I Remember, I Remember.

‘I remember, I remember the house where I was born, the little window where the sun came peeping in at dawn’. (Thomas Hood - 1826)

I remember the bomb that smashed that window into pieces and spread them over my bed and all over the bedroom floor. I remember cutting my feet, as I ran for the open door. I remember seeing Our Lady’s statue, as I ran down the stairs, and the Sacred Heart looking down on me from his picture on the wall. I remember two buckets of sand for ‘incendiaries’, standing each side of the grandfather clock. I remember running into the shelter that had squatted in our dining room. I remember the sirens sounding as my mother bandaged my feet. I remember kneeling to say the rosary with my parents, and my brothers. I remember praying for the bombs to stop, for our family to be kept safe and for other families too, and for all our relatives at the ‘front’. We prayed the same every night of the week before we went to bed, as we prayed at the Sunday Masses that were always crammed to the full. I remember how they gradually emptied, as the forties gave way to the fifties, and work filled people’s pockets again. I remember how God gradually began to come second, as the ‘swinging sixties’ put pleasure first.  read on......