´óÏó´«Ã½

This story was transcribed and posted by Mark Jeffers, with permission from the author.

I remember the gas masks. The babies had big ones called ‘Mickey Mouse’ and they were like a cot. I was evacuated. The Government paid six pence a week per child and my grandmother got the money for us. There was the biggest loss of life for the size of the population in Northern Ireland.

I went to Draperstown after the blitz and we moved into my aunt’s house. She was getting married though so after about three months we got a house of our own. There were an awful lot of barns around. One morning when we got up, the barns were full of soldiers and they asked if we could give them water. At that time though, you had to carry your water from a pump but we got someone to give it out. They wanted to give us money but we didn’t want to take it. A soldier said that he would want to give it to his own children but couldn’t so please could he give it to us. So my mummy let us take it. It was only a shilling or something. They stayed about three or four days while they practised manoeuvres in the surrounding fields.

We worked in the fields on the potatoes and things. One day we came home and we had managed to get a pig form somewhere and we had the ham for dinner. They got the butcher in to carve it up and they must have hid it. I can still remember the taste of it to this day, and I was only nine then! The farmers had to hide things in case the Government confiscated them. My mother had geese and they used to come and count them.

We used to give my brother cabbage in his piece [sandwich] because there were no other fillings. The railings were taken away from all round the houses but they never took the metal bars across the railings on our windows for some reason.

© Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.