Hugh M Fraser had a lot of fun at school in Aldourie

What was the school like during the war?

Well, we heard a wee bit about it already. I was just thinking this morning before coming along, I was trying to remember what form of lighting we had and I've come to the conclusion there was no lighting whatsoever in the school. There was a hook hanging in the centre of the ceiling in the big room but that, no I never remember lamps or anything like that. So in the winter-time, it, I think we came to school at half past nine and, of course, we had a thing called Double Summer Time for the sake of making the most/best use of daylight. But there was no electricity through the area at that time. And perhaps you remember when the electricity came through initially, we didn't all get it, but I know before we had electricity at home, it was in the 50s.

We walked three miles to home and there was no house on the road there. We knew all the best trees to shelter under when it was wet. And the only thing that ever kept us at home would be a blizzard, when the snow was really blowing. The wettest morning, we set off and we walked the three miles to school and sometimes our clothes were hanging up on the, our jacket was hanging up, our coat was hanging up, in the passage in the school and the rest of you was quite wet. There was no tarmac in the playground. There was no shelter when we came to school. That shelter out there was built during my time in Aldourie School and, just when we were coming in I was reminding the others, we used to - with the new corrugated iron - take our nail down it. And if you're doing it yourself, the sound isn't so bad, but the sound makes everyone else's hair stand on end. And there was lots of fun that way. I remember during the war somebody found a flare, just up on the edge of the wood there. It looked like an incendiary bomb. But during the wartime too in the school there was eh, post, big eh, placards on the wall showing the different kinds of bombs: the things, if you found them, you were to report them immediately and not touch them.

So, it was also, quite an area of the big room was screened off and there was blankets and rations - biscuits and things like that - stored in there because if, say, Inverness was bombed, it was going to be a centre where people could come and get blankets or sleep and get emergency rations. And I remember Mr Campbell had hens which roamed all around and occasionally in the summer-time, when the door was open, a hen would wander in, if nobody noticed, go behind the screen onto maybe a pile of blankets, and lay there. And of course when a hen lays, she starts to make an awful racket, and Mr Campbell would say, 'Put that hen out!' Somebody would have to go and chase the hen out. So we had a lot of fun too, even although it was war-time.