大象传媒

I was five when the war started. We had no radio - my mother announced it to us, but I suspect I had no idea what it meant. The first air raid I recall was in daylight - what I have always recalled as a single plane dropped a bomb that demolished a tenement on Leitch Street in Greenock. My grandparents lived just up the street, and we were suitably impressed by the sight and the acrid smell when we visited.

Memories of the 1941 blitz are dominated by air raid shelters and night time rushes to them. More than once we went to bed fully dressed, even to our shoes. Dad was in the army, and I was the eldest of (at that time) five. Mum had no appetite for the problem of getting all of us dressed and out. The shelters had no lighting - people brought candles and sat on the bare wooden benches round the walls, passing the time singing and gossiping, stopping only when a whistling bomb fell close enough to hear. Great aunt Maggie used to pass round a tin of Zubes.

We children were excited by it all, and Mr Stewart the Warden had a hard time keeping us in the shelter when all we wanted was to be out picking up shrapnel and watching the fireworks. The tail of an incendiary bomb (only the magnesium casing burned) was a great prize indeed.

There were many false alarms, both at night and during the day, and many rumours of this and that. Crowds went this way and that in response to whichever rumour they鈥檇 heard. I remember being part of a crowd convinced (at least the adults were) that we were going to be bussed to Ayrshire because of mines down at the Davie Shore, opposite where we lived. Whatever the truth of it, we went back home, and no mines ever exploded. We sometimes spent short periods in places other than our home. The old Port Glasgow Town Hall was sometimes full of families occupying their own bit of floor like refugees. I got a large splinter in my rear end from sliding on the floor. And the canteen of Lithgows鈥� shipyard on Boundary Street was fitted out with 鈥渂eds鈥� to sleep on - just planks of wood on trestles. I can still remember the smell of the new wood, and the low lights and the muted adult conversation when we tried to get to sleep.

Arrangements were made to ease the strain by offering to send some children away to live with families in other places. My younger brother, Iain, and I were selected, but our mother at first refused to give her permission. Eventually she relented, and we left from Chapelton School in Port Glasgow in a grey bus - all buses were painted grey during the war. We sang 鈥淚鈥檝e Got Sixpence鈥� and 鈥淩oll Out The Barrel鈥�, and didn鈥檛 give a thought to those we were leaving behind. I was seven and Iain was six, so that explains it. We thought it a great adventure. It was Thursday the 5th of June, 1941.

We arrived at Kilbarchan that day, since it wasn鈥檛 very far, though we had no idea where it was, and I doubt if we鈥檇 taken any notice of the road. Before getting on the bus we鈥檇 had labels pinned on, giving our details such as name, etc, and we lined up inside a hall in Kilbarchan and came forward one by one to people at a desk and were checked in. After a while Iain and I were collected by a man and a woman, Mr and Mrs Wilkie, and taken to their house on Dalhousie Road. I thought them very old, but they were probably a young couple. They had no children of their own.

We had to go to school, and Iain and I started at Kilbarchan Primary School on the 9th of June. I remember clearly that the work I got was behind what I鈥檇 been doing at Chapelton School, but it didn鈥檛 seem all that important to me. I just enjoyed the fact that it was easy and made me look clever.

We were allowed to go into Johnstone one afternoon to see Gulliver鈥檚 Travels at the cinema, and we stayed in to see it twice and got home to a severe telling off.

The street was a cul de sac with fields at the end of it. All of the houses had big gardens, and ours had bamboo growing in it. I was playing in the bamboo one day when Mr Wilkie brought me a toy gun that made sparks. That was for my 8th birthday, so it must have been on the 20th of June.

We last attended school there on the 8th of July, for Iain got chickenpox and was taken to Greendykes Hospital and, though I wasn鈥檛 sick, I was taken with him. The Wilkies were going on holiday, and we were to have gone with them, but it wasn鈥檛 to be. The ambulance took us away and we never saw or heard from the Wilkies again. I鈥檝e never been back to Dalhousie Road.

Our mother collected us from the hospital one day, and took us home to 7 Ardgowan Street at The Glen. Dad had been home on leave and he鈥檇 drawn me a bird for my birthday. It was the summer holidays, so we didn鈥檛 start back at Chapelton School till the 25th of August. Some time later I got chickenpox.

In 1945, the year of VE Day, I was 11 years old, and still a pupil at Chapelton School, Port Glasgow, in the final ("qualifying") year class of Mr William Wallace, a fine teacher whose influence on me was strong.

Of the immediate run up to VE Day I recall nothing specific. Of the day itself my main memory is of a bonfire at the junction of Clyde and Glenburn Streets at the Glen. Our house at 7 Ardgowan Street was at the back of the building, on the top flat left, and we had a good view of the Glen Burn and the streets on the other side of it. Glenburn Street ran up from the junction of Ardgowan and Belhaven Streets at the Glen Bridge, and Clyde Street went off it at an acute angle. Johnny Mauchlin the barber was on Clyde Street. We had our hair cut at Johnnie's - either by him or by his brother, Davie. Valeri's famous fish and chip shop opposite was where, many a night, we queued up for their excellent chips for our tea.

There was a good-sized space at the junction of the streets, and on it the bonfire blazed. The Greenock Telegraph reported dancing and music and general celebration, but I remember none of that very clearly. What I remember is excitement, and anticipation that wonderful things were now going to happen. That my Dad was going to come home was the main thing. He had been away a long time, with the 14th Army in Burma. I didn't know anyone else whose Dad was away, most men in the area were in reserved occupations.

Iain and I went up Chapelton Street to the vacant ground where the Baptist Church had been before it burned down in 1938 (the "tin church", or "the tinny" was what we called the place). In the middle stood the big Static Water Tank. This was stencilled on the side, but none of us ever could work out what static meant. It was a circular steel open-topped container about 5 feet high and maybe 20 feet across, full of the most polluted water that ever existed, liberally laced with dead dogs and cats and any interesting substance that we and our pals could find to put in it. Fortunately (to our knowledge) it was never used to supply fire hoses. We went up there to look for our cat, which had got out. Sadly, it had been burned by fireworks, and had to be put down.

VJ Day was different. There was a gigantic bonfire at the Public Park (Birkmyre Park) - a great pyramid of railway sleepers and barrels of tar and rubber tyres that was awesome to look at. It was there for some days beforehand. I went up to see the blaze by myself. There were lots of fireworks. I brought some unburned bits of them home, and put them on the kitchen fire, where they shot multi-coloured flames and sparks and balls of fire dangerously up the chimney.

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