Page 21 - COBH EDITION 15th MARCH DIGITAL VERSION

Moyra lived in Liverpool as a teenager during the war and she has lots of stories from that
difficult time including some close calls. One night in particular, the air raid sirens sounded
but she didn’t have time to get to the shelter before the bombing started. She was sitting in
her cousins’ house when she heard a loud whistling sound and she instinctively knew it was a
bomb. She held her breath, closed her eyes and offered a prayer.
The bomb landed nearby, and the explosion blew in the doors and windows of her home and
Moyra was thrown from the chair as the house filled with soot and dust. It was a terrifying ex-
perience and those air raids became almost a nightly occurrence. She’s had many experiences
in her lifetime, both good and bad and I suspect she’s not finished yet.
She shares a birth day with some famous names and has outlived them all. People like the
singer Nat King Cole, Desmond Doss, the war hero, Eva Peron, Sir Edmund Hillary, the moun-
tain climber, Jon Pertwee the actor and Pierre Trudeau, the Canadian politician.
Life expectancy in 1919 was 53.5 years for men and 56 years for females but obviously,
Moyra wasn’t prepared to accept those figures and chose to ignore them.

Also, in 1919, Michael Keogh, an Irishman who had joined the German army, stopped an
angry mob of men from killing two right-wing political agents who were stirring up trouble
among two hundred soldiers. They were being badly beaten and some knives were being
drawn to finish them off when Keogh ordered his men to fire a few shots in the air to disperse
the crowd and pulled the two men to safety.
In 1930 in Nuremburg, Keogh recognized one of the agents he had saved, and it was the infa-
mous Adolf Hitler. So, if he hadn’t intervened, life would have been very different for millions
of people.

And Moyra wouldn’t have been blown off her chair in Liverpool.

Read more from Trevor on his blog at www.trevorlaffan.com