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I was born on 18th June 1936 at 19 Lilybank Road, Dundee, across from Glebeland School.

My memories of the war are still very clear. I remember every house received two canvas bags. They were 18" long x 6" wide and had to be filled with sand. My older sister and I were sent to a vacant piece of land at the top of Lilybank Road to fill them.

I remember a man cutting the railings that divided the boys and girls, and being sent to Church Halls for lessons so that we would not be in the school in case we were bombed. They put air-raid shelters in the playground and for drill we had to go in them. We each received a plain pencil to grip between our teeth in case bombs were dropped.

On 4th November 1940, two 1000 kg. bombs were dropped near where we lived. One dropped in Baxter Park and exploded - nobody was hurt — and it did little damage. The other one landed in Taybank Works but did not explode. This was a few yards from where we lived. We heard it coming down - we heard a thump - my mother fainted. We were not in the air-raid shelter.

Dundee was very lucky it did not receive many air raids although it had a submarine base. It had British, French, Polish, Norwegian and Dutch subs. I remember being sent down to the docks with a message for my father who worked in the shipyard as a rigger and seeing long, grey, huge pipes with a pipe sticking out the top of them (the conning tower).

A clear memory is going home early in war - I had a key to the house as mum and dad worked. I found a brown postcard with what I thought was Chinese writing on it and ran up to meet my mum, telling her about the postcard. It turned out to be Japanese. My Uncle Alex had been captured. We received three of these during the war. I still have them. He never came back. After the war a Japanese prisoner advertised for anybody wanting to know about my Uncle, Corporal Alexander Malcolm. My mother and her two sisters went to Edinburgh to meet the man. My mother came back very upset. She told my father that the Japanese had ordered my uncle to drive a lorry for them; he refused and was hung up by his thumbs in the sun. She was told that American bombers were trying to hit a target but they hit the camp and he was killed.

I remember at the later stages of the war a German submarine came up the Tay to Dundee and surrendered. There was a lot of excitement in the city then.
When war ended, the Submarine U-2326? was handed over to the French Navy. It later sank with all hands in the Bay of Biscay.

When war in Europe ended I was in a picture house and somebody had written on a slide on the lens that war in Europe had finished. I ran down to tell my mum and dad. Later we had a large bonfire right outside my mum’s parents' door. The heat was so fierce it blistered the paint.

On 21st October 2005 my oldest friends and I went to Normandy to visit the beaches and war graves. I had a mission to find the grave of a Dundee soldier buried in Ranville Cemetery, which I found and took some photographs. We also visited Bayeux, Omaha and German war graves, but I did not see thousands and thousands of stones or crosses or plaques - I saw rows and rows of young men who died in World War II.

David Stott via Dundee Central Library

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