大象传媒

This story is by Nancy Blaikie, and has been added to the site with their permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions. The story was collected by Joyce Gibson, transcribed by Elizabeth Lamont and added to the site by Bruce Logan.
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My earliest wartime memory was standing in a queue with my mother in the Good Templar Hall in Hamilton Road. To my seven year old eyes the hall seemed packed with women and children snaking interminably round and round for ever waiting to collect our ration books and a bottle of concentrated orange juice.

My next memory was of a Sunday morning in Spring or Summer. Every Sunday morning early my Father would take my brother and I down to Pickie Pool for a swim. We were going home one morning and had just reached the Pickie gates when we heard a loud explosion. We looked round and we could see over towards Whitehead a fair sized ship settling in the water. It had hit a mine and for many years after its masts showed above the water. It was called the Troutpool and when I began sailing in the fifties it was used as a racing mark.

As children we were not affected a lot by the war. We learned to keep quiet when the news was on the wireless. We took it in turns on a Saturday morning to queue up for bread at Patterson鈥檚 bakery on Southwell Road. We soon became accustomed to the sight of soldiers in the town and the Forces鈥� patients in their blue uniforms from the 25th general hospital which had been established in the Central school. This had had the effect of spreading the pupils throughout the town in church halls, auction rooms, the British Legion etc. It must have been a nightmare of organisation for the school鈥檚 headmaster.

Our neighbours had gone to Canada at the start of the war. Our new neighbours were to be very different. The adjoining house was requisitioned by the army as an intelligence post. This meant that the front garden was filled with khaki motor cycles and a sentry was posted at the front gate complete with sentry box. I was off school when the army took possession of the house. I had been sick and confined to bed. The soldiers were putting in telephone communications and there was a lot of banging and hammering going on in the room next to mine. Suddenly there was a crash: a hole appeared in my bedroom wall and a soldier鈥檚 head came through. I don鈥檛 know who was the more startled. But for years after that the re-plastered hole was hidden behind a wardrobe. The army were still there when VE day arrived. We were determined to celebrate in style. Father hung out the Union Jack and my brother and I built a bonfire in the middle of the road. It was a superb bonfire 鈥� so much so that it set fire to the tar macadam and left a noticeable hole in the road.

Although rationed, I don鈥檛 remember feeling deprived or hungry. We really looked to Sunday morning breakfast, cooked by my father, our Ulster Fry, the one egg, one rasher of bacon (which occasionally tasted of the fish meal the hens were fed on) and some fried bread we had queued for on Saturday. We at least got white bread which our South of Ireland neighbours didn鈥檛. One summer we were going on holiday to Donegal. The last part of the journey was on the Lough Swilly railway and we had to go through Customs. The customs men were very strict in their searches and confiscated any food which they found. My mother was very upset when they took a jelly packet off a young lad who had tone to Derry for the day and was bringing the jelly home for his mother. There was a soldier on the train in a kilt and he was going home on leave. He had a loaf of white bread and I can see him as clearly as if it were yesterday, and hear him saying 鈥測ou鈥檙e not getting the bread I was bringing my mother鈥� and he tore it up and threw it on the railway lines.

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