The Shepherd and the Morning Star E-Book

Willie Orr

• Herausgeber: Birlinn
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 263

Beschreibung

The Shepherd and the Morning Star is a remarkable double biography and autobiography. In the course of it the life of the son, Willie Orr, gradually emerges from under the shadow of that of his father, Lawrence Orr (PB), leading Ulster Unionist politician, philanderer and would-be bigamist, who ends his days in disgrace with his career and family in ruins. Rootless and troubled, Willie himself went through various jobs – in the Belfast shipyards, as an actor, as a helper in the Iona Community. He suffered a severe nervous breakdown from which he slowly recovered, finding purpose and fulfilment working as a shepherd for many years and then later retraining as a teacher. In between times he wrote as a journalist for the Scotsman and with his wife set up a counselling service for adolescents in Oban. This book is a deeply absorbing and powerful piece of writing, a record of mood and emotional development as much as a detailed chronology. Very funny in parts and with a poet's sensitivity in others, it explores that precarious territory between the public and private lives of politicians. It ends with a glimpse of redemption and healing, a coming to terms with the ghosts of the past.

Leseprobe

THE SHEPHERDAND THEMORNING STAR

Willie Orr was born in 1940 in Northern Ireland. After a public school education, he had a variety of jobs, working for a time in the Belfast shipyards and also as an actor in theatres throughout Ireland. He then moved to Scotland and spent time in the Iona Community, before becoming a shepherd and later a teacher and a counsellor. A prolific writer of newspaper articles, poetry, plays and fiction, his previously published books are Deer Forests, Landlords and Crofters (1982) and Discovering Argyll, Mull and Iona (1990). He now lives near Oban in Argyll.

First published in 2019 by Birlinn Ltd

West Newington House

10 Newington Road

Edinburgh

EH9 1QS

www.birlinn.co.uk

Copyright © Willie Orr, 2019

The right of Willie Orr to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patent Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission of the publishers.

ISBN: 978 1 78027 588 8

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A

Contents

List of Illustrations

Two Conversations

The Shepherd and the Morning Star

Acknowledgements

Illustrations

Herbert Hughes

Frederick Patrick Hughes

Percy Story, Evelyn Story and George Story

PB in 1938

Ulster’s Solemn League and Covenant, signed by William Robert Macaulay Orr in 1912

PB with the Orr family, Reverend William Orr, Jean, Evelyn and Katherine Orr

PB in his regalia as Grand Master of the Orange Lodge

PB on a banner in an Orange parade, Liverpool

PB and Brian Faulkner

PB with Terence O’Neill and George Brown

PB and Willie Orr, 1941

Willie with the Garth House cricket team, 1954

Willie while in the Group Theatre, Belfast

Willie in Arran, 1961

Willie and his dog

To Justice for the ForgottenDublin and Monaghan

Two Conversations

I am cutting grass when he appears round the corner of the house. Two sparks of recognition flash in my head. First, it’s my brother – instantly dismissed as I know he’s in Canada. Secondly, my father – again dismissed as he is dead. Yet the resemblance is uncanny.

Are you Willie?’ he asks.

‘Yes.’

‘I’m your father’s illegitimate son.’

‘Good God!’

‘No. Just James, I’m afraid.’

There is no doubt about it. He is more like my father than any of the family — the same impenetrable brown eyes, the same restless eyebrows, the same coal-black hair swept back elegantly over the ears.

I am seventy-three and he, I guess, is about sixty.

The phone rang one morning in August 1974.

‘Hello. Is that Willie?’

A very well-spoken English lady.

‘It is.’

‘It’s Julia. You may remember that we met earlier this year.’

Of course I remembered. My father had been visiting us in the West Highlands and had left rather quickly, claiming the need to attend a meeting. After he left, my wife and I decided to take the children for a day out in the car and, as we crossed the road to reach the car, another vehicle came towards us and stopped suddenly some distance away. I thought it was his car but, not sure, hurried the five feral children into the back of ours. His car started again and stopped behind us. Out of the passenger door emerged an extremely elegant young lady in a beige camel-hair suit.

‘This is Mrs Stone,’ he said, ‘Julia Stone’.

‘Could you not have come up a more convincing name?’ I thought.

That must have been more than a year before the phone call.

‘Yes, Julia. I remember.’

‘Do you know where your father is?’

‘No, I’m sorry. Have you tried the houseboat?’

‘Yes. He’s not there.’

‘Perhaps he’s in Ireland in the constituency.’

‘No. Someone has tried there. Have you no idea?’

‘No, Julia. We really don’t keep in touch. Christmas, birthdays, that kind of thing. The last visit was the first for years. I really can’t help.’

‘You must have some idea. It’s very important.’

There was an urgency, if not panic, in her voice.

‘I’d like to help but there’s nothing I can do.’

‘He should be here. There are some very influential people here — John Gorst and other MPs. We’re in Caxton Hall and we’re about to get married but he hasn’t turned up.’

‘I see. I think it’s just as well. I’m afraid he is still married to my mother.’

‘What rubbish! What a dreadful thing to say. He’s divorced.’

‘No, Julia. You’d better check it out.’

The beginning of the end.

1

The bonfire spews flames and smoke into the night sky like the dragon’s breath in my bedtime book. It roars and its heat burns my bare knees but I’m too excited to move back. Flames coil round the man in the middle of the fire, scorching his clothes and melting the peak of his hat. The flames light the faces of the people round the fire. Their eyes glisten and the teeth in their smiles glow like coals. They cheer as the man bursts into flames, his armband with the swastika falling from his arm. I look up at my grandmother who is clapping her hands and I wonder why she is crying and laughing at the same time. My mother is in the city having a baby and my father is still away at the war.

May 1945. The war was over. There were other bonfires all along the coast of Ulster. I could see them flickering on the sea. They were burning Hitler too. There would be no more sirens. That pleased me more than anything as I was afraid of that wail in the night and the drone of the German bombers, monstrous and malevolent in England. I had heard the distant whine of the bombs and I had seen houses burst open by the blast. I knew what could happen. When we heard the siren we used to scuttle downstairs, my mother carrying my sister, and I could see the fear in her eyes and in the white dimples at the corner of her mouth. It made me afraid to look at her. Sometimes, when the bombs were near, she grabbed my arm and hurried me along, her fingers trembling. Then I wanted to cry but I had been taught to be brave like a soldier, like my father.

‘He will be home soon,’ she used to say. I did not believe her because she said it so often and he seldom appeared.

Tonight I open my grandfather’s diary, expecting to find a page welcoming the peace and mentioning my father’s return to Ireland. The entry is brief.

‘Mon 7th May — Slight showers. Working in garden. News this evening that the great European war has ended.’

A month later it records briefly that my father returned on leave and adds, ‘Slight showers again.’

I’m tempted to say that I was confused by his return, that I was shy, that I was resentful of the intrusion or that I was pleased to see him, but the truth is that I recall only two emotions. He brought home a red metal toy crane with green winding string and a weighted hook. I was delighted with that. He said it came from Germany. In the evening I watched him from an upstairs window. He was down on the shore, kneeling on the ribbed sand, building little dams with his hands. He was completely alone in the dusk. I remember a feeling of sorrow as if I sensed his solitude, his need to turn away from us. Of course the memory could be tainted, for I have nursed it as a part of my portrait of him, the man who became leader of the Ulster Unionists, the Imperial Grand Master of the Orange Order, a public figure engulfed in media attention. His urge to find peace, to relish the tranquillity of a trout stream or the silence on the shores of Lough Gill, diminished as he ascended and, as that interest faded, I lost the only thing we shared.

I was nearly five on VE day and he has been dead for twenty years. I can’t say that I knew him, for he spent most of his time away from us. I visited him in hospital when he was dying. I found an old man slumped in a chair, unable to raise his head or shuffle to the toilet. His brown eyes stared at the floor as if there was an abyss at his feet and he drifted in and out of disturbed sleep.

‘We never talked much,’ he said in one of his rare moments of lucidity.

‘A great pity,’ I replied.

It was, perhaps, his way of expressing regret.

I helped him to urinate into a cardboard bottle.

Twice he jerked out of sleep gasping with terror.

‘They’re coming!’ he shouted.

‘Who? Who is coming?’

The IRA? The police? The Orangemen? His women? Who knows?

I took his hand and stroked his head.

‘They’re coming.’

‘It’s the nurses, father. No-one else.’

The man who had spoken with such assurance and eloquence in the House was reduced to a pathetic creature haunted by shadows. For the first time I felt a strange affection for him. With all his faults — the philandering, the duplicity, the greed for power and acclaim — he had possessed irresistible charm and generosity and, far inside, that homunculus of romance and creativity which drew him into solitude.

How very different the patient from the man who returned from the war! I have a framed black and white photograph, a posed portrait, taken in 1940. It could be that of a film star like Omar Sharif. He is dangerously handsome, an affliction, in his case, which led to a succession of betrayals. Expertly lit, his sleek, dark hair merges with the black background and the light, filtered from above, emphasises his elegant jawline and sensitive lips. It is taken from the side and he is looking down as if absorbed in a book. A portrait of a thoughtful, creative young man — a poet or a painter or a musician but certainly not a reactionary politician.

I am intrigued, baffled even. How does a dreamer, a playwright, a young man entranced by the Celtic revival in Dublin before the war become a schemer, a ruthless manipulator, an equivocator? What changed the student who hired a horse-drawn caravan to explore the wilds of Galway with an actress who was not yet his wife? And what did the transformation do to her, for the actress became his bride and my mother? Was it a rapid change or was it a slow metamorphosis which she failed to notice till it was too late? So many unanswered, and perhaps unanswerable, questions.

There are, however, a few fragments which help to illuminate the dim territory of his past. There is a letter to my mother expressing his fury at De Valera’s decision to keep Ireland neutral. Could this account for the change of allegiance? Or did his experience of battle and the blitz draw his sympathies away from the Ireland of Synge and Yeats to the Britain of Churchill and the King? He told us that he had faced the enemy in France. Yet his military record shows that he never left England. He was a wireless instructor in Windsor. No experience of battle nor in any more danger than the land girls in the fields or the families in the East End.

There is another explanation. He obtained a commission in the Life Guards and fraternised with eminent members of the British elite. He had to borrow money from my mother to pay the prodigious mess bills of the cavalry regiment. Perhaps the lavish lifestyle and the affluent, influential company were so seductive that he could not relinquish them after the war. Certainly he developed a taste for extravagance which could not have been financed by the meagre and unreliable income of a writer. Any affection for Irish republicanism would have been anathema to his new companions. It is scarcely surprising that he worked for a position of power and influence on the conservative wing of politics. Yet I have no proof of his motivation. His ambition remains a mystery.

The war transformed us all. My memories, though few and no doubt coloured by time, are surprisingly vivid. Most of them are set in Camberley in Surrey close to where my father was stationed as a wireless instructor. My mother’s brother, Desmond Hughes, must have been stationed nearby when he flew his Mosquito over the house and dipped his wings in salute. Desmond, the fourth top night fighting ace with more than eighteen victories, was awarded the DFC and, after the war, the AFC, and became Air Vice-Marshall. Desmond must have been the only air ace to have a stowaway in his aircraft. In 1942 his terrier ‘Wee Scruffy’ leapt into his Beaufort at the last minute and accompanied his master as he shot down a Junkers over the North Sea.

Another visitor to the house was Paddy Donnell. He used to carry me on his shoulders, acting as my steed, as we careered through the pine woods. The coarse epaulets of his Commando battledress scraped the back of my knees but I urged him ever faster, holding tight to his fair curls. Paddy became Lieutenant Colonel in 47 Commando and led the attack on Westkapelle on Walchern Island to secure the landings in 1944. After the war he worked for the Shakespeare Memorial Company, organising tours in Eastern Europe. Mother’s eyes always lit up when Paddy visited and she seemed to blossom in his company. She often spoke of him with great affection. He was my hero then and I still regret losing touch with him. Father was different. He had dark, angry eyes, a foul temper and was used by Mother as a threat and a means of control.

Out on the moor near the house there was an abandoned tank, its turret blackened and its tracks broken. What a temptation to a four-year-old boy! I walked out over the heather and climbed into the cockpit, pretending to drive against the Germans. When a young couple parked their car on the road and sprinted towards the tank I couldn’t fathom why they were so agitated. I had not noticed the red flag on the hill and they explained breathlessly that I was sitting in a target and that shells could land at any time.

We didn’t have many toys through the war but I had a superb source near at hand. There was a searchlight station beyond the woods with a Nissen hut where the men were billeted. They had to learn to recognise all the aircraft — British, German and American — and to help identification they were supplied with model planes. Many of these found their way to my collection so, by 1945, I could distinguish a Junkers from a Wellington or a Mosquito from a Messerschmitt. The men adopted me as a mascot, taking me to football matches and allowing me into the searchlight cabin at night to watch the beam and the small luminous screen.

Occasionally today the TV will replay films of the ‘doodlebugs’ — the V1 and V2 — which were aimed at London but sometimes landed short of the target. I still react to the distinctive drone of their engines and recall the fear of adults when they were heard. Once, on recognising the sound, I crawled down under the blankets only to find, when the threat passed, that I was stuck, the bed being made too tight. That moment of panic returns at times when I remember the bombs.

Most people of my age respond to the wail of the sirens, always a signal for disruption as we hurried to hide under the stairs or in a shelter. Strangely, I never felt really afraid during the night raids but then our house had never been hit.

Towards the end of the war my mother taught me to change my sister’s nappies so that I could show Father how to do it when we were returning to Ireland. I can’t recall why she was remaining in England, unless she was pregnant at the time. Anyway Father, sister and I travelled by the night train towards Stranraer and I dutifully instructed Father on the art of changing a nappy. Halfway to Scotland we had to disembark and switch to a bus as the line ahead had been bombed. That was unpleasant in the cold dark night but worse was to come. When we reached Stranraer the Irish boat was delayed due to submarine activity and we had to spend the night on a covered pedestrian bridge over the railway.

My father’s military career was quite uneventful. He joined the Royal Ulster Rifles in September 1939 and was sent for Officer Training. His first commission was with the East Lancashire Regiment and he was posted as a full Lieutenant to the Royal Army Corps in 1941. He was promoted to Captain to train cadets until he was posted as Wireless Officer with the Household Cavalry in April 1944. He joined the Life Guards in May of that year and, on his official release in June 1946, was granted the honorary title of Captain, a title that he used in his Parliamentary career. His records show that he was awarded the Defence Medal and the War Medal but no Military Cross. After the war he claimed to have been decorated with the MC and provided my mother with the MC ribbon which she kept in her jewel box. This fraudulent claim led to a serious rift in the family, as Desmond Hughes was furious when he heard, many of his closest friends having been killed on active service. Why my father claimed to have been decorated I could never discover and it will remain a mystery now that both he and my mother are dead.

After the war we lived in Donaghadee in County Down with my mother’s parents. There I met a boy of my own age who was to become my best friend till he left Ireland to attend Bedford School in 1952. Jeremy (later Paddy) Ashdown had recently arrived from India, moving to a house just round the corner from ours. Discovering a neighbour with such an exotic, exciting background, I had to have him as a friend. He was a wiry, energetic, mischievous companion. We started primary school together and caused havoc in the classroom.

Sadly, my parents moved to a dismal hamlet called Blacker’s Mill near Gilford, presumably because Father had become a Unionist organiser. The bleak Victorian house, surrounded by trees, was near a mill in which, I think, linen cloth was dyed, as the burn running past the house was frequently thick with colour. I had a small bike at the time and cycled to Moyallan school which was not far from the house. The heating in the school, consisting of iron pipes and heavy radiators, was far from efficient and many of us suffered from chilblains. Chilblains inside the leather boots which we wore were a form of torture. They were desperately itchy but you couldn’t scratch them. I don’t remember learning much there except how to hang upside-down from a branch by my legs. One of the brighter aspects of Moyallan was the journey home, as I could stop at Sally Best’s house for fresh scones and jam. Sally was one of those splendid old country ladies who always kept treats in the cupboard for children.

It was in Blacker’s Mill that my parents recruited a nurse to look after us. A fearsome lady who tried to impose strict discipline on both children and adults in the house. My sister and I resented this intrusion so much that we set off walking to Gilford to our grandmother’s rectory, a considerable distance on the far side of the river Bann. I was six and she was four.

We marched past the school, across the white bridge, past the hatchery on Stramore Road, past Lauder’s farm and even past the raucous geese that stretched their necks and threatened to devour stray children. Grandmother was wonderfully sympathetic when we told her about the nurse, gave us some barmbrack and milk, and sent us home by taxi to avoid PB’s rage. We passed him as we returned, his car tearing towards the rectory.

We returned to Blacker’s Mill and the harridan who had come between our mother and ourselves and whose intrusion convinced us that our mother had abandoned us to the cruelty of the nurse.

It was in that dismal hamlet that I first experienced the emotion of compassion. I was standing in a roadway bordered by high hawthorn hedges leading down to a crossroads. At the crossroads, about 200 yards away, there was an old man in a shabby raincoat and felt hat who was being tormented by three youths. They were pushing him one way and then the other and laughing at his distress. The incident passed quickly as a car approached but I remember the feeling of pity and I have often wondered about its origin. Was it spontaneous, a natural sensation arising from the realms of the subconscious or had it been absorbed from stories such as the Good Samaritan, a product of Christian ideology? Had I experienced something which, years later, helped me always to identify with the victim? On the other hand, perhaps the retrieved memory deceives me and I invent all the sensations to tell myself what I should have felt at the time. Anyway, the vision remains associated with Blacker’s Mill.

2

‘When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,

Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,

Nor set down aught in malice . . .’

Othello.

These words from the Moor’s last speech will be a compass to steer me through the memories.

My father was known in his family as ‘Poor Billy’, shortened to PB, a soubriquet that I will use throughout this story. His father had him christened Lawrence Percy Story Orr but the entire village ignored the pretentious names and called him Billy. Born in Belfast in September 1918 just before the Great War ended, he was the first of four children. Not an easy birth. His father’s diary shows the stress:

Poor Evelyn had a rather bad time of it. It was a difficult case and we had to call in Dr Hicks . . . I passed through an hour or so of great anxiety . . . there was a serious risk of it being dead born. As it is however they are both happily safe.

Giving birth at that time was always a risk and many mothers did not survive the ordeal. Evelyn was confined to bed for more than a week. PB’s siblings said that he was not Evelyn’s favourite son. Perhaps the difficult birth accounts for her indifference, and may explain his long fruitless struggle for approval in later years. He remained Poor Billy even when he was a prominent politician. On one occasion he was chasing James round the kitchen and she laid him out with a frying pan on the skull.

Evelyn Sarah Poe was said to be related to Edgar Allan, but I have never been able to confirm the claim. Her grandfather had married an Eliza Poe in Ballinasloe in 1852 but whether she was related to the American clan is not clear. Her mother, Kate, died when Evelyn was four, leaving her father to look after her and her two brothers. Kate is buried in Carnlough in a small, peaceful cemetery looking out over the sea to Scotland. She was only 26. When my sister took the name of Kate Story as her stage name, her superstitious aunt warned her against it but she persisted. She died aged 25.

Evelyn’s father was a minister and lived till he was 96. A lean, irascible old man constantly at war with his housekeepers, there was nevertheless a twinkle in his eye and a mischievous grin beneath his silver Lloyd George moustache when he provoked an argument. Like many men of the cloth his temperament in the household was unknown to the parish where he was adored, particularly by the staff and patients of Belfast City Hospital as their honorary chaplain. Rev. Lawrence Parsons Story was a Galway man and a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin. He was Rector of Carnlough for twenty years after he married his second wife.

When Evelyn married my grandfather in Belfast in January 1917 he was described as a ‘Clerk in Holy Orders’. He was 33 and had just made an extraordinary change in allegiance from Methodism to the Episcopal Church of Ireland. I have searched his diaries for an explanation but it remains a mystery. A glance at his father’s long list of different parishes may provide a clue as, between 1869 and 1916, he moved 21 times between Ballyshannon in the south and Limavady in the north. Methodist ‘itinerants’ were moved regularly and perhaps my grandfather or his future wife preferred a more settled life. There is no record of his father’s view on his disloyalty. The family had all been Methodists and both his uncles were ministers in that church. His father, James Orr, had been a radical non-conformist, becoming Vice-President of the Peace Society protesting against the Boer War. Evelyn, however, was Church of Ireland.

My grandfather’s mother was from a hamlet near Roscrea in Tipperary. The founder of that dynasty was a farmer called ‘White Willie’ Drought of Ballybritt, known for his flamboyant attire of pristine white waistcoat and shirt. He poses for a photograph I have, standing nonchalantly with a leg crossed and one hand tucked in his pocket to expose his waistcoat, the picture of elegant wellbeing. Born just after the Napoleonic War in 1816, he lived till he was 81. My grandfather visited him shortly before his death in 1897 and found him in an immense four-poster bed, wearing a tasselled nightcap. I have his wife’s diary, written in a small, spidery script to save paper, in which she records in June 1879:

This day my dear Margaret left me to be married to Rev. James Orr. I came home with a heavy heart and very disconsolate. Nothing would have induced me to part with her but that she was marrying a Godly man.

Margaret, her beloved daughter, gave birth to my grandfather in 1884.

The conversion of the Orr clan to Methodism was quite dramatic. One Sunday evening in 1843 in the township of Ballyreagh, County Fermanagh, a little girl, the daughter of Robert Orr, became ‘suddenly and strangely affected’ while singing hymns and passed out. She was put to bed and, on regaining consciousness, began to ‘praise the Lord’. Robert was so affected by her response that he called people together for a prayer meeting. So many people attended that word of the event spread quickly till the ‘whole country was roused’. All five Orr brothers were, as the Methodist history puts it, ‘led to the Saviour’ and two of them, including James, became itinerant ministers.

Both families were, of course, staunch Protestants. Evelyn’s brother and her husband had signed Sir Edward Carson’s Ulster Covenant in 1912 opposing Home Rule and refusing to recognise an All-Ireland Parliament, if it were imposed on Ulster. This protest movement led to the formation of the Ulster Volunteer Force (the UVF) and the shipment of arms for a revolutionary Protestant army. 35,000 rifles and 3,000,000 rounds of ammunition were landed in the ports of Bangor, Larne and Donaghadee and over 100,000 men were soon drilling openly across the province. The Tory party not only colluded in this armed resistance but supported it, a fact that is often forgotten in its condemnation of the armed struggle abroad. Rudyard Kipling donated £30,000 and published a belligerent poem in support of the Ulstermen, ending:

What answer from the North?

One law, one land, one throne.

If England drive us forth

We shall not fall alone.

PB, then, was brought up as a member of what was called the ‘Protestant ascendancy’.

The family settled in Gilford, a small town centred on a linen mill which controlled the lives of the inhabitants. They rose in the morning to the wail of the mill horn and filed past under the watchful eye of the timekeeper at night. The mill owned the library, the cinema, the swimming pool and most of the dreary terraced houses. The mill bus collected the voters during elections and conveyed them to the polling stations. A town still lost in another century.

Rev. W.R.M. Orr started his ministry in Gilford in 1920 in turbulent times. The tragic partition of Ireland was imminent. There were sectarian riots in Belfast and killings were common throughout the province. Gilford was not exempt from the conflict. In September an Orangeman called William McDowell was murdered, an incident which immediately ignited sectarian strife in the mill. Convinced that Sinn Fein was responsible, the Protestant workers struck work and refused to return till the Catholics signed a declaration against Sinn Fein.

Two thousand Orangemen marched at the funeral at which my grandfather officiated and appealed for calm. ‘To wreak vengeance indiscriminately on the R.C. population is iniquitous,’ he wrote in his diary.

The trade union leader asked him to mediate so that the Catholics could return to work, an initiative which seems to have succeeded. Three men were eventually convicted of ‘highway robbery’ and murder and given life sentences. The jury having failed to reach agreement in a civil court, the case was transferred to a military court where they were found guilty.

There followed, however, one of the most sensational escapes in the history of Crumlin Road gaol. In May 1927 the three, with a superbly executed plan, overpowered warders and sped off into the night in a waiting car. One of them was caught soon afterwards but the others disappeared, apparently to run a garage in later years in the Republic. Material there surely for a movie.

I remember my grandfather from my childhood as a fearsome old man with a white beard and a Monaghan accent. He used to tell me stories from memory based on Poe’s morbid tales or Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. Sitting by the fire in his study at night with only the flicker of the flames to light the gloom, he would tell these tales with a conviction that added horror to the words. I can still recall shivering as he growled that sentence from the Baskervilles story, ‘It was the baying of that hideous hound’. I think he relished the terror injected by his performances.

After these ‘bed-time’ stories I had to creep upstairs with a candle casting menacing shadows on the walls and leap into bed before the monster under the bed could catch me. There was a stair in the bedroom leading to a loft which was cluttered with paraphernalia from my father’s childhood — a junior Orange drum emblazoned with ‘Orr’s True Blues’, the skeleton of a parasol, a black ostrich feather stole, a massive cast-iron weather vane, a box of tin soldiers. I had climbed the stair on one occasion, pausing with every step to listen for wild beasts, and had glimpsed that cobwebbed scene from the top but, in spite of that exploration, the suspicion remained that there was something malevolent lurking up there.