大象传媒

Approaching fourteen, registered for the new school year on Friday, after a happy holiday in Braemar. Almost feeling happy on Sunday too - war declared, so no school on Monday. Not nearly so happy on the first night time air raid warning siren in Aberdeen. Younger brother and I sitting on our Mum and Dad's beds, with anxious hollow feelings in our tums. But it passed. Other warnings came, but no sound of planes, bombs or guns.

It's a wonderful war! Not much real war at first. No school for several months, then afternoons only at Gordon's. No girls then, so they were a different and latently interesting species. Central, across the road, turned in to a hospital, took the morning shift. It's a wonderful winter! Cold. Freezing. The Dee frozen over, full of pack ice. So many mornings spent skating at the Duthie Park, weekends at Cults.

In periods of warnings without activity we began to sleep through Moaning Minie's sirens. That didn't last. One bang, one ack-ack shell-fire or bomb burst and we wakened at the first siren's call, retreating to the cellar. Variations came with the thrumming sound of hosts of german bombers flying overhead, engines detuned to confuse the sound location defences. No bombs, and the sounds fading! But the sonds came back, with the planes heading back to their subjugated homes, after dropping their cargoes on Glasgow and the Clyde.

But we did get the occasional attack, buildings destroyed, people killed, when they found no ships to drop them on. Such was the one reported by Ernest Bowie. We heard a commotion and looked out the kitchen window. A Heinkel flew low over East Saint Nicholas Churchyard. followed by two fire-spitting Hurricanes**. We collected handfuls of empty cartridge cases; took our bikes out later to see the wreckage but couldn't get near. Dad disappeared in the afternoon, helping with jaw and facial injuries at Woolmanhill and didn't return till next morning. That bomb dropped on Hall Russels shipyard canteen at lunch time was a lucky one for Gerry, but a horrific misery for many an Aberdeendonian.
**(I remember them as Hurricanes, but have read elsewhere that they were Spitfires)

A bigger raid caused considerable damage and many casualties. A bomb nearer to us sounded as if it might have been the school. A near thing, but no. A fairly small crater just off centre in the quadrangle at the front of the college seemed to be about all there was, next morning. But out the back, away from the bomb, a large number of the windows were shattered. Blast!

A more direct experience of the enemy was the crumpled piece of wreckage given to us, kept proudly under my brother's bed. It had canvas trim round one edge with bloodstains. Kids are cruel creatures, but not always. Walking by the harbour one day, an RAF launch came to tie up. On the deck stood a German officer, looking spruce, unconcerned and erect in a black uniform. He was smoking, probably a NAAFI cigarette. No one was looking at or by him, but at his feet lay a shrouded body. That was real, not kid's imagining.

Real too was the Sunday, at the time when the billboards were showing the daily German losses in the Battle of Britain, when a group of us were walking on top of a small hill. We were a school party, slleeping in a farmyard barn, clearing and burning brushwood from a felled forest north of Alford. Low and out of nowhere came a plane. No, not a plane. A bloody Heinkel. We didn't wave to the pilot, whom we could see clearly in his cockpit. Would they? No, they didn't shoot. Perhaps they were having an afternoon stroll like us; or, more probably, saving their ammo for a more important target.

So that was youth.

Shortly after the war in the East, I found myself in Emden, near Hamburg. That was reality again. A shattered ruined place that once was. Rubble, some people, no buildings left, anywhere. Two or three structures did stand, proudly in defeat. Concrete flak towers.

Later again, much later, two of us on a business trip went for a beer, in a dark looking pub by the river in Frankfurt. The Publican could speak English in a Germanic accent. He knew England and had lived in Amsted Garten Soborb. He was perhaps one of those pre-war German spies. We didn't ask. He was big,
very big, and probably SS.

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