大象传媒

"First Day of the war - I joined up there" - mum told me as we passed the building that sat on the unreal road to Fettes College. Didn't say it often - in fact I said it more often than her. She was reticent about her experiences and didn't regard them as worth noting but I never forgot it from the first time she told me on the number 20 bus with the open back door on the way to see our new house in the council scheme - Clermiston - January 1968.

She was 19 when she volunteered and had been working, since leaving school at 15, in Duncan Flockhart's in Holyrood Road - near Holyrood Palace but a Chemical factory all the same - 400 yards from the Dumbiedykes where she lived.

Mum was insisted that she wasn't a WAAF but in the Women's Royal Air Force. She was posted to Kinloss and never left although she told us tales of training in Cramond in one of the big houses near Bruntsfield Golf Course and of going out and back to Cramond Island and how some brave drunk souls had to climb up and down the barrier through the water when they missed the tide - go and see it and you'll be impressed.

Americans, Canadians, Poles, Czechs, Free French, all brave pilots who volunteered or flew their planes out to the UK all flew from Kinloss and my mum spoke about the difference in ability and bravado of the early volunteers versus the much later brash American conscripts whom she saw die in their dozens until they quietened down.

She ran the Sergeants' mess at Kinloss and told us few stories but the one about them answering the phone "Statue" was a good one and one day the caller responded with "Smee here" and mum started laughing and said "that's a good one" until a stern voice boomed "Staff Sergeant Smee".

We have a couple of photos - her in uniform, mum with the WRAF and one pilot picture with some names on the back. When we were wee, she'd run through the names and say who had died and how quickly.

She spent almost six years in the WRAF and there's no doubt at all to me that these were the best years of her life. She loved being a mum and did a great job but she was a very smart woman for whom the war gave her a responsibility she'd never have expected and would never have again.

Dad always said he was a volunteer but mum guffawed and said he was conscripted. He was in London for almost all of the war and was conscripted into the artillery. He said his group shot down a Heinkel and that he was the Predictor.

During the war, he was in a cinema in London - near Kennington Oval - he showed me where he lived in 1993 or so - he and his girlfriend - god what was her name? - were coming out of a cinema and a bomb dropped. He woke up in hospital to be told that she had been killed. He had been hit by shrapnel on the back of his neck.

It gets a bit vague here but it seems that my uncle Bill Mackay who was in some sort of secret or government role in London at the time, made enquiries and found him in hospital - a psychiatric hospital maybe. Anyway - Bill got him out of hospital and the Army sent him out on duty again - this time to Kinloss.

Of course, he met my mother there.

The thing that's confusing is that there were a number of these little photo booth pictures of my mum, trying to look good-looking and glamorous with "All My Love Darling" - Kay and "Remember Me?" on and she must have sent them to him - but why were they apart? Don't know. Ah - that was maybe after the war.

More to come when I remember more or get together with my brother.

Thanks 大象传媒.

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