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‘The War started in 1939 and in 1939 I was 14. I was in the Borders, not in Galashiels. 1939 I was in a place called Mordington, which is right on the Border. Originally I came down to say in Buckholm, but I was going to school in Duns. War was actually declared when I was in here — they interrupted a church service on a Sunday to say that we were at war, which was surprising. It sort of came very suddenly, but we could see we were going to have to, if we were to have peace.

The War affected everything we did. My father worked for the Post Office. He was in charge of the Border area and he said right away that all area engineers had to go and stay where they were in charge. That meant moving about, not staying in the one place in case of invasion. Down here, the airodrome was East Fortune, it was one of the last stations to be equipped with radar.

You always did drills for gas masks. The rationing was very a peculiar thing, I remember in Edinburgh being registered for meat with a butcher, in the High Street, and that was a very poor area, and they didn’t say to the Butcher, well, you’ll only get rid of certain cuts of meat. You could get better cuts of meat if you had the money.

I think the only thing I ever found tight was sugar — I took sugar in my tea at the time. I’ve still got my ration book somewhere. But people seemed to work out the rations pretty well. Clothing rations were peculiar too — if you needed clothing there was always something you could find.

It’s a sorry thing to say, but we lost more aircraft in training than we did in active service. There was always accidents, and lots of training was done overseas. Lots of people went away to Canada or the United States for training, but they never finished it — just one of those things.

I read papers daily during the War. It was one of the first things you did, you read the papers. I remember VE day — I was in Galashiels. There were parades down Channel Street, and the Poles were there and the occasional Italians. The Italian prisoners were at St Boswells and nobody bothered about them, and some of them worked round about here.

Rationing continued after the War but there were no real hardships — there was plenty of work going. There were 100s of jobs coming on, particularly industry and you didn’t have the unemployment then’.

(Collected by SMC Museums)

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