大象传媒

I was 9yrs old when the war started, and I remember my mother was very worried when she heard that Hitler had invaded Poland. My father was in protected employment, working for the Admiralty checking and testing ships before they were commissioned. He worked as an electrical engineer at sea, with a skeleton crew, testing the ships for safety before the crews came aboard. We were in the north east coast of Scotland,having moved from Larbert where food was short because we didn't get ration. Highland people were very kind to us. We used to eat trout that we caught from the stream, haw berries from the hedgerows, but father used to come home with a box of kippers. I used to deliver vegetables in a horse and cart. I helped on a Saturday, selling potatoes, turnips and kale from the local fields. I earned two shillings and sixpence at the end of the day and was able to buy a book. There was limited choice, but I usually found something. Just after this, I wanted to save up for a bicycle so I walked for an hour to the field to get there early for potato lifting. It was very cold, I had no socks on and one of the other people there gave me straw to put inside my boots to keep my feet warm. We had a bowl of porrige for breakfast, lunch was just a huge bowl of potatoes, and we had a bowl of rice pudding with golden syrup on it for dessert. I earned a shilling an hour after they had deducted the food cost and was soon able to get my bicycle.
We had longer school holidays in Scotland to allow us to help get in the harvest. There was a school camp which was a sort of holiday for us, we went to Alford and Tarland in Aberdeenshire. We had harsh winters with snow over six feet deep - dry snow which we played in a lot. Spring came later in the year - about June - and the growing season was over by mid-October when the snows came and we were snowed in again. Potatoes and turnips were stored in clamps in the fields ready for digging out when required. We saw a lot of Italian prisoners of war who used to work on the land, marching along with their hands on their heads, as well as a lot of American troops. We had one or two land army girls with us who were very hard working.
Shops had little stock at the time, but you could nearly always get haberdashery items. We had a tiny sweet ration and went to the cinema once a week for threepence a time to watch Tarzan films. We could get chips which we would eat on the way home from school to stop us from getting hungry. We all learnt to knit at a very young age and knitted socks for the troops. At school the teachers were either very young or very old, and not always very kind. Some were rather cruel. I remember getting the strap as punishment, in front of the whole school, for miss-spelling "necessary". I was only about eleven years old at the time and I can still remember the sense of humiliation as only the boys usually got this sort of punishment.

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