As I remember, I had been out playing one night and I had this ring, which I had taken off to do something and I remember thinking oh well I’ll never get my ring back. At the other corner the people went to the shelter, so there was only two boys (seagull’s squawking, which obscures voices), so as I say you just never know. We actually, my mother stayed on the ground floor, we went to the shelter and we were the only people in the house that were there, we were just sitting, my mother, my friend and me, we were just sitting thinking that the bombs and that was it, everybody else in the house was going to be killed. The noise of the bombs and the shelter door blew open with the blast and when we came out of the shelter we didn’t know if anyone was going to be left alive. The house which we stayed in was very badly damaged, we had to leave because there weren’t any walls, and we had to stay in Powis School. In the gym there they had the people who couldn’t stay in their houses had to go there, they set it up for us at night. I t was quite dangerous this area with the bombs near the railway line because there was a big marshalling yard in Bedford Road. There was a petrol place, where the petrol was stored underneath the Kirk, so that if the bombs had managed to get, well if you look at the one at the end of Bedford Road was there and at the other side of the street was where the petrol was stored, if it had at just gone a few yards the other way then I doubt that I would have been here to tell you.

“Do you remember anything about Hall Russells?”

Ah yes, this is always quite funny story about the day the day that Hall Russells was bombed at mid-day one day and at that time we had our main meal at Lunchtime not when we got home from work. We had it at the middle of the day, so we were all sitting round the kitchen table having our dinner at and we didn’t go to the shelter in those days, mum just put us in a small cupboard under the stairs and that cupboard housed the gas meter so she couldn’t have chosen a worse place to hide us. She used to herd us into a cupboard when the siren went off. So we were at the stage of having our pudding when they herded us into the lobby cupboard and my dad said that he was finishing his pudding as he had to go back to work and when we came back through, my dad was sitting at the table and he said that the plane flew so close that he could see it through the window and he could see the pilot looking for something – he was a bit of a story teller. So my sister looked for her plate and she said dad you’ve eaten my pear, now this was something special mother had gotten a tin of pears. She said dad you’ve eaten my pear and he said oh yes I’ve had my pear and he said, you know what it was I turned my back and that pilot must have come in the window and had the pear we never did discover if she had forgotten that she had eaten he pear or if the pilot had really eaten it but I don’t think that would have happened.

The night that St. Stephen’s was bombed, the whole of the front of it was destroyed, which incidentally the anniversary of it was yesterday. It was the 21st of April 1942 so it was 63 years ago yesterday that that happened, so I would say that 62 years ago today I would have been walking up here I lived in Pittodrie Place and we were going to my grandmothers, when we were walking up here and we went down past which was Causeway End Church and the front of it had completely caved in. Lots of houses were down, Mr. Taylor spoke about the shelters and what happened in Bedford Road was extremely unfortunate that bomb hit the shelter. But I remember that in Charles Street and Catherine’s Street there were houses that were completely crushed and in between the houses, there were shelters still standing and it just showed you how well constructed the shelters were. Houses on each side wrecked and shelters still standing in between.