That Neutral Island by Clair Wills

Author:Clair Wills [Clair Wills]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571317394
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2014-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

The idea that life and death might hang in the balance with a visit from the glimmer man had its own cruel bathos, of course, since it was obvious that Irish citizens were protecting nobody but themselves. Nonetheless stories of outwitting the glimmer man, of tea-withdrawal symptoms, of transport trauma, were eagerly recounted, suggesting as they did a population united in their ‘hour of need’ and facing their difficulties with good humour. In January 1941 Hodson found a number of people ‘almost glad that the petrol supply has been cut – they now feel they are doing something to help win the war’. Bowen too reported that ‘many of the public seem to derive a mild self-importance from being “like England” – in fact, in the movement.’ These were safe stories, in contrast to tales of the increasing homelessness and destitution that were one result of wartime seclusion. In one sense, rationing increased the atmosphere of isolation from the war (as Ireland became more insular, and returned to almost nineteenth-century living conditions). But it also helped Irish citizens to manufacture a sense of struggle. As many noted at the time, Ireland was asked to embrace austerity without the ‘wartime spirit’ and sense of pulling together which was the accepted line on the British response to war both then and now. ‘At present Éire suffers, in all senses,’ said Bowen, ‘and while her deprivations are far less than Britain’s, they have to be met without the heroic stimulus that comes from participation in the war.’ Britain itself was cut off from the main theatres of war, of course – indeed, part of the problem was that there were so many theatres to be isolated from. It may be that the stories of British stoicism under the Blitz were so powerful precisely because they could fill the void in people’s imaginations, when faced with trying to understand the war elsewhere. But while communal loyalties reshaped the individual’s private world in Britain, transforming it through a myth of public-spiritedness, the problem in Ireland seemed to be that there was too much privacy. If the idea of hearth and home was in disarray in bombed-out Britain, in Ireland home was impossible to escape.

A very British view of this atmosphere was captured by the comic team of Jimmy O’Dea and Harry O’Donovan, in their facetious look at Irish life in the BBC’s Irish Half Hour. A series of skits on small-town life under Emergency Powers ran throughout 1942 – and here again the emphasis was on the population’s good-humoured response to shortages, as though Ireland might vie with Britain for wartime indomitability. Events in the small town of ‘Ballygobackwards’ are shaped by anxiety over ration books and ‘capoons’ (inevitably coupons are issued only for unwanted items – ‘Yeh have to take what the government orders. There’s a war on’); by the always imminent arrival of government inspectors; by the impossibility of carrying out government directives; and above all by the difficulties of making contact with the outside world.

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