´óÏó´«Ã½

This story was submitted to the People's War site by Catherine Garvie, Learning Project Manager at ´óÏó´«Ã½ Scotland on behalf of the Greenock War Detectives project and has been added with their permission. The authors fully understand the site's terms and conditions.

I went to St John’s Primary School in Port Glasgow. We didn’t have a school uniform so we just wore whatever our mums decided we were to wear that day.

The one thing we always had, however, was our gas masks. We carried them around in a little box over the shoulder. Thankfully, we never had to wear our masks all the time, they were horrible. If you ever forgot your gas mask the teacher would send you home for it and it didn’t matter how far away you lived! My friend and I still laugh about that now. I never forgot mine.

A lot of male teachers were called up during the war and this had an impact on class sizes. Sometimes we’d find ourselves in huge classrooms because of the shortage of teachers. I had a lovely teacher in school. I thought he was an old man then, well he was too old to be called up to fight but probably not that old. He was a lovely Irish man and wasn’t too strict — he was a pussycat.

I only got the belt once in class. I had done something very naughty — I had a fight with a girl and I gave her a black eye. My teacher couldn’t keep his face straight when he was belting me. I think he thought it was so funny, this wee 9 year old giving another girl a black eye.

The classrooms themselves looked very different from the classrooms today. We had desks and chairs in two’s and inkwells in each desk. Filling the inkwells was a good job to have in the class. We only ever used a pen and ink to do our best writing in our good writing jotter, for all other writing we’d use a slate and slate pencil because of the shortage of paper. All the nice little girls had a wee sponge and a bottle of water to clean their slates but the boys used to just spit and use the sleeves of their jumpers.

I think I went home at lunchtime during school, most people did. Things weren’t like nowadays where children get picked up by car or get a bus to the door — some people had to walk quite long distances to school.

School didn’t do anything for VE Day but we had the next day off to celebrate. There were huge big parties — some in the street and some round the backs of the tenements. I lived in a tenement and there were 4 streets around us. Before the war iron railings divided them up but these were taken down so the metal could be used in the war effort. This left a great big open space and that’s where we celebrated. We were out all hours, singing and dancing.

© Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.