大象传媒

I was 7 when the Blitz came to Belfast and my brother was 13. There are two vivid memories that have stayed with me all these years and I am going to tell you about them.

The first was a few days before the planes came. My father who,incidentally, had served in the first war and was an 'Old Contemptible' having been at Mons at the beginning of that war, "knew" exactly when the jerries were coming as,it turned out, did most of the citizens of south and west Belfast.
So for two nights that warm May in 1941 our family, armed with blankets and thermos flasks, headed over the'Bog Meadows', up the Black Mountain and on round the corner away from the city. It was quite an adventure for me and my brother to sleep in a field under the stars with only a blanket between us and them. It must have been wonderfully warm weather because I don't recall feeling chilly at all.
Now for the memory. It was the next morning and we started back down the mountain at dawn. I wondered what the noise was. It sounded like hundreds and hundreds of donkeys clip-clopping on the road. It was the bulk of the population of our part of Belfast returning to get ready for work and school. Every field for miles around must have been occupied. We hadn't noticed the previous night as it was late by the time we got there.
Anyway after two nights of this my father decided the jerries would't be coming. And guess what? Yes the next night they came.

As I've told you My father was an old soldier and didn't fancy any of the shelters provided for us. He dug (with the help of neighbouring lads) a deep hole in our garden,lined it with corrugated iron,put seating round the wall and added a corrugated iron roof. I didn't much like it as it had a lot of spiders and cockroaches in it.
So when the sirens went for the first blitz we all went down to the shelter. In spite of the cockroaches I actually went to sleep and didn't wake up until a land mine exploded about a quarter of a mile away in Blythe Street. A lot of the bombs landed in North Belfast at the water works as the pilots thought they wre bombing the shipyard..Many incendiaries fell too and Belfast was in flames.
When the all-clear went we came out and here comes my second memory. The sky was red and silhouetted against the burning sky was a 'squadron' of swans, presumably from the River Lagan, making for the mountains.

So there are my memorable experiences of the Blitz - feet echoing down the mountain and swans silhouetted against a sky from the depths of hell. I don't really remember much about the bombing though it was a long time after the war before my stomach stopped turning over when the peace time fire siren went off.

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