Bricks and Flowers – An Anglo-irish Memoir by Katherine Everett Charlotte Moore
Bricks and Flowers – An Anglo-irish Memoir ‘The earliest emotion that I can remember was fear, and that fear was focused on my mother,’ writes Katherine Everett in this idiosyncratic and highly readable memoir, first published in 1949 and now attractively reissued by Somerville Press.
Everett spent her rain-soaked Victorian childhood at Cahernane House, Killarney. Her father, a ‘white-bearded giant’, was acutely aware of his noble lineage, as indeed was everyone in this almost feudal world – ‘We named all the babies born on the place’.
When the young Katherine heard the butler say her mother’s blood was ‘so blue a silver spoon would stand up in it’, she ‘believed this referred to a physical fact, which added to my mother’s alarming qualities’.
Blue blood was the only thing her parents shared. Their marriage was a disaster. ‘It was all odious,’ her mother said, recalling the hovering presence of an old retainer called Patsy the Bucket when she used the outdoor lavatory – there were none inside. ‘I made your father see how much I disliked it, and everything else about the place.’
For the children, the mood was lightened by cheery servants such as Mary the Dairy who slept with broods of ducklings in her bed, or by watching the ‘scriptural scene’ of the salmon haul on the lake shore, but home was always a place to be escaped from.
In her teens, Katherine volunteered to act as companion to an invalid cousin at the very grand Staunton Harold in Leicestershire, and turned her back on her parents for good.
She fell in with an extraordinary older cousin, Aurelia, whose survival depended on scrounging money from aristocratic relations. ‘She saw a white and shining yacht out in the bay and asked whose it was. “Lord Dundonald’s,” a friendly coastguard told her. She was very distantly connected with this peer and had never met him, but immediately decided to swim out and claim this nebulous link, thinking nothing of the three-quarters of a mile which lay between the yacht and the shore.’ Aurelia was hauled aboard and fêted royally.
Katherine had artistic talent. Aurelia enrolled them both at the Slade. The formidable Professor Henry Tonks met his match in the talentless but determined Aurelia, who set up camp in the studio, distributing religious tracts (‘I have discovered a new prophecy no one has ever thought of’) and making an enormous drawing of a male nude ‘of indescribably grotesque indecency’.
Aurelia’s son, Herbert Everett, doggedly painted alongside Katherine, shrugging off his mother’s eye-catching antics. They decided to marry. If Katherine had other suitors, we don’t meet them; her austere, uncompromising approach to life’s difficulties makes the reader imagine she was not good at intimacy.
After a terrifying honeymoon voyage to Australia on an unsound sailing ship, the couple moved to the manor house at Wool, Dorset, where Katherine gave birth to a sickly boy – ‘poor little bag of bones’. The house had belonged to the Turberville family, and the Everetts were visited by Thomas Hardy, but it had no heating or water.
Katherine’s father had squandered all his money on replacing the lovely Queen Anne house at Cahernane with a ‘vast cube of grey cement which turned almost black in the constant rain’.
She inherited his building instinct but not his bad taste. The Everetts decided to build their own house, overlooking Poole Harbour. Katherine had found her métier; she was poised to become that rare thing, a professional female builder, when simultaneously the First World War broke out and Herbert abandoned her and their two young sons, never to be seen again.
She became a nurse and then a ‘gardener companion’ to a rich spinster who, war or no war, ‘couldn’t live’ without year-round hothouse flowers. Yet another cousin provided a house in Ireland; here Katherine and the boys weathered the Irish Civil War.
In the interwar years, Katherine could explore her passion for creating houses and gardens, receiving many commissions. For herself she restored an ancient house near Florence and a medieval farmhouse in the Sussex Weald, and she – finally – built Roughfield, a lasting family home.
This memoir of resilience and inventiveness would fascinate anyone interested in Ireland, art, architecture, landscape, furniture, travel or the wilder extremes of human behaviour.