An Irishman’s Diary on a wartime childhood in Ballymena

It was the tramping feet that woke him, the tramping feet in the middle of the night. The date was April 15th, a late Easter Tuesday; the year was 1941. My father got up out of bed and, drawing back the curtain, looked out. A cavalcade of humanity was on the road below, heading for open country. Men, old women, children, young mothers pushing infants in prams. They were the people, mostly working-class, who lived in the centre of the town of Ballymena, Co Antrim.

On the Monday night of the previous week, 200 German bombers had unloaded their cargo of oil-bombs on Belfast, killing nearly 1,000 and leaving 100,000 homeless. Ballymena had heard on the wireless and read in the papers about that first blitz, and how the people of the city had decamped to the surrounding hills to sit out the holocaust, overnighting in the fields in the mild spring weather.

Children

On Easter Tuesday they came back, the bombers. The people of Ballymena heard them droning overhead, making for Belfast again, this time with incendiaries. And, fearing they were to be the targets, the people of Ballymena did what Belfast had done. They gathered up their children from their beds and made for the hills.

I was 16 days old at the time, so this is necessarily a second-hand memory. By August 1945 the world war was tottering towards a close. But I cared nothing for that. I was 4½, on my first day at the Model School, and my personal world was collapsing round me. In the first-day excitement my mother had forgotten to give me the copper penny which was the tariff for the one-third-pint bottle of milk that was daily supplied to us Baby Infants, to keep us sustained during the hard academic graft that lay ahead.

I remember those bottles of school milk with curious vividness. The caps were a disc of greaseproof cardboard, coloured brown and white, with a round perforation in the middle which you pushed in with the straw. In a fine example of early recycling, these cardboard discs with the hole in the middle were then used for winding wool round, as we strove towards our higher degrees in pompom-making. I recall, too, the blocks of unnaturally yellow margarine, the wrappers of which were saved to grease the pan.

Even in the midst of rationing we were by no means starving, of course, but an uncle in Canada must have thought we were because the Christmas food parcels continued for a time after the war. And thus were we introduced precociously to canned shrimp, sweetcorn, Fritos and chicken noodle soup some years before such delights appeared on the supermarket shelves on this side of the Atlantic. Come to think of it, a couple of decades before even supermarkets appeared.

Attic

Well into peacetime, a large brown cardboard box reposed in our attic. It was an infant’s gas-mask for my personal use in the event of a mustard attack, as in the first World War. I was to be encased entire in the rubbery thing, with a perspex window for me to look out at the invading Nazis. The gas didn’t come, of course, and neither did the Wehrmacht; but my mother couldn’t be persuaded to let us open the carton to satisfy our inquisitiveness. I think she believed the Authorities would eventually come looking for it back. They never did.

The public park across the road from our house was called the People’s Park. (That name has always had a comically Soviet association in my mind. You know: the People’s Park for Proletarian Culture and Anti-Imperialist Reorientation, or some such.). For some years after the war low bare walls with rusting metal stumps at fixed intervals flanked the now-gateless pillars of the park’s entrance. At Winston Churchill’s behest, all inessential municipal iron had been donated, ostensibly to make weaponry and ammunition for the gallant troops fighting the fascists. We know now that this was all a cod. The metal was quite unsuitable for such uses, and Churchill was only deploying a neat all-in-it-together morale-boosting trick.

Long after peace had broken out, the ornate wrought iron that had decorated the park’s entrance was replaced by rudimentary and unaesthetic steel bars. Eventually, too, from the fork in the road below our house they took away the last visible vestige of warfare, the redbrick bomb shelter with the flat reinforced concrete roof. But for years afterwards the weekly grocery shop continued to be referred to as “the rations”.