these days

Lucy Caldwell writes brilliantly about her hometown of Belfast, and the families who live there. Readers ask how much of her work is autobiographical and it seems that she draws on her own family and friends in the same way that Sebastian Barry does in his plays and novels. Like Barry, Caldwell was first a playwright, and her debut piece Leaves was presented by Druid in Galway before transferring to the Royal Court in London.

Caldwell is centred in Belfast and London, although holding to Kevin Barry’s dogma that it is possible to write about somewhere only after you have lived there for 11 years, means that most of her work is set in the capital of Northern Ireland. Caldwell said that even now she has been in London for as many years as she was in Belfast she is still ‘a Belfast writer.  I know that, in my bones’.

In these days she turns her attention to the year 1941 when the North, as part of the UK, was involved in a war against Hitler’s Germany.  Like many other British cities, among them Swansea and Cardiff, Belfast underwent a handful of raids by Luftwaffe bombers.  Caldwell’s these days recounts the ways in which one family is affected by the attacks.

Here is a nuclear family, as unprepared as anyone for a deluge of bombs falling from the sky.  Emma and Audrey Bell, the grown daughters at the centre of the novel, hide with their brother and parents in a ‘cupboard under the stairs’. Little Betty, who comes in to do the ‘rough’ domestic work, has nothing to shelter under but a kitchen table reinforced by two interior doors.  Neither family, irrespective of income can shelter underground as the ground in Belfast is too ‘claggy’. 

The first raid concentrated on the docks and factories but follow up raids hit residential streets.  Those in the public shelters, if receiving a direct hit, were pulverised as the buildings were above ground and provided little protection.  Caldwell’s research enables her to provide the military facts but also authentic period touches. 

Her description of the interior of the Bell home where the two sisters live with their parents, Florence and Philip, and younger brother, Paul is accurate and detailed, down to the smell of the polish. 

Class differentiation, too, is precise. Audrey’s fiancé, Richard Graham, comes from a residence which boasts a housekeeper and a cook.  Audrey’s mother has only the cook and Betty.  Maisie, a small child, who Audrey meets during a raid, lives in a home with no servants, whilst Betty, whose house is filled to the brim with relatives who have been bombed out, spends all her days at Audrey’s, working for the well-to-do family who do not expect to labour, even during a national emergency. 

Caldwell does not make much of religious fractures and presents mixed households of Protestants and Catholics, just like her own.  Those who know the city would recognise sectarian areas and there is mention of the civil, and First World Wars, delineating the toll that these conflicts have taken on the population.  Florence lost a lover in the Somme and her current partner, husband Philip, is very much a second best, second choice. 

Any loss that afflicts the characters of these days adds a new void to the life experiences of those who survive.  Any pacts that they make with God to be different, be better, be kinder are worthless in the face of indifferent, disinterested German bombs, which explode regardless of the consequences.  An excellent retelling of a forgotten Blitz. 

Caldwell, L. these days. faber & faber. 2023.

A version of this review was first published on page 36 of the Weekend section of the Irish Examiner on 21st July 2023. It is reproduced here by permission of the Editor.

Words of War Anthony Richards

Words of War: the story of the Second World War revealed in eye-witness letters, speeches and diaries.

Anthony Richards selected the content of this book from the archives of the Imperial War Museum where he is Head of Documents and Sound.  The first word of the famous venue does not sit happily in Irish ears.  And, as is well known, the so-called war was seen on this neutral island as an Emergency.  But the collection of phrases and sentences presented in Words of War is well worth a read, even if just for an understanding of how people cope under sustained ubiquitous pressure.  It will escape no one that the current challenge caused by Covid-19 is frequently compared with the Blitz in 1940s London.  Being ‘in it together’ is part of the way populations, in both the Republic and the United Kingdom, attempt to ‘bear up’ against attack, be it from a doodlebug or a coronavirus.

Returning for a moment to the word ‘Imperial’, James Holland, in his scholarly introduction, is at pains to underline the importance of the empire in the British war effort.  He states that it was decided that, after the loss of a generation of young men in the First World War, there should be a new policy of ‘steel not flesh’ and the subsequent mechanisation relied on the vast resources within Britain’s ‘global reach’.  Having made an unequivocal point about steel and other materials Holland explains that Richards himself, the curator of Words of War has focussed on people, not machines.  He has chosen, and transcribed, artifacts from those whose lives were radically affected by the worldwide conflict. 

What a labour of love this is.  To search, looking for the needles in the haystack, through reams of paper.  To listen, for hours upon end, to scratchy recordings of speeches and broadcasts.  To emerge, at the end of a long day, hair and skin laden with years’ worth of dust, from dark storage facilities.  And then to organize and annotate the precious findings so that the casual reader can flip through the pages, pausing to exclaim at this or that photograph or postcard.  Hats off to Richards who must still dream of piles of rejected material, regretting this choice and that decision, confident that the pieces he omitted from the final cut were, perhaps, the most poignant, the most central, the most telling.

Among the qualifiers are true gems: the depiction of a solemn-faced Jewish boy and his cheery companions awaiting embarkation on a Kindertransport plane; a letter from Flight Lieutenant William Reid describing the death of Air Gunner Albert Holt during a bomber mission; an exhortation from General Dwight D. Eisenhower to the soldiers, sailors and airmen of Operation Overlord; a poster inviting women to work in factories and a typescript of Churchill’s ‘blood, tears, toil and sweat’ speech with his own notes and corrections in red ink.

It would be good to purchase Words of War for a school library so that class teachers could use these primary sources in a project.  Children would pick out their favourite item and prepare a class presentation analysing its effective use of language placing it within the context of the period.  Alternatively, pupils could access the commemoration project overseen by the Digital Humanities department of Maynooth University, ‘Letters of 1916’ in which carefully developed lesson plans encourage them to study missives responding to that momentous year in Ireland.  Everything is available digitally so that searching is more efficient than using the contents, and index, pages of a book. 

It is a shame that this approach to history does not enable students to see the handwriting and the images, still seeming so fresh and so urgent, on the page.  On the other hand, should such serious concerns be foregrounded in a text that seems to be marketed as a coffee table book?  Perhaps the best approach would be to give a copy to everyone who thinks that the liberties being lost to government management of the current pandemic compare in any meaningful way to the dangers faced by European, American and Commonwealth citizens and combatants in those fateful years between 1939 and 1945.  There is no evidence, in these days of anxiety, of the ‘Blitz spirit’ displayed in 1940 nor of the resilience shown by those who were involved in standing up to the evils of fascism.  For such inspiration Richards’s Words of War is an ideal source.

Works cited

Richards, A. Words of War: the story of the Second World War revealed in eye-witness letters, speeches and diaries. Headline. 2021.

A version of this review was first published on page 34 of the Weekend section of the Irish Examiner on the 5th February 2022. It is reproduced here by permission of the Editor.