大象传媒

Belfast Blitz
When the sirens sounded my mother, sister Meta and I got seated under the staircase. My father being ex-Royal Navy was recalled in 1940 for war service. A number of incendiary bombs were dropped in our area. One of them got lodged in a corner of the roof space. I managed to smother the flames with a small sand bag. The fire burned a hole in the soffit and the bomb fell on to the concrete pathway at the side of the house.

The air raid warden came to enquire if we were alright. He told me to leave the windows partly open. Just as well they were, as a high explosive bomb landed at the back of the only detached villa in our street, Hillsborough Parade. We didn鈥檛 have a pane of glass broken in any of our windows. The villa was so badly wrecked that it had to be demolished.

Neighbour
Our neighbour, Fred Lloyd, who lived two doors away with his parents, came and took us to their underground air raid shelter in their back garden. We were there until the all clear sounded. When we came back to the house the warden came and told us to take any small valuables with us as there was an unexploded bomb buried on the Castlereagh Road opposite Hillsborough Parade. All the residents had to leave their houses until the bomb was defused by the army. The remainder of the night and the next day we stayed with friends of the Lloyd鈥檚 that lived on the Cregagh Road.

Friend
Mrs Orr, a good friend of my mother in Belfast, had relations living on the Killygomain Road in Portadown, Co. Armagh. They had a vacant cottage, so we all went there and stayed until we were able to return to our house. Mrs Orr had five of a family and she also brought with her an old neighbour, Mrs Brown, who was 82 and almost blind. There were three in our family.

All the cooking was done on a Primus stove and the large open fire in the living room. For our first dinner there we had fried sausages, bacon, potatoes and baked beans. The large pan was on the coal fire and in it were pork sausages, beef sausages and slices of bacon and ham. In comes Mrs Brown (the old neighbour) from the backyard with a shovel with coal on it and before anyone could stop her the coal landed in the pan. When my sister went to the kitchen and told Mrs Orr what had happened, she said the poor old soul didn鈥檛 see the pan was on the fire. Mrs Orr lifted the pan off the fire, took it to the kitchen and washed the pan and everything in it. She put fresh dripping in it and it went back on the fire.

Fortunate Neighbours
When we returned to our house I went and had a look at the back of the villa. The whole back wall and floor of the bathroom had collapsed in a pile of rubble; leaving the wash basin and the bath hanging, only supported by the water pipes. Looking at the front of the house, the windows were broken and the sitting room wall must have been lifted up with the blast and set down again, as half the sitting room carpet was under the wall. Fortunately for the family that had lived in the house, they were staying that weekend in their bungalow in Millisle, Co. Down.

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