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When war broke out, I was eleven years old and living in a small town called Abbeyleix, in the Irish Midlands. I was in my final year at primary school and I was studying for a scholarship to go to boarding school.

In early June of 1940 we suffered a severe electrical storm. While the storm was raging, we heard a knock on the door and my father went to answer it. I followed at a discreet distance, wondering who the caller might be. A member of the Gardai Siochana (Irish Police) stood there, asking for my brother, Ted, and telling my father that Ted was to report immediately to the barracks in his uniform to collect his rifle and his orders. Germans, he said, had been spotted, dropping by parachute into Knapton Woods and the members of the Local Defence Force (LDF) were to report for duty! Ted was fifteen years old at the time but he had joined the LDF. His duties up to then had merely involved guarding the gates of fields to ensure that farmers didn’t move their cattle during a severe outbreak of foot and mouth disease.

After the policeman had left, my father went to look for Ted and he found him in bed, hiding under the bedclothes, whimpering and shaking in fear. There was no way he was going out to face German soldiers! My father comforted him and said he wouldn’t have to go. The policeman returned and asked where Ted was and my father pleaded with him to let him go in Ted’s place. He said he had fought Germans at the front in the First World War and he could handle a rifle far better than his son, a lad at fifteen years of age, could. The policeman relented and said he would report that he couldn’t find the lad! He warned my father to keep his son hidden.

As I write this, I am thinking of the thousands of boy soldiers in the First World War and I can fully appreciate their fear. Their execution for refusing to fight seems harsh and cruel. My father would have experienced fear but he was 21 years old when he was sent to France in 1918. He would understand, however, how terrified his son was. Ted’s officer never upbraided him for his failure to answer the call of duty

What we took to be the entire Irish Air Force, consisting. of one aeroplane, flew from the Curragh that afternoon and landed in a field while the members of the LDF took up their stations around Knapton Wood. (I know now that an invasion of Britain was expected to take place through Ireland and that Britain later supplied planes to the Irish.)

A young courting couple had taken shelter under some trees but they soon grew scared of the lightning and decided to make a dash for it in the torrents of rain. As they emerged, a young LDF chap, on guard at that spot, dropped his rifle and fled for his life! Some hours later it was discovered that the ‘parachutes’ were a cock of hay. A whirlwind had lifted the hay from a field in County Kildare and carried it through the air as far as Knapton! There were some red faces around that day, not least my brother’s.

However, he was to redeem himself. At the age of 18, he went to work at Foster Gwynnes in Lincoln. He was really excited when he met the Managing Director, Sir William Tritton, who, I believe, invented the first tank, used in World War 1. Foster Gwynnes were still making tanks while Ted was there. He also joined the Civil Defence (ARP) and diligently carried out his duties, watching from the Tower of Lincoln Castle for the approach of German bombers and parading along the walls as he carried out his fire-watching duties. He later spoke of the terror of those years. After one bombing raid he retrieved the charred body of a child from the rubble and he never forgot having to hand the body to the mother

In September of 1940 I went away to boarding school in Cork and that is where I spent the final five years of the war. About the same time that we were experiencing a scare in Abbeyleix, girls in the boarding school had woken up one night to the loud roar of an aeroplane and they rushed to the window to see a German bomber fly low past the school. They could see its markings clearly. Perhaps the pilot had lost his way or, perhaps, he was fleeing from RAF pursuers. During a similar incursion in Dublin, a plane had dropped its bombs while being pursued.

Apart from these episodes, we were fairly sheltered from the harsh reality of war throughout our school years, but we regularly had air raid practices and these usually occurred during the night. How I loathed being woken up from my deep sleep!

We would make our way down to the basement, where we would be ordered to don our gas masks. At that time I suffered badly from claustrophobia and there was no way I was going to put my mask on. I decided I’d risk dying in an air raid rather than suffocate in that horrible contraption. I became so distressed about it that the teacher on duty would give up trying to make me put the mask on.

From one classroom I would dreamily look out at a barrage balloon floating serenely over the city. It looked so graceful as the sun glinted on its silver body, but it was another constant reminder of a possible threat.

I remember the day the war ended and we seniors were taken in to the head mistress’ drawing room to listen to the ´óÏó´«Ã½ extended news on the radio and we heard for the first time about the concentration camps. Then we found a Union Jack in the Girl Guides’ cupboard and we draped it around us in celebration. Shortly afterwards, we were leaving school and setting forth into what promised to be a bright new future.

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