Jessie Lightfoot got more than she bargained for in Ireland. A farmer’s daughter from Cornwall, she was hired as a domestic servant and nanny by the Bacon family in Co Kildare in the years leading up to the first World War.
Not only has she to contend with a country that is becoming increasingly hostile to the staunchly, pro-unionist Bacons but she also has to navigate her charges through the unpredictable and explosive violence of “Eddy” Bacon, the brutal and coercive father. His son, Francis, who was born on Dublin’s Baggot Street, and who would go on to be one of the most influential painters of the second half of the 20th century, is the particular object of the father’s uncontrollable rage. The descriptions of the punishments meted out by this unhinged ogre on a defenceless child are unfailingly harrowing.
Maylis Besserie has chosen the character of the nanny to tell the story of Francis Bacon. Lightfoot accompanied Bacon throughout his childhood and early career, first as nanny, then as helpmate, until her death in 1951. If Besserie’s previous two Irish-related novels – Yell, Sam, If You Still Can (2022) and Scattered Love (2023), dealing with Samuel Beckett and WB Yeats respectively – have focused primarily on endings, the last years of the writers’ lives, this third novel in the trilogy is especially haunted by beginnings.
The pain, agonising distortions, twisted discomforts on the canvases are not wholly explained by, but pick up on, the finely calibrated cruelty of the artist’s childhood. At the age of 16, Bacon would leave Ireland never to return. In the novel, his nanny observes: “No pilgrimage to the places of his childhood – why should he, anyway? – when his childhood is always with him, never leaves him.”
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Lightfoot, who prefers to sleep on the kitchen table during the day, in Bacon’s residence in 7 Cromwell Place, is also, on occasion, light-fingered, not above shoplifting and running gambling dens, when finances in the Bacon household are not what they might have been. The partying, the drinking, the doomed loves, the professional disappointments, the startling intuitions – all are all refracted through the wry commentary of the nanny, who despises fame while acknowledging greatness.
Francis Bacon’s Nanny is an impressive endpoint to Besserie’s sustained engagement over three novels with the imaginative turbulence of Irish artistic achievement.
