HISTORY: The Belfast Blitz: The People's Story, By Stephen Douds Blackstaff Press, 171pp. £9.99
'MY GOD. That's Belfast finished." This comment of an onlooker was recorded by James Kelly, the Northern political editor of the Irish Independent, during the Easter Tuesday raid that started on the evening of April 15th, 1941. Horror-stricken people had emerged from their houses on the high ridge of Glen Road to be confronted by a distant conflagration, "the awesome sight of a city enveloped in a sea of flames".
It was the second raid on a target very inadequately prepared for enemy action, the first having taken place just the previous week. The comforting notion of Belfast as a place apart, an outpost of Britain not worth the effort of bombing, went up in flames along with the rest.
The first raid by German bombers claimed the lives of 13 people, but the second caused death and destruction on a scale to match that in Glasgow or Coventry. And then, the following month, came a further onslaught, quickly designated “the fire raid” on account of the numbers of incendiary bombs unloaded by the Luftwaffe.
For those who lived through the havoc of those days the mood veered between shock and disorientation and “Belfast can take it”. Many of the little dockside streets were pulverised, parts of Antrim Road obliterated, City Hall itself topped by a blazing roof. In a rare moment of co-operation between north and south, firefighters sped from Dublin to lend a hand. Temporary morgues were set up in the drained Falls Baths and in St George’s Market, where a heart-stopping array of burnt and mutilated corpses lay in makeshift coffins awaiting identification.
Night after night a sense of fear and dread set whole communities streaming away from the shattered city, heading for fields and hills where a barn or a haystack might offer a kind of shelter. “Ditchers”, they were dubbed, half-contemptuously, by others who stuck it out, refusing to be intimidated and contributing doggedly to rescue and reclamation work.
The Belfast Blitzaims to capture the immediacy of wartime terrors and dislocations by allowing those affected to speak for themselves. It's not a history of the Blitz – Brian Barton's comprehensive study of 1983, also published by Blackstaff, has already provided that – but rather a series of glimpses into the fraught life of the era. Stephen Douds has assembled the testimonies of those on the spot, including air-raid wardens, nurses, librarians, civil servants, clerics, Stormont officials, ordinary civilians and others. They have stories to tell of escapes from harm, of damage done, of unspeakable sights, of high courage and compassion and heroic effort. Most of their reports were written in the heat of the moment, though a few have a retrospective slant on conditions in the city.
Two of Douds’s contributors, an English tax inspector called Doreen Bates and Moya Woodside, a surgeon’s wife from a staid south Belfast suburb, were Mass Observation recruits whose diaries form part of the Mass Observation Archive at Sussex University. A graduate of Queen’s University, the latter woman, in particular, is among the foremost chroniclers of the Belfast Blitz, displaying at all times a forthright approach and a sturdy repudiation of newspaper “cliche and claptrap” about “stricken mothers”, “courage and stoicism” and so on.
Resolutely middle class, she has scant time for whiners and scarperers, and presents a picture of evacuees reminiscent of the terrible Connolly children in Evelyn Waugh’s Put Out More Flags. When Woodside’s unfortunate mother in the country has filthy, pregnant, incontinent, tubercular, nit-ridden and stinking refugees imposed on her, she remains, according to her daughter, “kindliness itself” in the face of these odds, but can’t help feeling somewhat overpowered by the frightful influx.
Class distinctions didn’t evaporate overnight in the face of the common enemy, and neither did those of creed or political orientation. With the unidentified dead of all denominations laid out side by side, you’d think the time had come to jettison ancient spites and bigotries.
But no. Among the most dispiriting reports included here are those of the Clonard and Holy Family parishes, which congratulate themselves on counting low numbers of Catholics among the dead. German bombs don’t differentiate between the sects, but it seems their adherents do. All-in-it-together rhetoric doesn’t cut much ice with the factionally entrenched, of whatever persuasion.
But that’s only a part of The Belfast Blitz. Although longer extracts would have been welcome (there is a sense that the whole thing has been cut down from a larger compilation), a good range of tones and attitudes is covered in the book. The reader is left with images of searchlights moving across the sky, immense bomb craters where streets once stood, the dead being loaded on to lorries – and the indefatigable Moya Woodside on her bicycle, surveying the damage: “Belfast will certainly never look the same again.” Earlier she has summed up her feelings about the pass things have come to, from a vantage point under the stairs: “This was civilisation in 1941. Sitting shivering, bored and frightened in a cubbyhole at 3.30am.”
Patricia Craig is a critic and author. Her most recent book is a memoir,
Asking for Trouble
