the diary

The first I heard about the diary was an email forwarded by my mum. 

The email was from Russ, a cousin in Brooklyn who had found the family through a DNA testing website. He had some documents he wanted to share. They belonged to Nora Henry, the sister of my great grandmother Mary. Nora was his aunt too. 

“Anyway, I have a some of Aunt Nora's stuff and am in the process of scanning it. They include some pictures of your aunts and their accordions; she was very proud of them (your aunts, not the accordions). Also have some journals that she kept - man she did not like Bert Lahr.  I will send them to you (and anyone else who is interested) as I get up my motivation to continue (inertia can be a bitch).”

 As part of the email chain there was a black and white studio portrait of Nora. Naked save for a few ostrich feathers, she met my gaze with a recognisable air of “go on, dare you…”

I clicked through the pages of a pdf - the first image was an etching of a steam ship, titled “My Trip Abroad”. The following page was filled with a looping cursive hand, not dissimilar to my mum’s. Nora was on her way to Ireland, her first trip abroad since arriving at Ellis Island in 1894. The diary opens with salt baths on deck and highballs of scotch, but ends somewhere very different - the Falls Road during the final month of the Belfast pogrom.

The diary pulled me in. I signed up for a newspaper archive and before long news clippings piled up on my desktop. The sheer volume of the words created a momentum of its own.

Over the past year or so, I have been discovering a great many surprising things about Nora - an actress, burlesque dancer, occasional street brawler, devout catholic, sometime store detective, queer woman and matriarch. I wish I knew what this book would turn out to be, but for now it is a tale of two sisters, two cities and the question of whether it is ever really possible to return home.

home

By 1922 our family was living on Frere street, in an area of Belfast known as the Pound Loney or Lower Falls - the heart of the Catholic community. Nora’s older sister Mary already had four children, the youngest being my granny Netta (age two at the time of the diary).

Nora arrives into t at the start of June - what would end up being the final chapter of a terrifying and violent struggle in the North following the Irish War of Independence. It’s hard to know from the diary if Nora had any understanding of the situation she was arriving into… certainly her romantic first sighting of Ireland from the boat soon gives way to fear and anxiety as machine gun fire and bombs punctuate daily life with increasing regularity.

“Mary and Tom came down at 7:30 After all my baggage was in a taxi and we gave the address of Falls Road, he refused to drive us as he was a Protestant and he will be killed if he came in a Catholic section. After we got a Catholic driver we started the city was like death not a sound for a Sunday morning

After we came to the junction and turned into Falls Road, I could hardly draw my breath. Six soldiers with guns ready and helmets on and a small armoured car called the “whippet” was standing outside the middle school, which was a wreck from bomb and bullets. Never saw such a sight in my life. Mary and Tom had to run in a store on their way down to meet me as they killed Mr. Hunt in front of them because he did not run fast enough. If I knew this, I would never have come”