大象传媒

The Sleeping Bags

In the Autumn of 1944, at the end of September, I was eight years old and lived with my parents in a rented house belonging to a local farmer, between Ballymena and the village of Cullybackey.

The farmer arrived one day in his horse and cart, and proceeded to leave potato sacks in small piles, all around a potato field adjacent to our home.
The weather was starting to be slightly frosty at night, as was usual during the period when potatoes were dug, and cold fingers in the morning was the order of the day when gathering them.

We went off to bed that evening as usual and when we awoke next morning it was cold and somewhat frosty. We had just started breakfast when my mother called my father and I to the window to look out into the potato field, where the bags had been left the previous day.
The strange thing was, that the bags were no longer flat but looked to be full of potatoes, much to our amazement. Remember that this was before the days of tractors with spotlights for working by night.
As we tried to figure out what had caused this phenomenon, the bags started to move, and then to our amazement, men began to get out of the bags, stand up and stretch. They were all in uniform, complete with weapons and I was quite impressed, as I had never been this close to armed troops before.

It appeared that during the night the army had arrived on manoeuvres and the soldiers, finding the bags, got inside them and used them as improvised sleeping bags, and managed to remain reasonably comfortable during the cold night.

I certainly had never seen a sleeping bag, and I鈥檓 not sure if such a thing was available during the early nineteen and forties, but here was a fine example of the army living off the land, and utilising anything they found to their advantage.
As you can imagine, this was a big event in the life of an eight year old country boy.

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