Sixty years ago, in the summer of 1939, there were few signs on the surface that day-today life in Belfast was any different from past years. Rearmament because of Hitler had brought more employment and money to the shipyard and the aircraft factory. After serious disturbances in the city some years before, things had settled down and the Twelfth of July parade passed peacefully out along the Lisburn Road in sweaty cheerfulness close to where I lived.
It was only my second summer in the city. How had I, a raw and callow young man from Dublin, come to be there? As often happens in life, an unexpected twist of fate had touched me. One morning in March 1938, when I had just completed my first year as a Guinness clerk among the lofty mountains of wooden casks in the cooperage, I was summoned to the directors' office. I was told that I was required to move from Dublin. A young man had left the Belfast office and I was to take his place.
Transfer to Belfast
I was greatly taken aback. Cork, Galway even Ballinasloe, yes - but Belfast and the North? A completely alien place to a Dubliner brought up in an easy-going, friendly, Catholic atmosphere. That night I wept many tears into my pillow.
I was told of my transfer on a Thursday and on the following Monday I was having lunch with Eric Pinion, a fatherly Belfast Store official in the Merrythought Cafe in Wellington Place. He had arranged lodgings for me in Eglantine Avenue, a road running from the Malone Road at Fisherwick Presbyterian Church down to the Lisburn Road half-a-mile away.
His advice was sound: join the North of Ireland Club for rugby and the Belfast Boat Club for tennis. He was right, of course, but for many, many months I was lonely and homesick. Louis MacNeice's lines remind me of that time:
I was born in Belfast between the mountain and the gantries
To the hooting of lost sirens and the clang of trams:
The Guinness Store ran the full length of a Great Northern Railway siding and fronted on to the Grosvenor Road (referred to locally as the "Grov-nor") running from near the City Hall to intersect the Falls Road a mile away. The work was simple: ordering daily consignments of Extra Stout and Porter from Dublin, keeping an eye on five Guinness local delivery lorries, dealing with carriers and dispatching beer by road and rail from Derry to Down. No different from their Dublin brothers, Belfast men downed huge quantities of porter on draught from white-headed, wooden casks. For many weeks before the "Twelfth", the train-loads from Dublin were huge and the store was bursting at the seams. One little luxury for me was that if all the delivery lorries were not back by 7 p.m. I qualified for a five-shilling dinner allowance. A mixed grill at the Ritz Cinema restaurant just down the road left me with a half-crown in my pocket, a huge sum in those days.
The shipyard had no large pair of cranes like today's "Goliath" and "David". There were a dozen or so traditional gantries, probably unchanged since the building of the Titanic.
Cycling on the Falls
Very early on I bought a bicycle and rode to work along the Lisburn Road and Sandy Row, over the railway bridge into Durham Street, which intersects the "Grov-nor". A women named Annie Dolan was injured in an explosion in a house in Durham Street that year of 1938. Sixty years on, I read of her death. She was related to the Price sisters.
Some afternoons after work, my curiosity brought me to the Falls Road by bicycle. I followed the rippling wheels of the trolley buses up Castle Street, past the red-brick factories of Divis Street and on to the Falls itself. Then under the Black Mountain by the Glen Road and Andersonstown with a sweep east to Finaghy and home. All seemed much as elsewhere. Houses small at first, giving way to pleasant leafy suburbs - not really all that different from the Malone Road.
A fellow lodger took me to see Belfast Celtic play Cliftonville. For Celtic a small, ginger-haired wing named Kernoghan showed great skill and there were two McAlindens, Jimmy and Harry, who later went to England. A few bottles flew and there was abuse in the air.
At the North of Ireland Rugby Club, I met St John Pike, a clergyman and ex-Lansdowne man from Tipperary who was running the Church of Ireland Southern Mission at Ballymacarret, near the shipyard. He asked me to join other club players at Sunday afternoon services in St Martin's Church in Kenilworth Street. We helped to marshal the hundreds of teenage boys and girls from the nearby small streets and houses. I had never before in my life seen such an assembly of Protestants in one place.
At the Whit weekend, a new submarine, Thetis, still on trials, dived and got stuck in the seabed off North Wales. At low tide, her stern rose briefly above the sea surface: but over a hundred men perished.
Signs of war
As summer wore on ominous signs emerged. Billboards invited young men "to see life from a new angle" in the RAF. Yellow Tiger Moth training planes droned through the sky at weekends. A squadron of Wellington bombers curved high over the city. A "wonder" Spitfire fighter from Scotland thrilled the crowd at an airshow near Belfast Harbour. The new aircraft carrier Formidable was laid down. We were issued with monster-making gas masks at a depot in Donegall Pass. Practising searchlights swept the sky after dark.
The popular songs had a sombre, sad, sweet tone as befitted the passing of an era. Little Sir Echo, Deep Purple, and the best known, South of the Border, still haunt my memories.
Came September and Hitler attacked Poland. Jack Sayers, a future Belfast Telegraph editor, disappeared from the tennis club on Royal Navy mobilisation. A week later he returned. He had walked to safety down the side of the aircraft carrier Courageous after it was torpedoed west of Ireland.
When I left Belfast a year later to join the RAF, it was for good. But I have never forgotten the warmth of the friendship given to me in my adoptive city many years ago.