"The heels were blown off my shoes... the stockings were blown off my legs..."

IT was Christmas week in 1940 and I was one of the lucky emigrants going home from England to enjoy the season with my family in Cork.

I would be sailing from Liverpool to Dublin on the Innisfallen on Saturday, December 21, then taking the train down to Cork, where my parents lived on the Grand Parade.

I was 37 years old and had been teaching in West Hartlepool on England’s north-east coast. Usually the journey across to Liverpool would require just one change, but war, its depravations and precautions made the trek one long day of changes from cold train to colder train and standing in draughty stations.

Finally, we reached Liverpool. We had to go through Customs where our personal belongings were thoroughly searched. This we expected. What we did not expect was to be confronted by a Censor who demanded to see our handbags and any written material in our pockets.

This intrusion was forgotten when we eventually boarded the Innisfallen, it was familiar and friendly and, best of all, warm.

The boat was scheduled to depart at 4pm and already the December day was growing dark. But hours ticked by and we didn’t leave the harbour.

On enquiry, we learned the London train had been delayed and we were awaiting its passengers.

I made friends with another girl and, leaning over the rails, we watched as the London train arrived. Only two people got off. One was a young, elegant woman, who had a leash on which an equally elegant Afghan hound was pulling gently. A naval officer accompanied them.

As soon as they were aboard, the gangplank was lifted and it seemed at last we were leaving. But the naval officer, who was the girl’s fiancée, had intended to board the ship merely to help her settle in. Alarmed at the prospect of travelling to Ireland and being seen to abandon his duties, he realised he risked imprisonment and pleaded to be put to shore.

But it was too late. The Innisfallen had moved out of its berth and already another ship had moved in to replace it in dock.

We were coming to the mouth of the harbour when a siren blew. This was the night Liverpool was to suffer its first air raid.

Moving ships create a fluorescent light easily discernible by enemy aircraft and immediately every craft in the harbour halted.

For some hours we listened to the crash and whine of the aerial attack by German aircraft, until finally the bombing ended. We went to our cabins and slept.

I awoke the next morning to quietness and the welcome knock of a stewardess bringing tea. I enquired if we would be docking soon, presuming we had sailed all night to Dublin. The stewardess smiled and said we hadn’t moved an inch the whole night in case mines had been dropped, and we were going back to the quay.

At least the naval officer was happy as it meant he could be put ashore! Once he had disembarked, we set off again, at 3pm.

I sat in the lounge with the man’s fiancé and the girl I had befriended the day before, enjoying a meal. After that, cards were passed around and most passengers became absorbed in their games. But we were young and restless and the foetid air in the lounge drove us to the deck.

At 3.20pm, as we leaned on the protective glass, looking down the River Mersey estuary, an alarming sound rang out, like the anguished cry of a huge animal in acute pain. The girl who had arrived from London called out “We’ve been bombed” but there were no planes in sight. In fact, we had hit a mine and the Innisfallen was sinking.

The huge mast rose up in front of us. My London friend fell, her leg broken, and the other two of us tried to reach her to help, but some sailors who had come on deck roared at us to get back to the lounge.

We were standing on the deck im freezing water. I could see my handbag only a yard or so away. I reached towards it, but it seemed a mile away. The sailors tried to rush us off deck, but I insisted on saving my bag. The other girls’ handbags had been jerked out of their hands and fallen overboard. I forced myself to crawl towards my bag, and, in the days to come, I was glad I had made the huge effort to retrieve it.

The sailors then hurried us along. Waves were pouring over the ship and I thought that was the reason for my difficulty in walking and my peculiar gait. Then I looked down and realised the heels had blown off my shoes and the stockings had been blown off my legs.

Finally, after what seemed an eternity, but can only have been a minute or so, we reached the open space leading to cabins and lounges. It was pandemonium. Half-clad people were streaming out of their cabins, many shoeless, as they had been lying down.

There seemed to be no-one in charge. We discovered later that the mast had struck the captain who was on the bridge above and knocked him out.

The first officer and two sailors had gone forward to drop anchor — and the three were killed as the front of the ship was blown away. The second officer was in mufti as he was going on leave and the passengers did not recognise him. Only the third officer was recognisable — and this was his first voyage.

Then the ship began to settle and as it did so, it tilted. The left-hand railings were in the air, with people who had been on that side clinging to the railings. Our side was tipping towards the water.

Sailors frantically lowered a lifeboat and helped us in. As they rowed feverishly to get us away from the doomed Innisfallen, another ship loomed up out of the mist. Someone on it threw us a rope but, as the Innisfallen continued to sink, it was creating a vortex and, when the sailors on the other ship saw this, they threw the rope loose and left us to our own devices.

Fortunately, we managed to pull away from the sinking ship and the sailors rowed us towards Liverpool. Another ship appeared and this took us on board and back to the quayside.

We were a sorry sight as we clustered on the quay —drenched and shivering with the cold, many in shirts and dresses and with no shoes.

Some passengers lived in Liverpool and wanted to go home at once, and we all wanted to get away from the quayside because we knew there was almost sure to be a second night’s bombing — there usually was in a blitz.

However, bureaucracy ruled, and the quayside officials refused to let us move — we had gone through Emigration so were technically on Irish soil and could not go into Liverpool until the Emigration Officer passed us back in again.

We stayed there in the open, many soaked, all freezing, for an hour until the Emigration Officer arrived. I have rarely seen such an angry man. He gave the quayside officials hell for their stupidity in keeping us there in a crowd when there was almost certain to be another night’s bombing, and said we were to be dispersed at once.

He had hardly finished talking when the air raid sirens sounded and enemy planes appeared overhead. We were rushed to the air raid shelters and the bombing began again. From the shelters, we could see the other side of the river with flames 20 or 30 feet high and buildings collapsing.

We stayed there until 3am, when the bombing stopped and the planes left. We were then told there was a ship at the quayside, provisioned for passengers, and we could spend the rest of the night there. The next morning, senior B&I officials. told us we could have train tickets to anywhere in England, but would not give even sixpence in cash to anyone — not even the train fare to those living in Liverpool.

I was so glad I had insisted on retrieving my handbag. Those few of us who had managed to keep our bags gave some money to the stranded Liverpudlians. I was given a rail ticket back to West Hartlepool — continuing to Ireland was out of the question The first city after leaving Liverpool was Manchester and, when our train stopped there, I thought I would stay the night in the Railway Hotel. However, when I tried to get up, I could not move from exhaustion and bruises, so I sank back in the seat.

The train continued to Leeds, where we all had to get off as it was not going any further. I didn’t mind as I had friends in the city. I went to Leeds Railway Hotel and rang my friends. One came and, on seeing how awful I looked, rang a doctor, who gave me a strong drug to put me to sleep.

(That night, Manchester was bombed and destroyed the hotel where I would have been staying).

The next morning, I continued on to West Hartlepool and went to stay with friends there. It was Christmas Eve.

After a few days, when offices reopened after the holiday, I booked to go to Ireland via Holyhead. I was very worried about my family as wartime restrictions had made it impossible for me to contact them and I thought they must be frightfully worried when I failed to turn up in Cork.

No phone calls or telegrams were allowed out of the UK and all letters were censored. Any mention of air raids would have been cut from them.

As it happened, no mention was made in the Irish papers of the Liverpool blitz and it was some time before the news reached West Hartlepool. When I told people there why I was back, they looked at me peculiarly. They did not like to call me a liar, but they thought I was making it up because they had heard nothing and could not believe they would not have done so.

****** Maureen Curtis Black went on to live an extraordinary life (see panel above). After a career as a teacher in England, she returned to Cork a widow and dedicated herself to fighting for women’s rights and social justice.

Her work led to her becoming the first Cork woman to receive the Freedom of the City, in 1993.

Maureen’s niece Anne Curtis, who sent her aunt’s remarkable account to the Holly Bough, said: “Like many Irishmen and women living and working in wartime England, Maureen never spoke of her ordeal.

“Our family only learnt about what she had gone through when a handwritten account of this experience was found as we were clearing out her papers after her death in 1999.” ****** PS: By a bizarre twist of fate, the captain of the Innisfallen that night in 1940, Waterford-born widower George Firth, had on board his teenage daughter Maura, who was returning home from boarding school in England for Christmas At the end of the 1940s, Maura married Paddy Hooper — a cousin of Maureen’s.