Janet's thread

I love reading social history type books and this is a good one, so far.  That Neutral Island, A History of Ireland During the Second World War, by Clair Wills.

I was just a youngster during the War Years and was only aware of what was happening in my more immediate world of family and neighbourhood friends.  In the suburbs of Boston we were not affected by the War in the same way as countries on the other side of the Atlantic.  Now living in Ireland for so many years I have been very curious about what life was like here during those crucial years and  I love hearing my contemporaries tell what their experiences were during this time.  One friend, slightly older than I am, tells me that she was at boarding school during that time – a boarder at Wesley College, located on Stephen’s Green.  She was hardly affected.  And when she went home it was to a farm in County Kildare.  No shortage of essential food there.  But curiously, and what a number of people have said, is that she never knew what a banana was until after the War.  This is one of the things that seems to stand out in people’s minds when they remember the War years.  Only it was not War as such – it was called the Emergency.

One of my memories of the Second World War is of the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor – it was my fifth birthday.  The terrible news came through on the radio.  I was sitting at the desk in our living room and for some reason had a fountain pen in my hand – I accidentally spattered the wall with blue ink.  As the War progressed I was aware of not being able to get butter and we had Oleo margarine as a distasteful substitute.  We saved fat and took the tins to the local butcher.  Spam was frequently on the menu.  Gasoline was rationed so trips in the family car were few and far between.  You could hardly say we suffered.

My brother graduated from high school the following year in June 1942 when he turned 18 a month later, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy.  We were very proud of him in his uniform.  Our thoughts and letters followed him around the U.S. as he went from one training station to another, Lake Forest Illinois, San Diego California, Fitchburg Massachusetts, Pensacola Florida.  I became more aware of the geography of the U.S.  Occasionally he came home on leave and how happy we were.  Much to my father’s relief my brother was not sent overseas and eventually he was honourably discharged when the War was over.

My older sister graduated from high school in 1943 and enrolled for nurses’ training in Mt. Auburn Hospital in Cambridge so she continued to live at home.  And my other sister graduated from high school in 1944.  She went down to Washington to do secretarial work in one of the war departments.

Ireland was a part of the world I scarcely heard of.  The headlines during those years were all about the War in the Pacific and not so much about Europe, and more particularly not about Ireland.  I was certainly not aware of the thorny issue of Partition and Ireland’s troubled history.  I might possibly have had an awareness of Ireland through the medium of Irish fairy tales.  Modern Library books were popular in our house and I see that a volume of Irish Fairy and Folk Tales was an early publication in the Modern Library Series. 

As the years went by I became a stamp collector, and I still have some of the Irish stamps which I first collected in the 1940’s.     The following images and information are from wikipedia.

  lst stamp issued in 1922 by the Irish Free State

first definitive series, low values, issued 1922-23.  The designs were: Sword of Light, Map of Ireland, Celtic Cross, Arms of the Four Provinces and St. Patrick.