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My best friend was a painter and I served six years as a painter in the 1930s. It's not that I wanted to be a painter, but it gave me a regular wage. It was a good trade and I was busy.

Just before the war I applied to join the fire service. The Chief Officer of the fire station called out to me one night, and sent me to a doctor on the Antrim Road at 9pm one night. By 11pm I'd be passed fit and was in the fire brigade - I didn't even have time to get home to tell my mother! They even fixed me up with an old uniform!

Though I was in the fire brigade I still painted, helping to work in the fire station. Northern Ireland was reasonably peaceful at the start of the war, although the sirens went a lot at first even if nothing happened. Yet every siren saw us muster in the station, often for nothing.

The government was buying resendential houses and turning them into temporary fire stations at the time. The government recruited more firemen that the city council as the council couldn't afford it.

One night we were called out to a fire in Duncrue St. It was our first real air raid. The street had been littered with incendiary bombs, and we had several fires to put out. Later on, several more bombs went off and two firemen were killed by a bomb which hadn't exploded on impact - the area around the docks and the shore road was especially badly hit.

Eventually we got back to our stations, exhausted. From then on, we were out for raids regularly. At Easter 1941, there were a number of raids. I would up back at the docks as several timber yards were burning. Again, a bomb went off as we were putting out fires, but I was lucky in this case as I was out of the way enough not to be affected beyond being blown off my feet by the blast.

That night, after the all clear went, the sailors from the ships were all in shelters, but a number of us were still on the dock. Despite the raid being over we came under attack from German aircraft again - another lucky escape for me! That night I had to borrow another fighter's uniform as I was fighting from Ardoyne fire station and hadn't time to get my own uniform from my own stations.

I also remember horses from Wilton's funeral parlour running wild on Crumlin Road, as they were terrified of the bombs and someone had let them out.

I stayed in the fire service for another 30 years after the war, retiring finally in the early 1970s.

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