Derrick, 91, remembers Belfast Blitz boyhood and fallen brothers for VE Day

His boyhood was spent during the war years, taking in the trauma of evacuation and the terror of the Belfast Blitz, to playing among bomb craters and making toy soldiers out of shrapnel while eagerly awaiting the latest episode of a hit radio comedy that kept the nation smiling as it faced its greatest challenge.

But the Second World War cost his family dearly, as Derrick lost two of his older brothers – both of them falling in action within less than a year of each other.

Now 91, he’s been recalling his family’s experiences with an exhibition as part of VE Day commemorations run by Belfast’s Cregagh Presbyterian Church; in recent years, he’s also put down his own memories as part of anthology of wartime remembrances, and exhaustively researched the war records of his brothers Tommy and Fred.

Fighting in the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, Tommy was killed aged 21 when he rushed a machine gun post in Sicily, saving the lives of his comrades only to be hit by a mortar bomb.

Fred joined the Irish Guards, landing at Anzio in 1944 – an attempt to break Axis lines in Italy, the battle was heavy going with 10,000 British soldiers and 24,000 US troops killed or wounded, 23-year-old Lance-Sergeant Fred Cartlidge among them.

"The company he was with at the time were completely decimated by Germans on a hilltop,” says Derrick. "The remainders were sent to recuperate and eventually packed off home; subsequently, that section of the Irish Guards was disbanded, it was such a fierce battle.

“During the war Fred was wounded twice, patched up and sent back into battle; for the engagement against machine guns, Tommy was mentioned in despatches, as indeed Fred was.

"Fred is buried at Anzio, I've visited the grave there; at the time my parents were told Tommy was buried in a cemetery eight miles west of Syracuse [in Sicily], only to be told later he had no known grave.

"Their loss left a vast gap in our family."

Derrick remembers that “telegrams were feared” during the war, as they often brought the worst news a family could receive – their loved one had been killed in action, or was missing presumed dead.

"Our family received two,” he says, “creating the most painful memories of the way years for my older brother Ronnie, me and our parents.

"Losing two sons was a heavy cross for our parents to bear, but it was borne with a dignity and fortitude recognised by all who knew them.

“Down the years, composing books about Fred in the Guards and Tommy in the Fusiliers has helped me cope, and Ronnie was intensely interested in the books.”

On the home front, Derrick’s childhood took place among constant looming threat and rationing – but, he says: “I don’t remember wanting for anything. The adults no doubt found it hard to cope, but I enjoyed playing games in the street.”

Aged six, he was evacuated from east Belfast to rural Co Londonderry, where he was “thoroughly miserable and cried bitterly for home”. Later taken to stay with relatives on a farm near Lurgan, Derrick returned to the capital city just in time for the beginning of the Blitz.

“Air raid shelters in the streets became our gang headquarters,” he says of his Blitz-era boyhood. “They were padlocked, but someone would be able to get in.

“I have a vivid memory of looking into a bomb crater on the Cregagh Road and gathering up bits and pieces of shrapnel. At bedtime, they’d be either an aeroplane or a submarine – they were my toy soldiers.”

One of his strongest memories is receiving an airgraph from an away-on-service Fred for his birthday, which made him the talk of his school. “I was walking around like I was 10 feet tall,” he says.

Despite his many clear recollections of the war, that’s not the case of its end. “I can’t remember VE Day,” smiles Derrick. “It’s not there; a blank. Selective memory.”