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Sally and Harry Harrick — 12th July, 2005

Harry: I was the eldest of five children and it was March, 1941, when we were bombed out. On the 13th of March, that was the Thursday, in 1941, I had been out and the sirens had gone for the alert and the planes had started coming over and the ack ack had opened up on them and at that we all went out, we stayed in a typical Glasgow tenement, red sandstone, four storeys high and, on each flat, there was two flats with double rooms, one with a single flat and there was a good number of people there. But, on the occasion of every alert, we went downstairs to, it wasn’t a blood relationship, it was an aunt and uncle thing, and we went down to a lady on the second floor for self preservation, simply because the thinking was then, the higher you were up, the longer you had to fall. So, we were down, and it would be about 11.00 o’clock at night, and mum had said to me ‘go upstairs, go into the cupboard’, because my youngest sister, who was just 19 months, was ill, and there was some medicine, and she described the medicine, and I had gone upstairs with the torch, most families had torches because of the blackout, and I had gone to the cupboard, no lights on of course, and I had looked out of the window and I saw the near horizon with just a tremendous hell of fire and flame, later I learned that that was Clydebank on the 13th of March, so I came down with the medicine and the ‘all clear’ went and, as always, being children, remember I was just coming up for my 11th birthday, we searched the streets to get fragments of the anti aircraft shells and you just collected them and the bigger the piece you had, you were the winner. So, when on the 14th, that was the Friday, the same thing happened, the sirens went, and we went downstairs, and it would be about an hour later, and I was sitting in a chair adjacent to a wall, and suddenly there was — to this day I don’t remember a bang or anything — all I remember is a tremendous pressure in my chest and getting forced against the wall, and the next thing, a surgeon sucking, and I was lifted, as if someone had lifted me, thrown onto the floor, face down, in front of the fire, and, after all that confusion, we gathered out on the street, and it was an ARP Warden there, that was Anti Aircraft Precautions or something, I can’t remember now, they were all volunteers, they had a uniform with ARP on it, they gathered all the people from round about the streets and they took us up to the local primary school which was about 400 yards away and we spent the night there till dawn, and a Glasgow corporation double decker bus started to drive in and empty the school. This, I later learned, we were all distributed round surrounding schools and slept in gymnasiums for about six or seven days and we had meals came in with big milk churns, with porridge, bread and margarine, and tea and basically that was it. Eventually, we were settled in a house, still in Maryhill in Glasgow, we were in the perimeter of the city, and adjacent to fields and we were billeted there with a professional couple. The wife, she was a teacher of Art in the schools and the husband was a manager in a local engineering works. I learnt this later, of course. We spent about six weeks there, and then we got another posting or another lodgement in an empty house, again it was still in Maryhill, but had been vacated by the couple who had gone down to the coast to escape the bombing. They had apparently had been an elderly couple who had family down in Ayrshire so that’s where they stayed. All this I learnt later, of course. Being only 11 years old, only noise and flames interested me really. But that bomb, and it was a parachute bomb, that is a bomb that has a parachute, it doesn’t float but it retards the descent and speed of the bomb, again I learnt this much later in life, when it hits the ground it doesn’t dig a hole for itself, but the force is lateral, again I learnt this later. As I said, there was five of us in the family, but the immediate family around are shown here — my Aunt Jean, with her husband had six children, my Aunt Julia, her husband, two children, my Uncle John, he had two children and my maternal grandparents, they all stayed within three streets of each other, as it was in those days. You went to school, you went to the same church, same emotions, the same aims in life and we were all bombed out but Uncle John and Aunt Annie and their daughter, Matild, in that one bomb, it landed, it was just a three storey, it landed in a three storey, Glasgow tenement, and a tenement at that time was what you called closes, two closes in an ‘L’ shape, but they had just two closes and one close and, John Connelly, he was in the back room and his mum and dad and sisters were in the front room and they were killed and that bomb, they have got it in the library, it’s a good few years ago, killed 107 people. That bomb killed 107 people, that one bomb. And it was a soldier, home on leave in uniform, they found his uniformed corpse, they never found his head. I don’t know how many were killed — I’ve read the books certainly but never totted it up. It doesn’t stick in my mind — there are quite a few books. But, one of the points that struck me, it was years later, we were talking about it one Christmas or New Year, the family had gathered so it was something like that, was my sister, she seems to have taken an interest rather than me, and she knew all the aunts and uncles and all the scandals and all that, and I don’t know how it came up but I said to her ‘do you remember the name of the family that we were lodged with, you know the Art Teacher and her husband’ and she said ‘Mr and Mrs. Chalmers’ and there it came out that we were there about maybe six to eight weeks and she would get an allowance from the Government for putting up with us. She saved it up and gave it to my mum. They didn’t have any family and she was an Art Teacher and she draughted an appeal and sent it to one of the evening newspapers in Glasgow, the Evening Citizen, and she drew my mum and the rest of the family, my mum’s sitting and she’s got Agnes, who was only 19 months old on her knee, and we were all gathered around and that was headed the plea for anyone who could assist with any of these families that had lost their homes. I remember that before we came up here, that’s almost 30 years ago now, I went down to the Mitchell Library, which is a famous institution in Glasgow, and got the papers and went back to see if I could find it, but, as I didn’t know when it was published, I couldn’t find it. But, it was one sort of thought, you know, if we had that portrait, but this has stuck with me that this money was given to my mum.

Oh, yes, as I said, I went to, it was only a matter of about three miles, and it was an undamaged part of the city that we lodged in, and I spent about, it must have been eight or nine months, because I went back to primary school then, before we got a permanent lodging from Glasgow Corporation as it then was, then my life continued then. I didn’t get to go back to the same primary school.

Sally: Yes, I was only five. I went to primary school just as the war started. The thing I remember was that when the sirens went you got the next day off school! So I quite liked that! It depended when the sirens went off — I can’t remember the demarcation line but you would get the morning off school if the sirens went at a certain time, if it was early evening you would get a night’s sleep or something like that and if it went after something like 11.00 o’clock at night, then, that was it, a day off school. We enjoyed that! I can remember praying but I can’t remember which way I prayed — I hadn’t decided! I had a Mickey Mouse gas mask, I remember it. I remember it very much because, as I say, I was born in 1934 so I would just be five and starting school and what I remember was they had what they called Anderson Shelters, this is what they had in a house with a garden, and my aunt had it and she stayed, what, quarter of an hour away, and I can always remember my father putting me on his back, piggy back, to go up to the shelter and we spent there, and I remember the Clydebank Blitz because my father and my uncle stood in their stair and they could see right over to Clydebank and I remember that quite clearly.

Harry: My father was an engineer in John Brown’s Shipyards on the Clyde and they were doing twelve hour shifts and, if I remember rightly, a couple of days after he was out of the house where we were lodged and going back to work. Men were working when it (Clydebank) was bombed.

Sally: Yes, my father worked at Rolls Royce making aeroplane engines. The one thing I do remember is the day the war started. My father was called up because he was in the Territorials and I remember he had on his kilt and I remember crying, not wanting him to go away, but, because he was a fitter he got deferred to make aeroplanes. I always remember that.

Harry: My dad fought in the first world war, he was a sergeant in the machine gun corps. He was older and had fought in the first world war. He was born on August, 12th, 1892. He was the youngest of eight or nine of a family.

Sally: You had your ration book and you were allowed so much, I think it was an egg a week or something like that. That and so much butter, two ounce of butter. It was very little, I can imagine my mum and dad being concerned, but as I remember thinking, you can only take so much margarine, you were told to spread it thinly, my mum would only put out so much, and, what we called tea, you know, at 5 o’clock at night, there were no school meals then either, you came home for lunch, most of the primary schools were close so you were able to come home. But the main constituent, my mum had been in service, and she had been to college for domestic service, so she was well skilled at managing domestic wise, but the main thing was porridge, six days a week for breakfast and invariably, on a Sunday, it would be broth and bread, you always got broth, made with a piece of mutton, what we call flank mutton, and a couple of nat bones to make up the stock, with barley and pulses, invariably dried pulses, barley and peas and carrot and, in fact, I had to go for the vegetables for the broth on a Saturday night in Maryhill, the shop closed at 8 o’clock and between half past seven and five to eight, you went in and got, it cost you pennies, and it was enough to make a pot of broth, and it would be a leek, some carrot, a few tufts of parsley and a bit of turnip and that would be the constituents plus the broth and that was soaked overnight with some lentils in it as well.

I also remember that in 1942 I had appendix so I was taken to the hospital and most of my dad’s friends were in the army so they got special rations like chocolate but we didn’t ever have that, and they brought me in two Mars Bars and I never saw them — the nurses kept them and I’ve remembered that to this day! I’ve remembered that to this day, and that’s 65 years ago. I only learned of that when I came out of the hospital and they said ‘did you enjoy your Mars Bars?’ and I said ‘I never got any Mars Bars’. That’s stuck with me for 65 years. I think it did us good in a sense as we were all nice and slim, I mean we were never starved but we didn’t have any cakes or fancy things like crisps, you know.

Sally: Where we lived and where Harry lived, everyone knew each other and they were all very friendly. If someone was ill they would see what they could do or if someone was short of eggs like that, they would see what they could do. It was a recognised procedure, that my dad, he was a band master and travelled round the parks with the band, on the hogmanay night he would play a guid new year and our back tenement was ‘L’ shaped again and everyone waited until he had played it and then they would shout ‘happy new year’. You know, to get a drink of whisky at new year it was almost impossible, it was very short, they saved it up to have a drink at new year, I just remember them talking about it. He played a guid new year then lots of things, he played a lot of things, he was a very good musician.

Harry: It was a Sunday morning when war broke out. It was a two room apartment and I was in what you called the bedroom with the big bay window and we had a radio and we knew the war had started but I remember looking out the window and it would be about 11 o’clock and a newspaper vendor came up, a wee, fat man came up, and he had a big, white, linen or something like that, and printed on it was two words ‘War Declared’ and he stood with the paper, you see it in the U.S. films, the vendors standing and shouting ‘War Declared, War Declared’ and that was a Sunday morning.

Harry: I remember the rag and bone man and the banana man that used to come round, bananas were unavailable during the war, and he had a big, wicker basket, square handled, and he was enormous and I knew him, he was very tall and bulbous shaped, and he used to come round with this on his arm and he used to come round to the various back yards over walls or railings and he used to shout ‘hey bananas, hey bananas, hey bananas’ that was his call. And the rag and bone men, they were kept men, they sold compressed coal dust in brickets, they would come down and they would normally rattle a couple of tin plates or something in one hand, they would use that as a sort of clappers or something and they were frequent visitors.

Sally: Where I lived there was a marshalling yard for coal opposite and occasionally another excitement would be when the horse would run away, you know. And the owner would be chasing the horse, a big, huge, Clydesdale horse. Just next to my tenement, there was a smiddy for shoeing the horses, where the tram cars were, there was a farrier for shoeing the horses. I remember that, when you start talking, you remember things.

Harry: Adjacent to us, was Maryhill annexe which is now closed down. It’s a shopping precinct now and I remember my granddad taking me down there, pre war, and there were various celebrations for battles etc. and the troops would be assembled and do a little demonstration march and that, and the pipe band would be there and it was open to the public. I remember being fascinated by the uniform and the man in the guard box standing there with his rifle and spats and everything. This impressed me most!

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