大象传媒

This story has been submitted to the People's War website by Liz Andrew of the Lancshomeguard on behalf of Bill J Henderson and added to the site with his permission.

I was aged ten in 1942 and we lived in Milton, Dunbartonshire on the River Clyde. Our school had been taken over by an Infantry regiment and there was a Bofors gun on the side of the hill next to our house. Their targets were the German planes that used to come over to bomb John Brown's shipyards and the oil terminal half way up the Clyde.

Lads like myself used to earn pennies running up and down doing errands for the soldiers. We'd buy them papers and cigarettes - you could earn a shilling a week. And the soldiers were happy to explain to us how the guns worked. They would use the twin Vickers machine guns to work out the range of the bombers. One night it was about 9 or 10 o clock and I'd just finished running them a message when the alarm came on the landline telephone. The planes were coming over. Soon after they were in plain view. I got behind the machine gun and had the first shot at them -I didn't hit them - but I scared them!!!

My dad was a farmworker and we lived in a tied cottage at the bottom of the hill and I remember during 1940 and 1941 being underground in our Anderson shelter night after night. We had beds and everyting down there. One night two incendiary bombs came through the roof of our house. You could see the house from the shelter and we actually saw one bomb had landed on the windowsill - it was about 24 - 30 inches long and about 2 -3 inches in diameter and the heat was so intense that it melted the glass in the window. I remember people shouting and screaming and bawling and cursing - but for us, at our age, it was just a great adventure!! Afterwards we rigged up a tarpaulin over the roof and carried on.

We were immortal - it was fun. We would watch the dogfights in the sky when German planes came over to do daylight reconnaissance.We used to pick up shrapnel and shell cases from the machine guns on the aircraft. I remember once my brother and sister and I found an unexploded bomb. It was about 5 foot long, full of high expolsives and half sunk into the ground. We were very pleased with it. It was ours, we had found it and it was our souvenir so we tied an old clothes line round it to haul it out of the ground. But then the Bomb disposal man arrived - It scared the living daylights out of him and he gave me a good kicking!!

After the Battle of Britian it quietened down and apart from rationing the war almost ceased to exist for us though most families had somebody in uniform or on war work.

I remember VE day. By then we lived at Jamestown near Balloch. The farmer built a great big bonfire. All the lights were on, all the kids went mad and all the adults got drunk! I was fourteen and a half by then and had just left school ..and was not old enough to drink myself!!

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