WW2 travel

Because of the war, my mother hadn't seen her own mother for several years , so when things eased a little in 1944 she took me to see Granny Clarke in Northern Ireland. I intend to elaborate on her a bit later but for now let me tell about the boat journey. There were still U-Boats about and when we left Stranraer they started issuing life jackets. There was a sailor among the company and he refused to take one. When he was told it was for his own good in case we were torpedoed, the sailor said he didn't want to die slowly in the water or be burned when the oil took fire. He'd seen too many and he prefered to drown quickly. Naturally, I'd seen films where ships were sunk but this was close up and personal. The link, despite the change of name, is to an old family legend and the sister is Granny Clarke.

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Clydebank

By now WW2 was in the Battle of Britain and Sojer's games involved Rob and I following him as a pretend Spitfire wing chasing Messerschmitts, or being Dornier bombers  which Sojer shot down and we crash landed. He also escaped from POW camps with the help of the valiant resistance - Rob and I. He tried to get us to be the Gestapo trying to catch a spy but that was too far, as far as we were concerned and he played that game by himself.
It wasn't all fun. My father came home from work late one night and got me out of bed to see Clydebank being bombed. We didn't see the bombers but we could see the glow from the fires in Clydebank thirty miles away like a sunset. My mother hugged me and told me there were boys and girls and their mothers and fathers being killed by the bombs over there, which took a lot of adventure out of Sojer's games.
The picture is from the Daily Record.

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Grandfather

Best in Show was based on the competition between those competing in flower shows and while I have barely mentioned it in these chronicles, gardening was a large part of life in the village, especially during WW2. Everybody grew vegetables but one of the necessities of life for my grandfather was his tobacco and he started to grow his own. He'd been in the Royal Navy and always maintained a sailor could turn his hand to anything but how he learned to dry and make a twist in those days before the web, I don't know. The twist turned out to be a kind of black thick tarry cord, full of treacle and other secret ingredients although I doubt if there was any rum in the mixture. Mind you, he was security at the entrance to the army camp and perhaps he got some from a connection there. That would have been typical. If there was ever anyone who saw 'can't be done' as a challenge it was my grandfather.

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Boys often want to be like their fathers and I was no exception. Dad was in the mines and entitled to eight tons of coal a year, dumped on the pavement in front the house. It had to be carried into the coal cellar, inside the back door, with buckets . First was the lumps to make a kind of retaining wall, then came the smaller stuff thrown in behind. As the small got used up it was hard to reach and I went into the cellar with the kitchen shovel and pretended to be Dad in the mine. As I shovelled, I could smell the sharpness of the dust and wipe my dusty hand on my forehead and then have a bath like Dad. There were no showers on the small mines until the Coal Board took over, so Dad came home dirty and bathed before he ate. He never came to the table dirty no matter how hungry he might have been after the occasional double shift - there was a war on and people didn't worry about working to rule much at that time; many, like Dad in the ARP, had a second responsibility and didn't get much leisure time. Mining villages are often portrayed as grim and ugly, but ours was set in some lovely country.

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More Teachers

After Miss Robson our next teacher was a small bright, neatly dressed woman called Miss Russell who lived with her sister and had always whistled as her childhood party turn. I knew this because my father told me,

                              The next one to sing was wee Jean Russell,

                              She couldnae sing, so she started to whustle.

Despite this, like many country people, she was remarkably well informed. She told us how the school children had given pennies and collected silver paper to finance the building of HMS Belfast. She told us how Spitfires were built. She who told us how terrifying and obscene a telegram from the War Office saying a husband or son had been killed could be. We saw the effects for ourselves as time passed.

By now,  WW2 was three years old and the classroom windows had brown anti-shatter screens stuck on them and smelled of the glue used to stick the screens to the glass.

Officially, she taught us tables, but she also allowed the boy at the front of the class to sleep.

For some fault, or maybe for maintaining my innocence, I was sent to the front of the class beside him. I felt it my duty to try to keep him awake; how could he learn otherwise? He didn’t take kindly to that and I was blamed for the resulting disruption. At the time I was upset by the injustice, but realised later that there was little chance of rest in the hovel the boy lived in and Miss was making allowances. Thankfully, his old place of residence has long since been bulldozed.

A Land fit for heroes has it's origins in those days and those teachers who had lost sweethearts in WW1.

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Wee Brella at Football

Let me introduce Wee Brella. With her umbrella, she could have been the model for Mary Poppins. She was passionate about two things, romantic films and the local football team. One particular Saturday, despite the fact that they all knew each other, the two local teams were trying as hard as they could to kick lumps out of their opposite number. The referee let most of it go - for diplomatic reasons. It wasn’t unknown for a referee who gave the opposition needless fouls and especially penalty kicks to need a police escort to get him to the bus stop. The river was handy and remember, there was a war on.

That particular day, one of the opposition forwards was giving a good-looking young lad from our village the run around. Our lad just couldn’t get a decent tackle at the forward, either to get the ball, or maim the forward enough to slow him down. It really was a man’s game in those days.

This dribbling round our lad didn’t fit the script as Wee Brella felt it should be.

The ball came out just in front of her and the forward came to take the throw-in.

‘What d’you think you’re doing, makin’ oor Billy look daft?’ demanded Brella.

‘It’s no’ me, he’s doin’ it all himself. Billy couldnae take the ball off a haystack,’ the forward told her, smiling at his own humour as he stepped back to take the throw-in.

He didn’t do much more that day. Maybe he was suffering from concussion from the clout wee Brella gave him with her umbrella.

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WW2 Eggs and Tomatoes

Instead of just telling how I wanted to write about a village like Cairndhu, this is turning into the story of my childhood among the gardeners of the village. My grandfather lived in the top house in his street and rented the plot next door on which he had built a greenhouse and a chicken run. Both were a boon during the war years, not just for us but for the local community. Gramps sold eggs and tomatoes and I was called in to feed chickens and pollinate the tomato blooms with a rabbit's foot. Pollinating was a springtime job and was often welcome if the weather was cold because the greenhouse was heated and always cosy. The chickens chased after me and pecked at my ankles when I had the feed bucket, and occasionally got cross when I discovered an egg hidden in the long grass at the edges of the compound. It was those eggs that were suspect and reserved for family use. Occasionally one was rotten and that put me off eggs for days - not for weeks - everything was rationed. If a hen stopped laying it went into the pot and was sometimes soft enough not to need mincing to make it edible.

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Cairndhu in WW2

Cairndhu- WW2 had started when we went to school. Because of the shortage of paper, we had slates with a slate pencil that made marks on the slate. If you made a mistake, all you had to do was wet a finger and rub it out, which was handy if you felt your neighbour had a better answer than you.
Our early teachers were maiden ladies who might have been married if a whole generation of eligible young men had not been killed in WW1.
The first of these ladies, motherly Miss Draffan, wore brown woollen clothes that she knitted herself and smelt vaguely of moth balls. She gave some of the less fortunate children their first touch of gentleness and encouragement.

      While anyone who dared to talk when she was saying something was 'shushed' by the class, those who might struggle with a word like ‘cat’ or ‘mat’ would be given stage whispered help. If you got help, you had to decide who was right, usually a girl, because there were sniggering boys who thought it was funny to mislead you.

      Miss Draffan had a complement for everyone's scrawl on their slate. There were special pencils for the slates and as the quality deteriorated as a result of the war, they could be made to screech across the slate. Girls didn’t do things like that, of course, their mission was to call out 'it was Jim Scott, Miss'.

       After some laborious copying of letters with tongues stuck out following progress, the slates were put neatly in the corner as only a class of five year olds can; the boys closely supervised by the girls, who straightened any slate that was out of line.

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When the war started in 1939 a few of the men, especially those who were in the territorials went off to France but coal was important for all sorts of things, the railways used it, electricity was dependent on it, the steel industry needed coke and the result was that most of the miners were exempt from army service. Some even turned miner to escape going away, though, at that time the mines were not particularly safe. For us boys it produced films about heroes and one boy, two or three years older than Rob and I was particularly affected. We had our pwn fantasies about cowboys and indians and the French Foreign Legion, which included Laurel and Hardy, of course and we lived those out enthusiastically but when this older lad wanted us to pretend, we knew it wasn't real and despite his enthusiasm, couldn't get into dive bombing ships, or being commandos at all. Dad saw him once throwing a pretend hand grenade at a pretend tank and he got the nickname of Sojer. We had Polish soldiers camped in the castle grounds and, of course, Sojer discovered an imaginary spy among them and wanted us to sneak about to find out who it was. Fortunately it was tea time and we were too hungry to become spy catchers.

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