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I was born two years before the war. My wee brother was born three years later, shortly before Hitler’s blitzkrieg. I remember the air-raid sirens, a two-note signal for warning and a single long note for all-clear.

When the two-note signal sounded we all got under the stairs, which was regarded as the safest place to be, which for me was borne out by the number of wrecked houses in which the staircase was still standing.

The worst thing about the war, generally agreed among my peers was sweet rationing. This was set at one and half a half pounds of sweets per month. Per month? How was a child supposed to live on that? Only joking, we had no money either. We managed by selling some of our coupons to richer kids, kids whose da’s had a better job than your da, that sort of thing. Another memory is the radio. There was the Home Service, the Light Programme and the Third Programme. The Home Service was a news and information service; comics, singers, that sort of thing. Things to give respite from ‘the war’.

The Third Programme was ‘serious’. It had debates, classical music recordings and even some live classical music. That’s what I heard but I never listened to it. Gimme a break I was six or seven! On the Light Programme the family listened to the comedians Tommy Handley Horne and Murdock in ‘Much Binding In the Marsh’ and others I had no idea what it was all about but I fell about like everyone else and enjoyed it.

Granny had an old wind-up gramophone and some old shellac records, to which we listened regularly. Some were classical vocal music, which the adults enjoyed but for me they were nothing but a load of oul’ screeching. Others were more to my taste. For example, records of Dublin comedians like Jimmy O’Dea ,in his Biddy Mulligan mode.

We lived in a relatively new estate with longish front gardens, which had nice iron railings at the street end. One morning we were awakened by a strange noise. We looked out and saw men with acetylene torches going down the street burning off the railings and leaving them to be collected by a lorry. Apparently this was part of the ‘war effort’. Steel was needed for tanks and munitions.

Even though it turned out that the railings were the’ wrong sort of iron’ we never got them back. Some people had hedges which performed the function of railings. Others had to build new fences or leave their gardens open.

The open option was chosen by a fair-sized minority, which meant that eventually the street looked like a mouth with several teeth missing. That didn’t matter to us kids. Unfenced gardens made great places to play marbles, or ‘marlies’ as we called them.
The coming of the air-raid shelters was another boon to the kids. Somewhere else to play. Of course they were gated, but enterprising people, with nothing else to do, removed them one by one so anyone could gain access. Among other things the kids used them during the day as goalposts but what they were used for during the night I do not know. I was in bed by then.

I can’t remember whether it was before or after the government shelters were built, but at some stage a few people decided to buy or build their own. Maybe they didn’t trust the government or maybe they didn’t want to be with the ‘hoi-polloi’. An old aunt of mine, for instance, bought what I think was called an Anderson shelter. We all had to go on a visit to see it. She brought us into the dining room and pointed under the table. We saw what looked like a low metal cage, which certainly seemed strong enough to withstand a blast, but how would we know? A more enterprising effort was made by a neighbour a couple of doors away. He built an underground shelter in his front garden (we didn’t have back gardens), although we didn’t know what he was doing at the time. We used to watch him carrying bucket after bucket of water up steps he had built to the underground.

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