大象传媒

I was 5 when the war broke out and although I went throught the Blitz on Belfast in 1941 none of my family was killed or injured.We were extremely lucky because a whole housing development across the main road from where we lived was rased to the ground.

We were evacuated, not to strangers but with our mother and our aunt and cousins to a little remote cottage on the edge of the Antrim plateau where we went to school (walking two miles there and back)and learning to be real country children. As an adult, I have realised that the cottage ceased to be remote when the population got on four wheels and cars became sophisticated and speedy! Also the city has exploded outwards towards the countryside. What were quite distant villages in 1941 are now suburbs and, in one direction a new town.

We went back to the city when we got the news that our uncle, aged 20, had been shot down over Tobruk. All our mothers wanted to do was go home to the rest of the stricken family.

After that the war was remote. My father kept a map on the dining room wall and marked the progress of the Allies - he himself was part of the war effort requiring special code writing and breaking skills which had something to do with Post Office Telecommunications between Europe and America. He never would talk about it and I only found out the small bit that I have written down when he was very elderly and telling me about some of the people he worked with.

We collected waste paper and our schools got involved in collecting books. You started off as a "private" and got promoted as your collection record grew! If you achieved the dizzy heoght of Field Marshal the Lord Mayor invited you to lunch! Sadly, I became only a General - failing because of a great injustice. When the last day came, I was accused of tearing one book in two to reach the required number. Actually my grandmother had given me two Penguin books that had lost their paper covers but in those days teachers did not listen to reasons or ever climbed down. I was disappointed, but that was life!!

Much, much later, I remember coming home for lunch and my grandmother, full of bubbling excitement, rushing to the garden gate to tell me that Normandy had been invaded. It meant nothing to me but gradually I got the gist of it. Later when the war ended in Europe, I think we were disappointed. Our elders were ecstatic but for us it was the end of soldiers, sailors and airmen in our families and on the streets. Even when the sweets reappeared and the tins of fruit, we had lost our taste for them. When I got my first pineapple chunk (which I had remembered as being totally delicious), I actually spat it out

Life has been on the whole very good and I appreciate more each year the sacrifices that young men and women made for us in the war. I have had a long happy marriage, three wonderful children and seven grandchildren. I have had an invigorating job with responsibilities and delights. I have been able to travel abroad when I liked and now that I understand History I give thanks that we were spared the gruesome fate that awaited us all had Hitler won. I am now all too aware that while the English were considered Aryan and suitable citizens of an expanded and victorious Third Reich, the Celts and Gaels were to be dispossessed and turned into the new slave labour of the state.

I thank God for my survival and for the Allied victory.