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What song Richard Vautrin sang, or what accent he assumed when he hid himself amongst Provos, though puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture. His body, however, is likely to remain in its obscure, unhallowed grave (and it is a grave, the meat processing plant is a piece of IRA Grand Guignol) till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear, and the rocks melt wi’ the sun, or South Armagh stops being bandit country, whichever comes first.
Everybody has at least one Vautrin story, Madeleine Auchmuty says, with a cool look through a haze of Rothmans smoke that tells you what she thinks of most of them. But mine are all true, or as true as any anecdote needs to be.
All the world knows what Dick looked like, and that no surviving photograph does him justice, turning his strong, mobile face inexplicably heavy and prognathous. The same, one reflects, is true of Maud Gonne. 364 days of the year, Dick would have greeted that comparison with an appreciative bellow, but you always had to reckon with it being the 365th, when he’d knock you down for it. If you could take some fraction of the punishment that he, an accomplished light middleweight, could absorb, you might at length get back up again. But no man I ever met could, or was prepared to, take as much punishment as Dick Vautrin.
Dick wasn’t a fanatic, but he was a purist. Others will no doubt write in these pages of the upstream dry fly fishing, the goshawks manned according to Elizabethan principles, about which I can make no useful comment. Of his ambivalent loyalty to the post-Conciliar Church I can say little more, except that where one might have expected an ultramontane adherence to the Latin Mass, there was an unexpected willingness to tolerate simplistic translation, stone cladding, chummy homilies and faux-naïve bas-relief Stations in potting-shed varnished pine, all in the interests of ecumenism. His personal faith had a pre-Reformation quality, and he believed accordingly that the Church of England must be reconciled to Rome. As I said, Dick could take a lot of punishment.
Perhaps no other contributor to this book is able to say this, or would feel it necessary to say it (oh you straights and your “necessity”): Richard was unequivocally homosexual. How I am able to make that claim with certainty I leave as an exercise to the reader. When he was alive it would have been considered a libel. Now, I trust, it is no such thing, and not because the subject is dead. I have known a number of homosexuals of Richard’s approximate disposition—courageous, solitary, alternating between self-hatred and a fine arrogance—and for all their discipline they found it difficult, verging on impossible, to keep out of the saunas and clubs that brought them a measure of sexual satisfaction. Richard seems to have found it moderately easy. I conclude that his sex drive was weak, at least by the standard I did not find it so to be stopit shttupfuck off pomppus bollxock [whole paragraph marked in margin with delete symbol]
A word that comes up a good deal is ‘monkish.’ I won’t pretend not to know what is meant, but he would have made a hopeless monk, in all likelihood failing periodically to uphold even the vow he’d have struggled least with. Though outgoing and attractive, he always maintained exactly the kind of reserve catastrophic to communitarian life, and indulged his propensity to cordial hatred fairly indiscriminately. He was no sybarite: to him, as it is to adventurous small boys, eating was a regrettably necessary interruption to more interesting activities, he smoked socially, and drank only so that he should not be always sober, but his jealous regard for personal possessions, and his faintly vulgar insistence upon having the ‘best’ of everything, which extended even to his choice of regiment, made him on occasion an object of ridicule to both his more aristocratic brother officers and the democratic 22nd with whom he liaised. As for obedience—well, had he the least inclination to it, he would probably be alive today.
So, to the contractually-obligatory anecdote. It dates from before Dick’s time in Bandit Country, but to me—in an obscure way that perhaps makes little sense to others—is inextricably associated with it.
Dick had some sort of breakdown in his third year at Oxford. No-one ever got the whole story out of him. He'd crashed his gloriously unreliable Austin Seven, getting away with minor cuts and bruises before the car burst into flames, and with it all his painstaking study notes. He'd started doing LSD semi-regularly, and had a spectacularly bad trip. The boy he worshipped was fucking a bitter enemy of his, and he had discovered this by walking in on them in flagrante at a party. He’d got a bad concussion after a pratfall on a rugger-club bender and the quacks had tried to stop him playing and boxing. All of the above, maybe. The upshot was he got permission to defer his finals, and the summer before he began his fourth year he was staying in Dorset with Philip Weld, who had retired from the Commons at the 1970 General Election.
Dick got to know Philip through his son, also a falconer, but it was with the old man he really struck up a friendship. Philip had decided to take up fly fishing in his retirement, and Dick took it upon himself to teach him. He was amused by the reversal of roles, the youth of twenty-one instructor to a man nearly fifty years older; I think they both were. Of course, they were both Catholics too. Dick was always a bit distant from his own family, and at this point his father had done quite a lot of dashing about pulling strings for him with the college authorities at Lincoln and the county council for a year’s extra grant, all the while trying to put out feelers for an entrée to a Guards regiment. It was Philip’s nephew who secured the last for him, in the end. Anyway, Dick was feeling the burden of gratitude just a touch, and Athelhall was a congenial respite.
I went there as the guest of my old mentor in the Foreign Office, Alex Townsend-Lees, who was Philip’s brother-in-law. Looking back on it, it was all pretty frightfully inbred Establishment stuff, and I felt rather the inky grammar school oik, even though I was giving thirty a very hefty shove. Dick’s background was professional middle-class, not gentry, though you wouldn’t have known it from the sporting chat and the hand-made brogues, and in any case it was still as far above a furniture deliveryman’s son as stars in the firmament. But Dick had the precious gift of making everyone feel good about himself, and had I not felt a deep loyalty to old Alex, recently widowed and undergoing the oscillations between devastation and guilty liberation that attend a man recovering buried aspects of his personality after a thirty-year marriage, I might have made a p I liked him profoundly and instantly.
One afternoon, Dick caught a fifteen-pound pike in the Rushton. To Mrs Weld’s amusement and the cook’s disquiet, he insisted on preparing and cooking the monster himself, according to the only recipe he knew, which is given in The Compleat Angler. I remember him vividly, black curls tumbled on his brow, dark eyes sparkling and his hands full of entrails.
'Walton says that this dish of meat is too good for any but anglers and very honest men,' he said.
‘If your friend Mr Walton don’t know the differ betwixt fish and meat I wouldn’t trust him to direct you how to deal with eithern em,’ the cook grumbled, clearly impressed with Dick’s dexterity with a gutting-knife. Mrs Weld said that since that got her off the hook on two counts, three if one quibbled on 'very', she was going to telephone a neighbour and try out the new bistro in Colebridge.
It left us a stag-party. The pike, with thyme, anchovies, oysters, garlic and oranges, was delicious, and Philip kept a good cellar. I recall that more than once Jeremy Thorpe arose as a topic of conversation—I think he might well have been there, except that he was still not accepting many invitations after the death of his first wife. Some of the speculations grew scabrous, though I’m not sure any of them were untrue. Over brandy and cigarettes Alex and Dick had a set-to about Operation Demetrius, which might have scotched Dick’s hopes of a commission had Alex been less scrupulously fair-minded. There were people who thought Dick was unsound on the Ulster Question from the very start. To my mind, had there been more like him, men who believed that a true Unionism meant the equal and respectful inclusion of the Celtic portions of the British Isles, the Province would have been in something like its present, happier condition a lot earlier, with many lives saved.
He did not, on that occasion, sing the rebel ballads for which he later became notorious. Dick was quite possibly a lunatic, but right up until the last night of his life, he did possess some self-preservatory instincts. But sing he did, for he never could resist an invitation to show off his fine, rich tenor voice. He said the song he sang had been taught him by an old man in a Kilburn pub, though I have since bought the LP from which he almost certainly learned it. What matter! those venerable informants, last of their race, waiting in mute obscurity to share their ancient lore before piously expiring, have been a staple fiction of folk-historians for two hundred and fifty years. It would be a pity to lose them, after so long service.
The song was in Irish, and Dick’s pronunciation at that stage was probably very imperfect. Some Irish language-learning tapes were found in his room after his death, copper-fastening his reputation for unsoundness in the collective eyes of the SAS. In the event they can have done him little good, because they taught the synthetic Standard dialect, as remote from the Ulster Irish some of the more tradition-minded Provisionals used for primitive code as the language of a Home Office White Paper is from the argot of a Clydeside shipyard.
I had never heard anything like it before, quavering yet steady, wild and stern, pristine but somehow almost modernistic. I was moved to my absolute core, chilled to the bone in a way I am still at a loss to account for. Now I have heard more of the ‘sean-nós’ or ‘old style’ of Irish folk-singing, I am all the more astonished at Dick’s ability to mount a plausible imitation of a mode as difficult as plainchant. He explained the song to us then, and six men, the youngest of whom (me) was nearly a decade older than him, the oldest in his seventies, sat listening spellbound. Dick would have been wasted as the schoolmaster he at one time wanted to be, but had he taken that path he would still be alive, and so would the men the boys he k he would have been the sort no pupil can ever forget, for good mostly, but sometimes not.
The words of the song were composed in the eighteenth century by a wandering poet and rake, who was what the Irish call a ‘spoiled priest’, a seminary dropout. Perhaps born in Fermanagh, his stamping-ground was the old kingdom of Breffni (sp.??), or our godforsaken Bandit Country. The epithet in his name (look up sp.) meant yellow, and might refer either to the colour of his hair or his face, because he was a stupendous drunk. He sees a bittern lying dead on the road and imagines it died of thirst, a fate he plans to avoid by drinking—it is implied—himself to death instead. Thomas MacDonagh, one of the men shot for his part in the Easter 1916 Rising, made a very good English translation, preserving much of the Gaelic mouth-music, which poem in turn is commemorated in Francis Ledwidge’s elegy:
He shall not hear the bittern cry
In the wild sky, where he is lain,
Nor voices of the sweeter birds,
Above the wailing of the rain.
He shall not hear the bittern cry
He shall not hear the bittern cry
He shall not hear the bittern cry
He shall not hear the bittern cry He shall not hear the bittern cry He shall not har the bitten cry he shal not hesr thte bittern vcty he shall jot hear hte bittern cry hehsal shall not heare thte bttern cry he shall kt here etheb e y
(add thing about the fucjkin Air Cunnilingus upholstery here fr relief???)
I donnot know how to raconcile the affection no fuckit fucjkit the love the love the sreadfast love i bore for Richard Vautrin with my sure and certai n knoweldge that he was a murderer that he murdered inncetny civilisnd