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This story was submitted to the people's War site by a volunteer from Fivemiletown Primary School on behalf of Pat Palmer and has ben added to the site with her permission.
The last war was in its second year when German Aircraft first started bombing the well known Belfast shipyard and aircraft and munitions factories. Work here continued day and night. As sir raids were always carried out during the night the blackout came into operation. All street lights were out and the windows of houses, trams, buses, cars and trains had to be covered so light could not be seen from the air. The evacuation came along and children under fifteen were asked to g to the country for their own safety and so it was on a Sunday evening in late April 1041 I said goodbye to my Mum and Dad and boarded a bus at Smithfield Bus Station and left the city for a town I had never heard of.

It was scary driving along dark roads not able to read because of the very dim blue lights inside the bus. After four and a half hours my friend and I alighted from the bus and went along the quiet road to the house I was to stay in. I had arrived in Augher.

I took some days to take it all in. The quietness the space and all the green fields. Where I lived in the city centre trams rattled along the main roads and repairs were carried out during the night to the tram lines. Here in the country homes had no running water or electricity. We had oil lamps and went to bed with a candle. Cooking was done on a range or in black pots over a turf fire. These I got used to.
But one thing I never got used to was going to a small shed at the bottom of the garden when I needed to do a ‘tinkle’. A far cry from pulling a chain.

As I settled in to getting to know my way around I was given some jobs to do. I enjoyed going to the nearest farm house with a can and asking for ‘two pints of milk please’. Going round the chicken coop gathering eggs. Beside where I lived was a timber mill where great tree trunks were brought to be made into blanks of wood. On a good day, after school, I would sit on a tree trunk and wave to passengers going by to the next village some on the bus and some of the local miniature train called Puffing Billy so named because it had trouble going up the hills. At home I was in the Brownies. But there was no company in Augher. But they had the G.F.S. So I joined that and found it was quite like the Brownies. One of my favourite pasties was going for walks and I enjoyed going to the bridge on the Ballygawley Road; getting down to the bank of the River Blackwater and going along to the bridge on the Aughnacloy Road gathering wild flowers as I went and chatting to fisher men along the way. I don’t think my chat was appreciated, for one elderly gentleman said I frightened the fish away. Every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday evenings a friend and myself got the job of taking the milk out to the rectory where Canon and Mrs Stewart lived. It was fine during the ling summer evenings but during the winter some boys would hide in the hedges which lined the rectory lane and jump out — very scary indeed — thank goodness the milk cans, by then were empty.

I visited Augher last year and what a change. The railway station was now a café, the old school and the forge demolished. No more oil lamps (except for decoration) and thank goodness no more sheds at the bottom of the garden.

What a change from when I first arrived sixty four years ago.

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