Book review: ‘Midnight Again’ is a tour de force on wartime life in Northern Ireland

Journalist and author ALF McCREARY reviews a recently-published edited collection of letters, which provide insight into Ulster society during WW2:
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When I was a Queen’s University undergraduate many years ago, my grandfather Thomas McCreary wrote me many letters in beautiful copper-plate script.

He told me the latest news about my native village of Bessbrook in South Armagh, including all the recent weddings, births and deaths. These were the days before mobile phones and other social media, and I still treasure the fact that my grandfather took the time to keep me in touch in this way.

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Unfortunately letter-writing has become a lost art. As a reminder of what we have lost, the power of such writing is illustrated by the recent publication of the book “Midnight Again - The Wartime Letters of Helen Ramsey Turtle”, published by Turtle Mackie of Mahee Island.

Helen, an American who lived on the island in Strangford Lough with her husband Lancelot Turtle and three young daughters, wrote elegantly and copiously to her family back in Colorado during the Second World War and this very large collection of her letters provides a remarkable picture of life in Ulster during one of the most difficult and dangerous periods in its history.

She offers unique insights into the background of major events, such as the Easter air raids by German bombers on Belfast in April 1941, and tells us that people in her area of the Province knew very little of the details in the immediate aftermath of that blitz – “It is still the main topic of conversation every place with everyone still comparing notes and adding scraps of information - mostly rumour because everything is as hush-hush that no official statements as to damage, casualties etc are given and we just have to put 2 and 2 together to get a composite picture and then no-one knows because it is all rumour and gossip.”

One of the strengths of Helen Turtle’s letters is in demonstrating how her family was trying to live as normally as possible despite the war. After referring to the blitz she writes: “The Easter bunny came through our big window and filled (the children’s) new party shoes with Easter eggs and a few presents. The Easter egg situation was serious because there are so few sweets anyplace.”

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On 11 February 1942 Helen describes war rationing thus; ”The scarce thing lately has been soap flakes. That makes practically everything but bread rationed - most tinned goods, barley, rice, semolina etc are on a ‘points’ system with tinned meat, tinned fish etc. Most people spend most of their day chasing food. We don’t because shopping in Comber we take what we get.”

One important dimension to her writing is astutely observed by the book’s editor, Professor John Wilson Foster, in his perceptive afterword summary. He states: “... Helen’s letters utterly discredit the distinguished Irish writer Sean O’Faolain’s portrait of hell which masquerades as Belfast in An Irish Journey (1940). On the strength of a fleeting visit he writes of ‘the red factories and the grey buildings, and the ruthlessness with which the whole general rash of this stinking city was permitted to spread ... There is no aristocracy - no culture - no grace - no leisure worthy of the name. It all boils down to mixed grills, double whiskies, dividends, movies, and these strolling, homeless, hate-driven poor.’”

Jack Foster points out firmly: “ ... Helen is a one-woman dismissal of this travesty. She takes omnivorous advantage of the plays, movies, lectures, concerts and recitals, magazines and journals (including the progressive London literary journal Horizon as well as her beloved New Yorker) on offer in Belfast.”

If there were many more observers today like Helen Turtle writing about some of the improvements in social, educational and other important aspects of life here in the past 100 years under unionism, it would help to balance the furiously one-dimensional re-writing of history by Irish republicanism in recent years.

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Ironically, Helen loved visiting neutral Dublin during the Second World War when it was obviously more liberated than the North, which was at that point heroically engaged in the struggle for civilisation against Hitler and Nazi Germany, and which provided a life-line to help win the Battle of the Atlantic and contributed significantly to the overall Allied victory. Unfortunately this is something which is conveniently forgotten today in political circles in London as well as in Dublin.

Overall, Helen Turtle’s letters are a tour de force in providing important information about Northern Ireland during the Second World War. They ought to be preserved in all our important archives of scholarship to help historians provide a rounded and balanced picture of those crucial years during the Second World War.

It is also an important complementary publication to the definitive history of “Northern Ireland in the Second World War” by Professor John W Blake and Trevor Allen’s excellent “The Storm Passed By - Ireland and the Battle of the Atlantic 1940-41”, both of which I sourced extensively in my research for my own book “Titanic Port - An Illustrated History of Belfast Harbour”.

Much credit is due to everyone involved in the production of Midnight Again, and not least to her daughter Julie Turtle Mackie and the wider family, as well as to the editor Professor Foster and the designer Wendy Dunbar. The story of how Helen Turtle’s letters were preserved for all this time is worthy of a book in itself, and Midnight Again is a treasure for anyone who seeks fascinating grassroots information while reading between the headlines of major history itself.

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Midnight Again - The Wartime Letters of Helen Ramsey Turtle, published by Turtle Mackie of Mahee Island, is available in all good bookshops. It is also available on Amazon and on the Blackstaff Press/Colourpoint website.

Alf McCreary’s book, Titanic Port, is published by Booklink.

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