She knew to a penny the price of a cold in the head, a day at the seaside, a tea-party for the minister, a wedding invitation.
Janet McNeill, The Other Side of the Wall (1955).
Hilda Fawcett is trying to manage a household on her improvident husband’s earnings, and that is why she is so cost-conscious; the rather unexpected list, above, gives us an insight into unavoidable events in the mid-century, middle-class housewife’s life. (Irish Catholics could substitute ‘the stations’ for the minister’s tea-party). The novels of McNeill, Anne Crone and Patricia O’Connor (whose real name was Norah Ingram)chronicle carefully-handled resources and carefully-presented appearances, ironed handkerchiefs and lengths of tweed brought to a dressmaker, a world instantly recognisable to anybody familiar with the frugal, fragile worlds of our mothers and grandmothers. The tight-fisted farmer who uses old iron bedsteads to stop gaps in hedges in Crone’s My Heart and I (1955) had his equivalents south of the border, and Nancy Montgomery’s mother’s tremulous hope that her daughter might be marrying into a farmhouse with running water (..’but you can’t believe the half of what you hear…’) in O’Connor’s The Mill in the North (1939) would have been echoed anywhere on the island.
The earliest-published of the books I’m discussing here, Patricia O’Connor’s The Mill in the North is set in a fictional Co.Down mill town, Ringawoody. The novel’s heroine, Nancy Montgomery, a Protestant like most of the novel’s characters, is dismissed from her job at Harkness’s mill for refusing to grovel in apology to management for saying ‘damn’ when her arm was nearly torn off in an accident. Although her ‘flashy’ clothes are gently deplored in the way that all working-class women’s clothes were deplored by female novelists(without exception in this period), Nancy has character and spirit, and a lot more independence than the rather pathetic Marie Harkness, the mill-owner’s daughter who can drive a car, but doesn’t work at all. (Marie, however, is shocked to hear of Nancy’s dismissal: she is not a bad sort.) Nancy is sought in marriage by a local farmer’s son, Frank Orr. It might seem odd that a farmer’s son would marry a factory worker, but in Patrick Kavanagh’s Tarry Flynn (1948) farmers’ daughters from Cavan/Monaghan work in factories in local towns, so such an alliance would not have been unthinkable even south of the border. Nonetheless it is presented as somewhat unusual in the novel, the entire theme of which is movement up, down or sideways out of social spheres in love and in work – and not just for Nancy.There is broad approval from the author for such movement, and a certain amount of sad head-shaking at religio-social prejudice. It’s a good read and a good story.
Anne Crone wrote mainly about rural Ulster, and her first novel, Bridie Steen (1948) was listed as one of the outstanding books of the year by the New York Times. A sensitively-written exploration of sectarian tension – the Catholic Bridie is adopted by her Protestant grandmother and falls in love with a Protestant – it portrays Catholics generally as ignorant and priest-fearing. Crone laments Protestant prejudice too, but ‘rational’ Protestantism gets all the best lines. People reared Catholic in the anglophone world are so accustomed to the ‘default Protestantism’ of discourse that we correct for it automatically, but a Northern Irish setting makes us (if our background is also Irish), notice that correction that bit more. Still, it is a well-meaning book with a good, if sad, story. Another of Crone’s novels is My Heart and I (1955), the story of Grace, wife of a cold, grasping Fermanagh farmer, and daughter of a selfish old charmer, who invests all her hopeless love in her son, John, and finds herself completely at a loss when he marries Christine, a radiographer. Although Crone deplores Grace’s lack of backbone, she injects an acidic auctorial comment on Christine’s insistence to her husband that she and John cannot have Grace to live with them because they have to ‘live their lives’:
Our lives! Our precious, never-to-be-lived again, never-to-be-interfered-with lives! Our very own…….sensitive, miraculous, so easily-breakable lives! John had not thought about his life until now, had not considered it in the abstract….had not seen it as a box of sweets to be sucked ecstatically….
I read this astringent, refreshing passage (shortened considerably here) every so often to remind myself that my life is not a Project, no matter what the self-help industry might tell me.
In Janet McNeill’s The Other Side of the Wall, the disintegration of Hilda’s carefully-constructed world when her adult children tangle with the unpredictable neighbours in the other half of their semi-detached house makes unputdownable reading. All Hilda’s scrimping and saving and managing is as vain, in the end, as her husband’s literary endeavours, when confronted with the unexpected. The main character of McNeill’s As Strangers Here (1960) is Edward, a Presbyterian minister who refuses to let the IRA border campaign influence his broadly positive view of his Catholic neighbours. This is a slow and quiet read with a lot of vivid details about Belfast life; as the rather unusual subtitle (see below) suggests, it was meant as a slice of life rather than a story. A bomb is defused in Belfast Lough, creating an unlikely hero; a Junior Bible Class all sporting Halloween masks visit the Ulster Museum and become hopelessly mixed up with a bunch of Loreto schoolgirls (similarly masked) presided over by a ‘clever-looking nun and a nervous novice.’ And the minister has to pretend to enjoy a gymnastics display by half-naked teenage girls, when he finds it all grotesque and tedious – not indecent though. (Hard to imagine a priest even attending such a display, or female educators in independent Ireland staging one.) Another McNeill book, Tea At Four O’Clock (1956), is all about brothers and sisters. The death of Mildred has left Laura free, but vulnerable to the manipulation of their long-estranged, despicable (or is he, quite?) brother George. Another character in the book, Miss Parks, is homeless because the brother for whom she kept house for decades, the Reverend Cuthbert, decided to marry in middle age. ‘Miss Parks had to recreate her world’, as did many women everywhere in similar situations. McNeill, like other authors, doesn’t waste much sympathy on Miss Parks. Maura Laverty is equally dismissive of the ‘dried-up’ Irish governess, Miss Madden, exiled by her brother’s middle-aged marriage to Spain, in No More Than Human (1944).The universal happy ending of marriage rides roughshod over any casualties.
These books are packed with ethnographic detail. In The Mill., Nancy, at 20, looks 30, but when she started in the mill at 15, she looked 12. Doing heavy physical work from a young age has turned the undersized child into the prematurely-aged woman. An elderly aunt in hospital in The Other Side of the Wall , delighted to be brought flowers, is even more touched that they are Sweet-Williams, on the eve of the Twelfth. Sunday church services last an hour and a half, and street-lights are switched off at 1 a.m. (This used to happen in all Irish towns until the 1960s). Presbyterians call Anglicans ‘Episcopalians.’ In O’Connor’s book, the songs ‘O’Donnell Aboo’ (sic) and ‘Derry’s Walls’ are sung at the mill’s Christmas party, to cater for all political loyalties, and a Catholic priest is invited to speak at the proceedings and listened to respectfully, just as, O’Connor comments, a Protestant minister would be invited to do in the Free State. In the novels which touch on rural life, country people, Protestant and Catholic alike, eat soda bread, oatmeal, potatoes and bacon, drink tea and buttermilk, and cook on the fire.
Patricia O’Connor’s novel was first published in Dublin, and it, and McNeill’s and Crone’s novels were reviewed in both the Irish Press and the Irish Independent, as Northern-Irish-published books nearly always were. The Irish News and Belfast Newsletter, for their part, reviewed many books published in the 26 counties or written by Irish writers. Partition existed but several forms of cultural expression transcended it.
These novels offer intriguing insights into life in the 6 counties between the Troubles of the 1920s and those of the 1970s, but they are also worth reading as good stories in themselves.
Patricia O’Connor, The Mill in the North (Dublin: Talbot Press 1939: Dublin: Arlen House 2023).
Janet McNeill, The Other Side of the Wall (London: Hodder & Stoughton 1955)
———————Tea at Four o’clock (London: Hodder & Stoughton 1956: London: Turnpike books 2019). Virago (London) also brought out an edition of this in 1991.
———————As Strangers Here: a study of family and human relationships in a Belfast setting (London: Hodder & Stoughton 1960)
Anne Crone, Bridie Steen (New York: Scribner 1948:London: Heinemann 1949; Belfast: Blackstaff 1984)
———————My Heart and I ( London: Heinemann 1955).
Patrick Kavanagh, Tarry Flynn (London: Pilot Press 1948).
Maura Laverty, No More Than Human (London: Longmans, Green 1944).
RECENT READS:
Florence Knapp, The Names (London: Phoenix 2025).
In 1987 when the story opens, Cora, married to the controlling, domineering doctor Gordon, goes with her daughter Maia to register her baby son’s birth. Gordon wants him called Gordon, but Maia wants him called Bear, and Cora herself wants to call him Julian. So there are three scenarios, each based on the name Cora opts for, and each is worked through logically to the end, with Cora and her adult children’s destinies sometimes similar, sometimes widely divergent depending on the name chosen. Cora is Irish, so Ireland features a lot, and Knapp has done her home-work; she knows a bit about the Irish language, and totally avoids stereotyping Ireland as either a wonderful or an awful place, for which relief much thanks. There’s a lot of food for thought in this book. The scenario where Cora names her son Gordon results in a ‘stable’ two-parent family where both children become ‘high achievers’ but where she herself sinks and shrinks. The scenario where she calls him Bear might be the optimal one, except for the death it causes, and other things that happen(these aren’t spoilers by the way – the book works itself out so meticulously that it is full of surprises). However, the Julian scenario is impossible to write about without a spoiler. This is a book I’ll re-read, for the careful writing and the turns of the story. It deserves all the acclaim it is getting.
Frieda McFadden, Do Not Disturb (London: Poisoned Pen 2021, 2025).
My sister lent me this for a long bus journey and it did a lot more than pass the time. I’ve read a few others of McFadden’s, but this one stands out. Quinn (that’s her first name) has just killed her abusive husband in self-defence, so she goes on the run. I love ‘going-on-the-run’ stories but I hate ‘blamed-in-the-wrong’ ones, so this was very, very tense reading for me. Quinn is sad that she can’t tell her sister, the sister she’s always loved, all about it, though she has hinted to her about the abuse. Quinn ends up at a creepy motel where she is the only overnighter – there is a long-term witchy ex-carny resident and the motel-owner seems like a lovely young man, a little afraid of his invalid wife, playing hot and cold with Quinn who doesn’t quite know where she is – literally or metaphorically. I was starting to think it was sub-Psycho stuff (and I’ve never thought Psycho was Hitchcock’s best film anyway)when things took a turn for the unusual – let’s just say nothing is as it seems at first, in this novel. The twists aren’t cheap and visible a mile off, as they are in so many mystery novels churned out regularly by normally-good writers who can’t quite keep up standards for what seems now to be annual demand. And there is – spoiler alert – a heart-warming aspect to the whole story as well. It’s an unexpectedly kind book.
Clear Classic Books 
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