My years at primary school were the war years. You know the year? What year was it?

[1939]

Yes that’s right. Well I just started school then and to start with we didn’t even get to come to Sunnybank because the soldiers were here and I started at another school at the bottom of Bedford Road. I lived in Bedford Road. The school we had to go to, Old Aberdeen, and we only had to go to the school in the mornings and other people went in the afternoon. Then when this school was opened the soldiers had the new bit, they got that bit of the school and we used the old part of the school.

I don’t know if you line up nowadays but we had to line up outside then you came into your classroom and we were all in rows. There were quite a lot of children in the classroom there was round about forty normally. All the classrooms now have lovely pictures and your work displayed on the wall but all that I remember about my classroom was a huge map of the world with all the bits that were British Commonwealth in red and that’s all that I can remember in having in the classroom. The desks were….you had a slate at the back and an inkwell and it opened up and down and you got to put your books and that inside but you very seldom got to use exercise books, you had to use the slate and a slate pencil and it scraped. The noise! Really! When you were writing it was dreadful but as I say you only got to use your exercise book for special work. So you can imagine it was noisy to the extent that the slates.. You didn’t get to talk.

You know the plaque outside with the names of the children that were killed? Well two of them stayed beside me. John Moir stayed in the corner house where there were a lot of people killed with the bomb. They didn’t go to the shelter and the bomb went underneath the house and everybody that was there got killed.

On a Friday if everyone in your class behaved did you get a banner round the door?

No the only thing that we got was that if we had perfect attendance we used to get a half day on a Friday. That was the only thing that we had.

Some boys and girls didn’t have boots to wear in those days so the school supplied school boots for them. You always knew school boots; they had holes in the side of them. You had to put school boots back at weekends and in holidays. You only got them to wear in days you went to school.