大象传媒

This story is taken from an interview with Joan Campbell, and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions. The interviewer was David Reid, and the transcription was by Bruce Logan.
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[After the first Belfast Blitz]
We went to the country, to Antrim, and then from Antrim to Bangor. And in Antrim when we were there our house in the second raid got a direct hit. So we were left with nothing.

[how did you survive?]
You queued up. As far as I was concerned, I was only a child, and my mother stood crying when she seen it, and the air-raid warden said to her 鈥淎ren鈥檛 you glad there鈥檚 nobody in it鈥� 鈥� which we had just gone to my aunt鈥檚 in the country in Antrim, beforehand. And she says 鈥淵es, but we have nothing.鈥�
So we went down, and as far as I know she got different things to try and give us a bit of money, for we only had what we stood in 鈥� furniture and everything was away.
We were out to relatives in Antrim, and then my mother, she heard of a house going in Bangor. So we came to Bangor, and I have lived here ever since. And I went to the school here, in the British Legion, because the big school in Castle St was taken over as a hospital for the soldiers. So we were brought up here as a school. Second standard was up the stairs and it was Mrs McGraw, my teacher, and when the air-raid siren went we went down into the dug-out. Out the back here.

[is that still here?]
yes.

It was a school for everyone. They called us refugees when we came down to Bangor.

[What was school life like?]
School was very strange to me, because I experienced the Blitz from a young age. And when I heard the air-raid siren I yelled because of what had happened to me in Belfast. I was very traumatised by it all because I went through a terrible experience as a child. And no matter where I was, if I heard, even if it had have been, you know, trying out the siren 鈥� and I remember one day I was in Queen鈥檚 Parade going round to shop for a message for my mother, the siren went, and the screams and yells of me in Queen鈥檚 Parade. I think the people thought I鈥檇 gone mad. But again, it was just the reaction of it all.

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