Mauyen Keane, Hello, Is It All Over?

Abstract

Mauyen Keane’s short autobiography is centred around her experiences of work, war and romance in Jersey and Germany during the late 1930s and 1940s. The narrative begins with her account of her journey from Athenry in Galway where she was born in 1917, to St Helier in Jersey to begin her nurses’ training in the autumn of 1936. She remained on the island for the next seven years, during which time she endured the privations of the German occupation that began in July 1940. The following excerpt casts light on the contrasting responses of Jersey-based Irish doctors and nurses to the prospect of imminent invasion in the spring of 1940, and the kinds of personal and professional dilemmas they faced. Keane’s account of the occupation itself is notable for the way in which it humanises the Nazi troops and illuminates the disconcerting emotional intimacies produced by the enforced proximity of islanders and invaders. This empathetic portrait of the enemy is itself conditioned by the life-changing events it describes: the author’s falling in love with a German soldier and her dramatic journey across war-torn Europe in the spring of 1943 to join him in Jena. When formal permission to marry was refused on the grounds that the bride had a ‘slightly Jewish’ appearance, the couple married in secret and concealed their relationship for the remainder of the war. In 1947 they were allowed to leave Germany and immediately travelled to Ireland, their homecoming providing an appropriately happy ending to a suspenseful narrative of transgressive wartime romance.

(Dublin: Ababúna, 1984). 80pp.; pp. 17–22.