大象传媒

A Stenhousemuir Schoolboy鈥檚 Memories of the War

At the beginning of the war I was eight years old and attending school in Falkirk. We should have had Mr Crowe as our class teacher but he was called up. I did not see him again until after the war, when I was shocked to see the state of him. He had somehow managed to survive years of captivity by the Japanese army, but at great cost to his physical and mental condition.

Instead of Mr Crowe we had a succession of stand-in teachers. I remember one of them telling us how the Germans were invading more and more countries, implying that ours would be next. She then burst into tears. That was the only time during the war that I had any doubt about our winning it. Otherwise it was all something of a game, and it had its advantages from our point of view, as the shortage of teachers meant we only attended school in the mornings of one week and then in the afternoons of the next. Once a week we had to practice wearing our gas masks, which we always had to have with us. They were uncomfortable, claustrophobic things, and the visors mister up very quickly. Fortunately we never had to wear them for any length of time. Another sign of the war was the erection in the playground of two large brick window-less buildings, where we were supposed to go if there was an air raid. I can only remember one occasion when we all had to go and sit in these shelters. Otherwise they were a good place for the more daring to enter when playing hide-and-seek, being pitch dark and out of bounds.

School lunches had been introduced by then, consisting only of a bowl of soup and a pudding, which usually seemed to be semolina, which I dislike. But I developed a liking for tapioca, and remember going back four times to the dinner ladies for extra helpings, which pleased them as they had a huge container of the stuff to get rid of, and I seemed to be the only person in the school who liked it.

At home, I remember the appearance at the bottom of our garden of a corrugated-iron air-raid shelter, in which my father placed a large comfortable hay-filled mattress. There was a little solid-fuel stove in the corner, and we were quite warm and snug during the many nights we spent there, waiting for the 鈥楢ll Clear鈥� to sound. From the front window of our house we could see two barrage balloons tethered some miles away. I was told by someone that their purpose was to 鈥榢eep the cables up.鈥� They might have been protecting some vital installation, or they might just have been decoys. I don鈥檛 remember the Germans dropping any bombs in that area. In fact, during the whole of the war, I only heard two land mines go off. They had been dropped near Stirling, one of them landing on the pitch of Stirling Albion Football Club. One night there was a heavy raid on Clydebank, about thirty miles away, and some of my friend鈥檚 bombed-out relatives came to stay. His family could not accommodate them all, and we took in one of the children. We had another lodger for part of the war, a Polish officer whose unit was based in the grounds of a big house further up the road.

One strange thing was that, apart from the Polish soldiers, we saw very little of people in uniform, although once at the beginning of the war we observed 鈥榤anoeuvres鈥� being carried out in the woods behind our house. A bren-gun carrier ( a small, open, tracked vehicle) appeared one evening accompanied by a number of people in uniform, some of them quite young, who commenced firing rifles at each other. The curious thing was that instead of pulling the triggers they pulled on a piece of string attached to the barrel of their rifles, on which were a number of explosive strips like those inside Christmas crackers. They appeared quite embarrassed doing this in front of an audience of grinning boys, and left fairly quickly. From their armbands it appeared they belonged to the LDV (Local Defence Volunteers), later to become better known as the Home Guard.

We saw very little of the actual war-time activity, as the German bombers came over during the night, but I remember one day seeing one of our own aircraft ( I think it was a Spitfire) with smoke coming from it being circled by another plane, which may have been a Lysander, as it slowly descended, until both disappeared from view. I also remember cycling out into the country to see a crashed plane, which I think was a German fighter. All I remember finding in it was a lot of electrical cabling, some of which I took home as a souvenir.

We boys were always on the look-out for souvenirs, and when towards the end of the war long convoys of military vehicles used to stop for tea (provided by our mothers) on the verge of the road outside our houses, we used to run over and ask for 鈥渁ny souvenirs, mister?鈥� but as these were British soldiers, not Americans, we got only the odd button or cap badge, and not chocolate or chewing-gum. Later still, when the hospital at which my father worked was taken over as a base hospital, we got more buttons and badges from the wounded soldiers who used to go out walking in their distinctive uniforms of bright blue suits, white shirts and red ties.

One strange result of the military take-over was that my father and 鈥榟is鈥� patients had to be relocated to another hospital, in Dundee, so he turned out to be the only member of the family to become a war evacuee. I used to look forward to his coming home on leave, and especially to seeing what he had in his little case. Once it was full of plums, and another time he brought a home-made but very professional-looking magazine written by one of the Dundee patients. This was of interest to me as by then I had begun making my own comics, which I used to give to my sisters and friends to read for a ha鈥檖enny a time. I made quite a good profit, as proper comics were difficult to obtain.

With the invasion of Normandy in June 1944 it appeared that the war would soon be won, with the prospect of our being able to obtain again such delicacies as bananas and oranges, and a greater quantity and variety of sweets. It would have dampened our euphoria considerably if we had known that sweets would not come off the ration for another nine years!

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