RAPHAEL: the name given to an angel who came to the aid of a devout Jewish family living under difficulty and hardship. Something the author Patrick McCabe said brought the name to mind recently.
In speaking of a character called Raphael in his book The Dead School, he says Raphael was a fifties man, a GAA stalwart, a devout Catholic. Such men were proud and determined, with common goals and targets such men as were needed in a post colonial situation. They, McCabe says, endured a lot of "quiet hurts".
Raphael's father had died for Ireland and, as his son saw it, paved the way for the foundation of the State, the Lemass era, and the advent of RTE.
Many Raphaels
In Bardwell On Sea, in Essex, between 1952 and 1962, there were many such Raphaels. A nuclear power station was being built there and 90 per cent of the workforce about 1,200 men was Irish.
They hailed mainly from Mayo, Roscommon, and Donegal. Pre fab housing was built on site, to accommodate the men, two to a cubicle. There was a deduction of 14 shillings a week from their wages, to pay for this. Canteen costs were three shillings, and the hours worked were from 7.30 am. to 5.30 p.m. Overtime was until 10 p.m., and wages for a seven day week, excluding overtime, were £22.
The camp had a darts room and a billiard room. No drinking was allowed, and the nearest pub, The Green Man, was two miles away. On Thursdays pay day such was the demand for cash transfers to Ireland that a post office van came specially from Bradwell to the site.
Almost every man, married and single, queued to send home the weekly £10 to small towns and villages in various counties.
This cash flow was Ireland's Marshall/Raphael Plan, an invisible and unrecorded flood of generosity and responsibility to small uneconomic places. Such largesse, combined with the £2-10 shillings earned by some of the wives for knitting an Aran sweater, helped rear families slate houses and extend cow sheds.
A poor substitute
Life in the camp was a poor substitute for the simple warmth and cohesion left behind. The men tried to create a framework for living, through solidarity, camaraderie, and humour. Friendships, good wages, the challenge of work, and the company of decent English working class men, all helped support this framework.
The ritual of their faith also played an important part. On Sunday mornings a young priests would come to the camp to celebrate Mass. Cleaned up, brylcreamed, and dressed in navy serge suits, they knelt.
An accident in the camp would result in a very big funeral, followed by a generous whip around for the deceased's dependants.
On Sunday evenings, the single men organised a bus to a dance 10 miles away in Burnham on Crouch. An English dance band played Frauleen and China Doll, and some romances sprang up with local girls. Some even led to marriage, with a few Irishmen settling down in the area.
Instead of going to dances, the married men played darts and games of 25. They read the Irish provincial papers and Ireland's Own. They were not saints, but realists, knowing that loneliness brings its own temptations.
Visits home
Pre Christmas time saw these Irishmen walking around English department stores, bearing lists of children's measurements, written on the pages of lined copy book paper. They were preparing for the Christmas visit home with gifts for all.
Work closed down for two weeks. The men travelled home via Euston or Holyhead, and then to that tossing boat The Princess Maud, with sea water and vomit sloshing around its decks. The journey was cold and comfortless, and on arriving at Dun Laoghaire there was the corrugated shed of customs to navigate as well. The Raphaels were only half way there then.
At home finally, the two weeks holidays were often added to by a sick cert. Who could blame them, transiently enveloped in a sense of home? Then in Achill, Swinford, Charlestown, and Ballaghaderreen women and families lined up at railway stations for goodbyes.
Back at work again the odd free day meant a trip to London, and for the single men, the dance halls of the Buffalo, Camden Town and Cricklewood. Contacts were made in pubs. Those were the real labour exchanges as jobs wound down in one place and started up in another.
Some, with their physical strength spent after many work camps and too much drink, ended up as tea boys on big building sites.
Anchored to a dream
But the majority of Raphaels returned home, with money saved and with building, carpentry or mechanical skills. They had been anchored to the dream of returning, as a spider is anchored by a silken thread.
The framework of family, exile, loneliness, and hope was a fragile but tenacious one. Survival, not choice, was the operative word. Good times were juggled with bleak ones.
The Raphaels held on until the relief of the great leap forward of the Lemass era. In time to come, some of their younger children would benefit from the journey by yellow bus to the CAO conveyor belt, and others would form bands to sing of a new era.
Those men had a stubborn loyalty to their own, and an endurance. The women at home, married and single, watched the ebb and flow of their comings and goings over the bleak years. For counsel and support they had other women whose men walked the same path.
The price was high and the memory of that price is still carved deep in the Irish psyche. And if the Raphaels are deemed politically incorrect in these times, when social questions are pondered and "thoughtful frameworks of law" are slotted into place, it is not because of the stagnation or backwardness of those times.
It is because of the memory and the price paid then for real security of tenure, or the chance to create a life and a home in boggy rushy places or small grey towns. There is the memory, too, of how that juggling so frequently almost overwhelmed the jugglers, and how it did in some cases. Some would block out that memory.