ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½

We were going to Ballycastle on the day that war broke out, and they were painting the traffic lights so that instead of a big red light, only a little cross showed in the middle. On the way up we wanted petrol for the car, and every station we stopped at was saying, “oh no, we’re not giving any petrol out, it’s going to be rationed from now on.�
A car was something you couldn’t think about owning, because first you couldn’t possibly pay for it. People who used to own biggish cars, if there was a car the army were very fond of, it was requisitioned. If you happened to have a lorry which wasn’t used for essential purposes, they just took it. You had absolutely no rights at all, the war overruled everything. They could and did take over your house, particularly big houses, stately homes like Redburn House in Holywood, which belonged to the Dunvilles who were in the whiskey business at the time. I don’t think any of the Dunvilles were there, they were off somewhere else. The house was taken over by various people, the air force, the army, the Yanks; they were all there over time. The house I think was probably wrecked.
Gates, fences and anything metal was collected for scrap, and if you happened to have a metal gate, you lost it. Now a lot of that stuff never got any further than the docks of Belfast, and it was lying there for years, there maybe just weren’t the ships to take it away. I remember one particular man, he had got a set of gates erected about a month beforehand and he put up very strong grounds for keeping them, but it didn’t matter, they took them.
You couldn’t get batteries for the torches — my brother and I went to the Lifeboys at the time and when we were coming home we were so scared because there were all these stories about men grabbing you, men standing on the air raid shelters and grabbing you! It was very frightening going home when you were a child — there were no streetlights at all, everything was black. There were very few cars on the roads and they were very slow, not like today.

The first raid on Belfast happened when I was about nine. I heard a terrible noise about 11 o’clock. My mother came in to reassure my brother that it was only thunder, but we heard the siren going and we got up. The RP was at the door, telling us to get out into the shelter. It was the next day, when I read the paper that I realised all these people had been killed. We did go to the shelter that night and we were sitting in the shelter and everyone was singing and the noise from outside was terrible that night.
We were evacuated to Newtownards after that, to a relation’s farm. They had an old house and they fixed it up for us to go into, but it was absolutely full of rats! I wouldn’t stay a winter in it. But we were able to watch the air raids in Belfast from it. We stood outside the door and watched the flames everywhere in Belfast.

I can remember VE Day — great! Everyone was out in the street until the early hours of the morning; I was about 13 at the time. The street lights weren’t on but all the houses had lights coming out from them.

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