A trip around the war-scarred world

This story is taken from an interview with Fr Seamus Clenaghan, and has been added to the site with their permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions. The interview and transcription was by Bruce Logan.
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[after High School …]
I went to Dublin, down to Bonhallows and I was there for 6 years. I was there from 42 to 48. That bombing of Belfast must have been in 41, so it was, because I was in Ireland. I spent 6 yrs down there, and then I got deported after that to New Zealand.

Weren’t rationed to the same extent. We’d have felt it more there. The big college, and of course trying to heat it — the fuel, and they couldn’t get coal. There was very little coal from England. There was other things to do rather than getting coal to Ireland, so they tried to keep the furnaces going with peat turf and wood, I suppose. So we didn’t get very much heat out of them. And the rosary dinner before Xmas, we all had big overcoats on, trying to keep warm. After we came back after Xmas — we got home for 3 weeks, something — we went back, there was a little bit of heat, and just a small pipe — 3-quarter inch pipe, inch pipe, something like that.
That’s all the heat we’d got. No radiators or anything like that. It was just …
Most of all butter was in very short supply. And I suppose the food in general was restricted. We survived, at any rate.

[no flour in Republic?]
There was no problem like that. We never were short of bread. You could always get as much as you wanted. And porridge, I can tell you, that was the staple diet. That was how you started the day! A good plate of porridge and a couple of slices of bread. And if you wanted more you could have got it. We were never restricted.

After the, I left in 48 and it was still … post-war conditions we were travelling in. Getting accommodation on boats was extremely difficult. Our bookings were made just about 12 months before we were due to leave, and we booked with Cooks — Tomas Cooks. And the best that they could do for us, when it came to the time, was to get us on a Yugoslav ship. And so to get that Yugoslav ship we had to go to Trieste, if you know where that is. At the top of the Adriatic! That’s right. So Thomas Cook had gathered up a few other people who were emigrating, and there was 3 of us going to New Zealand, and gathered us all together on one day, and they sent an escort with us. From London - we had to go to London first, Belfast to Liverpool, down to London. That’s where I joined the Paddy Line, Mr Cook and Crome. And we left there for Dover. We travelled from Dover to Calais, and then got on the train at Calais into Paris. And we got to Paris — we had left in the morning time, mid-morn when we left London, we got to Paris at 6 0’clock in the evening. We were taken off the train there, for a meal, we had during the day, and then got back on the train again about 9 o’clock at night, travelled all night and all the next day, and the following night we got to Trieste, at 11 o’clock at night. It was rotten tough, I can tell you. The carriages, of course, had suffered badly as a result of all the things, moving of troops and activity, and no repairs had been done to it, anything. It was rough going, and not too much food on the way.
I got onto the ship, and we sailed the next day. Mid-morning, after we’d taken on a few immigrant people. Mostly elderly people, and they probably had sons or daughters out in Australia, Sydney or wherever. And they were going out there to start a new life there. But the conditions we travelled under .. it was tough. Our first stop was Malta, we took on about a couple of hundred boys there, ranging in age from probably about 18-20, a few at 23-4, young fellows, because there was nothing for them at home. Malta is a small island, I don’t know whether you know it or not.
It’s just a small island, it suffered greatly during the war. The Germans were hell-bent on getting that island. If they’d have got that, they’d have control of the Med. But they didn’t, but the Maltese did suffer as a consequence. So we took them on one night, and they went on to I think it was Cyprus, and we stopped there, off-shore, and we took on about 80 Greeks. Old men, old women, they came out in small boats. And then we sailed for Port Said, through the Suez. 6 weeks. From when I left my home here til I reached my journey’s end.
I was [incredible].

[3 sisters married — any relatives in the Forces?]
I had an uncle who was a chaplain in the First World War. He died there in 1981 at the age of 93. But he was a much interesting person. He started in the, what was it? The Connaught fusiliers. There is such a Regiment, isn’t there? The Connaught Rangers. He was attached to that, and it meant he spent a great deal of his time out in Egypt with them. Most of the time he was in, and he’d just become a priest at the time. There was a call went out for chaplains, and he volunteered to go out and be with them. So he had a lot of very interesting stories to tell about his experience.
I didn’t have immediate relations, but I certainly had a number of friends that went to school with me who joined up. Some in the Army, some in the Navy, and some in the Air Force as well. They’d been more or less the same time at school, and they joined up. I love to tell the tale.

[you never met up with them again?]
I hadn’t. They’re gone, gone away. I did meet somebody there a couple of years ago. A member of his family died, so I was at the funeral in Lisburn. I met up with him. Apart from him I can’t recall.
I did have in one of the Parishes I was at, we had a brazilian and he was in the army — a Major or something. And after the war he and the family packed up and came out to New Zealand. So he was a very good friend of mine indeed. From Scotland. He married an Irish girl. I saw a lot of them in my early days out there.
He was telling me about all, some of the activities. He said “You know, when war was declared they were in no way prepared for the war. We just didn’t have any equipment to fight anybody. We had better guns, all right, but we’d nothing to put in the guns when the war started”. And he said, “you probably would have noted a lot of troop movement around your home, in your area”. I said “oh yes”. He said “that was our bluff. We knew that there was info being fed back to the Germans, and to get the impression that we were in readiness, moving these troops from place to place, to give the impression that we were all ready. And this is what they were doing. The fact of the matter was, we were just moving rust. We had nothing to take with us”.
He was very interesting, in view of his own personal experience.

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