大象传媒

This story was input by Robbie Meredith of 大象传媒 Northern Ireland's 'Big Yellow Bus' on behalf of Sam Halliday, the author. The author understands and accepts the terms and conditions of the site.

I was born in September 1929, and I went to Euston Street school in East Belfast. I was the fourth son of James Halliday.

I was 10 years old at the outbreak of war. In September 1940, because we lived outside the city boundary, all the school children were moved for their lessons to the British Legion Hall in Bell's Lane, which is now Montgomery Road, and the Everton Mission Hall in Everton Drive in East Belfast.

On Sundays we would walk up the Rocky Road in Cregagh to see the Anti-Aircraft guns there, and over to Rosetta to watch the Search Light at night. The lights were located in the fields where St Andrew's church stands now. The Cregagh estate also stands in fields where we picked potatoes as children.

I left school in 1943 to work as a message boy for 10 shillings a week, but my brother joined the Royal Air Force in 1942. He told me about the American graveyard on the Rocky Road, which was started in 1943. In 1945, at the end of the war, the bodies of the American servicemen buried there were exhumed and returned to the USA.

Very little of the area is the same now, but the shops at Greenway on the Cregagh Road are located at the old site of Cregagh Tennis Club. During the war the tennis club pavilion doubled as the ARP headquaters.

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