When I was growing up, I do not recall birthdays being the extravagance that they seem to have become nowadays. One received a small present, mother baked a cake, usually chocolate, and there were certainly few, if any, parties. My parents were of very modest means, but I do not believe that it was ever much different with my friends from more affluent families.
The scars from the war were not yet healed, and if people had any money, they were cautious about spending it. The Egyptian takeover of the Suez Canal, the Russian invasion of Hungary, the building of the ‘Iron Curtain’ and the ongoing Cold War contributed to a general feeling of unease. I clearly remember my father saying, more than once, that he could soon be in uniform again. That was in 1956. I was ten at the time.
I left home when I was eighteen and I have only ever been back to Ireland for infrequent short-lived visits. For those of us who migrated from Ireland, and we were many, life was quite different to that of today. One communicated by mail. For instance, airmail from Australia, where I lived for some years, took at least ten days to the UK, and if sent by less-expensive sea mail, it could take 6-8 weeks. A corpse was buried and the soil well settled by the time one read of a death.
And telephone calls were exorbitantly expensive. People would save up for a three-minute call home for a birthday or Christmas. The only time I ever booked a call was when I was working in Nigeria in 1978. I went to a hut on Victoria Island, Lagos, gave the details of the call, paid the fee, and sat down to wait, along with several others. After about two hours, I was instructed to go to a booth, there were two, where my call to New York was waiting. Before I knew it, the operator interceded to say that my three minutes was up in ten seconds.
The first time I called home to Ireland was in 1981 from Miami.
For younger people, who are accustomed to instant free communication through texting, WhatsApp, email, Facebook and a host of other software applications, the lack of easy contact may be hard to envisage.
But that is how it was in my formative years.
The Irish Rover 