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I was living in North East Scotland when the war began. At first I was at school, and then went on to university at Aberdeen. It was a quiet part of the country with very few targets to attract the German bombers, and at first the main way we were affected was by the arrival of the people who were evacuated to the country from cities like Dundee. My two brothers were both in the forces. My elder brother was in the army, but was in England for most of the war though he took part in the D Day landings. My younger brother was in the Merchant Navy, working on ships in the Atlantic bringing in supplies from America. He was torpedoed twice: both ships were sunk and he lost everything he had — but was lucky enough to get home safely. No one of my family was killed in the war but my cousin was very lucky. He was serving in the battleship Royal Oak early in the war when she was torpedoed at night in Scapa Flow and sank very quickly with terrible casualties. But my cousin was celebrating his birthday and was up on deck reading his birthday mail. He was several hours in the water but he survived.

Our life in school was hardly affected at all by the war, though I can remember that we practised getting out of the building and going to the neighbouring houses if a bomb hit the school. I can remember we had one girl whose father was in the navy and who seemed to come to school every day with some new tale of the horrendous dangers all around us — the threat of invasion and that sort of thing. We saw nothing of the Battle of Britain in 1940 though a few bombs were dropped on Aberdeen. I was out for a walk one day when 2 bombs fell on the hospital. I was terrified as I had never been before, though fortunately they did very little damage. I remember too that the same night a bomb fell on the factory in the centre of the city and started a huge fire — one of the other medical students in the year above me received the George Cross for his work there. As university students we did fire watching at night, which meant sleeping in the offices or parts of the university building which were empty at night, to give the alarm if any fires were started.

Also of course during the long vacs we used to go harvesting. I was, in fact a land girl, with the proper khaki dungarees they wore, and that, in fact, was great fun. We had a long vac of 2 or 3 months or more and all the Scottish universities joined together to send students to help with the harvest. One year the harvest was rather late so the farmer’s wife put us all on to pruning raspberries — so if you ever want your raspberries pruned you know where to come! But I remember the idyllic summers of lovely weather, when we were all up and at work before 8 in the morning in the fields. At that time the farms still used horses and the farm workers would come out with these great enormous horses and put the into their carts and we would go out to the fields with them. That of course was after the stooking had been done. I don’t know if anyone knows about stooking nowadays. The binder would throw the sheaves of corn out behind it, and you would pick up a sheaf under each arm and plonk them down quite firmly and lean them against each other, and to make a proper stook you would have 3 or 4 of these sheaves on each side. You would leave them there to dry and when they were dry they’d be thrown up onto the cart and one of the farm workers would stand there on the cart and arrange them. We had pitchforks and helped to throw the corn up. We didn’t work with the horses but there were some tractors too, and they taught us how to drive a tractor. A great honour.

Another summer we went to a small village in the borders near Melrose. That was a very, very wet year and we couldn’t do much harvesting. When we went out in the morning to gather the sheaves they were soaking wet — we were drenched from chin to toe, and had to remain like that for most of the day. There must have been about a dozen of us, men and women, staying in a farmhouse together and when it was too wet to work the men taught us girls to play poker, and all my earnings vanished before I had even touched them! There were Italian prisoners of war working on the land too — I think they had a sort of mulberry coloured uniform but they didn’t impinge on us much.

There was food rationing of course, but we always had enough to eat, though there were very unpleasant things like dried eggs and dried milk. When I was harvesting once, we girls were taking it in turns to cook and one day we were going to have bacon and dried egg made up into a sort of omelette. The bacon was cooked first, but when the dried egg was put into the pan it began to behave in the most extraordinary fashion. It began to foam, rose up and came over the sides of the pan. It turned out the girl who had been cook thee day before was tidy and had put the soap powder into an empty dried egg tin! In our part of the country we were quite lucky because as well as our normal meat rations, we were able to get venison, which was quite freely available, and that was a great help. In Aberdeen, too, we could always get fish which was very cheap in those days.

We all heard Churchill’s speeches on the wireless — and we heard Lord Haw-Haw too! My father used to listen and I think I heard Haw-Haw myself.

This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Lawrence Le Quesne of the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Shropshire CSV Action Desk on behalf of Win Watson and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

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