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I was born in 1928. The Blitz was in 1940. I was about 12 then, my brother was 2 years older. Nobody ever thought Belfast would be bombed and they had what they called the 'baby Blitz'- one plane came over and dropped one bomb but it was really a reconnaissance plane. At Easter there were 2 big heavy Blitzes. The Easter Sunday Blitz was the worst, they came over in droves. It lasted about 5 hours both of the, they came in waves. They circled between the Castlereagh Hills and in round by the Antrim Road area and between Duncairn Gardens and the Limestone Road. There were a lot of streets absolutely flattened. There was Hillman Street and Hogarth Street and Ruth Street and Adam Street and I think Adlingham Street wasn't too badly hit but there were a lot of people killed. On the first raid there were many high explosives. We were lucky because we just stayed in underneath the stairs. My most abiding memory of underneath the stairs was every time a big bomb dropped it felt as if the floor went down and thumped up and hit you a thump on the backside. That was the vibration. The next day we came out and everybody had a look round.
The house we lived in had a fairly big back yard; we used it for climbing practice. Beyond that there was a big alley maybe about 20feet wide and it was closed off with a big barred gate. Shortly after that big blitz we got back into climbing practice and looked over and there was an unexploded bomb, huge big thing it was and nobody knew about it. My cousin was an air raid warden and I told him. The whole place was evacuated, the army came along and they had a big steaming device and they got it defused and dragged away. It must have been about 5-6feet long and maybe 18inches diameter.
The second time the really big Easter Blitz they not only brought high explosives they brought incendiary bombs, about a million. That was part of the tactics. Half the German airplanes were there to bomb tactical targets but the other ones were there just to set the place on fire. I'm told that as far away as Lisburn and Lurgan they could see the flames, the whole place was set on fire. It was terror bombing. A lot of people were killed.
My cousin was the air raid warden. I thought it was the Ark royal that was tied up in Belfast but he said it was a ship called the Indefatigable and when it started to fire its anti-aircraft guns in the docks it broke its moorings and they were only able to fire one side of them. If they'd fired the other side the ship would have smashed into the docks.
On the top of Jennymount Hill and on top of Gallagher鈥檚 they had machine guns but what good were they with planes maybe 4-5,000feet
up and they dropped flares so they could see where they were dropping the bombs.
They came and they wanted to bomb the shipyards and sink the big battleship. They mistook the Belfast waterworks for the Belfast docks and they dropped and awful lot of bombs into the waterworks. They saw this vast expanse of water and they mistook it. That's why North Belfast got hammered so badly. A lot of people killed. There was a brick built air raid shelter, there were 32 people in it. A land mine dropped near it. These air raid shelters were just there to protect you against the shrapnel. They were just on a concrete foundation and then bricks built. The foundation held but the whole air raid shelter just moved and turned the people into ice cream. Nobody could recognise them. There are mass graves up in the City Cemetery of people who couldn't be identified. The stray bombs that didn't hit the waterworks were drifting down between the waterworks and the docks, the Shore Road area. That's how that area between the Limestone Road and Duncairn Gardens was so badly bashed. Whenever the incendiary bombs started to come down we were all moved out of our houses. They took us up to Mountcollier School on the Limestone Road and why they did that I don't know for there wasn't a single shelter there.
My cousin, one of his jobs was to carry damage reports from the Newington Area where he was located down to the Police Barracks in York Street. There was a bomb when he was down in the barracks and it blew the whole front of the Barracks out. That damaged a lot of houses. In those days Belfast had gas and the gas didn't go on fire and the people who were trapped in the houses they couldn't get out and they were all gassed. There were dozens of them. Must have been a slow and painful death.
My aunt and all our family came from Dungannon direction. We went up to Dungannon after the Blitz. You couldn't have recognised York Street, you had to pick your way through the rubble all the way down it. All those houses down York Street, shops and so on, were very old houses. They were all flattened or on fire and even to this day I can still smell the smell of all the stuff that was burning and probably bodies mixed in and out through it too.
We had a great time up in Dungannon, a place called Killyman. We stayed with an aunt there for a while. We got a house of our own to rent but it was a most peculiar house because it had a turret in it. It ran up 3 storeys. It had been an old fortified farmhouse. The walls were about 2feet thick and the windows on the inside were maybe 2 and a half feet wide and on the outside they were only a foot wide. They were there for shooting out of.
We had our own orchard. There was one outhouse, it had just and we used that for storing the apples, Beauty of Bath apples. I enjoyed up there.
The old schoolmaster he decided that us 'Belfast Vaccies' as they called us needed some horticultural experience. He had a vegetable garden and he put 2 of the country chaps with us and our job was to cultivate his vegetable patch. If he saw a weed in it he created hell. We never got a thing out of it and all we did was dig his vegetable patch. We walked 1 and a half miles to go to school, you just carried a wee packed lunch. After awhile my shoes wore out.
County Tyrone's a beautiful County. Very well wooded area - Tyrone among the bushes. A lot of our relatives lived up there. During the war when we were evacuated we used to trap rabbits, snare them. There was a man collected and paid us for them. That was a bit of pocket money. There was mushroom collecting, I liked that. I stayed 1 and a half years in Dungannon. It was good. I enjoyed that. We moved back to Belfast. Bought a house in Alexander Park Avenue.
In Belfast there was a lady we knew and all she ever got was 'Coupie Logue'. She had a family of 13 and although her husband worked on the railway, there wasn't much money but she had plenty of clothing coupons and on the QT she would sell the clothing coupons and she was called 'Coupie Logue'.
There was no work; my father had been in the trenches in the First World War. He was a Company Sergeant Major. When WW2 started my father was unemployed, he was too old to join the army but he forged his age. He joined the Pioneer Corps. He finished up as Sergeant Cook in the Pioneer Corps.

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