大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War site by Allan Price on behalf of Moira Lang and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

When I was three or four years old I remember being taken out to the air raid shelter in our back garden wearing my siren suit. My dad was a builder and had built the shelter himself.

Being so young I remember it being fun to be woken in the middle of the night, to spend some hours singing songs with my parents and my brother.

One night that sticks in my memory is when my dad was carrying me down the the shelter as usual. We stopped and looked up at the sky. The cloud and smoke on the horizon was glowing red and orange in the distance, and we could see huge flames burning in the sky.

My dad said to me that it must be Clydebank that was on fire.

My dad was also in the Home Guard during the war. He told me that one night, when he was on his usual patrol with another man, he noticed a floating bomb falling slowly towards the first aid post where he was stationed.

Since the other man was carrying a gun he shouted "shoot the bomb, shoot the bomb". But the other man's gun wasn't loaded.

The bomb landed on the hospital and killed a lot of people. When the bomb exploded he threw hiself down and covered the back of his head with his hands. My father escaped with just a shrapnel wound in the back of his hand. When he got home that night my mother was standing waiting for him in the garden in her nightgown.

There were many times I remember being evacuated from our home due to unexploded bombs. We lived close to the Abbot's Inch air base, which is now Glasgow Airport.

漏 Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.