大象传媒

This story has been transcribed and published by Mark Jeffers, with permission from the author.

I remember the very first time I heard a bomb. We were playing out in the street, everything was blacked out, everything was completely dark and I heard this sound, like a massive plank of wood being dropped on top of another plank of wood. And I remember one of the neighbours coming out and saying, 鈥淲ould you youngsters get into the house!鈥�

My mother was away at the pictures at the time. I think that was the first time the bombs were dropped in Belfast. So anyway, we ran into the house and all the people picture houses were put out and she came home.

You weren鈥檛 allowed to go into other peoples houses during a raid, you were supposed to stay in your own house because if your house got bombed then they knew how many in that house would be dead. But we never stayed in our own house; we always went into somebody else鈥檚 which wasn鈥檛 the right thing to do.

We were all sitting in Mrs Gore鈥檚 house down the street one night during a raid and she had a big family as well. We were all sitting along a big settee, about four of us and then they got wee chairs and we all came round in a circle. Then a massive bomb came down and it was terrible. It hit the top part of Blythe Street off Sandy Row in Belfast. Behind that again there was a railway and they probably thought it was the main railway they were going for but it wasn鈥檛 the main railway at all.

I remember whenever it came down the children who were sitting round me were actually blown off their chairs onto the settee. No windows or anything came in though. I remember thinking that one must have been somewhere close by. We wanted to get out but of course the air raid wardens wouldn鈥檛 let us out the door. Eventually we did get out and I remember running round the corner to look. I could not get over it when I saw the houses in Blythe Street. It鈥檚 what you would see on television, maybe the whole front of the house was ordinary, but the back of the house, the whole wall was down and you could see people鈥檚 beds and furniture. The floors were at an angle with things coming down. It was awful. There were wee girls that went to school with me that lived in that area and the school was right beside it, and I daresay the school did get some of it.

It was just surprising how so many houses got it and how so many houses didn鈥檛 get it. They started putting out massive round water tanks and they had them on any bit of spare ground around, in case there were a lot of fires caused by the bombs. They were massive big tanks. One wee boy was walking round the top of one and he fell in and drowned. I don鈥檛 know who he was but I remember at the time that happening. Another casualty of the war.

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