A Berlin memory: Tullamore and the Third World War

I had arrived in London that summer hoping to make enough money to get through the next college term. My architectural skills were quickly snapped up by a firm engaged in the delivery of priority defence projects.

For the next two months I worked night and day and by the end of July was exhausted and badly needed a break. A friend had bought a second hand car so four of us decided to make an architectural trip to the Continent before returning to Ireland.

Copenhagen was our first stop as Scandinavian design was then very much the fashionable style for young architects. Its clean lines, painted brick and large areas of glass may be seen today in Paul Burke-Kennedy's offices for Irish Mist in Tullamore and Noel Heavey’s elegant church in Horseleap.

Our next destination was Berlin which was undergoing a massive post war reconstruction. We came down through Flensburg and crossed into East Germany, driving along an almost empty autobahn into the Western Sector . On Friday the 11th August, we booked into a youth hostel in Charlottenburg in the northern part of the city.

On Saturday morning we toured developments in the American zone. I found the new buildings around Zoo Station and Hansa Viertel a bit too glitzy and brash for my taste. I had just begun to appreciate the cool urbanism of Frank Gibney’s Bord na Móna housing and was more attuned to the unified street facades and classicism of Stalinalee which we viewed in the Soviet zone in the afternoon.

At breakfast on Sunday the 13th the manager of the hostel came around to our table to warn us not to take our car into the city as the traffic was in chaos. Nobody knew what was going on. The East Germans had started putting up fences and barriers and everywhere there were road signs saying ‘Umleitung’, meaning ‘Diversion’. These were of course the first works of the Wall which was later to become a more substantial structure and divide the city for the next twenty eight years.

By that afternoon, people were beginning to realise that these apparently unconnected and temporary barriers might become linked and permanent and were fleeing the Soviet zone in vast numbers. Many were crossing at Bernauer Strasse where the buildings in the East directly adjoined a road in the West. We went there and witnessed people jumping to freedom out of windows. I can never forget the sight of a baby being let down in a basket to waiting relatives below.

The atmosphere was getting more frightening by the hour, so we decided to get out of the city. Crossing back into West Germany along the now congested autobahn, at the Helmstedt/Marienborn checkpoint we saw American tanks lined up. The newspapers were saying that their advance into East Berlin was imminent. This would of course be resisted by the Russians and what might follow was unthinkable.

Stopping overnight in Dortmund we drove on to catch the ferry at Calais, arriving back in London on Thursday. International tension had reached new heights so we decided not to linger but to get back to ( hopefully) neutral Ireland. The next day we drove to Holyhead and landed in Dublin early on Saturday morning.

I said goodbye to my friends and took the train to Tullamore. Having first checked in with my worried uncle, I raced down to the ‘Murals’ to entertain my usual drinking companions with my adventures.

But none of the gang were there. No sign of Joe Kenny, Tom Horkan, Pat Carty, Denis Lumley or Billie Champ, all of whom I had wanted to impress with an account of the world shaking events I had witnessed.

The only customer in the bar was an elderly farmer from Rahan who was enjoying a quiet pint while his wife shopped in the grocery next door. He would have to do.

I invited myself into his company, and he politely accepted. We made small talk for a while and eventually I was offered the opportunity I longed for when he asked me if I had managed to get away anywhere nice for the summer.

‘ Now that you ask’ I said ‘ I’m just back from Berlin where I saw the Wall going up and maybe even the beginning of the Third World War’.

‘Well, you got the weather for it anyway’, he observed.