大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People's War site by Catherine Garvie, Learning Project Manager at 大象传媒 Scotland on behalf of the Greenock War Detectives project and has been added with their permission. The authors fully understand the site's terms and conditions.

When the war started, I was only 4 years old, and by the time it finished I was 10, so all my formative years in primary school were wartime. I was in St. John鈥檚 in Port Glasgow. Most of the teachers were women as the majority of the men had been called up and I remember big, big classes of 50 odd pupils. We sat in rows and learned everything by rote, chanting things out, all looking at the blackboard at the same time. There was a shortage of paper, so every double desk had a little slot that held your slate. The slate was bordered with wood, and we wrote on it with a slate pencil. All the girls had a little dish of water and a little sponge or cloth to clean their slate at the end of the lesson. The boys weren鈥檛 so fussy; they just spat on their slate, and rubbed it with their cuff. We had to carry our gas mask everyday to school. If you forgot it, you were sent back home to fetch it and it didn鈥檛 matter how far away you lived, you had to go.

One big exciting episode I remember at school was a shipload of apples came to Britain from Canada - all these beautiful red apples. I鈥檇 never seen such beautiful big fat glowing apples. At school, we were all given an apple each from the children of Canada. That鈥檚 really stuck in my memory.

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