大象传媒

I was three years old when the war broke out. My earliest childhood memories are of being woken by my mother in the middle of the night, bundled into my siren suit and carried out to the flat-roofed, concrete shelter which was at the bottom of the green behind our close at 40 Mount Pleasant Street.
We shared the shelter with ten or twelve other neighbours.
I vividly remember my first 'whistling' bomb. Whistling bombs were intended to demoralize the civilian population. As the bombs came lower and lower, the whistles got louder and louder. A teen aged neighbour sharing the shelter kept darting outside and returning with the gloomy prediction that "this one is coming down on our heads". In fact it destroyed two houses on Wallace Street on the other side of the dam about a half mile away. I am not sure that this raid was part of what became known as the Greenock Blitz or another smaller raid.
My father was in the National Fire Service headquartered in the old fire station on Dalrymple Street. He was always on duty during the times of the various bomb attacks. He sometimes would disappear for days at a time. I recall one occasion when my mother was frantic as she had not heard from my father for over a week. He had taken a fire engine and crew to London to help fight the fires resulting from one of the London Blitzes. One day my father came home and told my mother to pack up and get out of town that night. We climbed up to somewhere above the Peat Road and stayed the night in some sort or shelter. In retrospect, I wonder if somehow the NFS had some advance warning that Greenock was going to be a major target on the night of May 6th 1941.
The next morning, we returned to Mount Pleasant Street. A pall of smoke and flame covered the town.. We packed a few things and set off with my mother pushing my infant brother in a baby carriage and me walking at her side. We walked fifteen miles past Largs to Fairlie where a kindly lady took us in for a few days.
One other vivid recollection occured, I think, about the same time as the Greenock Blitz. I was a pupil at Finnart School and we had to determine from our parents and advise our teachers whether, in the event of an air raid alarm, we would run for home or stay in the shelter at the school. My instructions were to run like blazes for home. One day the sirens went off in the middle of the day. I ran for home and I can still see my mother racing down the Mount Pleasant Street hill, grabbing my arm and racing me into the shelter. A story circulated in the town that a Nazi fighter plane had strafed the town that day and that a young boy had been killed.
People of my age had their early childhood dominated by the war. We are most thankful that our children did not have to face the same experiences.

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