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This story was submitted to the ´óÏó´«Ã½ peoples war project by Bridie Nugent. The interviewer was Brian Morgan. The author fully understands and accepts the terms and conditions.

I was born in 1936 and war came in 1939. At that time I lived in Belfast. A landmine came down on a nearby golf course but didn’t explode. The debris thrown up by it had come down and some of it put a large hole in the roof of our house, through the bedroom ceiling and into the lounge. Fortunately we were not staying at home that night and the just sight we had of the house was of the curtains billowing in the lounge. It was decided that the city was too dangerous for me and so at the age of four years I was sent to the country and home to my family. Most children that were evacuated were sent to live with strangers, but not me.
Now that is not quite true because when you have lived with your Aunt, my fathers sister, and her husband since the age of one then your true family are like strangers. I can remember the feelings of confusion at that tender age and it seemed I didn’t belong to anyone.. My parents lived in Cavan with my two brothers and three sisters. Some food was rationed there also and tea and sugar were hard to come by. Cocoa was the main beverage. I have never felt the same about it since. White bread was made with un bleached flour and was called Black Bread for that reason.
In Belfast my aunt and uncle were allowed to stay in the house during the day but not at night.
Years later when I thought about it I often wondered what ‘great brain’ had decided that the unexploded mine would only ‘go off’ at night. I never did get to the bottom of that one.
My aunt and spouse spent their nights with a wonderful couple and their two daughters in the mill mangers house at Mosley just outside Belfast.
It is with some amusement now that I picture them taking refuge in a house beside a mill with a huge chimney stretching into the sky…a perfect target for a bomb.
Thankfully all came through unscathed. Back in Cavan I was sent to the local school which had two classrooms, one for seniors and one for juniors. The mistress took the little ones and the master the older ones. We used mostly black slates and chalk and sat at long desks with matching seats. In winter everyone brought a piece of turf each day for the fire. Lunch was home made soda/wheaten bread with home produced butter and crab-apple jelly jam. jelly jam. This was accompanied by a bottle of cold sweet tea and it was great. Even though I was young I loved that school and two years ago I went back for a reunion and seen my name in a’ roll book’. I could have cried. I had been a pupil there for one school year before I left and returned to Belfast where I have been ever since.

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