I started school in 1940, aged 5. We all had to wear these wee boxes with gas masks in them. Everybody had one and even wee babies had a special gas mask. You had to carry these gas masks with you where you went, pictures or anywhere at all. Every now and again you would get siren drill in school and we all had to rush to our wee boxes and see how quickly we could get our gas masks on. Nobody could ever do it in the time we were supposed to. Just trying to get the things on was torture because they had to be worn so tight. I think if there was a gas attack during the war we wouldn’t be here because it took us ages to get the masks on and even when you did manage they steamed up and you couldn’t see a thing. Nobody could hear what you were talking about either because your voice would be all muffled from the gas mask.

We had a big communal shelter. Can you imagine being hauled out of your bed at three in the morning to go to the shelter? It could be so cold in the middle of the night and you’d just be in your pyjamas, so it was really rough going. One night I remember we all piled into this big communal shelter and everybody was all bent over because they were terrified and half the women were crying because it was really frightening. We could hear all these big bangs, the guns going off and bombs dropping. There was one particular big blast and it really shook us up and my mother said, oh I think that’s our house away because it was a terrible bang but we were lucky it didn’t touch the house. It was a really, really bad time. Sometimes after an air raid I’d go down the town the next day and look at all the damage done from the previous night.

One bad experience I had was a night my brother and I had been to the pictures at the West Station. We were sitting there and halfway through the film a big notice came over telling everybody to leave the building. We got outside the building, it was a brilliant moon lit night, and the sirens were going so we started running up to the big shelter. We knew our mother and father would be waiting on us so we ran and ran and it felt like we were the only two people outside in the whole world that night. As we got closer I heard my mother shout hurry up, hurry up, quick, quick, quick, hurry up and then we heard this droan of a plane approaching. Then we could hear the sound of guns being fired. We just managed to get up to the gate and my mother hauled us in and the bullets went up the street just passed us, right across the street and across the roof. That was really bad; we were very lucky that night.

Most of the tenements had baffle walls built outside them to prevent any blast going up inside the close. During the blackout you couldn’t see a thing because it was so dark and people would bump into the baffle walls an awful lot. You weren’t allowed to show any light at all and if you used a torch when you walked outside, you’d have to just shine it a down onto the ground, just enough to see where your feet were going. It was the same in the house; you had to be really careful not to show any light. If my father has a little look outside the window during a blackout my mother would shout at him to get the blind down.

My mother took charge of the ration books and just as well she did otherwise we would have been in danger of eating all our sweetie rations in one night! She used to give us a few a day and that helped stretch them out to a week. We were allowed one egg each a week and we kept this for our Sunday breakfast - a boiled egg with a bit of toast and a mug of tea. After the war some things were still rationed and I didn’t see my first banana until the war ended. I’d heard about them from my father and they used to fascinate me.

When the war ended there was big celebrations. It was such a good feeling to know that you could come and go when you pleased and didn’t need any big blackout curtains on the windows. You didn’t have to worry anymore about when the sirens might go off so things were a bit more relaxed and happy.