大象传媒

I was born in Glasgow on Feb 21, 1938, and lived at 18 Barfillan Drive, Cardonald, Glasgow. I remember vivid incidents about the war, but cannot always put times to them. I remember bombings when we went down to a shelter to the rear of our tenement andwe listened to aircraft going over and the sound of bombs falling and exploding. I remember wearing a gas mask box. There were times when my father, George, who was a publican, decided that we would not go down to the shelter. We put the room lights out, opened the curtains and could see the flashes off in the distance as bombs exploded. Often, after a night bombing, my mother, Dolly, would take me on a tram to go shopping and we would see flattened bomb sites where yesterday there had been buildings. The trams ran even on the foggiest of days. We listened for the sound of an approaching tram before stepping out into the road to go to the tramline to board the tram. I thought war was fun and was sorry I was too young to take part. I went to Craigton School and often walked with pals, all with our gasmasks over our shoulders.
My father's job kept him out at nights so often when the sirens went he was not at home. But I never felt scared by the war - Mum and Dad never made a big thing of it. I eventually became a journalist for my working life - perhaps the first hint of my interest in this profession was wondering what would be in the papers when the war ended. There seemed to be no other stories.
I had aunts who lived in Mosspark and Paisley and we often went to visit them. Rationing didn't seem a bad thing to a young boy, and there always seemed to be little treats despite the restrictions. A sweet or a cake - something simple but always special.
We were lucky in that no damage was done by the raids on Glasgow to our neighbourhood but. looking back, I know that one of the nights we sat at our window looking out at the night sky lighting up with explosions, we were watching the blitz on Clydebank when the Germans attacked our shipbuilding yards.
When I eventually got married, in 1961, my new wife, Elizabeth, told me how she had been brought up on a farm in Dumfries-shire. When the farming community heard German bombers flying overhead, they used to light bonfires to make the Germans think they were over towns or cities and perhaps drop their bombs on open countryside instead of populated communities.

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