Childhood during the Belfast Blitz

This story is taken from an interview with Cathy Murphy, and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions. The interview and transcription was by Bruce Logan.
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When was I born? 1941.
There was a wee entry beside the house and there was a pub and all the rest of it …
I remember the 40s — well, some of it anyway. I remember the ration book …
I remember … the people with all the fear, and them sending the bombs down into the very street. And a couple of streets of streets away, long away, there was some of people killed in it. And one thing, and all the young children were told to go down, because they were going to Lisburn, to a nursery. And it wasn’t a nursery, it was tables and chairs and things like that. So they would be vaguely comfortable, but they didn’t know what they were going in for. Some of them even thought they were going to Dublin. That’s all I know.
That was the evacuation.
[were you with your friends?]
my mummy and daddy.

[rationing]
I don’t know about that. All I know is, the wee book for the rationing. Sugar and tea and things like that. But there was no … everybody done their best, for doing whatever they were going to do. There was no badness. Everybody done what they could to help, especially the children, to lift their friends out of the road, on a stretcher or whatever it was. They took them away out of the district. So they could not know anything about it either. You couldn’t know, so you couldn’t.

[your daddy’s job?]
I’ve no idea.

[entertainment]
It was a big hill, and we could have jumped down to the bottom and got a slide down there. That was entertainment for us. But other than that …
The wireless — it was only the rich people who had them type of thing. Us poor people had nothing.
We weren’t allowed to go to the Pictures ... You would have got a slap across your jaw, so that was the end of the pictures, like. That was really all just …
I couldn’t even see a newspaper never mind read it.

[relatives]
I had plenty of uncles but nobody in the army.

[yanks]
We didn’t meet them. We played. We played skips, and they played skips. That’s all it was. I’m not saying that to put me in the wrong or the right. But they would have come and shown us how they did it, and they played skips until their units turned up to collect them, and then they went away and we never seen them ever since.

[how do you “play skips”?]
You just keep jumping up and down with a wee rope, over the top of it. You just keep turning it. And sing a wee song, whatever it is.
That was entertainment for them. Sure they didn’t know where they were half of the time.

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