大象传媒

Since writing my original story, I have been discussing the war years with members of my family, and thus sharpening my recollection of what it was like in Ireland during those years.

Shortly after the outbreak of war my father鈥檚 eldest brother, who lived in Wembley and worked in the Strand in London, sent his wife and three daughters to Abbeyleix, to live in the Hartford family home, a short distance from where I lived. The older girls joined us in the little church school and they brought some glamour in to our quiet lives. Their father was missing them, so in June 1940 he sent for them to return to London. Two of my father鈥檚 sisters lived in London, too, one in Fulham and the other in Ruislip. They all wrote regularly to my parents but often their letters were so censored that they appeared as ribbons of papers! My eldest cousin remembers hearing about the Parachute scare that I wrote about in my first story, at about the time they were returning to London.

Although Ireland was officially neutral, being of Anglo-Irish descent, my family still felt part of Britain. We acquired our first radio, a gift from my father鈥檚 brother in Dublin, so that my father could follow the news. It was very different from modern radios and worked on valves, powered by a battery about the size of a car battery that had to be recharged regularly at sixpence a time! It was a large wooden piece of equipment and may have been made by Bush or Pye. I remember my father listening to Lord Haw Haw and discussing the question of propaganda with his brother, Charlie.

At that time my father was an ecclesiastical woodworker, and he worked in Japanese oak. That commodity vanished and he had to use unseasoned Irish oak. As most of his commissions were from wealthy English people wishing to erect memorials in Irish Anglican churches to relatives, orders for work ceased. He bought some trees and felled them and cut them up into logs. This enterprise was a disaster when all his wood was stolen! Coal supplies from Britain ceased so the Irish Government allotted a section of bog to each family and my father bought a donkey and made a little cart with tyres on the wheels. He bought a slean to cut his turf and one day he went across to bring home some turf and it had all been stolen! He ended up having to buy turf. We had an old Morris Cowley car but petrol was available only to essential users so the car was left to rust in the yard. Paraffin oil disappeared, too, and tea grew scarce. My father made a straw box and you heated a stew on the fire and then left it wrapped in the straw for several hours and it went on cooking. My mother learned to make currants from dried elderberries and she made juice from hips collected from the hedges. She obtained extra rations of sugar to make jam from wild blackberries and crab apples and to keep a hive of bees.

In those early years of war rumours of spies abounded. I remember going up to the family home and finding my father and my Uncle Charlie watching a man crouching in the reeds opposite the house. He had a pair of binoculars and was viewing the land around him. My father and uncle were convinced he was a German spy!

Abbeyleix was the home of the de Vesci family but lord and Lady de Vesci stayed in Britain during the war. We often walked down to the gardens and picked our own fruit and bought vegetables. The estate was run just as if the de Vescis were in residence. Their seat in church remained vacant each Sunday. But they returned when the war ended.

The main effect of the war on us was, therefore, that we became poorer and while I was away in boarding-school, my parents had to give up their rented house that had once belonged to ancestors of ours. They moved to an ex-Serviceman鈥檚 cottage that my father was entitled to because of his service in World War1.

Being away in school in Cork, I was spared a lot of the hardship endured by my family. I remember a remark from one of my classmates. The main effect of the war on her, she said, was that she was missing out on the European travel she would, otherwise, have been enjoying! Some of the girls in school were descended from the Huguenot refugees. Most of the others were of English descent In 1941 a girl from the Isle of Man joined our class. She and her mother had gone to live with her grandfather in Co. Cork. Her father was in the army and was stationed in Liverpool. She and her mother were travelling to Cork on the Innisfallen when it was struck by a mine in the river Mersey after leaving Liverpool in December 1940. They were rescued and they walked around Liverpool for hours trying to locate her father. They eventually reached Cork and they stayed there till the war was over.

My husband鈥檚 memories are different from mine. His first recollection is of waking up in Dublin and hearing a loud rumble of a plane. This was a German bomber that dropped a bomb on North Strand, causing death and havoc. Another cousin of mine lived near North Strand and she remembers the incident.

My husband鈥檚 eldest brother was in the Irish army and part of his duties was to guard German prisoners-of -war on the Curragh. On one occasion he was part of a group who travelled by truck to Belfast to collect weapons given to Ireland by the British. My Uncle Fred in Abbeyleix used to drive a local taxi and he was commissioned once to drive some prisoners from the Curragh on some kind of outing. I remember his remarking that security wasn鈥檛 tight as these prisoners were only too happy to be away from the war and would in no circumstance want to escape. My husband says that a U-boat surrendered in Cork and I guess it was their way of getting out of danger. They had run out of supplies. They were taken to the local police station. Then the Army sent soldiers to collect them and take them to be interned on the Curragh.

My husband鈥檚 mother鈥檚 brother joined the Royal Scots Fusiliers and he was wounded in Dunkirk. He died prematurely, probably as a result of those wounds. I think I found his name inscribed on the Roll of Honour in Edinburgh Castle.

These memories will, I hope, give some idea of what it was like in Southern Ireland during the War. I am still trying to persuade my New Zealand brother-in-law to talk about his experiences in the New Zealand forces at that time. I know that, after the War, he was part of the guard at the Japanese Emperor鈥檚 Palace.

I still read the Parish magazine from Abbeyleix and in the last issue the vicar mentioned a group who had appeared at a recent Sunday service, among them the son of a Royal Air Force pilot whose plane disappeared towards the end of the war and was never found. There is a memorial plaque on the wall of the church, made by my father, and they had gone to see the plaque and the grave of their grandparents. I guessed who it was and I guess it was an appropriate time to remember.

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