Beth Thom remembers how her mother took evacuees from London into their Dingwall home

How did the war effect your family?

Well, my husband was called up, of course, like everybody else, more or less, unless they were in agriculture or something when they were exempt, because of course we had to grow the food for everybody in the country and everybody did their own gardens, grew their fruit and veg, and if you had a little space, kept some hens so as there would be an egg for your tea or something like that. And, em, I lived with my mother.

One Sunday evening during the war - there was a Blitz on London - there was a lady appeared on our doorstep with a five-year-old child asleep in her arms looking for somewhere to stay. She did, had lived in Canning Town and had been bombed out, so she followed her husband up north - as he was stationed at Achterneed - and she couldn't find anywhere to stay, so my mother took her in, which meant of course that in a four-roomed house, at that point, there was very little room for anybody else, 'cause there was my mother, my brother, myself. Now we had this other two, and my son. So, that was how we lived at that time and it was really sad to see that somebody would be bombed out, nowhere to live, nowhere to go, and so it's always stuck to me. We kept in touch for many years until eventually her husband had died. He'd, apparently he'd been a docker down in the London area.