大象传媒

It was the Easter holidays and I was in Junior Infants (the old fashioned word for P1.) There were 63 of us as I found out when I discovered one of my school reports. When the Easter holidays came I was quite sorry not to have to go to school but, unknown to me, I wouldn't be back at that particular school for some considerable time.
There came the evening when I remember being lifted out of bed and someone saying
鈥淵ou鈥檙e going to sleep with grannie tonight鈥�.
That much registered, but I must have gone off to sleep at once. Later, a dull thumping coming from somewhere outside the room nudged me towards wakefulness and my grannie said,
鈥淕et up,now. I want you to come downstairs with me.鈥�

She steered my half-asleep body down the stairs and into the dining room. It was like a queer dream! All the furniture was rearranged and the dining room table was built into a sort of house against the wall of the kitchen with blankets and eiderdowns on top for a roof. Still confused and only half awake, I was steered into the interior of the table/house. I realised that my mother and my little brother were already inside and then I also realised that the thumping was louder and definitely outside. I wondered why our gasmask boxes were stacked under the table. My mother said,
鈥淲e鈥檙e playing buses and I am the bus conductor. You鈥檒l think where you want to go and I鈥檒l sell you all a ticket and then the bus will start and we鈥檒l tell each other what we can see out of the window.鈥�
We began to play. My little brother kept trying to escape from the bus and had to be recovered, and still the slow thump,thump went on outside and as I began to come fully awake I could hear my father in the kitchen talking to one of our soldiers, billeted in the unoccupied and newly built houses in the parallel street. Then I heard a sound I knew, had practised listening to in school drills. It was the siren sounding the all-clear! My grannie and I went back to bed. I fell asleep almost at once, but the thumping woke me again. Grannie got me up again and we went downstairs and got under the table and went on more exotic bus journeys. Again the all clear sounded and we went back to bed. Again the thumping woke me but I couldn鈥檛 bear to get up. This time my father came and carried me down stairs. At the bottom he set me on my feet.

鈥淚 need you to go into the dining room and help mummy and grannie keep Jack under the table. There are German planes trying to drop bombs to ruin our houses. You can hear the noise of them and you can hear the noise of our guns firing at them. You will all be safe if you stay under the table. I need to go out with Tom (the soldier) to put fires out if they start, but I鈥檒l be back soon鈥�

There was something exciting about being in the war, I thought, as I crept under the table and we all took the bus to the seaside.

After a bit Jack fell asleep and my mother and grandmother sat in silence. I think now they were probably praying. I leaned against the wall and listened to the thumping. Then there was a different noise as well 鈥� a sudden loud ferocious crashing noise that was far more frightening and immediate than the thumping. Then, at five years of age, I had a completely adult recognition of our danger. I knew instantaneously that I was listening to the explosions as bombs hit nearby houses and I knew that ours could be next. I recognised that we could all die.

Five is an early age to come face to face with your own mortality. It was so shocking as to be completely numbing and I sat there wondering what being dead felt like and grieving already for all of us. In this deep dark bereavement I heard the all clear. My father and Tom came back and there was an air of jollity as if we personally had chased the enemy away. I shut the emotions I had just experienced in a secret place and buried the door to them so deep I thought I would never be reached by them again.

The next morning my father went to work. As an adult I learned, totally by accident, that he had spent the war years sharing with another man the responsibility for keeping the hot line open that ran between London and Washington, even before America entered the war. He never told anyone the details of the job even in later years when he was an elderly man.

Our soldiers said we should not go out to play in case there were unexploded bombs and incendiaries around. Then, unexpectedly, my father arrived home bringing my grandfather with him. There was an argument in the front room. I sat quietly on the bottom stair and listened. My father was describing the scenes of devastation in the centre of the city and he and my grandfather were trying to convince my mother that she had to go to the cottage my grandfather owned in the Antrim hills.

鈥淪ay yes, Say yes!鈥� I repeated over and over again, willing her to agree. We spent holidays at the cottage and my grandmother used to take her children there after Easter each year and come back to the city at Hallowe鈥檈n. It was a precious place.

Eventually my live-in grannie was brought into the conference room. She was already making plans to go to a friend in a provincial town, so that was all right. I could hear my mother refusing to leave my father and I could hear him say he鈥檇 come at the weekends. Eventually they all came out and my mother went off to pack and my grandfather went off to perform the same errand of evacuation at the house of his eldest son!

That afternoon my mother, Jack and I, my Aunt Norah and my cousins Mullan and Sheila, together with as many as possible of our belongings and emergency rations for the next few days all squashed into grandpa鈥檚 car and set off for an undetermined period of evacuation.

On the way out of town, the footpaths were thick with people making their way out of the city; they carried cases and boxes; some carried babies while the families鈥� possessions were pushed along in the pram; there were laden handcarts, wheelbarrows and children鈥檚 go-carts, all piled high with rescued belongings. I can still see them, and to this day every televised procession of fleeing people in some far away conflict looks exactly the same as that moving procession fixed in my child鈥檚 mind on that distant Easter . I wanted us to stop and help; I pleaded and cried; their need was desperate compared with our secure safety. My grandfather drove on inexorably and my mother tried to tell me that there was nothing we could do. 鈥淲e couldn鈥檛 even fit one more person in this car鈥� she said. I knew she was right but it was no real comfort.

Hitler and the Luftwaffe continued to bomb the city throughout Easter. A whole housing development on the other side of the main road from our house was entirely demolished and the little streets surrounding the factories nearer the city centre were flattened. For one small girl safe in the countryside, the excitement of fields and farms and the magic of the little cottage, lifted and dissolved the trauma. Gradually the full joyful reality of the new dispensation dawned.

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