Paddy McEvoy, Author and Teacher

LETTER IN SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, NOVEMBER 29TH, 2015

Sir,

William Barrett's reminiscences of life in London in the post-war period (Tales of battles fought long ago, Sunday Independent Nov 22), re-activated some memories of my own, from my first visits to London in the early 1960s. Mr Barratt sketched some grim scenarios of life shuttling between the pub, the church, the dance-hall, the building-site, the digs... ('The crack was good in Cricklewood...').

In those early days, I made it my business to visit those parts of London most populated by emigre Irish, - Kilburn, Cricklewood, Camden Town... Not once did I see a No Irish sign in a lodging-house window. I'm not saying that none existed, but if they were as common as the myth-makers would have us believe, I surely should have come across the odd one. (The tens of thousands of Irish did find lodgings somewhere...)

The men Mr Barratt talked about, ill-prepared for the culture-shock of living in an often hostile place, would have headed back to their lodgings after their heroic weekend deeds. (I would hear them on a Monday regaling each other about such drink-fuelled depredations, the word latchiko an overused insult.) Who could blame a landlady for finding the antics of some such lodgers intolerable? And remember, many of those landladies would have lost family members, even sweethearts in the still-recent War, while the incoming waves of Irish, who had sat the war out in safe, neutral Ireland, were now arriving in their droves, hale and hearty.

We Irish are adept at holding the diaspora picture at a convenient angle, to make sure we appear at our best in it. It would be so refreshing to allow other voices to be heard, occasionally. Even the voices of landladies.