大象传媒

Father came back to stay with us, because he had failed the medical call-up for the war through having been forced to take part in a simulated gas attack during his medical. That finished his chances of ever being in uniform for the duration of the war. Father did his share of fire-watching at night in our area, most of it spent sitting on our front door step drinking tea. He earned the name 鈥楧addy suck suck鈥�, because of all the mugs of tea he drank during the long, pitch-black nights. In the morning, there were a good few empty mugs just inside the doorway.

At the faintest drone of an aircraft, he would haul us all out of bed, even before the siren alarm started to wail. We would be down in the shelter at the bottom of our garden : it was a cold, damp, dreary lean-to with a corrugated tin roof covered by two feet of earth and banked with mud, stones and anything we could find that wouldn鈥檛 blow away. Once, while being carried into the shelter, I struck my head on the tin opening. This started a terrible quarrel between my parents, which I shall never forget. Mother did not ever want us to go into the shelter, because she thought there was more protection for us in a cupboard under the stairs, 鈥渟hould bombs fall鈥�.

One dark night with not a star in the sky, we were toppled almost out of our beds by a bomb that had been dropped in a poppy field on the edge of the housing scheme where we lived. Apparently the bomb was meant for the double-deck bus that ran parallel to the field. The bus had turned at the circle on the road, and was missed by the bomb. After that incident, the bus鈥檚 headlamps were almost blacked out, until they looked like faded pearls looming out at us in the night.

Mother took us down to see where the bomb had landed. I had never seen such destruction and can feel the terror yet. I looked down into what seemed a huge crater, and what remains in my memory today is that there were poppies scattered around the edges, still intact as if they had been thrown in like flowers at a funeral. I was glad of the security of my mother鈥檚 hand. I cried all the way home and most of the dark night.

Maureen Black via Dundee Central Library

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