大象传媒

When war was declared I was about 12 years old and me and my younger brother and sister had been staying with my grandma the whole of August. Unbeknown to us, of course, my parents had been making arrangements to have us evacuated (along with other kids from our school) to a safe location. I was aware from listening to my parents that there might be a war, but never thought it would concern me, until, when we came home from my grandmas to be told we were going away again to a safe place. My parents weren't going because of my baby sister, who was only one year old at the time.
All I remember was my mother saying to stay together, and not to become separated, and as I was the eldest (11 years old) I had to look out for my brother and sister.
So there we were, dressed in our best clothes, with a little suitcase each, and our gas masks around our necks, and waving goodbye at the station. We just accepted what was happening, as children do. We weren't afraid, we were amongst all the other children, some mothewrs came on the train, as well as some teachers from our school, so it seemed like a big adventure, only we didn't know where we were going. It was a lovely train journey, that seemed to last all day, with beautiful scenery; I'd never seen so many trees. We stopped at little stations with strange names we'd never heard of, until at last we reached our destination, Inverness! We were then put on a bus and stopped at a little village school about an hour later, called Aldourie School. We all congregated in the playground and people from the village came and said hello to us. One lady asked if me and my sister Mary would like to come and live in her house, and I said "but what about my wee brother" and she said she could only take two girls, so I told her "no" as we had to stay together. Then a nice gentleman came over and again offereed to take my sister and I, and again I said "no" as we all had to stay together, And he finally said "ok, we'll put a small bed in your bedroom and your brother can come too" So we were whisked away to live in this beautiful house on the banks of Loch Ness, where we were introduced by Mr Fraser (who was a widower) to his son Hamish, who was a teacher in a school in Inverness, and also to Barbara, who was their housekeeper, and looking back, as I'm doing now, she was a saint for agreeing to look after the needs of three growing children and do everything for them.......So, we were fed and washed, and shown our room and told to come down for breakfast in the morning. Can you imagine three city kids from a working class background and living in a housing estate on the first floor of a very small flat and waking up to the idyllic sight of mountains and trees and a beautiful loch right on our doorstep! After breakfast Mr Fraser took us around his garden where for the first time in our lives we saw apples growing on trees! and a pear tree growing along a wall and potatoes and other vegetables and lovely flowers as well.
Because the school year had started we were shown the road we had to walk to get back to Aldourie school, where I was in for a shock, as there were only two primary classrooms. I never did find out where the secondary school was, probably in Inverness itself, however Mr Campbell who was the headmaster set up a room in what I think was a kitchen of sorts as it had a stove in it, and that became my and about a dozen other older kids classroom.I had been to my secondary school for a whole year and as the school had only been opened the year before it had all the latest mod cons and was absolutely inviting to attend ......so you can imagine what a come down it was for me to be sitting in a makeshift classroom ,...However there were compensations too . Mr Campbell also had a lovely garden and grew all his own food ,and all of a sudden he had lots of willing little helpers ,he also kept beehives and taught us the rudiments of looking after the bees and collecting the honey ,all of those very interesting things about nature I'm sure did us in good stead fot the rest of our lives .......My sister Mary became 10 years old on the 9th of Sept,exactly one week after arriving at Mr.Frasers house and when we came home for tea that day ,Barbara had made a beautiful birthday cake with royal icing and candles and her name on it ....to say the least we were overwhelmed as none of us had ever had a cake especially for us .....then on my own Birthday on the 29th Sept,again Barbara baked another beautiful cake for me........We were made to write a letter home to our parents every week and they also wrote to us all the time too .Mr.Frasers son Hamish only came home at the weekend and he always brought games and colouring books for us, and also three of our favourite comics which we were instructed to put under our pillows and not read until Sunday morning when we woke up, then we had to interchange with each other, and of course that obviously kept us quiet for an extra hour! Hamish certainly knew how to keep children happy, he also could play the piano and invited us into the drawing room to sing hymns on a Sunday after we came home from Sunday school. He also had us learn Christmas carols for Christmas, so as you can hear we were extremely happy living there, and were very sad to leave in April of 1940, as Barbara was getting married and Mr Fraser couldn't find another housekeeper.
We were then sent to live on a nearby farm run by Mr & Mrs McBain who had three daughters of their own, so that was also a wonderful new experience and we stayed there until July 1941 and my mother and father decided to bring us home for a holiday and we found out she was expecting another baby and decided not to send us away again. Those two years changed our lives forever, giving us an insight as to how other people lived, and although it ruined my education I was very lucky in my later life to find a wonderful husband who had been in the Merchant Navy all during the war, and somehow managed to escape all the torpedoes that were all around him. He survived even though his ship was torpedoed twice, I think because his mother and her two sisters prayed for him every day so he came home safely, but that is another story...

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