大象传媒

I had only just gone to school when the Germans bombed Belfast. The Luftwaffe's navigation was not what anyone expected for instead of hitting the centre of Belfast and the docks and shipyard, they emptied their bombs on to the suburban area where we lived.

The first night of the onslaught we all sat under the dining room table and played buses! My mother invented the game to amuse me and my baby brother and we had to pretend to buy tickets for some exciting places and then tell each other what we could see out of the 'bus' as we went along. That night we were up and down several times as the siren went off as each new wave of bombers came along.

The next night was the same thing over again only this time the centre of the city was badly blitzed. Across the road from us several avenues of suburban houses were razed to the ground with great loss of life.

Next day, my grandfather who was one of the rare people with a petrol allowance, arrived to take us to his small holiday cottage high on the Antrim plateau - the back of beyond, my mother said. We packed as much as we could and crammed into the car with my aunt and my two cousins who were being evacuated with us.

When we got tho the main road out of the city to the north there were hundreds and hundreds of people trudging towards the country side. There were families pushing handcarts, some with prams laden with personal things, women carrying children and older children carrying babies. Some had cardboard boxes, others had sacks, even large buckets were crammed with what had been rescued from the wreckage. My child's mind could not deal with the enormity of what my eyes were seeing.

I pleaded with my grandfather to stop, to help, to push their carts, to carry their babies while they had a rest. He drove on, keeping his eyes on the road. I sobbed to my mother that we should stop but she said we couldn't. "How do you think we could help all these people. We can't get any more people into this car and even if we could get one person in do you think any family would let one person out of their sight."

She was right of course, but at the time I sobbed my heart out for that great river of misery that flowed out of the city.

When I grew older I knew they came from the closely packed streets around the spinning mills and cigarette factory and that there were many many people who did not survive to make that awful journey out of the city to unknown destinations.

Throughout my life when I see newsreel pictures of the innocent victims of conflict trudging away from the horrors of what has happened without hope of a safe destination or a secure place to rest, I see the blitz victims of Belfast carrying their remaining possessions to the hills and shepherding their bewildered and exhausted children along the hard and unfriendly footpath.

Even now, writing this, I can see it all again and I cry with the sorrow of having had no help to offer.

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