The Wrong Country. Gerald Dawe

CHAPTER FOUR

      FROM THE GINGER MAN TO KITTY STOBLING

      The 1950s represent the end of a way of life and the beginning of the world we live in today. The industrial civilisation of the British imperial project finally started to run aground in the 1950s: a culture that had spanned the globe and had produced an extraordinary legacy – of great modernising achievement on the one hand, yet on the other a battleground of colonialism. Post-war, these two powerful forces would clash in localised struggles in various parts of the remaining British Empire or countries under British influence. ‘When [Harold] Macmillan became Prime Minister in 1957,’ writes the social historian Dominic Sandbrook, ‘no fewer that forty-five different countries were still governed by the Colonial Office, but during the next seven years Ghana, Malaya, Cyprus, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Tanganyika, Western Samoa, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Uganda, Zanzibar and Kenya were all granted their independence.’1

      These struggles would form the political and ultimately the social backdrop to a generation of young men and women who, in the 50s, were starting to break free from the conventional and prescribed ways of living and working: the context to much of the best in English fiction of the period such as John Braine’s Room at the Top, David Storey’s This Sporting Life, and Colin MacInnes’s Absolute Beginners, as well as in the writing of poets such as Philip Larkin.

      In Britain, the welfare state and the democratic opening up of educational possibilities created the foundations for a new kind of society that would finally emerge in the 1960s. The transformation of England, in particular, into a consumerist society, provided Ireland with the safety valve that the truly conservative nature of the Irish state and the fragility of its traditional economy obviously needed. Emigration to England, and farther afield, was both a forced and elegiac comment on the failure of de Valera’s nationalism. It was also an opportunity to see the wider world and play some part in the cultural and economic changes that were taking place, although how this would have been viewed at the time is clearly a matter of perspective and of how individuals fared in their new lives ‘across the water’.

      The following statistic is a stark reminder of how things were: ‘Of every 100 girls in Connacht aged 15–19 in 1946, 42 had left by 1951.’2 To what kind of life and loving one wonders. Indeed, the statistics become a story in themselves: ‘About 400,000 souls left in ten years for Britain, and to a lesser extent, for Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand.’3 During post-war reconstruction in Britain, 634,000 Irish men and women settled in the UK; but if one stretches this cohort to include the period 1931–61, ‘Irish-born’ residents in Britain increased from 505,000 to 951,000 which, if one considers the numbers of those who returned to Ireland during the Second World War, is really quite staggering.

      On a wider front, though, 1950s America and the momentum that was building up throughout that society, as well as the first mass moves towards civil rights and an end to racial segregation in the States, would politicise the English-speaking world by the end of the decade. The example of the civil rights movement in the United States would create an unstoppable cultural dynamic towards equality of races and religions with the separation of church and state.

      In Ireland, the 1950s was probably the last decade in which both parts of the island, the ruling political parties and the pre-eminent role of the churches, could withstand this shifting of power in the western world. Fifties’ Ireland was the beginning of the end for that unhealthy relationship, while the literature and drama of the period mark a threshold between the short-lived past of an independent Catholic Ireland and the emergence of a more modernising free state or republic that simply had to reconnect with Europe and, more pressingly, with its British neighbours, if it (‘Ireland’) was to survive. This is exactly what started to happen under the strategic shifts of economic policy initiated by T.K. Whitaker and others within the Department of Finance and in the mostly Dublin-based intellectual and political elite.4 (A process poetically dramatized a few years later in Thomas Kinsella’s long poem ‘Nightwalker’.)5

      In Northern Ireland, in a landscape still scarred by Nazi bombs, as I well remember growing up there, and its after-effects (Belfast had been blitzed in 1941 with the loss of approximately 1,000 people),6 the momentary possibility of opening up and producing an egalitarian civic society (notwithstanding the abortive IRA campaign, Operation Harvest, during the 1950s) stuttered and stumbled into the mid-sixties before the hope of a just society was snuffed out with the eruption of the Troubles.

      There are two parts to the Irish story of the 1950s – a Northern and Southern dual-narrative which sometimes interconnects but more often diverges – and it is a story that has not really been told. In 1950s Belfast, many enjoyed and prospered in the stability and quality of life provided by good schools, functioning well-run hospitals, and proliferating new roads that led into blossoming suburbs; diversifying new ‘tech’ factories sat alongside the traditional heavy industries of shipbuilding, aircraft manufacture, tobacco, mills and suchlike.7 However, these industries, we now know, were becoming increasingly untenable and in a couple of decades would be extinct. A completely traditional way of industrial life, with its customs, work practices, housing and expectations was eliminated, and along with this disappearance the exposure, at almost exactly the same time, of a bigoted and repressive system of government that was blind to the poverty and inequality in its treatment of its Catholic minority and the urban poor of both religions.

      The political world was redefining the power blocs of the Cold War – in Korea, in Suez, and in what became known as the Iron Curtain, behind which previously autonomous states had been colonised by the Soviet Union and would remain so for fifty years, despite brave attempts at liberation in Hungary which were ruthlessly repressed.

      On the island of Ireland, the old wounding partition aside, the ingrained grievances of poverty, injustice and the dreadful inner-city housing conditions in both capitals seemed beyond the ability of either church or state to remedy. Ireland’s difficulty became Britain’s opportunity and, as we know, emigration flourished into a way of life. The statistics say it all.

      On the cultural front, however, much was happening in Ireland and to Irish writers based abroad. Alongside the list Brian Fallon provides in his essential portrait, An Age of Innocence: Irish Culture 1930–1960,8 one can add the achievements of Elizabeth Bowen, Mary Lavin and Kate O’Brien. According to Terence Brown’s study Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 1922–2002, the early fiction of Edna O’Brien, in The Country Girls (1960) and The Lonely Girl (1962), charts an emerging pattern of ‘a brief idyll of youthful discovery followed by disillusionment before sending them [O’Brien’s country girls] on to the more exotic attractions of London, but the young woman or man from a rural background who sought to establish a family in the city was confronted there by adjustment to the novel ways of urban family life’.9 Brown goes on to point out that by the 1950s, ‘despite the slow rate of economic growth in the country as a whole, Dublin has been transformed from the elegant, colourful, and decaying colonial centre of English rule in Ireland into a modern if rather dull administrative and commercial capital’.10

      This change would work its way into the livelihoods