Digital Literary Atlas of Ireland,
1922-1949
Writers
Michael McLaverty
Call My Brother Back (1939) Rathlin Island and Belfast
'. . . he turned it over admiring its tiny vein of white and its freckles of brown; and as he looked at it a shore took shape in his mind: grey stones in curve, and down by the edge of the tide the pebbles rattling as the waves came slashing in, farther back dry sticks eaten by sea lice, a frayed piece of rope, whitened limpet shells that crackled under the feet, and a bicycle tyre with rusted rims.'
TIMELINE
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Lifepath
Michael McLaverty was born in Carrickmacross, County Monaghan on 5 July 1904. His parents Michael and Catherine migrated to Belfast in 1909 to seek employment. He recalled, ‘My father was a waiter in the hotel and he came to Belfast with his two brothers as they did not have enough land to support all of them’ (1), and remembered sadly, ‘My mother was from Kildare via Dublin. My mother took ill after having her ninth baby. She married when she was only eighteen and having a baby every year was just too much for her and she died very young’ (2). Emigration and personal tragedy were not alien to McLaverty, and would influence the development of the fictional characters that he populated Rathlin Island with in his prose. He attended Queen’s University, and took a Physics degree in 1927 and a Master’s degree in Science in 1933. He also attended St. Mary’s in Strawberry Hill London, where in 1928 he received a higher diploma in education, before commencing a teaching career at St. John’s Primary School in 1929.
McLaverty began writing fiction during the early 1930s and published short stories in Ireland Today, the Irish Monthly, the Catholic World and the Capuchin Annual. Many of these early stories were set in the hinterlands of Rathlin Island and captured a sense of place, that possessed the intuitive and ambient tone of poetry, reinforced with a pedantic attention to detail. His stories caught the attention of the American literary anthologist E. J. O’Brien, who encouraged McLaverty to commence his first novel: ‘He told me I should try to write. I thought of my pigeon house and the places around. I was really willing and felt power stirring in me. I thought not only of my pigeon shed but also of Rathlin Island where we went for our holidays of years’ (3).
Call My Brother Back was published in 1939. The first part of the book was set on Rathlin and expanded upon themes contained in the minute sketches of his short stories about the island, its people and its landscapes. McLaverty’s representation of Belfast in the second part of Call My Brother Back is framed from the perspective of the rural economic refugee adjusting to the industrial culture and alien space of a city.
Sources
In a 1933 story The Letter, McLaverty examined the theme of emigration and its effects on family members left on the island. The piece is set during the bleak and desolate months of winter and concerns the contents of a correspondence from America. A letter arrives containing news of the death of a daughter who had emigrated. In the story the daughter’s mother is both isolated by her illiteracy. As she cannot read, her youngest son must perform this task for her. As he reads the letter, the son discovers the heartbreaking truth about his sister, as he is conveying the news of her death to his elderly mother. McLaverty’s representation of the atmospheric conditions on Rathlin mirrors the forlorn poverty of landscape, mind and soul which drives the cold tides of emigration:
'Winter had come to Roecarra. A December wind blew over the naked-grey land, whistling sharply through the unmortared stone hedges and making the donkeys shiver in their beds of sapless bracken. The morning sky was ice-blue streaked with white skeletons of clouds' (1).
The tenuous attachment to place of young islanders was a concern of McLaverty’s as well, and formed the theme for his 1937 piece Leavetaking. In the story, a young boy who is about to emigrate to Belfast to attend boarding school visits his elderly aunt and uncle. A model ship sitting in a glass bottle fascinates the boy, as he listens to his uncle ruefully comment on the emigration that is draining Rathlin of its lifeblood:
‘ “It’s sad to see so many young people leavin’ the island and none comin’ back. There’ll soon be nothin’ on the island only rabbits – with nobody marryin’, the oul dyin’, and the young goin’ away” ’(2).
The boy however, is filled with expectation and excitement as he anticipates life in the city, and wonders if any there is any remnant of island life that he will be able to remember:
'The road climbed gradually out of the village, up into the hills, where the air was clear and cool. Here he could see Fair Head and dark Knocklayde bulging strangely near. Away beyond that lovely mountain he would soon be going to Belfast, and as he looked at its cold, sodden folds, he wondered if he would be able to see it from the town' (3).
The mountain links the boy’s past and future together, as he begins his emigration from the landscapes of an island to the streetscapes of a city. Themes of isolation, emigration and place attachment, tied to rural island life, were re-imagined for the longer prose treatment of McLaverty’s first novel, Call My Brother Back (1939).
Sources
Digital Literary Atlas of Ireland, 1922 - 1949 (Email)