Now how many of you have seen dad’s army? Its funny isn’t it. Well when they started off, we needed a second army to defend us in Britain, this was started all ages, if they were fit they could join. And to begin with they had no tin hats and no rifles, so practising what they did was wear there bowler hats, used umbrellas and walking sticks, and they were a funny lot. But with training they had their uniforms, all their equipment and one part of the country one very serious night, the home guard was very, very helpful indeed. There was one night Germany tried to invade Britain. Everyone was on red alert and it was a very, very anxious night. But the home guard was there to, as were the ordinary soldiers and we were more than well prepared.

Every building had to have fire watching done (?) they were put into teams and they could spot something straight away. And I’ve told you of manufacturing chemists. And what we had in our warehouses were chemicals and flammables stuff and all the rest. And beside the sink we had a bucket of sand, a bucket of water and a stirrup pump. We tried to lift the bucket and couldn’t do it. We’ll put the stirrup pump in and hose it over. But when you put something in water it displaces ??? and when we pumped away the water went everywhere and we were all soaked. So many things went wrong, but as time went on we became very efficient. The ladies took the evening shift, and the men did it overnight. But as we were doing that we thought ‘What chance have we got?’, if there was any bomb or any incendiary, we’d had it. The place would have just gone up, so we really thought our fire watching was pointless. But to get that we wore this batch, we wore that and put them on our arms so we were allowed to work there.

Staff of the town house were asked, rather told, that they would have to do fire watching there. But they hadn’t enough so they’d come up to people and two of my friends and myself joined that. So we were no members of the report and control, we got a badge and we got a great coat, a tin hat, and a pass. We slept in one of the buildings in King Street and went through to the base station, where we had supper and breakfast. There was rationing and the two good meals we had once every so often when we were on duty as the police were well looked after. We had practises and it was a very, very particular thing. We had to be very careful, because people would phone in and say a bomb had been dropped, say Bedford Road, and we got the message wrong, and then went to Bedford Avenue. This meant that all the services went to the wrong place. We took a note of the people that were hurt, trapped, the extent of the damage. All that had to be put into this form and taken to a controller. We were never on duty during a raid, but we had to be there once a week. When we entered the police station we had to show our pass, and at the end of the war we had to hand back our passes. Our raincoats and our tin hats and other things we got to keep.

Places were being bombed and damaged now if you couldn’t go back to your home you had you had to go somewhere hadn’t you. So they put up things like Rest Centres now today out east they are refugee camps they but this was a rest centre. Its rather dirty (refers to badge being shown to pupils) I’m scared to wash it. But people were picked up from all different parts of the town. Mostly in church halls and or minister at the time he had to gather the personnel and what did we do we volunteered. So we were now in the Rest centre. There was no mobiles phones, the minister got the word first to open the? Somebody with a phone we didn’t have many phones at the time. Somebody phoned and they would phone the next person and five doors along to tell them to go on duty and the 5th person would carry on it was a silly system but it worked. Because I lived a wee bit away from the church few cars that there were somebody had to keep petrol and pick up other ones. Well we had practices and believe me some of the practices were dreadful we couldn’t get the palliasses right and we didn’t get that but with practice with were great. But the day of the big raid in Aberdeen was the 21st of April and our church you’ve seen photographs of our church it was bombed and also the rest centre the hall was no use and we didn’t get a chance to do our bit. That is a photograph it was in the paper the next day. Now it was very pitiful you wouldn’t have liked to be out of your house all your favourite things gone or you had no where to sleep but that is what happened.