Belfast, August 1912. A post-Titanic city, lacking in confidence and profoundly affected by loss. The gloom created by the sinking of the unsinkable feeds into a growing political and civil unease. A secretary called Marie Johnson takes ill suddenly, and her employer offers Marie’s friend Winnie Carney the job. These are the small turns in fortune that echo for decades: Winnie’s new employer is James Connolly.
Winnie Carney’s story is unique. Already a determined and fiercely intelligent activist, she becomes tirelessly devoted to Connolly. At his insistence, she is constantly by his side in the GPO during the Rising – think typewriter under one arm, Webley revolver under the other – and her grief when he is executed is profound. Allison Murphy includes small details which contribute greatly to the sense of her as an individual rather than as a composite of causes. When the rebels take the GPO and Connolly tells Winnie to sit at the main stamp counter, “she couldn’t help feeling sorry for those needy people who were waiting for the money orders that the letters might contain”.
Shipyards
George McBride too is a fighter. From a Church of Ireland family, he is only 16 when he enlists in the British army at the start of the first World War. George serves in the 36th Ulster Division, which distinguishes itself at the Somme, Messines, Ypres and St Quentin, and becomes a prisoner of war at a stone quarry in the Black Forest. He is demobbed and goes back to work in the shipyards and his parents’ new home in Crimea Street (the irony of surviving one war only to live in a house named for another).
Winnie and George meet in 1924 at a Labour Party meeting and are friends for several years before he can persuade her to marry him. The opposition from their families is more nuanced than merely concern about the religious and political divides: his mother is appalled at the thought of her son courting a woman 10 years older than himself. They marry in Holyhead, with only two registry office employees as witnesses. Her mother, elderly and infirm, gets over her initial anger and, having refused to have anything to do with the wedding, is installed in the McBrides’ spare bedroom within days.
Winnie drops her life as an activist and becomes a housewife. But their happy ever after lasts for only 15 years. When Winnie dies in 1943, her widower is only 45 and will live, grieving, for another 35 years. The story of their life together is quite a short part of the book; the social and political world in which they operated – and which operated them – is the bulk of the narrative.
Factual tale
Winnie and George is meticulously researched and detailed. It is also, as the publisher refers to it, "enhanced with dramatised dialogue". This nonplussed me at first. Did that mean it aimed to be true to the events of history or true to an unrecorded personal story, or both (or neither)? After all, what is any story but dramatised dialogue? Fiction is a simulacrum of how people speak, behave, think. And if it's to be a factual tale, a history, then is it wrong to add to it, to shade it in more than can be substantiated? For me, these passages of conversation felt unnecessary because they conveyed information rather than giving an insight into any emotional register.
The unusual story of Winnie and George is one of three stories playing out in this book. Winnie’s relationship with James Connolly is fascinating, and Murphy’s research does it great justice. Connolly obviously relied on Winnie’s intelligence and valued her opinions: “If he did not receive a daily letter from her, he still wrote in the hope that one would arrive in the night post”.
The third story is that of the unlikely, yet clearly very genuine, friendship between elderly widower George and nurse Rita Murphy in the UVF retirement hospital in Belfast where he spends his last years. Rita is the author’s mother-in-law, and it is through her this book began. Winnie and George may be a love story, yet at its heart are the stories of two remarkable friendships.
Henrietta McKervey’s second novel, The Heart of Everything, is out now in paperback
