大象传媒

My first recollection of W.W.2.was coming out of church on a Sunday morning and being aware of a commotion going on. The billboards beside the newspaper sellers displayed notices 鈥淲AR BREAKS OUT鈥�.

During the following year we were issued with gas masks. As a six year old I was given a Mickey-Mouse gas mask. At school we had practices for air-raids when we evacuated the school and took refuge in neighbouring houses. My aunt lived near school so my sister, cousin and I ran to her house and waited for the bell to sound when we would go back to school.

Time passed uneventfully until one night in April 1941 when the Germans raided Belfast. We were living in the Antrim Road area and, as I learned many years later, the German bombers mistook the Water Works for Belfast Lough and dropped their bombs in the Antrim Road area.

Like most other families we were taking shelter under the stairs. Some bombs made a whistling sound as they came down; there were ack-ack guns and the dreadful noise of buildings collapsing. Three land-mines landed near our house, two exploded but the third did not. When the all-clear sounded we made our way out of the house, past the unexploded land-mine and started walking to my grandmother鈥檚 house at the other side of town. I remember streets of rubble, fires, dust, and men climbing around in the midst of all the wreckage trying to rescue people. I have a vivid memory of a man emerging from a wrecked house holding a large brass cage with a brightly coloured parrot in it. We walked for hours and finally arrived at my grandmother鈥檚 house where we were put to bed.

We three younger members of the family spent the next ten months as evacuees in the country attending the local school where there was a particularly harsh regime. Punishment was meted for the slightest misdemeanour and I learned very quickly to sit still and say nothing. There were good times in the country; we got off school for potato-picking, collected eggs, watched milking, plucked chickens, had baby calves for pets, had rides on the donkey and most importantly made some very good life-long friends.

Within a year we returned to a different area of Belfast to a new house and a new school. We spent lots of time queueing for food; the railings were removed from the house to be used for the war effort and a barrage balloon flew from the school playing fields.

In 1945, the war finally ended, but it was years later until food and clothes rationing stopped or until we had oranges or bananas or lots of other things which are now taken for granted.

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