Asked to take Billets

After the war broke out Derry filled up with hundreds, no thousands of servicemen - there were more soldires and sailors than accomodation for them - so families were asked to put men up - sometimes often just for a couple of days till their ship was in dock - sometimes longer.

My mother took 2. all the houses in Messines was all asked if they would squeeze in a couple. You only had them for 2-3days, only waiting for their boats to come in. When their boat came into Derry they were away. You didn’t really have them, you’d have had them for a week. We met some nice … we had a bank manager who lived in Devon. And he was Mister. We had to call him Mister, we weren’t allowed to call him by his first name. Mr Williams. Never should have been in the navy, yon man. He was lost.
He was a bank manager. Too nice, too soft for the Navy crowd.
We had 2 Canadians. They went out one night, and they weren’t back from where they were going by the time we went to our bed. And through the night my father heard a rattling. They’d climbed up our spouting, in the window.
But they weren’t bad. They were ok.
We had another nice fellow named Thompson. very young. And whatever it was about him, my mother took to him great. Was fussing over him. And the day he had to join his ship down the quay, my mother left him away down the street. She watched him going away. And she says “we’ll never see him again”. And I says “they don’t normally get in touch with you once they leave”. He went out, and outside Moville they were torpedoed and sunk. He was a nice boy, Thompson. The German subs were round that Irish coast, and them boys went out. They knew they were coming. A lot of lives lost there that shouldn’t have been lost.
The sailors used to go down to Moville for a drink. Or Buncrana. And the Germans was sitting there, and they were in drinking. That’s true.
Our boys wasn’t supposed to go across the border, because across the border wasn’t at war. It was neutral.

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