1. More The Irish Mail on Sunday March 22 • 2015 March 22 • 2015 The Irish Mail on Sunday More 79
give that
cuckootheboot
T
he figure of the
emigrant looms
about as large as a
figure can loom in
Irish life and lit-
erature – and not
a few ballads too. From the Wild
Geese to the Walworth Farce, the
figure of the hard-pressed Paddy
starting over in a new country –
sometimescomingtoruin,always
to plangent nostalgia – is an ines-
capable one.
ClairWills’sstudyofthesubject
focuses on one particular wave
of emigration, that of the 1950s, a
timewhenagenerationtooktothe
boat in staggering numbers: of the
children born in Ireland between
1931 and 1941, four out of every
five eventually emigrated; more
than half a million (out of a pop-
ulation of less than three) moved
abroadbetween1945and1960.
Writing in 1964, John B Keane
described his own departure
from Listowel: ‘When I boarded
the train that morning, it seemed
as if everyone was leaving. It
was the same at every station
along the way. As we left Dún
Laoghaire, the younger men were
drunk... tragically so, as I was, to
forget the dreadful loneliness of
having to leave home. The whole
scene reminded me of the early
Christian martyrs going out to
face the terrors of the arena.’
Wills’sanalysis,whileacknowl-
edging the trauma of those forced
toleave,takesanuancedapproach
to what can be an understand-
ably emotive subject. She offers
a fascinating survey of how the
debate around mass emigra-
tion was framed in Ireland – the
misgivings of those left behind,
physically and culturally – as well
as exploring how Irish immi-
grants in Britain were perceived
‘over there’ and represented by
contemporary Irish and British
writers.
She starts by pointing out that,
although most accounts of emi-
gration, like Keane’s, present it as
an unalloyed tragedy – and for so
many it undoubtedly was – there
were also some for whom it was
an adventure.
In a society where subsistence
farming was dying out but where
modernisation had yet to create
work for the large unpaid pool
of relatives living on smallhold-
ings, a venture across the Irish
sea, where a booming post-war
economy meant a regular wage
and a much higher standard of
living, was a distinctly pragmatic
undertaking.
For many, it was an escape from
a stratified and complacent soci-
ety quick to assign to others a
life of drudgery. The example of
nursing is particularly interest-
ing. In Ireland in the 1950s, Wills
explains,nursingtrainingwasnot
publicly funded and so was often
confined to the daughters of so-
called ‘respectable’ families.
InEngland,trainingopportuni-
tiesofferedameansofbetterment
for any young woman who could
scrape together the fare over.
This new mobility often horri-
fied those who felt the class from
which they drew their servants
should know their place. One
doctor, William Doolin, even
complained at the time to the
INO that ‘my wife had some trou-
ble with a recalcitrant maid who
threatened to go to England and
take up nursing’. One hopes she
made a clean getaway.
By contrast, the fate of male
emigrants was often far less
favourable, with life on construc-
tion sites offering few chances to
integrate with the local popula-
tion – an existence shown at its
extremes in Tom Murphy’s grim
classic from 1961, A Whistle In
The Dark.
But it’s the chapters in Wills’s
study that deal with anxieties
about women leaving Mother
Ireland that are the strongest
and by far the most compelling.
She describes how there was a
sort of moral panic at the idea of
young girls leaving their simple,
rural homesteads for the urban
centres of England, with its dubi-
A
long with daffodils,
new-born lambs and
lighter evenings, noth-
ing announces spring
more joyously than the first cry
of the cuckoo. The oldest song in
the English language mentions
it – Sumer Is Icumen In (Lhude
Sing Cuccu) – and so do Chaucer,
Shakespeare, Wordsworth et al.
So it’s a shock to be reminded
that, far from being a welcome
messenger of pleasant times, the
cuckoo is a bully and a thief. If it
was human, and lived next door,
you’d want it booted out.
It’s long been known that
cuckoos are parasites. Instead
of bringing up their own babies,
they lay their eggs in the nests
of other birds and then watch
from a distance while poor,
over-worked reed warblers,
dunnocks and meadow pipits do
allthemotheringontheirbehalf.
Thecuckoo’satrociousbehav-
iourhasbeenwellknownfor
centuriesbutthehowsandwhys
haveremainedunanswered.How
doesafemalecuckoobreakinto
anotherbird’snestandlayanegg
withouttheownersnoticing?
Whydon’tthehostsfreakout
whentheyspotthere’sanextra
eggintheirclutch?And,per-
hapsmostimportantlyofall,who
cameupwiththisspectacularly
unfairsysteminthefirstplace?
Nick Davies has spent a life-
time puzzling at these mysteries.
Although he’s a Professor of
Behavioural Ecology, there’s
nothing academic about his
approach. Instead of DNA
samples, he relies on close obser-
vation and patient fieldwork.
One of his more grisly rev-
elations is that the first thing
a cuckoo chick does on hatch-
ing is to evict its foster-siblings.
Search underneath a host nest
and you will find a pile of tiny
dead chicks that have been sys-
tematically pushed to their
deaths by their bullying lodger,
who is bigger and stronger.
Thecarnagedoesn’tendthere,
though.Whenamothercuckoo
laysheregg,she’llsnatchone
ofherhost’sandproceedtoeat
thecontents.Thiskillstwobirds
withonestone:thecuckoogetsa
freelunch,andthenestlooksless
crowdedtothereturninghost.
Davies’s book is positively
chirruping with fascinating
information like this. The fact,
for instance, that cuckoos lay
eggs that exactly match those of
their hosts. So cuckoos that live
in an area where there are reed
warblers lay eggs that are green
and spotted, while those target-
ing the nests of pied wagtails
produce eggs that are greyish-
white and speckled.
Why don’t the hosts do some-
thing to avoid this, like, say,
changing the colour of their own
eggs? They do, apparently, but
the cuckoos are clever enough to
spot this and quickly play catch-
up. This is what Davies calls the
‘arms race’ taking place between
cuckoos and their hosts. One
side takes evasive action, and the
other simply adjusts its strategy.
Nature writing is having a
bit of a moment though some
might say the overly poetic
style adopted by some writers
is getting in the way of the facts.
Refreshingly, this isn’t the case
with Davies. He uses words to
explain and enlighten rather
than to embellish. The result is
a fascinating book, even if, in its
own way, it has all the qualities
of a horrible nightmare.
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Farquharson’s three young sons
were in the back. Their father
escaped, and a few minutes
later he was found standing
by the side of the road, soaked
and filthy and demanding to be
driven to his ex-wife’s house to
tell her their children were dead.
A little while later this ex-wife,
Cindy Gambino, and her new
partner, Stephen Moules, would
rush to the lake, and Moules
would dive into the water in a
desperate attempt to save the
kids. But it was too dark, too
cold, too late. Farquharson stood
there watching, asking anyone
nearby if they had a cigarette. It
was Father’s Day.
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police decided they didn’t buy
Farquharson’s belated expla-
nation for what had happened
– that he had blacked out at the
wheel following a coughing
fit – and charged him with the
murder of his children: Jai, 10,
Tyler, 7, and two-year-old Bailey.
When the case came to court,
the eminent Australian novel-
ist and true-crime writer Helen
Garner decided to attend the
trial. Like most of us, her initial
reaction was to pray that it was
indeed an accident. The alterna-
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may deliberately drive his chil-
dren into a deep, dark pool and
leave them there to drown while
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stolen lives: Robert Farquharson. His sons Jai, Bailey and Tyler
before the legal proceedings
finally ground to a halt.
Itmighthavebeenashorter
legal battleifFarquharsonhad
nothadhissupporters.Hislaw-
yer,PeterMorrissey,wentto
extraordinarylengthstofight
forhisclient.Hissistersstuck
byhimthroughout,implacable
intheirbeliefinhisinnocence.
Moresurprisingly,atthefirst
trialatleast,hisex-wifeCindy
testifiedinhisfavour.Sherefused
tobelievehewouldeverhave
donesuchathingtotheirchil-
dren.Sheknewhelovedthem.
In the end, all the legal argu-
ment came down to a simple
question. Did Farquharson’s
explanation ring true? It was up
to the jury to decide whether
they believed in the coughing
fit. I won’t spoil the suspense by
telling you what they decided.
Helen Garner set herself a
harder task – to look into the
heart of the man in the dock: the
man who was hurting after his
wife left him, who resented the
fact that she had kept their good
car and he had to drive his kids
around in an old rust-bucket.
Could an ordinary bloke really
do something so monstrous
to the kids he loved? Garner’s
account wrestles with the awful
truth that love does not protect
us from danger, but can lie at its
very heart.
At the end of this considered,
compelling, oddly beautiful
book, she concludes that what
we are left with is simply our
sadness and our need to mourn
the lost children. But for me that
isn’t quite enough: for what we
are also left with is the knowl-
edge that the potential for such
tragedies is around us every day.
We need to be open to seeing
where these fault lines might
occur, and to try to reach across
them, to avert more cars driv-
ing into more lakes, more fathers
staring into the blackness and
asking for a cigarette.
Lifeonconstruction
sitesofferedfew
chancestointegrate
withthelocals
tragedyandrelief
ofleaving
Mother
Ireland
Fouroutof
fiveyoung
Irishtookthe
boatinthe
1950s–a
calamityfor
manybut
alsoachance
forabetter
life,especially
forwomen
EMigrAnts: Nurse Bridget
Lawlor, above, 1955 and, below,
waitress Mary Wilson, 1953.
Brendan Behan, London, 1956
ous luxuries. Women’s desire for
a standard of living that a small
farm could not possibly offer was
seen by some as a threat to a tra-
ditional way of life that, since the
Gaelic revival, had been glorified
as somehow more authentically
Irish – as well as more virtuous
– than city life.
It’s startling to see some of the
sermonising around the issue.
One priest, a member of the
government’s commission on
emigration, claimed that the psy-
chological causes of emigration
from Co. Clare were ‘the infe-
riority complex’, a ‘poor idea of
patriotism’ and a ‘modern craze
for pleasure’. It’s hard to imag-
ine anyone saying something so
obnoxious about our post-crash
wave of emigrants in Sydney and
Toronto–ifthatisofanycomfort
to them.
A
t the same time,
Wills does not
reducethesubject
into a simplistic
conflict between
a narrow-minded
old guard and brave modernity.
She argues that many of the fears
around emigration were the result
of powerlessness in the face of
large-scale economic change
– in particular the growth of con-
sumerism – that was destroying
previously viable small commu-
nities. It cannot have been easy
to watch the young leave in such
numbers.
Within a relatively short space
– the study is just 190 pages long
– Wills takes in an impressively
broad range of material, with
quotes from sources as varied as
Irish women’s magazines of the
1960s to one fantastically snotty
EnglishHRmanagerwho
declares her Irish
employees to be ‘worse
than any other
immigrants’.
The same breadth
is evident in the extent
of literary works Wills
examines. As well as John
B Keane, Tom Murphy and
Edna O’Brien, she looks at
autobiographical accounts of life
amongIrishlabourersinBritainby
Irish-languagewritersDónallMac
Amhlaigh and Richard Power, as
well as novels by Anthony Cronin
andDavidLodge.Eventhetinyfig-
uresofconstructionworkersinthe
paintings of Frank Auerbach
aremadepartofthepicture.
This is a fine study of an
absorbing subject. And
Wills’s focus on a short
period of such a long-
lived problem allows us
to see in detail quite how
much – all the questions
of national identity, com-
munity and class
– is tied up in
the debate on
emigration.
country
girl: Author
Edna O’Brien
TheBestAreLeaving:
EmigrationAnd
Post-WarIrishCulture
ClairWills
CambridgeUniversityPress €27
★★★★★
sheena
davittSocialhistory
books
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