When the siren went off you knew that you had to go right home or the Air Raid warden would take you straight to the shelter and you had to go into the shelter.

The night of the bombing of Aberdeen, I was at this camp and I was worried as I had to walk along King Street, where the lines had be bombed a couple of times we didn’t go anywhere we just stayed where we were, there were four young soldiers with us, who had been told that they had to get back to the Bridge of Don if there was a raid, but we couldn’t go out on the street because about halfway down Market Street, do you know where Marks and Spencer now there was a big place there and we were put in there and we didn’t get out until the all clear was given. I ran with these boys all the way down Union Street and down King Street and they saw me home and my first thought was that the house was still standing. It was a dreadful night that night a truly frightening night and then of course we heard about the church and all the people who had died.

There were two factories in Aberdeen that made ammunition for the army. Hendersons and MacKinnon’s in East North Street, they also took all the railings off the walls and people had to give up their railings, fences and iron gates. They needed the iron for making bullets, boats and bombs. One day after we got home from school we were all playing at the bottom of Powis Place. We were skipping at the time, when the siren went off and the planes were firing bullets at us, we were playing next to the railway line at Elmbank, it had been the railway line that the were aiming for. Two of my sisters took an arm each of mine and we flew up the Tarrie Brae, my legs were moving, but my feet weren’t touching the ground and we passed Isie Mason’s and around Canal Road and home we were all crying. The children from Froghall that were at Causeway End had to cross the railway line at Canal Road, sometimes the siren would go off and the children were caught in the middle, between Causeway End School and this bridge. It was the bride that they were aiming for, the railway bridge that they were trying to bomb. Well my mum would run out of the house and take all of the children in to the house when the planes were flying over, she would only let them leave once the bombs had stopped. They might have been killed if they went over that bridge because they were aiming for the bridge and the railway line at the time. Sunnybank had a plaque on the wall of the school naming the children killed in April 1943. That was when the enemy came over and really bombed Aberdeen. I remember it well, the sirens went off and we all rushed to the shelter we were all terrified, they were bombing all around us – Froghall, Charles Street, Fraser Place, Catherine Street and Powis Place. Causewayend Church was bombed. The bombing went on for ages, we were terrified. When we came out of the shelter, we couldn’t go back into the house as the wardens were all around our garden. There was a very big hole in our garden, they thought that it was an unexploded bomb and the whole family was evacuated. We had to go down to Grey Friars Church to sleep on the church hall floor on palliasses.

Do you know what palliasses are?
No

It’s like a mattress, which is full of straw. After the investigation of the bomb, which they thought I was, it wasn’t a bomb it was a very large boulder from the Causeway End Church, that had came through the house above us and through and down the side of our and into the garden, so it wasn’t a bomb it was just a boulder. My brother and his pals were searching around in the rubble, I was tagging along, and I remember I was trying to get a pram and a doll free from the rubble. When a man shouted at us, you don’t think it at the time when you are young, but those toys had belonged to a little girl who had died – it was wrong, but you didn’t think save this doll – but it was wrong.