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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 was only at school for one year during the war - I started school during the final year. There are lots of differences between schools now and during the war. We didn’t have a school uniform, for example and just wore our ordinary clothes. I remember we did have a peaked school cap that I wore every day.

We also got free milk at school. It came in glass bottles with cardboard tops that you’d push down and we’d drink the milk with a straw. I liked this as a child and would bring a piece and jam from home for my break. The school had a canteen and for dinner we’d have soup, soup and more soup! Everybody ate lots of soup during the war.

The desks were quite different from today. My desk was a sloping desk with a lid I could lift up and store my books under. All the desks had inkwells too.

In the playground we played skittles, football and marbles. The boys would make paper planes and kites and the girls played skipping and beds (hopscotch).

We studied lots of different subjects in school. Us boys even did sewing! That was actually quite good — at least we knew how to darn our own socks if we were stuck. But my favourite subject of all of them was science.

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