England

England appears as a destination shaped by economic necessity, but it becomes more than an emigrant’s workplace: it is where the narrator encounters the writers he reveres, earns a measure of independence, and later makes a home with Annikki and his siblings nearby. Its promise is real but incomplete. Work is available, family ties endure across the crossing, and yet neither the narrator nor Annikki feels wholly at home there.

Emigration and the Irish departure

In 1953, England stood at the far end of a mass departure. The narrator recalls that half a million people emigrated from Ireland during the decade, nearly all to Britain, more than in any other decade of the century. They were mostly young, poorly educated, and ill prepared. Their passage was crowded and humiliating: boat trains filled, boats little better than cattle boats, and the Liverpool boat carrying cattle in its hold. Emigration was not an abstract national statistic but a movement of bodies sent away to sell their strength and labor.

The narrator places this exodus within an unequal social order. Men worked long hours and came home boasting of overtime; women also worked long hours, and some returned with English husbands. The Church-connected class that had prospered after Independence looked down on emigrants, treating their departure as if it were their fault. In contrast, the narrator had entered St Patrick’s Training College, where teachers were paid better than in England and the profession attracted some of the country’s best minds. He understood himself as one of the fortunate few permitted to work in Ireland rather than leave on the trains and cattle boats. England’s significance thus begins in a contrast: it offers employment, but the need to seek it exposes the poverty and social judgment that drive people away.

A crossing made sacred by literature

In the summer of 1954, while St Patrick’s was closed, the narrator took a boat to England to look for building work. The departure carried an inherited religious echo. His mother had listened to the excitement surrounding the 1932 Eucharistic Congress on a convent radio in Ballinamore while waiting to marry his father; now, after his father remarried, the narrator was crossing in the opposite direction, away from home. Religious feeling, he reflects, does not simply disappear at the water’s edge.

At Holyhead, the crossing changed register. Stepping ashore and boarding the London train, he thought of Shakespeare, Milton, and Dickens, writers he had read and studied. England seemed to him like sacred ground—not because the country had ceased to be a practical destination, but because its literary inheritance transformed arrival into an encounter with the culture he had imagined through books. That reverence sits beside material necessity: the job he found at a building site off Commercial Road was rough, though well paid. England gave him a wage and a literary horizon at once.

Work, family, and distance

On Sundays the narrator travelled to Leytonstone to see Rosaleen, who was training as a nurse. Most of the trainee nurses were Irish; Rosaleen had made friends, seemed happy, and showed a natural aptitude for study. Her wry comparison of life in England with life in the barracks registered how thoroughly her earlier hardship had altered the scale by which she judged her new circumstances. The narrator and Rosaleen hired a boat and rowed on an artificial lake among racing, splashing boats, speaking instead of the empty river and Oakport. England could provide work and companionship, but conversation still turned toward the landscape left behind.

Their father wrote to Rosaleen demanding the narrator’s address. Although the narrator had asked her not to give it, a letter in their father’s familiar handwriting was waiting on his next visit. It accused him of ingratitude and insisted that the family home was more open to everyone since the remarriage, with Agnes sharing that aim. The narrator answered that he had no quarrel with either of them and wished them happiness; he had come to London to earn independent spending money and see Rosaleen, and expected to see his father and Agnes when he returned to the barracks. England offered distance, but distance did not end family claims or correspondence.

A later home, and its limits

In a later period in London, the balance of dependence shifted. The narrator and Annikki first stayed in the large house Breedge and Rosaleen shared with their husbands and daughters while looking for a place of their own. He found work as a supply teacher without difficulty, and Rosaleen, then working night duty in an emergency theatre she ran, often shared breakfast with him as she came off duty and he set out for school. Their affection and her comic way of describing the work made these ordinary meetings a point of connection within an otherwise demanding routine.

After a month they found a flat in Notting Hill, and later moved to an apartment overlooking Victoria Park in Bethnal Green. The siblings met regularly, visited one another, and sometimes shopped in markets or met for drinks. Annikki translated Ostrovsky’s plays; she had lived and worked in Russia and spoke Russian fluently. The couple were also welcomed at dinners and parties in London, Oxford, and the English countryside, among people from theatre, writing, journalism, publishing, and academia. Annikki was admired and sought out, yet remained unhappy and felt she could never belong in England. The narrator felt a similar estrangement in a different way. England could shelter work, kinship, and social life without resolving the deeper question of belonging.