大象传媒

Needless to say, the 2nd World War has been over a long time, approximately sixty years, as it started in 1939 and peace was declared in 1945

It lasted about six years. I was born on 21st of July 1928 and, being only eleven years at the outbreak of war, my memory may not be sufficient to do justice to such an historic time in the lives of so many people.

The first memory that I recall clearly was just before the outbreak of hostilities and I remember being in a butcher鈥檚 shop with my mother to buy some meat and hearing the butcher say the sky will be black with planes bombing everywhere, and the war would not last any longer than six or seven weeks - a very black outlook indeed and so very apt as far as the planes were concerned but so wide of the mark as regards the time hostilities would last.

I digress a little here to explain the aptness of the remark about the skies being black with planes. As most people now know, both the allies and the German forces practised saturation bombing when thousands of heavy bombers would conduct an air raid on a single city. Well anyone who happened to be in these cities during one of these raids and able to look up at the sky would say it was no exaggeration to say the skies were black with planes.

However, back to my own memories such as they are. I remember being issued with gas masks at school. After that I don鈥檛 remember much until we first started to hear the air raid sirens going off occasionally, and eventually going up the Castlereagh Road at night.

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