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This story was submitted to the People’s War website by Annie Keane of the ´óÏó´«Ã½ on behalf of Bridget and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

I was living in Lamavady in Derry, Northern Ireland. We were near a big Air Force base in Ballykelly and the Navy were also near by. I was 7 when the war started, we used to hear the planes taking off at night to go into Germany and coming back in the morning.

I remember the local men marching off to war down the main street, they weren’t in uniform. One of them was so shocked that my mother had died when he was away, because they got so little news from home. I remember him coming back to see her. There was no conscription in Northern Ireland so there was still a big male population. My father came to England to work, in Wolverhampton in a factory making rubber for aircraft. He came back during the war because he got a job at the naval base and stayed there until he retired.

I suppose we were lucky because we had the bases nearby, we had the gas masks. But now when you think about it we were unlucky because they could have been a target.

Gum and candy
The main change for us was the Americans came, they were based on a big estate near us. They always had chewing gum and candy for us and some of the older kids got cigarettes as well.

We were forbidden to talk to them of course, so you couldn’t go home with any gum in your pocket. One day we went home with a big carton of cigarettes. Our Aunty smoked but she wouldn’t take them, but she must have felt sick about that! She told them to give them to her neighbour who took them very happily.

It was the first time we’d ever encountered anyone who wasn’t Irish or English. The first time we’d met black people, but even we could see they were segregated in the American forces. The British Army came and they had nothing to offer, no sweets or gum.

Things were rationed but we didn’t really suffer, I remember my uncle coming home once with a big box of mars bars and sharing it out with everybody. We were in an agricultural area. I remember my uncle digging up a garden to grow vegetables.

We used to get coupons, to buy sweets. My father never used his, so we used to take them. All the coupons were different values and you also had to use money with them.

Rumours
I remember people being grateful for soap and oranges from the Americans. Amongst the older crowd, they said we shouldn’t eat them because they might have dope in them. We also knew that some American prisoners had been released so that they could serve in the army, and there used to be stories about that as well.

The loss
Some of these young men were buried at the back of our local church. It sounds dreadful now, but at the time we liked getting time off school so we would go to mass for them. I’ve been back since and looked at those graves Some of them were from New Zealand and some of there were only 18 years old. It really makes me think now and especially when you see what young people do these days.

Of course people we knew died as well, two men from our town went down with the Hood and lots of other people killed but it didn’t even impact on us then because of our age. In those days you were seen and not heard. My sister’s father-in-law was buried in Tunisia, so many miles away and we still haven’t got peace today.

Derry bombed
We never felt deprived we just got on with our lives. We did get bombed, but we used to think it was the British. We lived at my grandmothers, one night she said ‘Get up the Germans are bombing Derry.’ My uncle said ‘Leave those children there, if they’re bombing Derry, we’re going to die in our own beds.’ The next day we were the only ones at school. The bombing was worse in Belfast.

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