The family banshee defended in wartime.

The Premier's reference in the House to the "banshee howlings" of the air-raid sirens called forth hilarity from honourable members. Honourable members had better be careful, lest they offend a 75 per cent neutral country. We Irish are very sensitive on the subject of the banshee. Moreover, the banshee does no howl, as any Irish man or woman will tell you. It wails.

The banshee, in fact, is a different kind of ghost. It is different because unlike other ghosts, it appertains not to a particular house or locality, but to a family. Wherever that family - the genuine strain - goes throughout the world the banshee follows. It is the family spectre, and that is the reason why we are so sensitive about it. Moreover the banshee is always feminine, and very Celtic. The name, as you will find in the folklore, is the Gaelic bean-shith, i.e. bean, woman, shith, fairy.

And what does the banshee do? It wails for death, and for death only. Seriously, I wish the Premier had not used the word in relation to the sirens. It is not descriptive, becuase the sirens are happily not proclaiming death but calling for care, watchfulness, and the safeguarding of life.

I belong, on my mother's side, to a very ancient Irish family. My late uncle, who spoke with authority, used to declare that no family in Ireland was more ancient than ours. The name, now almost extinct, runs back a thousand years and has regal and saintly associations. And we have our own banshee, a circumstance always well understood among us, and handed down by tradition.

Not for many years now has the fairy woman been heard. My mother, who owned that she herself had not at any time heard the mournful cry of doom, related circumstantially that her mother had. This was on the night when an ancient scion of the house passed away. My grandmother and her sister were sitting by the fire downstairs in the house where the sufferer lay when, declared my mother, there came to them a strange chilling waft, and from the chimney-top a voice, as it were, of a bird taking flight, uttering as it went the Celtic lament, "ochon-ee." That incident must have been well nigh a hundred years ago.

There was, however, a later claimant to banshee honours. My aunt, who died about a dozen years ago, affirmed that she heard the same lament, in the same form, in the field adjoining my grand-uncle's house - he had lived there all his life, as his forebears had - on the night the old man died. Nothing was said about my grandfather's clock.

Now whether these affirmations were supported by fact or not it is not for me to say. I know they are genuine. It may be that those who heard or believed they heard, the strange midnight wailings were overwrought in mind at the time, and imagining things.

On the other hand, it may not. I do not know how our family fairy woman keeps her "who's who" up to date and how she knows which individual to wail for, but I am rather proud of her, and certainly do not intend to demobilise her even if M.P.s laugh. It is no small thing to have a banshee in the connection. Besides, this kind of ghost is considerate - not coming frightening people at midnight like the clanking-chains variety, or the headless-man-with-sword-stuck-through-gizzard kind.

Still, I am in no hurry for a visit from our banshee, per siren or otherwise - no hurry at all.
S.J.P.

In the Yorkshire Evening Post, 7th September 1940.