Lucky Dip Number 5
Click the CLOSE button at the end of the poem to return to the 'Lucky Dip' page.
Memories
My earliest memory, unless a dream, was waking up in a crowded room in my mother's arms and something, perhaps the tension in the group, must have imprinted this one scene on my infant mind for no other memories (except perhaps one) survive from that time. It may have been in an air-raid shelter during the blitz of 1941 when I was aged two on a night when Belfast was ablaze and over half of its houses were damaged or totally destroyed for the family had run there after a warden had mistakenly told them their roof was on fire. Almost immediately we left the city and until after the war ended lived in a bungalow in Bangor West owned by my grandmother. I remember sleeping over with friends of our family who had a home not far away (for a surprising number then of people who lived in the terraced streets of Belfast owned or rented such sought after second homes) and an unusual experience for me was when the mother kissed us goodnight, for the adults in my own home were less demonstrative. My father and the other menfolk in our family connection stayed on in Belfast throughout all of this time and one night he and one of my uncles came close to being killed. Some of the incendiaries that always preceded the main bombardment had fallen among the stables and garages of the family premises and my father and uncle had gone there quickly to extinguish them. The standard issue stirrup pumps seemed to have little effect ("You might as well pee on them!" said my forthright uncle) and instead they used the manure that was liberally provided by the black funeral horses that were then the hallmark of the family trade. They were with the horses when my uncle said urgently "Let's get out of here before the heavy stuff comes down" and thereby saved both their lives for only moments later a landmine landed nearby on a separate building and a large block of masonry was hurled over some distance to penetrate first the roof of the coffin and hayloft of the two storey stables (my play place in later years) and then tear its way through the ground floor ceiling between the two rows of horse stalls (sparing those beautiful animals) to where my father and uncle had been standing and it is sad and sobering to think that the multitude of memories from sixty years of knowing my caring father would then never have been and a forceful reminder that the vagaries of memory are but a pale reflection of the vagaries of life. |