The Question and The Answer
4
THE FORTIES
In 1914 the First World War started. In 1914 Clare won the All Ireland
Hurling Final, for the first and to-date the only time. I went to St Flannans
in 1939. In that year the Second World War broke out. Young people today
will ask which War? Vietnam? Yugoslavia? Let me explain. The First World
War was the War to end all Wars. The Second World War was a second chance
to do the same. Our experience of wars had been the Abyssinian War, the
Spanish Civil War, and the Chino/Japanese War. They were in faraway places.
Didn’t affect us. This was different. It was on our own doorstep. Well
almost. We might see some of the action. You’d never know Maybe we
were about to take off.
The day war broke out, my Mother and Delia, the live-in maid, were cleaning
the dining room. Chamberlains tinny voice came over the Radio. ”We
are now at war with Germany”. “Oh isn’t it awful Mrs. O’Dea,
they’re at war”. “Why Delia? Sure from now on we’ll
hear nothing but war music on the wireless”. The skirl of bagpipes.
Well, that was one way of looking at it. The Chief, Dev., came on the radio.
”We are not at war, this the Emergency”. What a let down. Ennis
was to remain a backward little hole after all.
Between starting at St. Flannans and war breaking out, it was too much.
I’ll have to separate the two. I’ll stick to the less important
one, the war. Or, to give it it’s official name, “The Emergency”.
According to Dev. that meant we were neutral. We could neither lean towards
the Germans nor the British. At the start, droves of young unemployed Ennis
men flocked to Britain and joined the forces. A few die-hard Republicans
like the “Bummer” Mc. Hugh joined Adolf Hitler to fight the British.
It was reported that the “Bummer” drove his motorbike off the
Newfoundout in Kilkee into the Atlantic, before he set off for Germany.
The L. D. F. was formed. I was too young to join. They drilled in the
yard of the Old Masonic Hall next door. They had Hurley’s for rifles.
Up Down, Left Right, Left Right, in their uniforms and boots. The stuff
of dreams. Someday they’d| get rifles. They’d stop any old Gerry
or Limey or whoever from invading Ireland. How I wished I were a couple
of years older. I‘d fight for my country. I dunno about dying though.
That’s a different story.
Then the Army arrived. We were to become a garrison town again. Only
this time a right one. The old Infirmary had been abandoned. The New Hospital
was built. The Infirmary and the Club House were to become Headquarters.
All on our side of Town. On our doorstep. We couldn’t have asked for
more. All this was happening in 1940. Things were shaping up after all,
in spite of “The Emergency”. I’ll never forget the day the
first armoured car drove up past the Terrace to the Infirmary; sorry, Headquarters.
It was almost as good as the pictures.
A new war vocabulary came into being. Johnny Webster, the owner of Knox’s,
the biggest grocery store in the town, rang the Railway Station. He enquired
as to whether the ten to eleven to Limerick running on time. A brisk voice
informed him that it was; at “10:50”. Mr. Webster left Ennis at
quarter past eleven. From our contacts with the Army we learnt that things
were at one o’ clock, two o’ clock, three o’ clock. Not quite
rock. That was to come after I had left the Town. The L. D. F. got their
rifles, ancient American Springfields. With their long barrels they looked
like buffalo guns. The elder brothers of my friends complained about the
recoil. To prove it they showed us their upper arms, which were black and
blue for weeks after firing them for the first time. They complained that
the recoil of the First World War Lee-Enfields issued to the Army was just
a little more than a 22 . If it had been me, I wouldn’t have complained.
I would have been proud to have such marks for the defence of my Country.
And they were the big boys?
An number of us insinuated ourselves into the war effort. We had bicycles.
There were manoeuvres. The Army versus the L. D. F. We knew who had superior
firepower. We sided with and followed the Army. So much for loyalty to the
Town. As blanks were used, there was no danger of us getting shot. How we
escaped getting run over by armoured cars is another matter. What the Armed
Forces thought about it all, I don’t know. Still, we were there, right
in the thick of things.
The downside of the scale was rationing. Our parents worried about the
shortage of tea. There was no shortage of grub, all which came in from the
countryside. We didn’t worry about such trivia. You could always drink
milk, or at worst, Irel Coffee. What we worried about was more important:
Cigarettes. Where to get them. You had to have cigarettes, if you wanted
to be important. We were learning fast what mattered in this brave new world.
As the Emergency progressed, we learnt more Geography. Through the magic
of Radio, Press and Cinema. Tripoli, Ed Alemain, Casino and all those other
queer sounding names. Strange thing about Radio and Cinema. Pictures about
the war though. English or American films about the war were banned by the
censor. They were propaganda. On the radio we listened to Lord Haw-Haw.
”Germany calling, Germany calling”. In the Cinema we looked at
British Pathe newsreels, showing “our gallant British troops and sailors.”
That wasn’t propaganda. That was News. Talk about an Irish solution
to an Irish problem. Then of course we had Dev. as our Chief. He had the
answer to everything,
When Pearl Harbour came, a new dimension unfolded. The Yanks were in
it. To speed the War effort more young men and women, (unemployed), went
over to England to work in munitions. They came back on holidays with loads
of money. Some of them, even after six months there, acquired English accents.
A lot of them had strange talk and strange ideas. Something was happening
to our Town. It looked like people were getting above themselves. Both in
relation to their status and beliefs. The cold winds of change were blowing.
My Fathers War/Emergency first effort. I’ve said he was progressive.
I should have said a progressive dreamer. He dreamt of making a fortune.
One of his friends was Mr. Gibson. The Gibsons, brother and sister, lived
in this lovely old world house outside the town. His sister, Rose, was straight
out of Victoriana. There was a beautiful rose garden. There was also a farm.
Mr. Gibson was no farmer. He was an inventor.
Years before the “Emergency” he invented a hay cock making
machine. It worked. There are old photographs of it at work. He invented
it to take the drudgery of saving hay. As I said Mr. Gibson was no farmer.
My Father, the entrepreneur, invested in it. Various good friends of his
joined in. They backed out when the chips were down. i.e., “Put your
money where your mouth is”. In the light of modern farming, i.e., hay
baling, it would have become obsolete. My Father lost a fair packet. He
and Jim Gibson still remained friends.
In 1938 Mr. Gibson invented the “non-skid brake”. There were
no takers. In 1939 he made the brake. Then came the Emergency. My Father
felt that it had Military possibilities, on armoured cars. The Army mysteriously
became interested. There was petrol rationing, for essentials. Mr. Gibson
was not an essential. The Army saw him as a National War “Emergency”
effort. There was no problem. Mr. Gibson got petrol for his old Bull-nosed
Morris and Model T Ford in order to experiment further.
I remember various high-ranking Army Officers in our house at evening
times. I became the envy of my friends. No, I couldn’t tell them. It
was all very secret stuff. Hush-hush Army business. I was sworn to secrecy.
The whiskey bottle came out. Progress on the project was discussed. The
date for the demonstration was fixed. My Father and I with the Army Officers
assembled in Mr. Gibson’s muddy field. The trouble was to start Mr.
Gibson’s old bangers. It took ages. The Army became fidgety. Eventually
the old Bull-nosed Morris spat into life. From the exhaust came a shower
of sparks, followed by a cloud of blue oily smoke. The backfiring sounded
like machine guns. In a cloud of evil smelling smoke it trundled off. As
it gathered speed, Mr. Gibson frenetically put the “non-skid brake”
through its paces. He looked the part. Rimless glasses perched on the end
of his long thin nose. Peaked cap back to front. The muddy field was fast
becoming engulfed in this foul smelling smoke. Mr. Gibson drove round and
round the field like one demented. To my untutored eye, through the pall
of smoke, he seemed to be “shlippen and shliden” all over the
place. The Army Brass looked on bemusedly at this strange spectacle. Mr.
Gibson claimed it a one hundred per cent success.
We never heard from the Army again. My young brother Vincent succinctly
summed it all up. Granny in the far-away place gave him a present of a little
mechanical car. Being wound up and put on the table, it could not fall off
when it came to the edge. A small transverse rubber wheel to centre of the
car did the trick. Things went wrong. It started to fall off the table.
Mr. Gibson was in our house one day. Vincent consulted him. He took out
a small screwdriver and opened the bottom of the car. He poked around the
innards. “Vincent,” he said “there’s a little sphring
gone somewhere.” He wasn’t able to fix it. “Huh,” said
Vincent “and he calls himself an inventor.” My father and Mr Gibson
remained good friends right up until Jim’s death. He believed in Mr.
Gibson.
My fathers second War “Emergency” effort. This was at the behest
of Headquarters in Dublin. It was a serious “National” effort.
“Save the Harvest”. I can’t remember which year it was, but
it was wet, but wet. Dev. told the farmers to grow wheat. Wheat grew everywhere.
Not quite in ditches, but almost. That wet year, if the Harvest wasn’t
saved, we’d have no brown bread. We, the Townies, were to be mobilised
to “Save the Harvest”. The first thing that happened was, three
chests of the precious stuff called tea arrived at our house. They were
followed by six sacks of sugar (another rationed commodity). Sustenance
for the troops. The overall plan was that lorry loads of volunteers would
go out and help the farmers to “Save the Harvest”. Each volunteer
relieved a “screw” of tea and sugar. Rations for the day. Vincent
and I were volunteers. Naturally, our Father was co-ordinator for the whole
project. Both of us milled around Mr. Costello’s sodden wheat field.
We got in the way of the farm labourers. So did the rest of the townies.
This performance was repeated a second day. We were having a great time,
whilst doing work of “National importance”. No school. On the
third day Mr. Costello sent in word, thanking us for our effort. However
he did not require any further assistance. The other lorries dwindled until
there were none. My Mother got uneasy. She told my Father to write up to
the Dipartment. What were we to do with two and a half chests of tea, and
four and a half sacks of sugar? The letter must have been lost somewhere.
My parents didn’t worry about tea anymore as they awaited instructions
from the Dipartment. They also made lots of friends in the latter part of
“The Emergency”.
Towards the end I became totally disenchanted with the whole affair.
The War/Emergency was getting to be a big bore. The Army and the L.D.F.
with their manoeuvres were just plain stupid. They wouldn’t stop an
army of geriatrics from invading the country. The daily hunt for cigs was
getting on my nerves. I wished the whole bloody shebang was over. The Convent
girls were still unattainable. That didn’t matter though; I’d
be soon leaving school. Where I was going, it was said, there were three
girls for every fella. Wouldn’t it be awful though, having to spend
all your time hunting for cigs in a strange place? Life could be terribly
unfair.
A last War/Emergency memory. I was sitting by the big rock in Hallorans
meadow and reading a book. It was a lovely summers day. Across the blue
sky drifted a barrage balloon at about 1000 ft. Its’ tow chain glinted
in the Sun. I fantasised. Here was a War balloon that wanted out. It rebelled
and broke its mooring. It wanted no more of this War and “Emergency”
stuff. As it drifted across this green and lovely Island it thought: “This
seems to be a lovely place; so peaceful and quiet.” Suddenly it looked
down. In horror it saw men engaged in savage combat. The Manoeuvres. “Oh
no,” it said “I’d better drift further”. Sadly it drifted
out over the Atlantic to “Dreamland”. The land that was at war,
but no “Emergency” nor rationing. The land of unlimited camels.
Not beasts of burden. Cigarettes. We smoked anything that came in during
“The Emergency”.
1945 I did my Leaving and Matric. I left Saint Flannans Diocesan College
for good. Elsewhere it tells whether I did or did not, with regret. ”The
Emergency” ended. The crisis was over. I was on my way.
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