大象传媒

I was a child in Belfast, as my father was the Salvation Army officer in charge of the Belfast Citadel. After the second or third raid on Belfast - trying to get the shipyards of Harland and Woolf as well as the aircraft
plants - it was decided that my mother and we children, as well as a friend called Richard Nesbitt, should be evacuated to Limavady My father and I had already put out an incendiary bomb in the back yard with sand and a stirrup pump, using bin lids to shield us. Father had also had to go to the Belfast meat market to help identify the dead; he was gone more than twenty four hours.
In order to get the the station we had to walk across Belfast. I remember the glass crunching beneath our feet and the smoke still rising from the devastated buildings. Once we got to the station we had to wait while they repaired the track. And when we arrived in Limavady Richard`s case was pinched.
We stayed at the old-style, white farm of Mr Cairns, a staunch Presbyterian. Baking was done on the peat fire; the peat was dug on the farm and there were flax dams as well. I went to Limavady Grammar School but we all helped about the farm, of course; I remember putting the milk through muslin as we made the butter. We went to church in a pony and trap.
On one occasion I was taken to the top of a hill from which we could see a red glow in the southern sky: a raid on Belfast. But the raids eased off and after about six months we went home. Father was now in charge of Salvation Army war work in Northern Ireland so I went to Methodist College in Belfast until we left to go to Plymouth in 1946.
One interesting bit of cooperation during the raids was that the Fire Services of both the Republic and the North crossed the border to help out when necessary.

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