Delivered by lamplight in old rural Donegal
James Harvey's memoir Grappling With Ghosts captures the strangeness and struggle of a lost world. Below is an extract from the book...
THE world on both sides of the Irish Sea is so utterly changed today from what it was when I entered it eight decades ago, that it's hard to recapture it now.
But recreating the strange and remote realities of that world is what I set out to do in the memoir of my childhood, Grappling With Ghosts, published earlier this year.
Ireland, just 30 years removed from 700 years of British domination, had scarcely emerged from the 19th century. It remained a 'priest-ridden, God-forsaken race,' in James Joyce's acerbic description.
London, meanwhile, shrouded in fog and greasy coal soot was the epicentre of an exhausted debtor nation, still clinging to an image of British exceptionalism. A young Queen Elizabeth took the throne, Winston Churchill took his second bite at the prime ministerial apple, and the Empire circled the drain.
As my mother's contractions began on the day she delivered me, back in the 1940s, the only way to get her to Donegal hospital about ten miles away was by horse and cart. There were few cars in Donegal at the time. There was no taxi stand to turn to.
Even if there had been, there were no telephones. For that matter, there was no electricity. The horse-drawn cart was the only option, its boxy body without springs sitting on an unforgiving cast-iron axle and large 4-foot-high wooden wheels, shod in steel.
They never made it to the hospital. As the horse plodded along on Donegal's rough roads, my mother realized they had better stop at her parents' thatched cottage.
My grandmother got busy preparing to deliver the baby. In due course I arrived, and my grandmother made a startling discovery. 'There's another one in there,' she declared to my mother's shock. Before they knew it, my twin brother Frank, made his appearance.
And the two of us became the fourth and fifth children in the family. Frank earned the only crib in the cottage. I was unceremoniously dumped in a kitchen drawer.
James Harvey's mother pictured at the Neeld Arms in Paddington, London
Pregnant women and their families at the time had so little agency that professionals didn't think they needed to know that twins were on the way.
Meanwhile, London, to which we moved three years later, was still marked by the destruction of World War II. Everywhere you turned you found armless and legless men in wheelchairs or on crutches.
There were bombed sites all over the city—buildings that had been flattened during World War II. One of them was located right beside our home in St. John's Wood. Another was across Cirencester Street from the primary school I later attended in Paddington.
The overwhelming sense of London in the early 1950s was of a grim and dark environment. Thousands of chimneys belched black coal smoke that congealed greasily on everything it touched—and in every lung it entered.
Bronchial catarrh was a sort of universal affliction among London adults. After men hopped off busses, many of them performed a routine pantomime of coughing, hawking, and spitting to get rid of the discharge.
Life was tough for working people. Work was hard. Wages tight. Spousal abuse was taken for granted. Newsagents sold cigarettes in packs of five, and even one or two at a time. And toughs known as Teddy Boys dressed in Edwardian clothes and terrorized some streets.
Teddy Boys in 1950s London
But shafts of light penetrated this gloom. Queen Elizabeth II was crowned. A British expedition scaled Everest. And Roger Bannister, an Oxford medical student, broke the legendary four-minute mile barrier.
Locally, pubs provided a break from the tedium. The Neeld Arms in Paddington, where my mother worked as a barmaid, served as a social centre for the Irish community in and around Harrow Road.
Life was a challenging struggle for the working-class Irish, whether farming in Donegal or living as labourers or domestics in London. But the bleakness and financial stress of those days could be relieved by the love and affection of close-knit families.
The book is available now
James Harvey's memoir, Grappling With Ghosts: Childhood Memories from Postwar Ireland and London, 2025 is available now. www.grapplingwithghosts.com
See More: Grappling With Ghoses, James Harvey, Memoir
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