as the incident when Mrs Fitz-Simon, smuggling candles in her corset from Strabane to relatives in the Free State, is unexpectedly delayed at the Border post, and finds she has to peel the melted candles from her person at journey's end. Great-Aunt Zane is grateful for the re-constituted candles, but does remark on their peculiar shape. Colourful recollected phrases add zest and vigour. The painter doing up his aunt's house in Monaghan admires her attention to detail: "She misses nothin', yon Mrs Killen. She'd see a midge on a mare's arse in Tyrone".
The special skill of the narrative, however, is the detached, observant, child's eye view of people and places. Sam Beckett is to be seen visiting his artistic aunt Peggy, "sitting in a corner of the garden in a deck-chair, peering through his dark-rimmed glasses at a book, or scribbling words on a scrap of paper". The theatre director Tony Guthrie makes for a formidable audience "all six foot six of him, inclined against the marble chimney-piece of the drawing-room" at Annaghmakerrig, as the young Christopher recites the whole 118 lines of Tennyson's The Revenge.
Matching the accomplished plain style of the book's description are the atmospheric black and white drawings by the author of the various houses, one at the head of each chapter. The memoir ends with Christopher leaving his prep-school at the age of 13. We are given little sense of the circumstances that were to lead on to his distinguished career as actor, broadcaster, theatre manager and historian. He portrays himself as a not especially gifted child, with no interest in sports or riding, spottily educated by governesses and temporary sojourns in schools, weak to middling in all academic subjects except English and drawing. These two strengths, however, were to stand him in very good stead in creating for the readers of his memoir, nostalgically but unsentimentally, a rich and now vanished world.
Nicholas Grene is Professor of English Literature at Trinity College, Dublin. His next book, Yeats's Poetic Codes, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2008
Eleven Houses: A Memoir of Childhood By Christopher Fitz-Simon Penguin Ireland, 296pp. €25