ABSTRACT
Miriam Billig was something of a free spirit, unconventional and uncowed by the demands of respectability, and when she met an Irish freedom fighter in London, she was bowled over by him: they married in June 1929, in a Catholic church in Soho. Their first child was born less than nine months later. The former Irish freedom fighter was Joseph Noel D’Arcy. Born in Dublin in 1898, he got his first job in the British Civil Service there. Roman Catholicism dominated every area of social and political life in the Irish Free State at this time and was in virtually every sphere a drag on progress and innovation. Margaretta however felt herself something of a misfit. In 1937, Joseph D’Arcy was transferred to London again, and the D’Arcy family moved back to Dublin, to an upstairs flat in Wilton Place, a dog-leg shaped crescent in a residential area south-east of St Stephen’s Green.
