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The war didn’t affect us particularly. My father had acquired a wireless from somewhere and he used to sit in the corner of the kitchen of an evening, with his better ear fully attuned, listening to the voice of Lord Haw –Haw. He has a passion for Haw-Haw, sometimes repeating what the man said, imitating his accent, badly. It was most annoying. We would go Haw-Haw, Haw-Haw, baying like donkeys. But with restraint. Normally we kept well out of the way, lest we instigate the start of homework.
One night towards the end of the war we heard the planes go over really low and rushed up the braes to watch four bombs dropping on the city of Derry, some fifteen miles away. We children were wildly excited, but the parents got themselves into a state of near dementia. The relations, dozens of them, lived in Derry. Both mothers were there – the fathers being dead – sisters, cousins, second cousins, nieces, nephews; they all lived in the city. Hitler would have been hard put not to have hit at least one of them. We had no telephone, so my father took the next day off school and both he and my mother went in on the bus to investigate the devastation, leaving us to look after ourselves. Some relations had indeed experienced a direct hit, their houses being flattened, but had been safely ensconced in the air-raid shelters at the time. There were no casualties, but it was considered imperative that both my grandmothers get away from the firing-line and come to stay with us in the comparative safety of the mountains.
Everybody arrived back in the evening, ably piloted by my uncle Gerry, a car mechanic by trade and so with easy access to transport –a chirrupy, smiley man with black curls, florid of cheek, and a salubrious appetite for the drink. My father was singing to his heart’s content. We unloaded the luggage, an assortment of brown paper bags, hat boxes, veteran attaché cases, and carried the lot upstairs to my parents’ bedroom, where the mothers were now to play houses for a while, the sitting-room at last being taken over by my parents.
There followed a trying time for everyone. The two women were irrevocably different in every imaginable way. And they had to share the double bed. Da’s mother was big, a coarse woman, blowsy, held together with corsets, an ex-teacher and bossy. In contrast, my maternal grandmother was a rather sedate individual, tiny, piping thin, frosty silver hair in a strict little bun sitting on the back of her immaculate head, a bunch of violets pinned to her throat, a delicate waft of lavender all around. But she was prone to attacks of asthma, when she would cough and spit out everything into a brown paper sugar-bag she kept adjacent to the chamber-pot her side of the bed. It was revolting.
Their presence in the house rapidly began to dominate our lives. We were constantly required to fetch and carry for them and got the snappy end of both their tongues if we didn’t behave ourselves. Fortunately they didn’t tarry long. I was delighted when they departed, having taken to neither of them.
People lit fires in the mountains, hoping the Germans would mistake them for towns and disgorge their bombs thereon. My mother made blackout blinds using sacking bags which she dyed from blackberries we gathered up the lane. Blackberry gathering became a good sideline for us that autumn. We sold them by the tin bucket-load to McGuigan’s, upending them into rough wooden barrels of already stinking, maggot-crawling fermentation lorried up for the journey to the city.
My father, who had a modicum of sympathy for the Huns – he too not being over-fond of the British Empire – at times became rather perplexed by events, not certain which side he was on. My mother obviously denounced them both, plus a few others, including America and France and almost every country she’d heard of, holding them, without exception, responsible for the continuing shortage of such necessities as sugar and marmalade jam.
But I was growing up. There was a rumour going around the school that babies were NOT brought by the doctor. This was intensely more interesting than any old war or rationing or gas masks. We were in the grip of the most exciting discovery of our small lives, with much conjecture and bawdy rumour and speculation spiralling through the schoolyard in a whirlwind of salacious innuendo.

It was the collapse of the Age of Innocence.

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