大象传媒

I am submitting this story on behalf of my friend, Mary Gardiner, who was born and brought up in Turriff, Buchan, in the north-east of Scotland. Mary is aware of the the 大象传媒's Rights and Responsibilities Policy and has agreed to her story being displayed under these conditions.

If I were to give this brief reminiscence a tile, it might be "From Possilpark to Hutcheon Park" that is from the urban streets of one of the poorest and meanest areas of North Glasgow to the open spaces of playing fields in rural Aberdeenshire, where even the poorest families were well-fed and lived a reasonably comfortable existence. That journey - from one world to another totally different - was made by our evacuees in the early days of September 1939.

To my friends and to me - school children ourselves - the impending arrival of other children from so very far away was an exciting event. We were told they would be- "different" was the word used- but nothing quite prepared us for those white-faced, scared-looking children who seemed so much younger than we were. Over the next few days we pieced together their disjointed fragments of what must have been a nightmare experience: a twelve and a half hour journey from Glasgow to Aberdeen and then on to the towns and villages of Aberdeenshire. Neither food nor water had been provided and what families had themselves taken from home was eaten befoe the trains left Glasgow. Small wonder that mothers and children were worn out and in tears and that the host families waiting the local church hall for 'their evacuees' were shocked by their appearance.

To interrupt these reminiscences briefly - Government reports on this first wave of evacuees, generally acknowledge that the enterprise was a failure. Mothers who travelled with their children found a way of life that was totally strange - no extended families at 'stair-heid' and close-mouth - and they soon began to drift back to homes and familiar surroundings. Those who did not accompany their children found that entrusting them to strangers was a far harder task than they had anticipated. They were too far away to visit regularly and when they did, they left, inevitably, unsettled, tearful children. Gradually, having their families at home became a greater priority than safety and the evacuees left us.

The second evacuation in the early Spring of 1940 profited from the acknowledged mistakes of the previous attempt. Certainly the children stayed longer and integrated more happily and their sojourn this time I thought, would provide my memory with interesting and amusing anecdotes. One evacuee who had gasped on sight of his future home - "It's jist a WEE toon" completely astonished presumably that people could live without tenements or trams, soon found that it had a picture house AND a chip shop. He was then prepared to give it a chance! Our local chip shop, however, didn't have what the evacuees called 'good' fish or even 'good chips.' Such derogatorey - and of course, completely wrong comments - could not be allowed to pass unanswered and many were the arguments and even fights about the adequacy or otherwise of our local amenities. Food was always a matter of contention. Fresh produce had nothing to recommend it. Why, for example, didn't we have tinned peas - much better and less of an effort than opening pea-pods from the garden? And eggs - we, the local children, found it hard to believe that some of the evacuees had seen only reconstituted egg and had no idea how to deal with the boiled variety. As for scrambled egg, that was strange inedible concoction.

The country-side was appreciated however, certainly by the boys; and the local farmers were remarkably tolerant of games of football in the fields.. In fact, this wasn't really a problem. At first sight of a lamb, let alone a bull, the boys made a dash for the barbed wire fence and scrambled though with much resulting damage to skin and trousers! It goes with saying really that the local boys had their fill of laughs, such is the cruelty of children.

I wish I could remember some of the comments made by the evacuees in their own local dialect - comments which had to be translated for our benefit, or perhaps not, remaining a mystery to us and a source of high amusement to them. They must have been just as bewildered by our Buchan Doric which as some of you know, can be pretty incomprehensible! What after all are 'loons' and 'quines?' Both sides took full advantage of this language difficulty. It was a wonderful ready-made excuse to be able to say :"We didnae hear ye say that" or "! didnae ken that wis whit ye meant."

The big break-through came when evacuees and local children elected to PLAY together. No longer were they aliens to us nor we country clod-hoppers to them and the early days of one-up-man-ship, even enmity, forgotten. Several eventually became pen-friends after their return to Glasgow, until the differing cultures claimed their own and what we once had in common was slowly put aside.

This account of 'our' evacuees has not turned out at all as I expected. Form the evacuees' point of view and with perhaps a Molly Weir to tell their tales, it might have been more light-hearted. In hindsight, of course, we who were the local children then, must inevitably view the whole experience on a much more traumatic scale and can acknowledge the lack of compassion we felt at the time for those children uprooted from the known and pushed into the unknown, and for the dismay and fear this well-intentioned exercise must have caused them.

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