大象传媒

Childhood Memories of the War Years 1939 - 1945

Extracts from Phil Cunningham鈥檚 book, 鈥楧erry Down the Days鈥�. Published in Nov 2002
by Guildhall Press Derry N Ireland.

When the Second World War began in 1939, I was nearly years old. The war ended in 1945. During those years the defence forces installed an anti-aircraft system to protect the docks that contained a major North Atlantic navel base. A ring of huge helium filled barrage balloons were anchored with steel cables and floated about a hundred feet above the ground to keep enemy bomber planes from flying low over the docks. From the top of the banking, where I lived in Friel鈥檚 Terrace beside the Derry walls, we could see two of the silvery grey coloured balloons over Brooke鈥檚 Park and Pennyburn. A large open topped steel water tank about twenty feet in diameter and five or six feet high was erected in corner of the Diamond where Sullivan鈥檚 auctioneers stood. The tank water was to be used in emergencies if ever any of the buildings caught fire during an air raid by German aircraft, but thank Heavens it never had to be used because the city escaped being attacked during the war. The only tragedy connected to the water tank was when a group of young children were playing around it one day and a boy climbed onto the rim and fell in and was drowned.

Johnny McGill lived in upper Nailor鈥檚 Row and regularly walked my father's greyhounds. Johnny was a tall slim man and always had a pleasant smile and a twinkle in his eyes. He was of a quiet nature and wore a brown brimmed hat, but only had one arm; he lost the other in the war when he was in the trenches in Borneo. A Japanese sniper shot him and he pretended to be dead but had a bayonet stuck through his arm which later had to be amputated. As a young boy I loved to go out a walk with Johnny and the greyhounds up through Bligh鈥檚 Lane and into the fields where we would slip off their leashes and let them run free.

One day, as I was toasting a piece of bread at the fire, I said to my mother, 鈥淛ohnny McGill has only one arm, you know.鈥� I hadn鈥檛 noticed Johnny sitting in the corner beside the dresser and when I turned around to look at my mother, he was smiling at me. I was very embarrassed, even at my young age, and ran out into the front street.

Those were the war years when many young men from Derry City joined the British army just to earn a few bob, get clothed and fed, and to escape from the poverty trap. Many of them never came home again, and we often saw the post office messenger boy delivering a telegram containing the sad news of another lost son to an anxious mother.

Two brothers, Spider and Gander Scanlon, from a family in Walker鈥檚 Square, came home and ended their days begging for money to buy alcohol. One of them did menial work cleaning out rubbish and collecting returnable bottles for a livelihood. The other I found laying dead in the gutter at the top of Long Tower Street many years later, the street where he had played when he was a boy. Spider was his nickname, a name he got in his younger days when he did a bit of boxing. He was not related to the famous father and son British and Empire welterweight champion boxers, Spider Kellys, who lived in Fahan Street.

Smuggling and Sirens
All household commodities were scarce during the war years and every family had an official government ration book. A ration coupon was handed to the shopkeeper along with some money to purchase items such as tea, sugar, tobacco, snuff and clothing, when they were available.

The Irish Republic was neutral during the war and Derry people travelled to and fro across the border that was only three miles from the city to smuggle household essentials by bus, bicycle and train. Many people walked the few miles to County Donegal, usually in the late evening when darkness was falling where the British Customs and Excise Authorities set up checkpoints to catch people taking their meagre purchases home and often confiscated any goods they discovered. It was a form of highway robbery because there were many stories about confiscated goods being taken home by some of the customs men for their own use.

Women and children went on the train to get some goods for themselves and their neighbours. When they were returning they sometimes hung their shopping bags full of contraband on the outside door handles of the train, on the side away from the station platform, so the customs men wouldn't find them when they came aboard to search. Sometimes a suspicious official looked out of the window to see the outside of the train lined with full shopping bags, and sometimes he pretended not to see them and waved to the train driver to continue on his journey to sighs of relief from the nervous passengers.

During those war years, 1939 to 1945, fruit was scarce in the shops and in October, lorries came from Armagh loaded with apples from the orchards. Whenever one came into our street everybody queued to buy a bucketful for a shilling. It was a great treat to eat a couple of juicy apples or to get a piece of apple pie that my mother baked in the fire oven. Sometimes she would give us a piece of dough that was left over and we would make a couple of small apple tarts to cook along with the cakes or pies.

After the war had ended, a variety of fruits started to arrive in the shops. On one occasion my older brother Paddy, who drove a fruit lorry for Bannigan's stores on Foyle Street, brought home a bunch of bananas. He gave me one and I began to eat it without removing the skin; it tasted horrible! After he stopped laughing and told me that it had to be peeled I enjoyed the taste of it. The only place I had seen bananas before was in the school geography books about Africa.

Cigarettes as well as many other commodities were scarce during the war and people smuggled them across the border from County Donegal. One day my brother Willie heard that a shop at the bottom of Howard鈥檚 Street was selling Turkish 鈥楶asha鈥� cigarettes so he sent me to get him some. When I eventually got back home with the cigarettes after queuing for twenty minutes, Willie eagerly lit one up. He immediately started to choke because they were such a rotten taste and he threw them into the bin. When Willie wasn't looking my brother Freddie and I took the cigarettes out of the bin and went around to the banking where about six of us lit some of them up and nearly choked ourselves to death. That was our only attempt at smoking until the war was well over.

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