大象传媒

About 8 o'clock on 5th November 1940 I was sitting in my bedroom with my mother and grandmother as we had heard the air raid sirens going, when I heard a whistling noise and then a big bang. I looked towards the window and the glass appeared to come into the house and then go back out again. I found out later that this was due to the blast from the bombs that had fallen just about 500 yards from our house. My father went out to see what had happened but my mother would not let me go with him.

One bomb demolished part of a tenement and killed some people, and another landed beside the cinema but no one was hurt, even though the place was full. Some people thought the German planes only dropped their bombs in a hurry to get back to their home base. Dundee had shipyards, munitions factories and jute mills that were making millions of sand bags plus the Tay rail bridge, but none of them seemed to be a target.

When they were building air raid shelters at the end of my street we used to go and sit with the night watchman by his fire in his hut and watch the searchlights in the sky looking for the bombers as they went over. You could tell they were German by the drone of their engines. I found out later that they were heading for Clydebank, which was very heavily bombed. In the day time we used to see the flying boats taking off from the River Tay, they were mostly Catalinas and sometimes Sunderlands.

When the schools all closed we used to go in small groups to different parents' houses to get our lessons. We were then issued with gas masks and had to practice putting them on and also see how quickly we could evacuate the school. My mother used to take me with her to the theatre, and when we were coming home on the tram, the conductor, because of the blackout, used to have to shout out the names of the tram stops to let you know where you had to get off. Then while walking home you sometimes had to walk on the road to avoid bumping into lampposts or sandbags, even though they had white lines painted on them to make them more visible.

Alan Wilson via Dundee Central Library

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