In Belfast they have always claimed, with pride at their remembered endurance, that the air raids on the city in April and May 60 years ago were among the heaviest inflicted by the Luftwaffe during the war, surpassed in their intensity only by the attacks on London and Coventry. I didn't really notice at the time. I was too busy having fun in the mangled streets and ruined houses of north Belfast. Of course no-one expected the city to be bombed. It was too far away from the Nazi airfields and there would be too many risks en route.
Harland and Wolff's shipyard and Short's aircraft factory, with their increasing number of armaments contracts for the British war machine, were considered relatively safe havens. But after the fall of France in 1940 the journey from the airfields of northern Europe to the banks of the Lagan was much less hazardous.
Wailing of sirens
The intermittent wailing of sirens all over the city heralded the first raid on April 7th, 1941. My mother shepherded us into the small cubby hole under the stairs of the less-than stoutly built terrace house in Alliance Parade, but my elder sisters insisted on dodging out to look out the window at the flames. Fortunately no bombs fell near.
Damage was confined largely to east Belfast with the shipyard and the aircraft factory getting a battering. Few people were killed and the accepted wisdom of the day was that the raid was a once-off long-distance exercise by the Luftwaffe.
The complacency was soon shattered. On April 15th, the Tuesday after Easter, the sirens wailed again around midnight. Once more it was under the stairs for us. We could hear the heavy drone of bombers as flight after flight came in low over Belfast Lough loaded with high explosive and incendiary bombs. They met little resistance as they climbed to a higher altitude before going into a loud whining dive to drop their loads.
It was said later that the entire city had less than 40 antiaircraft guns to defend itself and no searchlights or night fighters. Our house shook violently several times and windows were blown out. Behind us in Alliance Road a house got a direct hit. It was well after four o'clock the following morning before the continuous wailing of the sirens sounded the all clear. We soon learned the mantra of the blitz: the intermittent wailing meant that the bombers were coming, the continuous wailing signalled they had gone.
We were on the streets early that morning, myself and my fellow six and seven-year olds. The corporation workmen were already clearing away the rubble and glass and boarding up the broken windows. We soon discovered unexpected treasure: shrapnel from the incendiary bombs, a greyish-white substance like hard putty, was plentiful in some streets. We piled it high and with a match donated by one of the workmen we set it alight: a miniature and premature Twelfth bonfire, around which we danced and capered.
Direct hits
We marvelled at the ruins of the house which had received the direct hit. It had been demolished cleanly, as if taken down brick by brick, leaving the houses on either side unscathed. There were no signs of the occupants.
On that one night 745 people were killed and thousands were injured. No city, apart from London, suffered such a high rate of mortality in a single raid. Hospitals were overwhelmed. The public baths and fruit and vegetable markers were taken over as mortuaries. It was said the flames of Belfast could be seen from the English coast.
Fire brigades came from all over, even from Dundalk and Dublin. Rumours abounded among the ruins. After that night precautions were taken. The anti-aircraft defences were strengthened. I was sent over to the Falls Road for safety. The belief was that as Fascist Italy was on the side of the Germans the Pope and Hitler had agreed that Catholic areas would not be bombed.
As I was walked over to this divinely-protected warren of back-to-back houses my mother was unable to explain why the mills and houses around Flax Street in Catholic Ardoyne lay shattered around us. Her brother had married a Catholic and, as they say in Belfast, had "turned". I spent a few undisturbed nights in his over-crowded Catholic house and was then sent home.
Occasionally, panic gripped the city. Rumours would spread that another blitz was on the way and in the dusk we headed off, with many other families, to spend the night in the fields above Ballysillan looking down over the lough. Gas masks in their cardboard boxes were carried at all times.
No fires burned and no lights flashed for there was now a complete blackout. In the night cold and sometimes in the rain we slept uneasily under blankets. It was from this bleak and uncomfortable eyrie on the moonlight night of May 4th that we watched the next great Luftwaffe raid on Belfast.
More than 200 German planes came in over the lough, wave after wave of black, droning machines illuminated by the moonlight and the probing searchlights. The guns on the ground cracked and flashed incessantly. I cannot remember seeing any plane being hit, but there was the odd shout of "look they got one over there, over in the Bangor direction". But they kept coming, dropping their bombs until the early hours of the morning, leaving the city again in flames.
1,000 people killed
On that night 150 people were killed and many more injured. It took six months to rebuild the vital shipyard and the aircraft factory. There was another raid the following night, but it was much less intense and only 14 people were killed. The four raids on Belfast took more than 1,000 lives in all and flattening half the city's properties; some of the empty spaces remain until this day.
No-one knew the blitz had ended. The children of Belfast were evacuated to the country - after the raids - for the remainder of the war. We were sent back to our native Fermanagh, where the only wartime diversion was watching the crew baling out of the occasional American bomber, bound for the Western Front, as it ran out of fuel before reaching the airfields around Enniskillen.