Flaming Onions

It was a Sunday morning in 1939 in a little County Down village of Millisle, where we were on holiday. I was with my mother, younger brother and Mrs Herey, a family friend. There was an atmosphere of general confusion — what did war mean? We went home the next day and on the sofa was a tin helmet, uniform and a kit bag. I began to cry.
Next I rememeber an easter air raid — my dad was on leave and due to go back the next day. He held me up in his arms at the bedroom window looking towards the city and the pom-poms in the sky and said we call them “flaming onions” and I was wasn’t afraid. Next day we left him to York street station over lots of debris — he must have been very worried leaving us. After that on his other leaves, on his last day my job was to make a loaf of sandwiches and when we knew he would be coming home we saved our bacon and egg ration for weeks so he could have his favourite meal — an Ulster fry.
I have a postcard he wrote after landing in England post-Dunkirk, or in his case Cherbourg, and a photograph — he was dirty and weary, but grinning.
We were rationed, but the only thing I really missed was butter. We used to save the cream of the milk and put it in a little screwtop bottle, and we’d shake it for ages until we had a little scrap of butter.
There was a black market but my grandmother would say “I have two sons serving — there will be no black market food in this family.” I always respected her for that.
We had searchlights in the fields at the bottom of the street and the AA guns on the castlereagh hills above Lisnabreeny and an anderson shelter in the living room (an iron table with right-angled corner legs). It was so cold, we kept a thick blanket on top.
I had to carry my gas mask everywhere and I hated my lunch in winter — soggy tomato sandwiches (tomatoes were not rationed) — and the blackouts.
Going to guides or maybe a carol service, I had an encounter with a lamp post that left me with a black eye, but luckily my dad made it home intact.
Because we were the last row before the fields we had “smoke screens”. These were metal tubes with a chimney three feet tall that burned paraffin, and the soldiers used to come and light them when we had an alert. They belched black smoke and were supposed to conufse enemy planes. Guess what the local housewives thought of them!
Any spare ground was cultivated with the slogan Dig For Victory, and we had to grow as much food as possible for obvious reasons, but we grew some flowers too.

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