Aunty’s Special Relationship With America.
Seventy years ago the newspapers both here and in America and most especially the Daily Express wrote up a piece about my Aunty, Nurse Susan McGinley of Clare Hall Hospital, on the extraordinary quirky circumstances of being fined ten shillings at Barnet Court, for riding a bicycle to work without rear light in dead of blackout night, during height of the World War.
She was a hardy soul. During the early years of the ‘Troubles’, in Ireland, when the flying columns under General Michael Collins were out on their feet, some of his men commandeered the family home. They put the frighteners on everyone, even went so far as to turf the children out of their beds. . One or two of them would have a gun under their pillows during the night, and in early morning as children left the house, they’d be warned, ‘not say a word until you’re at school gates, and not even then.’ Even so she later on became a stalwart of IRA. Maybe because she felt good land had been taken from under family’s feet, and somewhat deprived. Who knows?
She was not even thrown by tragedy of the death of brother Charlie in ambush by IRA by holding to their mantra of a Free Ireland Susan, this remarkable girl, was born in 1913, growing up in a land not many years distant from the great famine. There was to be no hopscotch and conkers for her. In her formative childhood, she was just three years old at time of Easter Rising, a fast growing girl in a chapter of years, which took in the War of Independence, and Civil War.
She was a great worker on the bare farm that they had, feeding cows and scatter of chickens, bringing buckets of water up from the spring, I suppose she was a tomboy but yet a good-looking colleen. And fast forward, to 1922, during the Civil War, she was witness to the family grief when her elder brother, Charlie, met his early death.
He had been called on to join the Volunteers, President De Valera’s men by the prominent influential local Senator, Doctor J McGinley who was no small man in Donegal. He stirred my grandma to release her precious son Charlie, for the national cause.
‘Keep fast to the Treaty, on solid ground standing
Refuse to be bullied by others astray’.
It was to be a fight to the finish, between those who wanted what had already been agreed, by their general, in Downing Street, namely, a twenty-six county free state, – a bird in the bush, against contrarily, the presidents men – who yearned blood and soul for a full and free, thirty-two county Irish Nation.
So it happened that one day, July 11th 1922, Charlie found himself in the invidious position as a Volunteer, driving a lead car, before a truck –hardly a convoy- with twelve fellow soldiers, got up in civvies, -it’s doubtful that in the early days of the Treaty, they had enough new uniforms to go round – with eyes skinned for the enemy, on a route to take them to Letterkenny Town
Charlie slowed down on seeing a man with his hands held over his head at Drumkeen crossroads. It proved to be an ambush. Immediately, a volley of bullets was fired at them by upwards of fifty Irregulars. Charlie was wounded, so dove out of car for the safety of near wall. Unfortunately, he was again struck down. ‘I’m done. Carry on’ he cried.
Later that day, the same gang of IRA surrounded my grandma’s house, when shots were fired by way of warning against touting to the authorities.
Charlie’ died at Lifford Hospital, following which his coffin was draped in the tricolour, and given full military honours, followed by a requiem at St Eugene’s Cathedral, Letterkenny. Many a woman lined the bleak road, the whole crowd shedding churns of tears, for he had been a joy to their thoughts with his curly locks dangling over effervescent dancing blue eyes, as he often took a dander down high street, from his work at Avery’s well known shop in Letterkenny. He was buried at Church Hill, soon joined by brother Hugh, who died of self-neglect. With no thought for himself and no cover to his head, he went about wistful and worn in the worst of all weathers. He had no power in his hands as he clinched a cattle sale, and soon followed Charlie, down to his grave. Long running healthy grass lies over both graves bordered by the ruins of the old church; much battered by the elements, which still survives, crumbly and poignant not far away from Gortan, where St. Columchaillne was born, in a house, no bigger than a shed, where he first started out, on the missions track.
Dr McGinley’s son, Niall sent the family, a biography of his father, ‘His Times ‘ in which he wrote a personal foreword, in pen and ink. ‘I hope you are happy about the account of Drumkeen, and about Glen Swilley generally. My father was very disturbed about Charlie’s death’
I suppose these happenings hardened Susan, to the extent that she would not take any old buck from anyone, not even a future prime minister?
And this was borne out by the clash that came about one day.
When years less than her teens, just hardly nine, she spotted a party coming down the Meenaroy Road.
In their arms they straddled long shot guns, and were making to cross our boggy land.
‘What’s it you’re wanting?’ Susan called out.
And as they closed on her, the lead man haughtily responded.
‘It’s not the first time we’ve strayed on to your farm, I’m Lord Brookeborough and I came here last year, for a pot at the grouse’
‘Well hold you fast. You’ve got on our farm’.
‘Where’s your ma? And he spouts some old guff. ‘Last time she gave us a drop of buttermilk’
‘That may be so, but just now me mither’s away in Dublin, on business, and you’ll just skeet off our land’
Brookeborough and his cronies, had to turn tail, after Susan stymied him. Of course, she delighted in recounting this story to me. How the great man had to get back to his friends in the black North. And I never doubted it.
Didn’t he have a cheek, against me, and me, such a small thing?
(It was Lord Brookeborough who as Prime Minister infamously proclaimed his intent of running, ‘A Protestant Parliament for a Protestant people, which in no small way put in train the eventual dissolution of Unionist rule in the North of Ireland. Not content with that little misdemeanour he further defamed himself by saying that he would have no truck with Catholic workmen. His apartheid outlook was going on in Britain’s backyard, but Parliament and its people proved to be conveniently blinkered With the sadness of Charlie and Hughie’s deaths behind her and the poor patch of farmland unsustainable Susan joined her sister, my mother, over in nursing cottage on outskirts of London. Coming over from Belfast in an old cattle boat more or less cheek by jowl with dung-ridden cows it wouldn’t have taken a beat out of her.
Well she would have been getting on sixteen when she left those wars behind, not knowing she would arrive on England’s shores shortly before Second World War.
When asked about her first impression of the English, her answer was: ‘they’re cold as ice, mostly mute, and stiff as blackthorn sticks with their prickly bits.
She must have been a sad item then, for she was leaving behind a mother she treasured, ever grieving her sons, the heart of her life. There was to be no Caid Maillie Faillte, hundred thousand welcomes to England.
‘When I first came over you couldn’t get to the end of the village, with the stones being thrown.’
As one of nine children, Susan had left no great comforts, but the share of a curtained off, out shot bed. A big peat fire took up centre of room above which would be suspended a heavy black pot and large kettle, from chain hanging from crossbar of cast iron crane. Smoke would swirl about, before it took off for the straw thatch in ceiling where it would make its escape from a vent cut in the roof.
During the Second World War years, there was a pattern to our evenings, when at a singularly precise time my mother would glance up from her ironing board across the small divide of clotheshorse, set in front of the coal range, to take in her wedding present clock, on the mantelpiece, and then call out to me, ‘ Give your Aunty Sue a knock, it’s time she was up’.
Susan now a sixteen-year-old; young strip of a girl, fortunate to squeeze into the upstairs box room, not the size of a prison cell, in my parent’s house.
I would waken her at six in the evening with strong cup of tea to get her juices moving, and take thought for the road. I could see her bed was showing its age, suspended like a sailors hammock, set up fast against a cold gable wall. I would catch the faint smell of a fag end or two, and see some Senior Service cigs, stubbed out on the cut glass ashtray, on small beside locker.
‘It’s your time’ I would mutter, in a small civil way, and she would stretch out for the sugarless tea, murmuring into another night ‘is the weather holding?’ or ‘are the batteries okay, been primed on warm stove?’ So okay I would hurry down the stairs to buff up hers shoes with a sanitary rag from an old cardboard box under the stairs.
And as she hoisted her slacks, I suppose you could see in her eyes that they were on happenings back home, before she tramped downstairs for a likely egg on toast.
It could be that she imagined the cramped room as some sort of luxury, after early years, spent in her parents mean thatch cottage, on a poor scratch of land, on the side of the mountain Crogh Mor, Donegal.
Granny in a black shawl would get about in bare feet, with scatter of children, seeing to cows and chickens before returning for a bite to eat and some prayers. Most evenings a rosary was recited for relatives, friends and exiles abroad
My Uncle Mickie would hurl a pillow at my head, for the Craic . My grandma would scowl at him, dressed as she was in a black shawl and long widow’s weeds. Her husband had long been taken for the grave, since putting back too much poteen. Sometime you could hear through the divide of thick wall, the troubled cows, always clammy, and restless for feed.
Susan had obtained work at Clare Hall Hospital, whose premises were originally at Clerkenwell devoted to cure of smallpox. Back in 1901 nurses were recruited from the Nurses Cooperative Society at three guineas a week, thought to be a great wad of money for only the best of nurses, to take on this serious disease.
Now at time of war, the hospital was transferred to a location in the backwoods, on Middx/Herts border, two miles south of the better known, Fred’s Eighteen Mile Transport Café.
Its brief was to fix up the war wounded, in particular the unfortunately injured men of the Air Force, the so-called Brylcream boys, more dandyish than other services, and at the same time in the sanatorium, take on treatment of Tuberculosis, which was rife in the country.
In mid nineteen thirties nearly fifty percent of TB patients were discharged by death. Even with the isolation of Koch’s baccilus the idea was put about that one could not cure a fool of TB, due to the long and troublesome treatment. An army surgeon elaborated on that, when he said, ‘For tuberculosis we prescribe not medicine but a mode of life’..
Of her hospital work she told me that, if there were to be any disagreement with the Ward Sister she would insist on taking the argument into the office to sort out. She told me about their annual dance, and the dress she had dreamed up, which she created with colourful odds and ends, from a ragbag of material. She had been a top sprigger in embroidery, at national school. Could sew and knit to a band playing, but was quite surprised when chosen belle of ball. Some ward sisters were quite snotty about it, envious like cats deprived of cream, and sniggered at her early efforts in the wards. She refused to be put down, this great looking colleen. She said to me, ‘they never put one over on me, those girls in royal blue’.
Another time she won a trip to Llandudno with a slogan compiled for a John Bull magazine: As Nice as Pie: and she added finishing touch: Fritz. Remember those Ovens?
So it was not all work and no play, but she never got away from the wars. Even when going to a dance in Watford with her best nursing friend Betty Griffith’s from the Rhonda, they managed to miss the last bus home, and had to walk the seven or eight miles, when halfway, they were forced to take shelter from falling bombs, in a church at Aldenham.
There were no buses or other means of transport, other than the bike, to get her the three miles to work. At start of her journey she pushed her heavy black, sturdy, ladies- no crossbar, Hercules bike, up the sheer face of Eigher like, Black Lion Hill, into Shenley Village. (Four hundred feet above sea level)
Some nights in bleak midwinter, a bitter freezing cold would await her journey. With hands numb from icy cold handlebars, she would take to the blustery road, overhung by high snow wrapped hedges, leaning in to the lanes. She would struggle through snowdrifts, the whole length of the quick rise and fall of those corrugated lanes, which at times almost doubled back on themselves.
The nights, black as the stockings Suzy wore and the coal we fed in our cast iron range.
At the height of summer on hot sticky nights, huge clouds would get up with rolling thunder, plying sheets of lightning. The rain so incessant if not mixed with sockets of hail, that combined to flood the Catherine Bourne, taking all her real grit when drenched and soaked through to tender young skin, she would have to ford with heavy bicycle slung over shoulder. It was to be mind over matter in 1941 when she faced the enemy along with the elements. For it was then the Germans went on vast bombing raids, when she would only too distinctly hear the rumble and drone of huge planes overhead, either over flying London to release their deadly cargo, or intent on De Havilland or Handley Page factories, so inconveniently was she in their flight path in her solitary ride. I daresay, knowing the cut of her, she would have lost herself in prayer. While Susan was mending her way to work, the rest of family took shelter under the stairs or way out in the Anderson Shelter. An insalubrious, bent over, corrugated iron device, which seemed to take to the sky, after any bomb landed close. One moment it was as if, all a tremble, only then to take off, staying to hover a second or two, before crashing back down to earth, leaving our hair, nose and ears, full of powdery choky cement.
It was about that time that a heavy incendiary device, a land mine, became suspended not far from our house, in a large oak tree, caught by its filigree of lace, which my father said, had it touched the ground, would have sent our road, numbering all of sixty houses, to smithereens.
It was on one such night near top of Black Lion Hill, Shenley. Susan was involved in the incident, which made the news both here, and in America.
She had topped the steep climb when a policeman in full uniform emerged out the black shroud of night, waving a huge torch like a big gun in front of Susan.
‘Stop there!’ he challenged his catch. The sharp light pinched a hole in the blackness to take blind siege of Susan’s eyes.
Close up, he could see into her blue Irish, eyes. On her head, a navy blue cap, which matched her coat draping her knees, and outlining the sheen of fine, strong legs.
‘Where are you from?’ and ‘where are you going?’ he said officiously.
And, staccato like ‘ don’t you know there’s a war’s on?
Big pause. ‘Where are your lights?’
Susan, you can be sure, did not take kindly to his attitude.
He wasn’t inclined to listen to her story of how she had tried to revive her batteries on top of warm stove, to give them some life. They were whacked out, duds, and given leave; she would get new batteries.
He told her that wasn’t good enough and she’d get a summons to appear at court.
She reared up, and smarting said, that war or no war, she needed to get to desperately ill patients.
The constable demanded she push the bike the rest of way, to work. At times a laser light searchlight would reach up into the wide blackboard of sky. The shrill orders of army crews reaching from across the high hawthorn hedges, under the tall, dripping wet, oak trees. Anti- aircraft emplacements were being readied, with their long tough metal barrels, to puncture the night,
When Susan reported late for work after being stopped by policeman there was no sympathy from matron, but that was for nothing compared to a further bust up when she later on read a full report of the incident in the newspapers about her spell in the dock at Barnet Court. She became something else, not so much a dragon as a fiend in female uniform. She spattered bullets of hyperbole, at Susan. Threatened her with the push, ‘ I have a mind to sack you’. Then you could be given twenty minutes notice, just to pack your bags and leave main gates.
‘By inclusion in the papers your case has shown up the location of this hospital.
Now it’s known to Adolph Hitler’, the matron ranted. Our staff and patients will be at wits end, forever up and down bomb shelters’.
The Medical Super was asked, if she should be fired in the circumstance.
Mr Simmonds, equivocated…. ‘Of course it’s down to you.’
Dr Laird, the hospital surgeon came to her support. Said she was an excellent nurse who should be retained.
The national newspapers in particular the Daily Express wrote up the episode that transpired at her court appearance, in February 1941, which soon enough made its way across the pond, to America’s Philadelphia Inquirer:
Lady without the lamp
Nurse Susan McGinley of Clare Hall Hospital South Mimms Middlesex, was fined ten shillings at Barnet Magistrates Court, for riding a bicycle without light..
She said, ‘As a nurse it was my duty to get to work at all costs to attend Hitler’s wounded and mutilated victims. With the words of Herbert Morrison ‘Go to it’ surging through my ears, I, unlike Florence Nightingale- the lady with the lamp- went to it without a lamp, thus falling foul of the law, in the honoured purpose of alleviating pain and helping my country to defeat Hitler’s death dealing blows’.
The magistrate’s clerk: she might have dealt a death-dealing blow with her bicycle.
The American papers trumpeted the story, making her a bit of a celebrity. Why she would be paraded up and down Main Street, hundreds of marriage proposals made and any numbers of bikes would be hers for the asking, in fact a new bike would be manufactured in her name, The McGinley Flier.
Susan was unimpressed, saying, ‘Oh the Yanks, they’re big blowers.’
Not alone that, the now snazzy, healthy Air force men, closed ranks, and in particular took up and supported Susan’s cause with special vigour, arguing for her retention. Why there was some argy bargy of a night if Susan did not put in an appearance with a regular Guinness to hand, ‘ Where’s Mac?’ they would say. Susan was delighted, tearful and redemptive. She learned that there was great good in them. Though never disclaiming the notion of freedom for her own native land, thereafter never held a bad thought for those brave fighter pilot boys, coming to love them all. Susan took the memory of her hard work with tuberculosis patients, along with treatment of fine young airmen who fought the war for this country’s freedom, into old age, and laughed heartily at remembrance of their youthful antics and indiscretions .She could deservedly pat herself on the back for getting those young air force pilots back in the air, flying free once again to combat our common enemy, like birds in the sky..
I have that certain earlier picture in my head, of her chasing after them, for when given half a chance; they would take off in high spirits no matter their condition, to the local Old Guinea Pub, South Mimms, Hertfordshire.