Midnight Again

by Helen Ramsey Turtle

'Midnight Again' is a selection of the alert and animated letters that Helen Ramsey Turtle wrote back to her family in Denver, Colorado from Northern Ireland during the Second World War, edited by John Wilson Foster.

The letters home kept her American family abreast of her domestic life in Belfast and on Mahee Island, Strangford Lough where she lived with her husband, the naturalist and stockbroker, Lancelot Turtle, and young daughters. And abreast, too, of the conduct of the war on the home front as well as the European front: its impact on everyday life through blackout, rationing, travel restrictions and the departure of friends' fathers, sons and siblings to the war.

An American liberal pacifist, she was converted to the cause of the war and hoped her country would join the war against Hitler's Germany. Being unable to travel to her native land, she was overjoyed when the first American troops to arrive in the United Kingdom landed in Northern Ireland and brought with them energy, hope and colour. All the while an avid reader, picture, theatre and concert goer, and convivial hostess, Helen Turtle brings to life in her letters a Northern Irish culture rarely depicted.

Her early death in 1946 deprived family and friends of a spirited presence, but her letters remain to preserve the thoughts, observations and feelings of a remarkable personality.

514 pages, Paperback

Published April 1, 2021

Reviews

[Malcolm Walker · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a good solid read, and a book that would repay selective re-reading. The author is a wealthy American who marries a Northern Irishman and comes to live and raise a family in Northern Ireland in the 1930's. She remains stuck in Northern Ireland during WW2, whilst wanting to return to America but being unable to. But she writes daily to her birth family and friends in America, often simply observing what is going on around her, from what the children are doing, to the latest shortage that her domestic staff are complaining about, to what is being broadcast at any given moment on the BBC Home Service and the BBC Armed Forces Service radio. She has an interest in literature and poetry and regularly attends a women's book club as we'd call it now, in her time it was called the DRC, the Drawing Room Circle. She is a woman of privilege and comfort, but she looks out onto the world with a curious eye as only an outsider who is comfortable with themselves can do. She suffers serious ill health during the war, and that reduces her writing output, but it does not stop her writing to America altogether, she observes her tiredness with all the energy she has. That is when the weight of observation that words can carry proves itself most. The letters stop at the end of the war.

There is an afterword carries the story forward, when the letters stop which summarises the brio with which these letters are written and the reasons for the writing. If ever a book was carried forward by footnotes at the bottom of the page then this one is, where each film, book, and radio programme, each writer or politician, the author enthuses about to the folks back home is given it's title, described and given a source quote/reference for further perusal by the reader should they have the stamina.