What was it like in the bomb raid shelters?
Elsie: Never been in one.
Martha: It was horrible… I just remember getting taken oot o’ my bed and getting on this blue, they called it a siren suite – you would call it an all in one. And we were taken down to Anderson Shelter and it wis just a stone building… stone floors and we had to sit there… the women took flasks of tea and things like that and sometimes we were there quite a while. It wis damp and cold and you didn’t get back to ye house till the siren (the all clear) went so you were there sometime quite a few nights in a month or so. You heard the sirens and then you heard the planes coming. When the siren went you had to go down to the Anderson Shelter.

What was the scariest thing about being taking to the shelter?
Taken oot yer bed for a start! I didnae like that.. but it was dark an the noise of the planes overhead it wis really scary. Where I stayed it wis a tenement there where ‘sunks’ right doon at the bottom… whit they called the ‘sunks’. Some of the people went doon there but I didnae like it - it wis worse than the shelters …there it was dump and there was water an it wasn’t fine.

So... you lived in a country house?
yes
Did you have to go into a shelter at all?
No – no shelter built.
There was prisoners of war eventually came, they put up great big hut’s and there where Germans, Italians, Polish (there would not have been Polish) they were put to work on farms.
On your farm?
Aye there was one German working on our farm; maybe at the harvest time there might have been more than one person helping.

Did the farmers mind that?
No they just got on with it. It was just extra workers for then and they got the work done quicker than just with their ordinary people. I remember my dad telling me years after. I don’t know what they got paid but if they had too much money when they went back to stay in the camp it was taken off them. So my father, he used to keep some of it. If he had been caught doing that he would have been in serious trouble. They did not have big wages.
My first wage was GBP 1.50. I worked for Anderson’s Roses.
I got a pound a week when I started working but then I was living in. I had all my good and ma bed and every thing there.

Where were you working?
At a doctor’s house in Insch- looking after the children and doing housework.