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Radio review: Haunting songs of wars long ago

Nuala McCann

Nuala McCann

Nuala McCann is an Irish News columnist and writes a weekly radio review.

Nuala McCann
Nuala McCann Nuala McCann

Michael Morpurgo’s Folk Journeys Radio 4 BBC Sounds

November is remembrance month and what fitting way to mark it than to look back at the songs about war with a writer who has captured the anguish in books like War Horse and Private Peaceful.

Michael Morpurgo explored the song Johnny I Hardly Knew You in this episode. It’s a song that sends me back to a picture of myself as a child on my knees in front of our big wooden radiogram.

The album was a Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem special – they smiled out from the front cover in their Aran jumpers and flat caps.

As a child, Johnny I Hardly Knew You seemed a rousing song… I never listened to the lyrics, never thought it was about a soldier returning, injured, from war.

It was originally about a soldier returning from war in Ceylon to the town of Athy where he meets his lover again.

The words are hers … as she remembers the man who went off to war and stares at the man, standing in front of her, who has returned.

“Where are the eyes that were so mild, hurroo, hurroo.”

She berates him for running off to war and leaving her and their child and she looks at the wreck that has returned and says:

“You’re an armless, boneless, chickenless egg

“You’ll have to be left with a bowl out to beg

“Johnny I hardly knew you.”

Morpurgo enlisted the help of singers, songwriters and passionate folk experts for this journey around the song.

It may have been a parody of an old US song “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.”

The programme featured haunting songs from Steeleye Span, Ewan McColl and Karine Polwart.

And it brought me back to my mother’s memories of how, as a small child, on the day World War 2 was declared, the women from the street all gathered in her home to listen to the news on the radio. They had lived through the Great War. They knew what was ahead. They put their heads in their hands and wept.