Capturing The Castl

Capturing The Castle, Charlie and Emily Napper, copyright Victoria Mary Clarke, 2003

            The other day, I saw a film called ‘I Capture the Castle”. A trio of sisters find themselves living in a ruined medieval castle with their penniless parents. Because the family are so utterly broke, the girls decide to find rich husbands who can support them in the manner to which they aspire to being supported. The idea of moving to a smaller house, or even finding ordinary husbands with ordinary jobs simply never gets considered. The girls are totally trapped in their own class and to step outside of it would mean a change of identity, not just a change of address. Like many young women of their time and indeed of the present day, they are defined by their position in society.
          Like the girls in the film, Emily Napper grew up in a castle in Wales. In fact, Emily owns the castle that was used in the film and she grew up in a similar castle, just down the road. When she wasn’t at the castle, she was at West Wickham, the country seat of her father, Sir Francis Dashwood. A house which has often been used as a film location for Jane Austen-style romantic costume dramas. Emily comes from a background of enormous privilege and she belongs to the upper echelons of the English and Anglo-Irish class system. Her father was a famous entrepreneur and diplomat and was a founding member of the infamous Hellfire club, a secret society for naughty, bored members of Her Majesty’s government. He spoke six languages and was extremely popular with women.
          But like in the film, the glamour could not make up for the neglect that Emily suffered. And trying to live a life within the confines of a strictly ordered system of behaviour was tortuous and uncomfortable and ultimately isolating.   Emily escaped.
          As is so often the way in upper class families, Emily saw very little of her mother. And when she was eighteen, her mother died, having never spent a day with her in her entire life. Within six months, her dashing father had married an Italian model and Emily had run away to Australia. Her father hadn’t told her he was getting married and she felt betrayed and abandoned, but was determined to forge a new life for herself, with or without her family.
          The posh young lady got a job in a pub, despite never having learned to pull a pint. She was pretty and she knew how to flirt, and this made her popular with the customers. But being a country girl at heart, she soon found a better job as a bush girl, rounding up sheep on horseback. In all the time that she lived in Australia, Emily was just plain Emily with no surname and no family identity. And it was, she says, the thing that set her free and set her on course for the rest of her life.
          Today, as we eat dinner at Lough Crew, the family home of her husband Charlie there is evidence of this unpretentious Emily that became a punk, upon her return to London in the late seventies. A girl who went to art school and painted clothes for pop groups and got into all kinds of trouble with very undesirable, druggy boys in London. Par for the course, she says, matter-of-factly, grinning wickedly. She has a delightful grin and twinkly blue, blue eyes. And she laughs a belly laugh that comes from the soul.
          ‘Oh yes,’ she says. ‘Where I come from, you have a chance to meet people with too much money and too many drugs. Some of them survived, some of them didn’t. If you don’t have stability in your life, it’s very easy to go off the rails.”
          Having been abandoned by her father who was living a new life with his new wife, Emily had no home to go to, in England and she shared a house with a collection of drop-outs in London. But stability was provided by her grandmother, Lady Sheila Dunsany who lived at Dunsany Castle, in Meath. Sheila had also been brought up in the castle in Wales and had married a Polish soldier, who was shot soon after the wedding and died. So she moved to London and met the late Randall Dunsany, who took her home to Ireland. It was to Dunsany Castle that the young Emily would retreat, in her boiler suits and fishnets, when she was in need of tender loving care. And on one of these visits to Ireland, Lady Sheila insisted that her grand-daughter attend a posh dinner party, and meet some eligible young men. The only person she knew at the party had suffered an injury to his face, and couldn’t talk, so she was force to make conversation with the young man on her left at the table, Charlie Napper, a rally driver.
          ‘He was very good-looking!” Emily laughs. ‘And he invited me to a party in his rally car and I went.’
          There were many more outings in the rally car and Emily found an excuse to go and visit Charlie at Lough Crew House, in Kells, which he had recently inherited. The fabulous Georgian mansion had been burned down for the third time and Charlie was living in the Orangery, which also housed some of his sheep and tractors.
          . “It was really disgusting here,’ Emily says. “The kitchen table was covered in newspapers and they never washed anything. We hardly even had a bath.   I came from the most beautiful house in England and here I was in squalor! But I thought it was magical.’
          Within six weeks of knowing each other, Charlie had proposed.
          “I was cleaning up the mess, because the men who lived here were very untidy and Charlie came in and said “Put a skirt on.” I said I didn’t have one, why? He said “Well go and tidy yourself up then!-he didn’t like my punk clothes. I said I couldn’t tidy myself up and he was really upset with me. So I did my best and he took me out to dinner. He didn’t have money for that sort of thing, so I was very shocked. And he asked me to marry him, over dinner. I don’t know what got into me, but I said yes. I was twenty one and I was so innocent! My dad came over and was absolutely horrified. He said “You can’t live here! You can’t marry an Irishman and you’re not living in Ireland.” But I did, and I’m still here.
          Life was tough, at Lough Crew. The house had once been very grand, but the family had been cursed by a local priest, who declared that their house would burn down three times and crows would fly in and out of the windows. And so it came to pass, the house did burn down three times and Charlie’s father eventually gave up trying to rebuild it. Charlie remembers being relieved when the family moved into one of the cottages and his mother took the opportunity to take off, never to return. Leaving Charlie, his father and two brothers to get on with things. Apart from driving rally cars, Charlie kept sheep and when Emily arrived to live at Lough Crew, she rode horses and shepherded, just as she had in Australia. One day, Charlie decided to organise a shoot and some very rich friends, the Fortes, of Trusthouse Forte fame asked if they could come and join in. Emily was distraught. She was commuting to Dublin every day, to work in the National Gallery and she had two small boys to look after.
          “These grand people coming to stay, wanting champagne in their bedrooms? I couldn’t cope! So I rented them a castle nearby and they loved it. Now they’ve bought their own.’
          Such are the problems of people like Charlie and Emily. Being a lively and gregarious and highly innovative young woman, Emily wasn’t about to stand still, at Lough Crew and pretty soon she was bringing all kinds of people to visit. She travelled all over France and Italy, bringing back beautiful pieces of furniture to gild and to sell and she opened a showroom in one of the stables. And she opened a school, teaching people to gild and they came from all over the world to learn. But even that wasn’t enough.
          “A friend of mine came to visit, with a pot-bellied pig for me, as a present. And he decided to go for a walk in the old garden. And when he saw what a state it was in and realised what it could look like, he asked me why I didn’t apply for a grant, to restore the garden. So I did. I filled in the forms and we got chosen. I didn’t know a thing about gardening!’
          Seven years on, Lough Crew Historic Gardens is open to the public and is one of the most beautiful of its kind in Ireland. A tranquil, magical place with the oldest Yew Tree Walk in Europe and the church of Saint Oliver Plunkett just next door to the cafe. This year, for the fourth year running, an Opera will be staged in a marquee in the garden. Emily is painting the scenery herself, a challenge which she finds at once daunting and exciting.
          “ Four years ago I met an opera singer, in a shoe shop in Covent Garden and he was a good looking guy and he said that he would like to sing in an Irish garden. So I said fine, come and sing in mine!   And when he arrived, to take a look, there were lots of models in the garden, being photographed for a fashion magazine and he thought this was wonderful, so he agreed to put on the Opera. And he told me that I would have to do the set. I know nothing about opera and I had no idea what a set was, so the first year I did nothing at all. But then I started painting sets. And it’s grown from nothing, amazingly. People said it wouldn’t work, but it has and this year there will be twelve hundred people over two nights.”
          This year, the marquee has been especially imported from Morocco, purchased on one of Emily’s buying trips there. The taxi driver who is supposed to be sending it has been incommunicado for a few days, so there is a slight air of panic about Lough Crew. The scenery is nowhere near ready and the tickets have not all been sold. There is barely time to eat, there’s so much to do and when they aren’t on the phone, organising things, there is the garden to mow and the café to run. And there’s a fundraiser at nearby Headfort School, for which Emily is calling in hampers and other goodies, from friends. But for a time, things weren’t so breezy.
          Charlie has suffered with depression for most of his life. And Emily had always done her best to cope. But a few years ago, she was running out of steam and had begun to have trouble doing even simple things, when she ran into a woman who changed her life completely.
          “I had gone to a U2 concert with one of my Italian friends, Lorenzo. And Lorenzo is very good-looking, so people naturally asked me where Charlie was. And I said that Charlie wasn’t feeling good. So Henry Mountcharles recommended that I take him to see this wonderful lady called Fiona Arrigo. And when I took Charlie along to her she said ‘You’re the one who needs help.” I didn’t believe a word of it, but she made me go back to when I was three and re-live my childhood.”
          Emily confronted the fact that even though her parents were privileged, they had never shown her any love, and she had been crippled by low self esteem, all her life.
          “ Like Princess Diana, I was locked up on the top floor with the nannies, as a child and I was completely messed up. My mother had exactly the same upbringing and she didn’t know any different. I would never do that to my own kids, never. It’s so important to give love back to other people. And it doesn’t take much to give love. But to learn to trust people is a huge thing, if you’ve been hurt badly. In a place like this, you have to learn to trust people, though, because you can’t do it all by yourself!”
          Having reconciled herself with her childhood, Emily is taking steps to turn Lough Crew into a place of healing for other people to come to, with a weekly Chi Kung class in one of the sheds. Already, it is a place of pilgrimage for spiritual seekers from all over the world, because of the Megalithic tombs which sit on top of two of the nearby hills. We take a walk up to the nearest one and sense the energy of thousands of years of witches and druids. Emily has been entrusted with the job of keeper of the key for the bigger of the tombs and because of the symbolic significance of the position, she feels that she will never leave the place.
          ‘You wouldn’t want to leave a place like this, would you?” she asks me as we stroll through a glade of bluebells and emerge into glorious sunshine, with a view of never-ending rolling hills and the dramatic sight of the portico of Lough Crew House, which has been erected, like the entrance to the Parthenon.
          No indeed, I agree. You wouldn’t want to leave. And I arrange myself on the lawn, in the sunshine and switch off my mobile phone. As Charlie mucks out the stables and Emily busies herself with the task of painting sixty more scenes for Cosi Fan Tutti.