Literary account of city life makes farming attractive

TWO books, both of them recollections of childhood during the 1940s and 50s, came my way recently.

One is titled This Boy by Alan Johnson, a British Labour Party politician who served as home secretary for a period in the Tony Blair government. The other is Asdee in the 1940s and 50s: A Rural Miscellany written by Jim Costelloe who grew up on a small farm in Kerry. In later years he began writing a weekly newspaper column, containing reminiscences of life during his early years in Asdee and describing the customs and lifestyle of the people of north Kerry during his youth.

His book is, in essence, a compilation of these articles and is a valuable record of rural life and daily practices that are now almost forgotten.

What struck me most was the contrast between Alan Johnson’s life as a small child growing up in the Notting Hill area of London and that of Jim Costelloe during the same period.

Notting Hill at that time was a virtual slum where poverty was endemic. Accurate comparisons of life in different regions 70 or 80 years ago are always difficult and open to challenge but it seems to me that the life of a small farmer and his family in Kerry, as described in the pages of Asdee, was little short of heaven compared to the hardships of trying to survive in London during the post-war period when money was tight and the welfare state was in its infancy.

This Boy was, no doubt, helped to bestseller status by favourable reviews and the political fame of its author. Recommended by the Sunday Times, it also captured several prestigious literary awards.

Perhaps his tough childhood groomed Johnson for the battleground of politics but it was an upbringing that for the greater part no one could wish for, if they had the choice.

This excerpt from the publisher’s review describes it well, “London’s Notting Hill in the 1950s was an unimaginably different place to the white stucco splendour it’s known for today”.

Alan Johnson’s family lived in condemned housing, declared unfit for human habitation, in a cramped flat with no central heating, no electricity and no running water. His mother Lily battled against poor health, poverty, domestic violence and chronic loneliness to try and ensure a better life for her children.

His sister, Linda, took on an adult’s burden of responsibility and fought to keep the family together when she was still only a child. Linda emerges as a true hero as do so many women in the pages of other autobiographies and memoirs. From reading many such books over the years, it seems to me that women possess an emotional strength and an ability to survive extreme hardship that is not given to most men. Perhaps we are more pragmatic and, like the author’s father, some of us just turn our backs on such adversity. Now I can already hear the howls of protest from the men who are reading this but please don’t take offence as I am simply pondering. There are of course thousands of brave and selfless fathers out there and perhaps their story needs to be told more frequently. Yet while reading This Boy I was immediatelyately reminded of the heroine of Angela’s Ashes and so many other books where mothers have fought like tigresses for the welfare of their children. When Jim Costelloe was living in rural Kerry, there was of course no central heating, electricity or running water in the home. A pump in the yard was a rarity and was seen as a status symbol. But there was plenty of turf, eggs from the ducks and chickens, a pig to slaughter annually and milk and potatoes and