The White Boxes

Mum (Betty Maguire) recently entered a writing competition and wrote of her experience in her first job in Dublin in 1942. The story goes thus.

The White boxes

When I was fifteen years of age my Father died, and I had no option but to leave school and get a job, as there were two younger sisters, one three years of age and the other nine years old. The job I got (my first) was in the offices of a butcher’s shop in Donore Avenue keeping accounts.
Whilst I had not got a lot to do but sit in my cubby hole, I learned a lot about cuts of meat and joints etc., but not much else. I was bored!
At that time, 1942 due to the war, there was daylight saving and the clocks didn’t go back in the winter. Consequently it was dark in the mornings when I went to work at 9 a.m.
Looking out from my cubby hole I used to observe every morning groups of men walking up the other side of the street, which was unlit. There was a blackout in force also then. These men were carrying white boxes on their shoulders and would take turns carrying the boxes.
Curiosity got the better of me and I asked the butcher what were they doing with the boxes. “Do you mean to tell me you don’t know what’s in the boxes” he said incredulously. No I said. “They are dead babies and young children from the tenements in Marrowbone Lane and Meath Street and Marshals Barracks’’ The men went early while it was still dark out of shames sake. There was, no pasturised milk, they shared common facilities in the yard. Mostly the babies died from gastro enteritis, and the Mothers were ill nourished as well, Father’s unemployed.
T.B. at that time was ripe and at epidemic proportions. Whole families were wiped out by this disease.
Upon mentioning this tale to my son who was born in the 60’s, he refused point blank to believe it, brought up as he was with all mod cons in the home, car in the drive, colour T.V. etc. He just could not accept that such poverty existed, and insisted that it was all a figment of my imagination.
This was holy Ireland in 1942, whilst elsewhere in Europe, Dachau for instance, a somewhat similar fate was happening to Mothers and children.
What’s the difference you may ask? Man’s inhumanity to man in both places.

Poverty such as this hardly exists today although the Vincent de Paul Society will tell you otherwise. I find it hard to believe with all the social welfare allowances going these days, but I suppose as Jesus Christ said “The poor we will always have with us”, or can we try at least to make poverty history as Sir Bob Geldof and Bono wishes. I sincerely hope so.