You’re an 11-year old boy living in Liverpool, England in September, 1939. You’re going about your business and listening closely to the radio. When on Sept. 3, you get the news: England declares a state of war with Germany.

“We have a clear conscience, we have done all that any country could do to establish peace. The situation in which no word given by Germany’s ruler could be trusted, and no people or country could feel themselves safe has become intolerable ... Now may God bless you all. May He defend the right. For it is evil things that we shall be fighting against – brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression and persecution – and against them I am certain that the right will prevail,” ~ British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain.

Brian Kennelly was that boy crowded around the radio to listen to the all-important broadcasting of a declaration of war.

“I heard Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain speak on the radio on that Sunday, Sept. 3 announcing we were now in a state of war with Germany,” says Kennelly. “As a child, it was an adventure, it was something exciting. You never thought about people getting killed.”

The scenes which overtook his hometown of Liverpool were to him, exciting, but to many others, life took on a different tone. Because of the patriotism of many men and women, the atmosphere of the town changed during the war years, Kennelly mentions. The pubs, bars and dance halls were crowded with soldiers and sailors who were looking for a good time; they were unsure if they would be alive in the coming weeks.

“I was living with my parents and I had four sisters, and they were all at home. I was the youngest of the family at 11, and they treated us as adults, that we understood what was going on,” he says. “We had an air-raid shelter built into the house ... the government sent in workers to put in steel posts and corrugated iron to support the roof in case the house collapsed on top of it.”

The constant, nightly air-raids sometimes lasted eight hours, starting in the evening and lasting all night. Kennelly’s father worked at a theatre in Birkenhead, across the river from Liverpool. The theatre wouldn’t close until 11 p.m., so his father would take an underground train under the river, but from downtown Liverpool, he had to walk home. “He had a steel helmet and carried a gas mask, and if he heard bombs coming down or shrapnel raining, he’d duck into a doorway shelter. Then he’d carry on walking. My mother used to be worried to death that dad wouldn’t make it home some nights.”

War became a part of life for Kennelly, who eventually joined the Merchant Navy when he became of age. But up until that point, he had to deal daily with the hardships of war. To him, it was just something you coped with.

“People got killed -- your neighbours, kids you went to school with got killed in an air-raid. They didn’t send around counsellors to do grief counselling, you just accepted this as part of life,” he says. “This is day-to-day living in those days, and you coped, and that’s the way it was.”

Aside from the dreary moments, growing up as a young boy in wartime, Kennelly says the excitement of war moved him, and as a young patriot, he joined the sea cadets. “I was afraid that the war might end before I could get into it, and I was very anxious to be involved. I was patriotic – I wanted to fight for my country,” he says. “It was an adventure I thought I was missing out on.”

It wasn’t just Kennelly with this sentiment either. He says most boys his age belonged to the air, sea or army cadets.

Kennelly still had to attend school, though. With the school only five or six blocks from his residence, he says they never worried much about air raids during the day, but some nights he would enjoy air raids because his geography teacher would forgive him for not completing his homework if there had been an air raid the night before. “People are not getting any sleep, and yet you have to function the next day. I had to go to school, and the war workers would have to do their work.”

He joined the Merchant Navy in 1945 when he was just 16 – when his father finally let him. At this point, there was only six months left in WWII, and his wartime experience didn’t last long. He said the German U-Boat menace had been pretty well beat. The boats still travelled in convoys for protection, and no war-action was seen by Kennelly, which in retrospect he says he is partly thankful for.