An 'Under Milk Wood' for Belfast

A classic radio play from the 1950s was a celebration of the city’s spirit, but ‘The Return Room’ is only now arriving in a print edition, after languishing in a BBC archive for decades

WHEN WR RODGERS'S The Return Roomwas first broadcast by the BBC Home Service, on December 23rd, 1955, its impact was instantaneous. People seemed to notice straight away that something of consequence, bravado and allure had come into being to counteract the dour image of Belfast. This was a kind of local Under Milk Wood, whose indigenous ingredients struck a chord with Irish listeners.

"When I worked for the BBC in Belfast, between 1974 and 1986," Paul Muldoon writes in his engaging foreword to a new Blackstaff edition, " The Return Roomwas already held up as an example of radio at its peak."

It was known, however, to a select band and only by word of mouth, as the original script had gone missing – and stayed missing until the 1990s, when Douglas Carson, a producer, found it by accident in the BBC archives at Ormeau Avenue.

The way was then open for a proper publication of this masterwork, and although it has taken nearly 20 years to get it into print we have it now, in a splendid limited edition complete with marvellous ad-hoc illustrations by the Belfast artist Gerard Dillon. (It also comes with a CD of the original production, with Rodgers himself taking the part of the narrator, and Dillon singing some Belfast songs.)

How did the broadcast come about? Douglas Carson, in his sterling introduction, describes its genesis, its nurturing by the producer Sam Hanna Bell, the missed deadlines besetting it as Rodgers’s characteristic procrastination came into play. At a crucial stage, Carson says, “the script had not advanced beyond ideas”. BBC personnel were tearing their hair out. Would the thing ever materialise? It did, just a year after it was originally scheduled, and everything miraculously fell into place: the actors, the wordplay, the background, the evocations, the snatches of songs blowing “in and out of the script like dandelion fluff”.

The Return Room is “a close and intricate wickerwork” (Rodgers’s phrase) of impressions and recollections. WR Rodgers was born in 1909 in the Mountpottinger district of Belfast, into an intensely Presbyterian family, and his re-creation of the shreds and shards of an Ulster childhood is, as he says, “partly autobiographical . . . largely imaginary, and wholly true”.

As true as the great mill chimneys, the whins in June, the newsboys crying the papers over the rain-drenched city. Or as Gerard Dillon’s cheerful pigeon fanciers, girls at their skipping games and shawled mill workers, all against a background of cobbled streets, rows of terraced houses and the ring of hills looking down on Belfast. “There was a halo of hills around me from the start, and a hug-me-tight of holiness,” says Rodgers’s unregenerate narrator.

The author-narrator is adamant about the disabling power of “bible-black” religions, of which Rodgers had first-hand knowledge. He was, indeed, ordained as a Presbyterian minister and served at Loughgall, in Co Armagh, until his friend Louis MacNeice and the BBC intervened to good effect, and showed him his true vocation as a poet and broadcaster.

He left Armagh for London in 1945 and never looked back – at least, until he came to write The Return Room,in one of whose scenes a gloomy hymn is swamped by a straggle of ragamuffin children with voices upraised in a seasonal chant: "Our queen can birl her leg, birl her leg, birl her leg." The broadcast bristles with a juvenile joie de vivre and pungent idiosyncrasy of speech and demeanour: "God help the wee man. Sure if he was any smaller you'd have to cut the grass to see him."

Rich terms such as "blather-me-skite" are bandied about. Rodgers's religious temperament, which he never discarded entirely, was alive to sensation and inimical to guilt and coercion of any sort. He wanted to have a biblical thread running through The Return Room, like the "clear and harmonious lane-way" in one of his poems, and indeed this thread adds a touch of eloquence to the whole intoxicating script: "The apple blushed for me below Bellevue, Lagan was my Jordan, Connswater my washpot, and over Castlereagh I cast out my shoe."

Even in his Loughgall days Rodgers was known affectionately as “the Catholic Presbyterian” on account of his liberal instincts, which, remarkably, had withstood an upbringing in the rancorous city defined by its clashing sects.

“Everything in Belfast had two sides,” declares his narrator, and “even the walls of Belfast took sides”. Here every side is allowed to have its say. The rhythmic and lucid narrative voice is interspersed with a medley of Belfast voices: scolding (“I declare to my clogs, Tommy, you’re the world’s worst slowcoach. You’d be a good one to send for sorrow”), philosophical, assertive, delighted or defiant (“Up the rebels”).

The tone is always good-humoured, though, as befits the celebration of the childhood city (for it is, above all, a celebration); violence and bitterness are excluded from its precincts. Controversies are restrained. It holds the child’s capacity for enchantment, light- headedness and fair play – and it has drama and exhilaration too.

“Strange city, God-fearing, far-faring, devil-may-caring. I would need a gold pen as big as a gun, filled with heart’s blood, to put down the rehoboams of its praise and the passion of its ways . . .”

The passion of its ways. The Return Roomreturns us, readers and listeners, along with its author, to the robust street life of those days at the end of the first World War, the doffers streaming out of the mills, the dark pubs with sawdust on the floor, distillery carts and gospel halls, Lambeg drums, "ships and shawlies, doles and doyleys". The raggedy boys with their ever-hopeful plea: "Give us a penny, mister."

But that’s not all. Its dead-and-gone days are doubly encapsulated. The programme is firmly grounded in 1950s Belfast, with Rodgers himself, the great radio producer Sam Hanna Bell, the poets Louis MacNeice and John Hewitt (somewhere in the wings), the artists Gerard Dillon, George Campbell and Rowel Friers, the actors JG Devlin, Elizabeth Begley, James Boyce, the Ulster Singers, elementary-school children from St Comgall’s and Harding Memorial, all presiding over its cultural atmosphere.

These, you might say, in present-day minds, share the role of “old residenters” with the magnified figures of Rodgers’s boyhood: Ezekiel Knight, Mrs Bittercup, Uncle Jacob, Mickey Clark and the rest of them.

The Return Roomhas found a way to tell a distinctive Belfast story, and allow its potent glimpses from a back window on the city to work their enriching effect. It's a singular achievement.

The Return Room, by WR Rodgers, is published by Blackstaff Press, £30; blackstaffpress.com