his restless probing of ideas about regionalism with which he would become much more identified. His discomfort with the Northern state is well charted ground, and his critical sense of not making contact with a readership in Northern Ireland pained him, or maybe frustrated is a better word. ‘I am not speaking to my people,’ he was to remark in an interview in 1980 about this fracture in communication between poet and his community, ‘it is inescapable. But linked with it is the important fact of the total lack of literary interest amongst unionists of the north, the lack of any fixed literary tradition.’18
Hewitt’s verse from Conacre (1943) and No Rebel Word (1948) all the way through to the final collections such as Kites in Spring: A Belfast Boyhood (1980) and Loose Ends (1983)19 are inflected with a deepening consciousness of the damage done by the political exploitation of division as much as by a nostalgia for a different past, often embodied in the personae of his father, for instance in his poem, ‘Going Up to Dublin’ as delegate to a teachers’ conference:
When, with Partition, Protestants hived off,
he stayed in loyally to all his kind,
that they were teachers was to him enough,
to sect and party singularly blind.20
His sketches of local life lived under the shadows of violence have a resonance for all involved in the, at times, sanitised revisiting of Irish history, particularly in this decade of commemorations, as in ‘The Troubles 1922’.
With Curfew tense,
each evening when that quiet hour was due,
I never ventured far from where I knew
I could reach home in safety. At the door
I’d sometimes stand, till with oncoming roar,
the wire-cage Crossley tenders swept in view.21
Even his youthful enthusiasm for James Connolly finds its expression in an elegy published in 1928,22 as well as in an unpublished sonnet, identified by Frank Ormsby in his editing of the Collected Poems of John Hewitt with the title, ‘To the Memory of James Connolly, patriot and martyr, murdered by British soldiers, May 10th 1916’,23 though, as Ormsby reminds us, Connolly was actually executed by firing squad in Kilmainham Gaol on 12 May:
When I was six years old I heard
Connolly address a Labour Crowd –
I cannot recollect a word
Yet I am very proud[.]
Alongside these simple poetic samples one can place so many much finer and more complex Hewitt poems whose concern ranges from the Great War and the Spanish Civil War to the Second World War and its bloody aftermath, both for the victorious Allies and for the cities of defeated Nazi Germany. It seems that at a very early stage of his development, John Hewitt’s cultural bearings were earthed by the 1930s excitement with politics, as W.J. McCormack’s Northman biography describes in regard to Hewitt’s contact with leading figures of the Irish Republican Congress, such as Peadar O’Donnell and Frank Ryan, and writing under the pseudonym (Richard Telford) for The Irish Democrat and much else. Hewitt was regularly back and forth across the border to Dublin and elsewhere, as much as he was visiting in London and all the other very many different places in Europe both he and Roberta vacationed in throughout their lives together.
On 16 December 1949, just a year after that conversation with Seán MacBride in Sligo, the Hewitts were on the move again, on the ‘Enterprise’ train ostensibly bound for a dinner organised by the PEN Club in Dublin. ‘Complex feelings of resentment, relief, guilt, and confusion shuttled across the border,’ McCormack remarks, as the Hewitts temporarily left behind post-war (and blitzed) Belfast for a brief stay in post-Emergency and neutral Dublin:
On board the ‘Enterprise’ they met friends, including the painter Daniel O’Neill; the journey passed quickly. They had booked into Jury’s [sic] Hotel – ‘posh’ by their standards. On Saturday evening, Hewitt was surprised and pleased by Roger McHugh’s knowledge of his work, less impressed by Professor H.O. White’s pretences. Kenneth Reddin, a minor literary figure and a judge,24 brought them to the Hermitage, near Rathfarnham, an eighteenth-century mansion where Patrick Pearse had conducted a school. Roberta was moved by the romantic history of the place – it had been the home of Robert Emmet’s beloved [Sarah]; somebody had been hanged there. ‘I became a bit of an Irish Republican in the atmosphere’ [she records in her Journal].25
But the other reason for visiting Dublin was ‘to buy goods still scarce inside the United Kingdom, several pairs of nylon stockings which Roberta smuggled inside her corset’, we are told. On New Year’s Eve that year (1949), the Hewitts ‘again attended Mass with neighbours’26 in the Glens of Antrim and John Hewitt would compose perhaps his best-known and most controversial poem, ‘The Colony’, a poem that revisits the earful Seán MacBride received the previous year. The poem’s straight-talking (and, for many, offensive) persona who asks uncomfortable questions for the time: ‘to be redeemed/if they themselves rise up against the spells/and fears their celibates surround them with.’27
Maybe it is too much of a leap of imagination (or faith) to suggest that the overshadowing of this uncomfortably independent Northern voice, which John and Roberta Hewitt and their like personified in the critical founding years of the Irish Free State of the 30s and 40s, is a story yet to be told. Told, that is, for its own sake, yes, but also for the sake of being just to all Irish histories and not only to those which are either more fashionable or closer to home and thereby more worthy of commemoration.
CHAPTER FOUR
FROM THE GINGER MAN TO KITTY STOBLING
The 1950s represent the end of a way of life and the beginning of the world we live in today. The industrial civilisation of the British imperial project finally started to run aground in the 1950s: a culture that had spanned the globe and had produced an extraordinary legacy – of great modernising achievement on the one hand, yet on the other a battleground of colonialism. Post-war, these two powerful forces would clash in localised struggles in various parts of the remaining British Empire or countries under British influence. ‘When [Harold] Macmillan became Prime Minister in 1957,’ writes the social historian Dominic Sandbrook, ‘no fewer that forty-five different countries were still governed by the Colonial Office, but during the next seven years Ghana, Malaya, Cyprus, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Tanganyika, Western Samoa, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Uganda, Zanzibar and Kenya were all granted their independence.’1
These struggles would form the political and ultimately the social backdrop to a generation of young men and women who, in the 50s, were starting to break free from the conventional and prescribed ways of living and working: the context to much of the best in English fiction of the period such as John Braine’s Room at the Top, David Storey’s This Sporting Life, and Colin MacInnes’s Absolute Beginners, as well as in the writing of poets such as Philip Larkin.
In Britain, the welfare state and the democratic opening up of educational possibilities created the foundations for a new kind of society that would finally emerge in the 1960s. The transformation of England, in particular, into a consumerist society, provided Ireland with the safety valve that the truly conservative nature of the Irish state and the fragility of its traditional economy obviously needed. Emigration to England, and farther afield, was both a forced and elegiac comment on the failure of de Valera’s nationalism. It was also an opportunity to see the wider world and play some part in the cultural and economic changes that were taking place, although how this
