大象传媒

Earning a living
There was a street-singer who came into the street often. He wore a shabby raincoat that was tied around the middle with a piece of sisal cord, and he always sang the hymn, 鈥淔aith of our Fathers鈥�, and collected a few pennies in his cap. Sometimes we followed him and he went into the Protestant Fountain Street and sang the anthem, 鈥淕od save the Queen鈥�. Nobody had any ill feelings towards him, because everybody had their own methods to stave off the hunger and pay for their keep in those times of hardship.

In Annie Barr鈥檚 lodging house there was George Gallagher who had a handcart and he brought suitcases of passenger鈥檚 luggage to and from the railway station for a living. There was another person who collected and sorted all sorts of bottles to bring them back to the shops so that he could get the refunds of a penny each for them. A man called 鈥楽labbery鈥� Mickey made windmills that didn鈥檛 work very well and exchanged them for jam jars. Ned McDevitt and his son Seamus exchanged cups for rags or jam jars.

A man had a portable sharpening wheel that was worked with a foot pedal, and he sharpened knives and scissors for a halfpenny each. On Friday mornings Leonard Coyle, selling fish from his handcart, could be heard calling, 鈥渇resh herring, their eyes all open, pipes in their mouths and them all smoking鈥�. Sometimes a man stood in the middle of the street playing an accordion, or another man played a tin whistle. There being no government benefits in those days, most of the people shared what they had, and that was why some men used whatever little talents they had to make ends meet. Nothing new was being built in those days, no houses or roads. The very iron ornamental railings around big houses and public buildings were being taken away and shipped to England to be melted down for to make transport and weapons for the war. Everything was in decay, and the bricks and houses were crumbling around the people.

Many of the local young men were joining the army and the local Home Guards. My brother Mickey, then about seventeen, and other young lads of his age that he palled with joined the medical team of the ARP, a local voluntary defence core. He and Dixie Dean and Patsy O鈥橞rien, both from the lower Nailor鈥檚 Row, and my cousin Willie Lynch from Fox鈥檚 Corner were issued with long black coats and tin helmets. Each wore a white armband with a Red Cross on it and was given a shoulder bag with bandages and cotton wool in it. We stood and watched from the top of the banking when they were practising giving first aid to someone who had faked being injured in a mock explosion and carry him to the top of the grassy slope on a stretcher to give them medical aid. It all looked so real to us and we didn鈥檛 find it a bit amusing at the time. Except on the one time when they were carrying a pretend injured man up the steep banking on the stretcher. The carrier at the back slipped and the whole three of them, along with the stretcher, went tumbling back down to the bottom uninjured. For a part of the exercises there were stuffed dummy men placed on the tops of some of the house roofs. It reminded me of whenever I saw the film Beau Gest in the cinema, about the French Foreign Legion propping the dead Legionaries on the ramparts of their fort to bluff the enemy attackers.

It made me aware of the realness of the war, especially at night whenever the sirens wailed when the German planes droned overhead on their way to bomb Belfast or us. Then we hurried frightened to the safety of the air raid shelters, and many hid under their stairs and beds until the long wail of the all clear siren was heard and we all could go home to sleep safely in our beds.

One day a boy older than us said that he was going to parachute off the top of the air raid shelter, so he took his fathers bicycle and with our help, put it on top of the shelter. Then he climbed up onto the roof with his mother鈥檚 umbrella and tied it on to his back. He then mounted the bike and peddled as hard as he could along the roof of the shelter, so that whenever he went off the edge of it he would float with the aid of the umbrella to the ground. We were all on the ground watching up at him as he sped along the roof and plummeted over the edge to hit the ground with the umbrella inside out and the bicycle鈥檚 wheels buckling underneath him. He escaped unhurt from his experiment, but I wondered if he got off so lightly with his parents after damaging their belongings without their consent.

Extracts from Phil Cunningham鈥檚 book, 鈥楧erry Down the Days鈥�. Published in Nov 2002
by Guildhall Press Derry N Ireland. www.ghpress.com. Email; info@ghpress.com

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