Alistair Mackintosh remembers life in a school hostel in Inverness

If you lived on the farm, you were very well off; you'd all the home-produced stuff. But I went to a hostel. Everyone on that side of Aldourie had to go to a hostel in Inverness. The Scaniport ones were well off; they got travelling. But the bus service was so poor that you had to go into this hostel. It's called Drummond Park. It's still there on the outskirts of Inverness. And that was pretty hard. Some said it was worse than the Army. All the rations - I recognise them - that we were talking about earlier on, were there, and on the thing that we got was stale rolls. And they didn't go mouldy; they were really hard. And we went eating them like a dog eating a bone, and we gnawed away at them and we loved it, because if you're hungry - and we were hungry then - any food is better than nothing, stale rolls or not. And, of course, if it had been mould on it, it would have been bad for us, but they seemed to just go quite hard and otherwise - . So it wasn't a highlight eating stale rolls, but still it kept us going.

One thing no-one saw during the war was a banana. And you know how when you go into the supermarkets, you see all shelves of bananas. None. They were imported; they were taken in from out, from other places, so there was no place for bananas. But we had home-produced apples and maybe pears. I can't remember ever getting an orange - don't think so but definitely not bananas. They were not on the menu. But we would eat cooking apples - you know, those James Grieve things that would put your teeth on edge, we'd eat them. When you're hungry, you'll - And we never saw a fat person in the district in those days and I can say that quite truthfully.