Behind the Book

These Days by Lucy Caldwell

My grandma didn’t like to talk about the Belfast Blitz: ‘Ach, sure, what do you want to know about all that for?’ Towards the end of her life, wracked with vascular dementia, all questions became traps, and then she couldn’t talk at all. I still wonder, even after years of researching it, what her stories might have been. Her father, a pawnbroker before the Great War, came back from the trenches with lungs so ravaged by mustard gas he could no longer be inside, and found work driving the trams, where he could be sedentary, yet in fresh air all day. He died just before war broke out again in 1939. My grandma was seventeen, the eldest of five. Her mother worked in the linen mills, and my grandma began work in the local Co-Op to help support her siblings. They lived in North Belfast then, on the Oldpark then on the Deerpark Road, areas that were heavily damaged in the Blitz. My father remembers his uncles talking with glee about running up the Black Mountain to collect still-hot shrapnel from a German plane that crash-landed. But that’s all I have.

I started collecting stories of the Belfast Blitz in a circuitous way. For the best part of a year, my infant son loved the Janet and Allan Ahlberg book Peepo!: ‘Here’s a little baby / One, two, three / Stands in his cot / What does he see?’ We read it every night for months. A day in the life of a baby, it’s set against the backdrop of the London Blitz – bombed-out buildings, barrage balloons and, by the end, the father in full uniform kissing his family goodbye. We lived in a flat in East London at the time, and it was strange to think that in that bed, in that room, in that Victorian warehouse, we would have survived everything, and yet a few metres away in almost every direction, street after street was flattened. You don’t come from the place and time that I do without being hypersensitive to those vagaries of chance – of being in one building rather than another, of being five minutes early or five minutes late, of running the way they tell you to, or in the opposite direction . . .

And so Belfast was on my mind, and I started to think about its Blitz. I started with fiction: Brian Moore’s The Emperor of Ice-Cream and Joan Lingard’s The File on Fraulein Berg; a section in Mary Beckett’s Give Them Stones – but there’s barely anything else. It was surprising to me that the Belfast Blitz, which I knew had caused some of the worst devastation, the worst loss of life of any of the UK blitzes, should be such an under-told chapter in the fiction of my city. I was greatly indebted to the historian Brian Barton – his book The Blitz: Belfast in the War Years is a dense and magisterial tome of almost a thousand pages, intense and rigorous, the work of a lifetime. Stephen Douds’s The Belfast Blitz: The People’s Story, a collage of newspaper clippings, diaries and personal testimony, was also a valuable jumping-off point.