Cockasnook Books
‘Irene Remembers’
Irene Boyd
IRENE REMEMBERS — A Cheshire Childhood
Introduction: Ellen Marion Irene Boyd was born in Northwich, Cheshire in 1907 and spent much of her early years at The Beeches, Whitegate with her family. She became ill as a child and spent time in a number of hospitals including Guy's, London. All this was to no avail; she became crippled with Rheumatoid Arthritis and eventually almost completely paralysed, apart from a little movement in her hands which enabled her to write — provided someone else was there to furnish her with pad and pen. She walked for the last time when she was ten, at a time when her youngest sister Norah was learning to walk:
‘While Baby Norah finds it easier and easier to master the complicated art of walking, Irene finds it more and more difficult to keep it up’
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a book of incandescent spirituality
The book contains a detailed account of Irene's childhood and youth, beginning with her birth and continuing until she becomes an adult, at which time her experience of life has become so painful, her suffering so great that she can no longer remain a child. Her formative years are over. Irene does not tell us what happened during the remaining fifty years of her life, though there are numerous small hints in the text. She scarcely even tells us what she herself feels as she stands on the brink of maturity, but we can see that her future will not be marred by any backward-looking or selfish impulse. Irene seemed able to turn sorrow and disillusion into enlightenment, resignation into compassion and empathy. This is a book of incandescent spirituality.
With no rancour, Irene recounts the disappointments, privations and abuses of her childhood and adolescence; with no bitterness, she recalls the unmitigated tortures inflicted on her by (no doubt well-meaning) doctors; with no spite, the foolishness of the child who remarks ‘Don't you ever get tired of sitting in that chair all day?’; no jealousy for the activities of her siblings, who clearly have their own crosses to bear. With characteristic self-effacement, uncompromising humanity and sublime spirituality, Irene remembers and tells all.
THE BOYD FAMILY circa 1917
One remarkable thing about this very remarkable book is the way in which the style of writing changes ever so gradually as Irene develops over a period of some twenty years. At the beginning Irene is a baby and so she describes her infancy in deceptively childlike language, but do not be deceived: in later chapters she addresses her adolescence and youth in the most intellectual and philosophical manner.
Growing up in a truly beautiful spot, in the bosom of a cosy, well-to-do and well-respected Cheshire family, should have been idyllic, yet the story is harrowing nay, shocking. The idyll is marred by the presence of a sinister inanimate character. Witness this extract:
‘Irene and Nancy and Muriel share a big double bed now, and though they sometimes struggle for the bedclothes and complain “You're sticking your big bottom in me!” they collaborate in all sorts of bed games. They have plenty of time for these since they go to bed, winter and summer, at six o' clock, to give Mother and the neighbours ‘a bit of peace’.
Playing School is one of their games. Irene is the teacher, of course, and sets them sums on toilet paper, purloined from the bathroom. If Nancy and Muriel get the sums wrong she raps their knuckles with a ruler like a real teacher.
They also play top-tails over the bottom of the bed. The footpiece is an iron scrollwork, higher in the middle than at the sides and topped with three brass bars. Once as Nancy upended in a top-tail over one of these bars Mother, appearing with the Stick, found her just in the right position for its application.
Irene sometimes said that the bed was a Desert Island and the bottom of the bed was a Cliff where the three Castaways scrambled for Seagull's Eggs. If you fell onto the linoleum you were Drowned in the Sea.
The bedside rug was a Lagoon. You sat on the Island and fished with your toes. As Irene had the longest legs and prehensile toes she usually caught the most handkerchief fish.
Another method of fishing was for the Castaways to lie on their faces on the Island and, supported on their hands, lean out across the Lagoon towards the Open Sea where Fish were swimming. A quick grab could often catch one without the Castaways falling into the Lagoon.
The trouble for Irene was that her elbows were beginning to be stiff and bent.
The trouble for everybody was that too many bumps into the Lagoon would summon up the Stick. Afterwards they would stand in front of the long mirror on the door of the wardrobe and count their stripes.’
a popular writer and poet
Irene Boyd was a popular writer and poet, well known and well liked in the localities in which she lived. But, all things considered, it is remarkable that she wrote anything at all, let alone prose and poetry worthy of publication. She attended primary school and enjoyed it very much, though even this was interrupted by lengthy hospital treatment, but was unable to attend secondary school, which dashed her dreams of the grammar school.
Her body scarcely grew or developed from the age of ten so that as a mature adult she weighed only around five stone. Unsuccessful and ill-advised operations and treatments resulted in her body becoming rigidified, so that she could not even sit up and had to remain supine, her head characteristically tipped permanently forward so that she could see people and relate to them.
educated herself from books
Unable to attend secondary school, she educated herself at home. Nonetheless, she proceeded to a remarkable lifetime achievement. As a young person she began publishing short stories and poems. By necessity she educated herself more or less entirely from books, any books, whatever she was able to beg and borrow from family, friends and neighbours. At one stage during adolescence these books constituted a major part of her life, which is why in telling her story it became necessary for her to describe the books to which she had access. On the basis of her studies she applied to London University to read for an external degree in Philosophy and was accepted — at a time when few even able-bodied women gained entry — and, what is most remarkable, in time she became able to satisfy the authorities that she had reached a sufficient standard to be awarded her degree.
turned lives around
On the strength of this qualification she became able to offer her services as a private teacher or tutor. She lived for much of her life in a home for the incurably ill — Mauldeth Home at Stockport in Manchester — where she had a small summerhouse in the grounds. She received her pupils, visitors and friends in this setting. Her warm encouraging presence inspired others in many ways, not least to verse:
Irene Boyd outside Mauldeth Home in 1976
Indeed, from her horizontal position she became able to turn other people's lives around:
the best hotels
Her income from teaching supplemented the ongoing earnings from her writing and enabled her to travel, and she made a point of always staying at the very best hotels. Mauldeth Home must have seemed a prison to some but Irene was able to turn it into a useful base, one from which she could get away. There was never any shortage of nurses and young people who were happy to accompany her. She died on Christmas Day 1977.
Her autobiography ‘Irene Remembers’ was her major full-length manuscript and she intended it for publication, but it was not published in her lifetime. It is now appearing for the first time. Irene remembers… And we remember Irene.
a Cheshire scene by Rene Maycock
The cover was designed by Margaret Swift using an original painting of a contemporary Cheshire scene by Rene Maycock which is intensely evocative of Irene's memories of those times. However, though the trees may well be beeches they are not Irene's beeches, which were at a crossroads facing her house, and though the atmosphere is certainly that of the lake at Sixes' Hole, we cannot claim it to be Sixes' Hole which, in contrast to much of the surrounding landscape, is to be found in a ravine and is believed to be very deep (on account of subsidence resulting from the extraction of salt in the area). The painting is almost certainly imaginary as indeed, at the time it was conceived, it had to be.
‘A Cheshire Scene’ by Rene Maycock
Rene Maycock is the naïve child who, when visiting the Boyd sisters at The Beeches, commented to the crippled Irene, “Don't you get ever get tired of sitting in that chair all day?” How cruel is fate. With what supreme irony did Rene herself come to be imprisoned in a wheelchair as a result of poliomyelitis, contracted, she told friends, from taking a drink of unclean water from a trough at Bawsgate Farm, Cinder Hill, Whitegate. Whatever the cause, her main escape from this plight had to be her imagination and her painting.
Neither she nor her brother Hugh — who went to Canada — had any children and so paintings were passed on to friends, this one a gift to her close friend Myra Proctor (born Myra Barratt, now living at Audlem, niece to Norah's husband Bertie Swift) who passed it on to Margaret and Andrew Swift.
Rene's mother Florence, a teacher at Whitegate School, was by all reports a very beautiful woman who was persuaded into marriage several times, in the course of the book to the ill-fated Harcourt Bevin and later, after the close of Irene's narrative, to the very Mr Bennet whom Irene had secretly adored. Rene and her mother are now buried together in a family grave in the churchyard at Whitegate almost adjacent to that of the Boyds.
the complete story
‘Irene Remembers’ has been edited by Margaret Swift from two versions that are in existence. Great care has been taken in amalgamating these to protect Irene's original words and ideas. Nothing has been added and nothing taken out; only the ordering of material has been changed, as necessary to avoid the repetition that would inevitably have ensued had the two versions simply been bolted together. Everything is included, appearing once only. When she prepared the later of the two versions for publication some forty or more years ago, Irene omitted certain passages ‘to protect the living’ but we are sure you will agree it is now ‘high time’ for the complete story to be told.
the launch of ‘Irene Remembers’
‘Irene Remembers’ was launched on Easter Monday 2007 at the Village Hall in the idyllic village of Whitegate, Cheshire, a venue adjacent to The Beeches, the beautiful old house where Irene lived as a child. The hall was packed with three generations of nieces and nephews plus local people keen to share their own memories of the family. Within an hour the first edition of the book sold out and orders were taken for the next print run. Margaret Swift opened the proceedings on behalf of Cockasnook Books and introduced James K Humble OBE who offered a moving eulogy to Irene Boyd. After the launch family members moved on to a special family luncheon to celebrate the centenary of Irene's birth in the Great Hall at the historic Vale Royal Abbey in the village of Whitegate.
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