大象传媒

Pat McKee

Random Jottings

The day war broke out I was more concerned and nervous about the next day as I was starting a new school at the top of the Ormeau Road in Belfast. Everyone else was busy listening to the bulletins on the wireless and the announcement that war had been declared.

There was an empty house next to us and after a while soldiers were billeted there and it became more usual to see soldiers iD the streets. My mother was an excellent cook and would send my father and me out at night with trays of scones and biscuits for the soldiers.

For a while it seemed unreal as nothing seemed to be happening other than the amount of soldiers everywhere, mostly young men sent over to do their training. My father joined the LDV (local defence volunteers called jokingly-look-duck and vanish ) and was in charge of a troop. It was a long time before they were given rifles but mainly they patrolled seeing that blackout regulations were observed and seeing that nothing strange or unusual was happening.

One night we heard the planes coming over in large numbers, we had heard of the bombings in England but never quite believed it would ever happen here. I saw a land mine floating beneath its parachute across the houses in Princetown Road and luckily it went into the sea. But houses in Southwell Road were hit and some bombs fell on the golf course.

I was now working in the Inland Revenue and set off for work the morning after the raid as usual. It was quite unnerving鈥攕moke and water everywhere and cables and hoses and all sorts of debris in the street, the smell of burning and smoke, police, army and fire brigade men everywhere. I got to my office and it was a shambles, they were using it to train the fire hoses on the building opposite. It took some time to get the place up and working again. One of the of fices which had a staff of seven soon had over seventy staff as dockers and other workers who had never paid tax were brought into the system.

One Saturday evening I was out with my parents and we ended up at Caproni鈥檚 dance hall. During the evening a lot of Canadian soldiers arrived. They had reached Liverpool that morning and the barracks were not ready for them so they were given two weeks leave. Many of them had Irish connections so came over right away. We ended up bringing some of them home and with mattresses on the floor they stayed with us over the weekend.

Before I had started work a lot of boys left and joined up, one or two became casualties before even leaving Northern Ireland, it was then many like myself began to take the situation seriously and realise what being at war meant.

Bangor Central School became a military hospital and there were lines of nissen huts as extra wards. Nurses and men in hospital blues were sometimes seen in the park or, if well enough, in the town.

Weather became important, we needed good harvests as so much that we took for granted was no longer to be had and our ships had more important cargoes. There was rationing and it was quite stringent but enough to keep us healthy more so than now when we have plenty

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