When war broke out, I was eleven years old and living in a small town called Abbeyleix, in the Irish Midlands. I was in my final year at primary school and I was studying for a scholarship to go to boarding school.
In early June of 1940 we suffered a severe electrical storm. While the storm was raging, we heard a knock on the door and my father went to answer it. I followed at a discreet distance, wondering who the caller might be. A member of the Gardai Siochana (Irish Police) stood there, asking for my brother, Ted, and telling my father that Ted was to report immediately to the barracks in his uniform to collect his rifle and his orders. Germans, he said, had been spotted, dropping by parachute in Knapton Woods and the young men of the Local Defence Force (LDF) were to go and defend their country! Ted was fifteen years old at the time but he had joined the LDF. His duties up to then had merely involved guarding the gates of fields to ensure that farmers didnt move their cattle during a severe outbreak of foot and mouth disease.
After the policeman had left, my father went to look for Ted and he found him in bed, hiding under the bedclothes, whimpering and shaking in fear. There was no way he was going out to face German soldiers! My father comforted him and said he wouldn't have to go. The policeman returned and asked where Ted was and my father pleaded with him to let him go in Ted's place. He said he had fought Germans at the front in the First World War and he could handle a rifle far better than his son, a lad at fifteen years of age, could. The policeman relented and said he would report that he couldnt find the lad! As I write this, I am thinking of the thousands of boy soldiers in the First World War and I can fully appreciate their fear. Their execution for refusing to fight seems cruel. Ted's officer never upbraided him for his failure to answer the call of duty
The entire Irish Air Force, consisting of one aeroplane, flew from the Curragh and landed in a field while the young members of the LDF took up their stations around Knapton Wood. (I know now that an invasion of Britain was feared to take place through Ireland and that Britain later supplied five planes to the Irish.) A young courting couple had taken shelter under some trees but they soon grew scared of the lightning and decided to make a dash for it in the torrents of rain. As they emerged, a young LDF chap dropped his rifle and fled for his life! Some hours later it was discovered that the parachutes were a cock of hay. A whirlwind had lifted the hay from a field in County Kildare and carried it through the air as far as Knapton! There were some red faces around that day, not least my brother's.
However, he was to redeem himself. Midway during the war he went to work in Lincoln at Foster Gwynnes. He was really excited when he met the Managing Director, Sir William Tritton, who, I believe, invented the first tank used in World War 1. Foster Gwynnes were still making tanks while Ted was there. He joined the Civil Defence (ARP) and diligently carried out his duties, watching from the Tower of Lincoln Castle for the approach of German bombers and parading along the walls as he carried out his fire-watching duties. He later spoke of the terror of those years. After one bombing raid he retrieved the charred body of a child from the rubble and he never forgot having to hand the body to the mother.
In September of 1940 I went away to boarding school in Cork and that is where I spent the final five years of the war. About the same time that we were experiencing a scare in Abbeyleix, girls in the boarding school had woken up in the night to the loud roar of an aeroplane and they rushed to the window to see a German bomber fly low past the school. They could see the pilot clearly. A short distance on, the plane dropped its bombs on Cork and made off out to sea. Apparently, the plane was making its getaway from RAF planes.
We were fairly sheltered from the harsh reality of war throughout our school years, but we regularly had air raid practices and these usually occurred during the night. We assembled in the basement and had to don our gas masks. At that time I suffered badly from claustrophobia and there was no way I was going to put my mask on. I decided I'd risk dying in an air raid rather than suffocate in that horrible contraption. From one classroom I could see a barrage balloon floating serenely over the city. It looked so graceful as the sun glinted on its silver body, but it was a constant reminder of a possible threat.
I remember the day the war ended and we seniors were taken in to the head mistress' drawing room to listen to the news and we heard for the first time about the concentration camps. Then we found a Union Jack in the Girl Guides cupboard and we draped it around us and sang God Save Our gracious King and that was our celebration.
Header Image: Miss FitzHerbert taken on the Monk's Bridge down near the Old Church and my father's workshop as an apprentice. after he died she invited Mike and me to lunch to talk about those early years of my parents' lives.