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This story has been transcribed and published by Mark Jeffers, with permission from the author.

It was always said that Ireland would never get hit because we were too far away but we were hit towards the latter end of the war. Of course Belfast got an awful lot, they got an awful lot of bombing they really did due to it being an important industrial city.

The Newtownards Road got the majority of it because of the shipyard and that’s were the bombers were heading for.

There were air raid shelters in our street, in fact there was one outside our door but we never used it, we never went near it. It was an awful looking old thing. It was about the size of a caravan. They were all brick, with nothing else in it; I mean where the devil did they expect you to sit? You were more comfortable in your own home. It just sat on the road, they weren’t buried. It was built I’d say with steel, they’d put those big steel rods in the concrete; they’d be reinforced so they’d be stronger than a house.

We used to go in to what we called the coal hole. It was under the stairs, for people often said go under the stairs. If you ever saw a house that was bombed, the stairs were always there, so you used to hide under there. I didn’t like it because there were always cockroaches under there. That was when we stayed in our own house. What used to worry my mother when the siren went off was that she had so many to gather up. I remember her saying to me that when we were all away and the siren sounded and they all ran, they went away up near Bellevue for safety. It was out in the country and away from the city. I remember her saying that these planes came down and the pilots saw them running and started shooting bullets. I don’t think they got any of them but that is what they were doing.

I remember my husband telling me that over in England they were down at the railway and they were at a railway bridge and it was really in the heart of the country. He and another friend were standing looking and they saw a plane coming down. They had a big horse and cart and the plane come right down on to the railway and shot and the old horse was shot; they hid behind the bridge and ducked. When you’re young you don’t think about the dangers, you don’t realise the dangers when you think about the things that you used to do.

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