The First Year of the War

On the day war was declared in 1939 it was a beautiful, sunny September day.  I remember standing in the square in front of our house listening to the adults discussing this extraordinary event.  It was a momentous occasion but rather remote from that small sleepy hamlet in the Irish Midlands.

The first effect felt by us was the arrival of our Aunt Mary and her three daughters from London.  I can still recall them as they walked up our drive.  They were very beautiful and glamorous and wore posher clothes than any we had ever come across.  Aunt Mary was very different from my mother.  She seemed to be well off and she soon set about cleaning up the family home where they were intending to stay for the duration of the war.  I can still picture her with a cigarette dangling from her mouth, as she washed and swept and scrubbed.  She did her housework in the morning while, as she explained, she was still fresh from sleep.

Maureen and Elizabeth joined us in the South School and were accepted without reservation.  Abbeyleix was very different from London.  They were used to a life of luxury, compared with ours.  Maureen would have a daintily prepared lunch, a healthy balanced diet, while we often had but a thick hunk of bread sprinkled with brown sugar!  Sometimes, we had to wait for my older brother to bring the lunch to us.  My mother would be waiting for a postal order in the post and then she would send Ted to cash it in the general stores next door and buy some groceries.  The loaves were what we called ‘turnovers’ and would be fresh from the bakery.  Bread was baked daily in local bakeries, and sold hot from the oven.

 Maureen’s food would be wrapped in clean greaseproof paper while ours would be in a used paper bag.  I remember my mother and Maureen discussing the scarcity of eggs as Maureen remarked, ”Even I didn’t have an egg for my breakfast this morning.”  My mother said softly, “None of my children had one, either.”  At that time egg production was very much a seasonal occurrence.  Eggs were cheap and plentiful around Easter but scarce and expensive near Christmas.

I think my mother felt inferior in Aunt Mary’s presence and she felt sensitive at not being able to give us the things our cousins and friends had.  That Christmas Aunt Mary invited us to a Christmas party and we were intrigued that she had a lovely Christmas tree with candles lighting on it.  That was well before rural electrification was introduced.   She gave each of us a present from the tree.  The only Christmas trees we had seen up to then had been at the annual parish Christmas parties.

I remember Uncle Dick coming on a visit with a young man called John.  John’s father was a doctor attached to Aut Even Hospital in Kilkenny.  My father, who had great faith in this doctor, used to tell how the doctor would throw chairs about in temper in the ward.  If he found biscuits in a patient’s locker, he would fling them across the floor, too.  John, we were told, was a medical student in Trinity College, Dublin.  Aunt Mary that day joined my parents at lunch.  We children, as usual, were kept out of sight but after lunch we were lined up to be introduced to the visitors.  Maureen was suffering from hives and Aunt Mary pulled her out from the line and asked John to look at the hives. 

A few years ago I was visiting my friend, Hazel, in Dublin and she took me out with the walking group she belongs to.  I got speaking to one of the walkers, and discovered she was John’s former wife.  She told me he had dropped out of his medical studies in his first year and had joined the RAF in England.  They had lived in Lincolnshire before their divorce.  The past seems to be forever catching up with me like this!  In the mid-fifties I went on holiday to Dunmore East and met John’s mother and sister in their retirement bungalow.  I remember hearing that my uncle had been going to marry John’s sister, but then broke off the engagement.

Early in 1940 I began to have extra tuition from Mrs Galbraith in her home after school.  She was preparing me for the scholarship exam for one of the schools run by the Incorporated Society for the Promotion of Protestant Education in Ireland.  That sounds a bit of a mouthful!  The school I was aiming for was Rochelle in Cork.  My Aunt Gladys had gone to Celbridge School and I think I was being guided to follow in her footsteps.  She died in 1929, shortly before her 21^st birthday, just before she took up her first teaching post.  She was my father’s youngest sister.  My second name is Gladys.  Maureen was given Aunt Gladys’ second name, Antoinette, as her second one.  Uncle Dick, my father’s youngest brother, was close to his sister, Gladys.  They were the only two out of ten children who went away to boarding school and then to Trinity College in Dublin.  I have a little book called ‘They are not Dead’ inscribed by Uncle Dick to his mother in October 1929.  It is a collection of sayings on death from spiritual writers of different faiths.

As the war progressed, my father had to give up driving his old Morris Cowley car and it was left to rust in the yard.  Only essential users like doctors and the clergy could buy petrol.  My father used to go up each day to his family home, where he had his workshop in the barn.  One day I was there with him and Uncle Charlie.  They were watching a man crouched in the reeds across from the house.  I think he was probably a bird-watcher but the talk those days was of German spies.  What a German spy might be doing in those parts I couldn’t understand. 

Uncle Eddy came to take my aunt and my cousins back to London in May 1940.  A short while later there was the excitement of the false alarm about German parachutes dropping on Knapton Woods.  On that day in June 1940 I was sitting studying at the table in the middle of the drawing room while my father and Uncle Charlie sat chatting by the window.  Outside, a severe electrical storm was raging.  Suddenly, a huge ball of light rolled rapidly across the floor from door to door and we three jumped to our feet in alarm.  

“What was it?” I cried out.  My father thought it was a thunderbolt and I accepted this as a rare occurrence.  In later years I came to realise that thunderbolts existed only in fables and myths, yet I couldn’t work out what had rolled across the floor that day.  Only recently have I discovered that there is a phenomenon called ball lightning.  It was a scary experience with a hint of the supernatural about it.

 In the midst of all the excitement and awe, we heard a loud knock on the front door and my father went to answer it.  I followed at a discreet distance, wondering who the caller might be.  Unexpected visitors were rare in those days.  A member of the Gardai Siochana (Irish Police) stood there, asking for my brother, Ted, and telling my father that Ted was to report immediately to the barracks to collect his rifle and his orders.  The Germans, he said, had landed by parachute in Knapton Woods and the young men of the Local Defence Force were to go and defend their country!  Ted was fifteen years old at the time but he had joined the LDF and his duties up to then had involved guarding the gates of fields to ensure that farmers didn’t move their cattle during a severe outbreak of foot and mouth disease.  He was proud of his khaki uniform and his heavy brown boots.  He had asked his officer if he might have a pair of boots for his dad and he proudly presented the boots to our father who was really pleased with the gift as those boots were good leather ones. 

I remember once going to visit Ted as he stood to attention with his rifle on his shoulder in the field he was guarding.  At that time he was a pupil at the Preston School, the Protestant secondary school in Abbeyleix where our Uncle Eddy had gone from the national school.  With just two teachers, the headmaster and a lady assistant, the education concentrated on Mathematics and English literature, Shakespeare and Dickens, in particular.  I remember my brother one day mimicking the headmaster’s definition of parallel lines: ‘though two straight lines be produced to hell and back, they will never meet.’ 

Anyway, after the policeman had left, my father went to look for Ted and he found him in bed, hiding under the bedclothes, crying and shaking in fear.  There was no way he was going out to face German soldiers!  My father comforted him and said he wouldn’t have to go.  The policeman returned and asked where Ted was and my father pleaded with him to let him go in Ted’s place.  He said he had fought Germans on the front in the First World War and he could handle a rifle far better than his son, a lad of fifteen years of age, could.  The policeman relented and said he would report that he couldn’t find young Hartford!  As I write this, I am thinking of the thousands of boy soldiers in the First World War and I can fully appreciate their fear.  Their execution for refusing to fight seems cruel.  Ted’s officer never upbraided him for his failure to answer the call of duty.

An aeroplane flew from the Curragh and landed in a local farmer’s field while the young members of the LDF took up their stations around Knapton Wood.  A young courting couple had taken shelter under some trees but they soon grew scared of the lightning and decided to make a dash for it in the torrents of rain.  As they emerged, a young LDF chap dropped his rifle and fled for his life!  Some hours later it was discovered that the ‘parachutes’ were a cock of hay.  A whirlwind had lifted the hay from a field in County Kildare and carried it through the air as far as Knapton.  This was a good example of typical Irish exaggeration! I guess there were some red faces around that day.  It brought a bit of excitement into the dullness of our insular surroundings.

I had sat my scholarship exam around Easter time for which I had travelled to Kilkenny College.  Ted had gone on the train with me and my Aunt May had taken us for tea and cakes to a teashop.  I passed the exam and was excitedly looking forward to going off to boarding school that September.  My Uncle Dick was to pay the £40 a year for the boarding part of the fees since the scholarship covered only the day fees.  My Aunt May paid for my uniform.  Two items of clothing I remember with loathing, a liberty bodice and a lace-up corset.  When they arrived from my aunt, I wept bitterly saying I wouldn’t wear those awful garments and Aunt Mary appeared and asked why I was crying.  When she heard why, she remarked, “I don’t wonder at the child!”  No way would her daughters ever have to wear such horrible underwear.

The sun seemed to have shone daily throughout that summer and when I finally set out for Cork in September, I couldn’t have guessed that by Christmas my parents would have left Oldtown and gone to live in an ex-Serviceman’s house in an area called ’Ballytarsna’.  My father was given the house rent-free because of his service with the RAF in World War 1.  I hated that house but it is where my parents spent the rest of their lives together.

Little did we know then that the War would last for a further five years and that when it ended in 1945 the world would be a very different place from that familiar to us throughout our childhood.