大象传媒

Born in 1929, I was 10 years old when I heard Neville Chamberlain, the Prime Minister, broadcasting the declaration of war with Germany. Gas masks and National Identity Cards were issued. I still have the card. I do not remember how soon after the declaration of war identity cards were issued, but I well remember that the use of gas masks became a regular class-room drill and that the ID numbers were used for National Insurance when it was introduced by the post-war Labour government. Like my army number (National Service 1948-49) and date of birth, it is indellibly printed in my memory.

However, the main purpose of this contribution is to record my recollection of the first air-raid of the war, which was in Scotland, over the Firth of Forth, on 16 October 1939. I then lived in South Queensferry and was on my way home from school, about lunch time, when the action began over the Forth, less than a mile away. I stopped to watch Junkers 88s etc. versus Spitfires, naval guns and shore artillery, but when the direction of the noise changed and I turned round and looked up to see little white clouds which had nothing to do with the weather, I thought I should get a move on, but not before watching a cluster of bombs falling from the belly of one of the bombers just before it was broken in two, presumably by naval gunnery.* A few minutes later I was called into the shelter of a house, followed by one or two employees of a local whisky distillery ("King George IV"), like me, on their way home for lunch, one of whom, a teenage girl in a state of shock, was offered a cigarette which she held with some difficulty in violently shaking hands. For a ten-year-old boy all of this was very interesting rather than alarming.

As far as I am aware, the local population did not suffer any casualties in that raid, but a number of sailors, whose ships were primary targets, lost their lives. The Forth Bridge, thought to be another target, was undamaged. Apart from the bomber I saw falling into the Forth, I do not know what the German losses were.

Later in the war, when I was about 12 or 13 years old, I was on a cycle run which started peacefully enough but ran into an air-raid not far from the Port Edgar naval base, near Queensferry, and was on my way home when I heard the thump of shrapnel landing in the grass verge a few feet away. At least, I presumed it was shrapnel but I did not stop to investigate, thinking it safer to increase my distance from naval targets, and besides there was nowhere to shelter. Shrapnel was a collector's item for boys, but not on that occasion.

None of those boyhood experiences was remotely frightening, but the plight of others was brought into focus with the arrival of refugee children from Czechoslovakia (one of them was called Jesus) and the sound of waves of German bombers from Norway crossing the Scottish east coast at night on their way to Clydebank. As one grew older and read newspaper reports, the full horror of total war entered one's consciousness in terms of massive bombing raids, military defeats, aircraft losses and the sinking of colossal tonnages of merchant and naval ships (the crew of the battleship HMS Hood included local seamen). Of course it was not until the war in Europe ended or was near its end that one saw, at the age of 15 or 16, the newsreels of the concentration camps and their inmates, which were watched in stunned and silent horror. Another lasting image of the war, which does not come from a newsreel, is of a young man in hospital blues, a former prisoner-of-war returned from the Far East, looking old and very frail, walking home during a spot of sick leave.

Unlike those of other contributors, these recollections are of a boyhood scarcely touched by the war; but a consequence of the war was National Service in a Scottish infantry regiment, although that was an absolute breeze compared with the wartime service of older members of my generation, some of whom were among my instructors.

*Postscript
After submitting this report, I was told by my younger brother that he had a closer and frightening view of the event, being on the shore, near the harbour, taking a day off school, that the bomber had in fact been shot down by a Spitfire in hot pursuit, and that the close proximity of all this was enough to send him running for home as fast as his little legs could carry him.

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