大象传媒

It鈥檚 surprising the thing that stirs memory. People, places, events cropping up randomly day by day which spark off recollections in one鈥檚 mind of times past.

It was September 2nd 2000 on the choir trip to Holy Island, Bamburgh, and Seahouses brought the memories back. Well it wasn鈥檛 actually the specific places but the sand dunes that did it. Stretch after stretch of sand dunes that made me remember childhood days which for so long had been locked up in the deeper parts of my mind.

Many people may not know this but I was raised as a Scot in the small village on the Firth of Forth called Gullane, five miles west of North Berwick and half a mile from a marvellous beach where we, as children spent most of our summers. The beach probably about a mile in length was bounded by huge sand dunes.

It was on that very beach and in amongst the dunes and high grasses that the real adventure began.

It was towards the end of World War II prior to the invasion of Europe when this stretch of the Firth of Forth and our beach was banned to civilians during weekday hours because the troops were rehearsing for something really big. I suspect, on reflection, that it may have been the D day landings. We could only use this beach on weekends and then only in certain areas.

This didn鈥檛 prevent a bunch of mischievous kids using their knowledge of the sand dunes to creep past the guards and the barbed wire to observe a truly marvellous panorama of military machines and naval vessels playing at what we thought were ferried back and forth from the beach in landing craft to the ships moored off the bay in what I now realise was a mock invasion exercise.

We would lie hidden and watch for hours at this marvellous scene. The thought never struck us as to what would have happened if we got caught!

Similarly in the village a large contingent of troops were billeted in the commandeered hotels and many more camped in bivouacs and dug-outs on the village green. It didn鈥檛 take us long to get to know some of the soldiers, indeed we got quite friendly with them and ran errands for then.

On a night when it got dark we would crawl under the barbed wire which surrounded the encampment and past the guards. We would make our way to a particular dug out or tent and the soldiers would give us money to go to the bakery to see if we could buy bread. We would creep back out again because the baker was at work in his bakery at night and used to sell us what he could. Once the errand was completed we would be rewarded with a handful of boiled sweets, which in those days was like manna from heaven to a bunch of wartime kids. Again we never stopped to think of the danger or the risk should we have been caught. I sometimes think now, years later that the authorities knew these security rules were being broken by a handful of youngsters, but just chose to ignore it. Nevertheless it was fun and we wouldn鈥檛 have changed it for the world.

Many things in my life remind me of things we did as children, particularly those of us who played out our childhood during the war years. Now and again we let them surface as fond held memories.

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