EXTRACT
A CITY IMAGINED
Below is an extract from A CITY IMAGINED - Belfast Soulscapes, by Belfast-born author, Gerald Dawe, published by Merrion Press.
Simply put, my late mother was a keen admirer of all kinds of music in performance. As a very young woman she fell in love with my musician-father. Originally from a family from the WelshEnglish border, he was London-born and joined the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers band at a young age. The band toured Northern Ireland for a morale-boosting celebration towards the end of the Second World War. They were married in 1945. The marriage lasted until the mid-1950s, whereupon my sister and I and my mother relocated to my grandmother’s house in north Belfast. It was during this time – the mid- to late 1950s – that the aftermath of the war registered with me. For ‘the war’ – the Second World War was colloquial- ly known as simply ‘the war’ – was literally everywhere. Barely a decade had gone by since its end, and Belfast was still very much marked by the experience. The physical landscape bore the scars of the deadly blitz of 1941 – when almost 1,000 citizens had perished – and in the quasi-industrial pop-up camps that had been created to house army installations, garages, depots and the like, one could still wander. As young boys we did so, picking up the habits of bubble-gum, hairstyle and, latterly, dance moves from the long-departed American troops who had been stationed nearby. The ‘prefabs’ – as temporary housing was called – remained along north Belfast’s Shore Road. But the sense of a ceremonial life in honour of those who had lost family members during the war was very much an accepted and unselfconscious part of our upbringing in school and in social and civic life. More intimately, the house in which I spent my early years retained fixtures of the war –
blackout blinds to seal off any light that might benefit Luftwaffe bombers remained in place on the bedroom windows upstairs; ration-books were left in a kitchen press, and the language and customs that were associated with rationing carried over well into the 1950s. Food was not thrown out; clothes were repaired, socks darned and these practices continued not out of thrift but out of habit. The human dimension of this post-war world retains a very special resonance for me, bearing in mind what would descend upon the city of Belfast by the end of the 1960s. In the house I moved to in the mid-1950s, with its random relics of wartime, I took in, without actually knowing it, many stories of precisely how war recasts what seems to be the stabilities and securities of ‘home’. My mother and her brother were evacuated after the first blitz in Belfast to the Antrim countryside from their own family home to which they had returned from Canada in the mid-1930s. It was in this house in north Belfast that refugees, contacts of friends of my grandmother, had briefly passed through on their way to Canada. I was fascinated to hear about the CID calling to that house to interview my grandmother about one such friend, one of the fleeing émigrés, only to be confronted by her straight-laced and stalwart father, who denied any such knowledge and sent the police on their way. Or so the story goes. Around that house and the surrounding avenues and terraces off the Antrim and Cliftonville roads, the Nazi bombs would fall and create carnage in the blitz of 1941. If the aftermath of war had left its mark on the streetscapes of Belfast, one can also see in retrospect how lives had been not so much ‘influenced’ by the war as determined by it. Men in their regimental blazers heading to the British Legion sporting pencil-thin moustaches, raincoats folded neatly over arm, turned out well was the phrase. One of our neighbours, who never fully recovered from the experience of being torpedoed, could be heard crying out at night for his friend and second-in-command whom he had lost at sea. The strained understanding of their women was stretched, no doubt, to breaking point. A friend’s father, who had been a rear gunner on a Lancaster (a perilous position with high mortalities), never referred to his war experiences and would unaccountably turn morose and barely talk for days on end. A neighbour, literally next door, a quiet unassuming civil servant who had fought with the British Army through the bitter campaigns liberating Europe, found himself finally in Vienna, where he met and married Elsa, with whom he returned to Belfast to live a subdued life before illness struck him
down in middle-age. Elsa seemed so foreign in manner and style and custom. One evening my mother, to whom she was very close, recounted the truth of Elsa’s hounded wartime existence, dressed as a man to avoid rape when the avenging Soviet troops settled their grim score with the Third Reich. There were other such stories, which I heard without quite understanding. I had another friend whose mother was Czech. She was a wonderful, quietly mannered and sophisticated woman, but who amongst us could know what she had gone through, of what had happened that took her across Europe to a suburban home in north Belfast. Our boyhood was peopled with many such stories. The anecdotes I eagerly listened to when ‘soirées’ gathered in our house included recollections about the Pathé newsreels that featured the release from the camps of desperate, unbelievable figures. Those who watched laughed at first and thought that what they were seeing on the screen was a ‘horror’ movie until the reality dawned that this was actual. My mother recounted how people in the Capitol cinema on the Antrim Road fainted or were sick and fled. When I started at the Lyric Youth theatre as a young, impressionable teenager, our dance instructress was a wonderful woman called Helen Lewis, who had been incarcerated in a concentration camp (her camp number was stamped on her arm) – experiences which she recounted in A Time to Speak, one of the few Holocaust survivor accounts from Ireland.
A CITY IMAGINED - Belfast Soulscapes, by Gerald Dawe, published by Merrion Press.
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