From Ceylon to Connemara

CLOSELY KNIT Sonia Kelly, aged 2, with her nanny, Mary Keegan from Dublin.

Sonia Kelly

I believe my childhood was pretty unusual, in that it lacked no creature comforts but was devoid of affection.
You see, my father, like many British people at that time, had a tea estate in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and it was the custom to send their children home – as they called it – to be educated, parking them on some unfortunate relative. In the case of my brother and I, our grandmother was the victim.
She had already come through a traumatic period herself. Being from Roscommon and of French Huguenot descent, her family of four girls and two boys had grown up and left home when her husband, William Eden Holmes, had eloped with a Scottish heiress. Three of the girls had married army officers and had settled in Cirencester in Gloucestershire and they clubbed together to buy her a house there, which was called ‘The Cot’.
So my mother set off for ‘home’ with me and my brother, who was six years older, and an ayah (servant) to look after us. I actually still have the ticket for our passage on the liner to England.
The ayah went back immediately to Ceylon, and my mother engaged a professional nanny to care for me, so the grandmother was saddled with three lodgers, but presumably she was compensated for this.
As I had never experienced affection I didn’t miss it, but my brother seriously resented being rejected, and most of his future contacts ended in harsh words. Now, my mother went home leaving us in charge of Mary Keegan from Dublin, who was always treated as an employee, never as a friend, and who was hated by my brother, who luckily went to boarding school.
Looking back now, Nanny seems fantastic; she guarded me fiercely so that I was only allowed one friend apart from family, the son of a colonel who lived nearby. She gave me lessons every day, and I could read and write when I was four – and she knitted all my clothes.
Eventually it became time for my father to retire. He had a business partner called Gerard Robinson, my godfather, from Ballynahinch Castle, whose family lived there since Humanity Dick Martin went broke. He had a sister who was married to Graham Tulloch who lived near Cleggan in Connemara. They had a house to let beside Cartron Lake, which we took. It was supplied with servants and we moved in, plus Nanny.
She continued to give me lessons, and I made a chariot from an old doll’s pram and harnessed the two gun-dogs to it for horses. My father enjoyed fishing and shooting and even the brother was happy between terms at Charter House. Roundabout then, when I was exploring, the vegetable gardener made sexual advances to me. When I reported this he was sacked immediately.
Two years later, it was decided to send me to school at Kylemore Abbey, eight miles away. I only went two days a week and was driven to and collected by our chauffeur in the van we had. He was the son of a local farmer, and he taught me to ride on his horse.
Because I was so shy it was difficult fitting in to school life. On the crocodile walks we took, I initially had no one to walk with, until I was befriended by the Mayock sisters from Westport, who saved the situation. The nuns taught deportment and elocution, which I consider to be essential, and I even learned how to play the piano while there.
However, one day my father took me with him to Clifden and I heard him telling my mother on our return, “She never said a single thing there and the whole way back” – so I hadn’t yet succeeded in conquering my shyness.
About now my father started to visit London for long periods, and it transpired that he had invested his money in a film company, and lost most of it. He became ill, and we had to return to England for his treatment, giving up all that we had grown to like in Connemara, while Nanny went to live with her niece in Dublin, and we never heard from her anymore.

The first of a series of articles in which Sonia Kelly, who is now now in her 90s, looks back on her childhood. An author, poet and entrepreneur, Sonia founded Cloona Health Centre in Westport in l973.