An Under-told Chapter in the Fiction of My City: Writing the Belfast Blitz: A Guest Post by Lucy Caldwell
Two sisters grapple with life, love and survival during WWII in a breathtaking new story. Read on for an exclusive essay from author Lucy Caldwell on what inspired her to research the Belfast Blitz and write her latest novel, These Days.
Hardcover $28.00
These Days
These Days
In Stock Online
Hardcover $28.00
An “exquisitely lyrical” (Louise Kennedy) WWII novel from a singular Irish writer following two sisters over the course of four nights as they reckon with their futures in crumbling Belfast.
An “exquisitely lyrical” (Louise Kennedy) WWII novel from a singular Irish writer following two sisters over the course of four nights as they reckon with their futures in crumbling Belfast.
When my son was a toddler, he was obsessed with a book by Janet & Allan Ahlberg called Peepo!, a day in the life of a baby during the London Blitz. We lived at the time in a flat in the Docklands of East London – a Victorian warehouse conversion, one of the only buildings around that hadn’t been flattened by the aerial raids. I read Peepo! aloud every night for weeks, thinking of that, and of how many of my own favourite writers – Elizabeth Bowen, Rosamond Lehmann, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Virginia Woolf, Graham Greene, Louis MacNeice – were great writers of the London Blitz. I started to wonder if there might be a story in Belfast’s Blitz – I knew there had been one, though knew very little about it. My grandma, 21 when it happened, had refused to talk about it: “Sure, what do you want to know about all that for?” she’d snap if asked. Her attitude was not uncommon; the Belfast Blitz barely exists in the fiction of my city, despite the aerial raids that comprised it – over four nights from April-May 1941 – causing such devastation that people thought the city was done for. There are even transcripts of Luftwaffe pilots flying over the burning city saying, “My God, what have we done?”
By winter 2019 I knew I had not just a short story, but a novel. As we moved into spring 2020, the first wave of Covid taking hold, my quest to find and to preserve people’s stories became more urgent. There was a lot of talk in the media during Covid of “Blitz spirit” – stiff upper lip, keep calm and carry on. But I felt I understood the Blitz in a new way – the sheer provisionality of it. You don’t grow up in the time and place that I did – Belfast of the Troubles – without being acutely aware of the vagaries of chance; of what might mark the difference between life and death. Being ten minutes early, or five minutes late – running the way they tell you to, or in the opposite direction. That has always been the aim of terror – to induce in its victims a radical, destabilising uncertainty, to make everyday life impossible. And yet life goes on. You make the most of what you have, because you don’t get another chance at things, be it in the Belfast Blitz, or during the Troubles, or Covid times.
It became the work of my days to plot a course through the horrors, not stinting on the cruelty, the meaninglessness of so much of it, but showing how people survived; just how irrepressibly life does go on. What struck me most poignantly about the diaries I read, the memories of the people I spoke to, was the oddness of the delights the Blitz had unexpectedly brought – the acts of resilience, the kindnesses, the fortitude. And the joy – in dark times it becomes more important than ever to insist on the possibility of joy.
My novel’s title comes from a line by MacNeice: These days, though lost, will be all your days. I hope, for all the readers who may be unfamiliar with the Belfast Blitz, it illuminates those days. But I also hope it speaks to our now – and our always.
Photo Credit: Joseph Taussig