CHILDREN OF THE HOME FRONT:
Some War-time Memories of Campbeltown
Margaret Macaulay
The Second World War is history now, and, for those of us who lived through it, even more disturbing is the fact that children today know very little about it. Maybe that's unfair - how much did we as children know about the Boer War?
My Second World War was spent in Campbeltown, a very different place from the town today. So, in the interests of recording history, I've set down some of my memories of that extraordinary and very special time.
At the outbreak of the war I had just turned five. I have few memories of pre-war Campbeltown, apart from a snapshot in my mind of staring up at a beam in a shop in Cross Street which had hands of bananas strung along it, and a memory of Sunday mornings after church when my father used to take my brother and me to visit his aunt and uncle in the end house of Pensioners' Row (where Auntie Tina had a Jenny-a-Things shop). I suspect I preserved these memories because for the next six years both bananas and my father were largely to disappear from my life.
The biggest upset for the children of Campbeltown was of course the requisitioning of school buildings in the town by the Royal Navy as HMS Nimrod. I had started school in the 'Wee Grammar' (now the Catholic primary school) but soon found myself in the back hall of Lorne Street Church where the first three classes of primary school were housed under the tutelage of three kind but firm ladies - Miss MacConnachie, Miss Jordan and Miss MacDonald.
Miss Jordan was my mother's favourite, principally because she once told my mother I was 'a little Spitfire'. My mother often quoted this remark to me with pride - the Spitfire after all was the plane that was winning the Battle of Britain for the nation at that time - but I can hardly imagine how I qualified for the comparison. I was a very shy, quiet child.
I don't remember any toilets at Lorne Street, but there must have been some because we all soon learned the magic phrase, 'Please may I leave the room?' Later we moved to Kirk Street Hall where we were supposed to share the toilets of the Catholic School across the road, though we rarely did. The Catholic School was another world to us, so it was hard to think of using their 'facilities', which were in any case as dank and unpleasant as all such places were in these days.
At interval times - or 'race', as we called it - our school, lacking any playground, emptied its pupils out into the streets, where we did indeed race about. No road safety problems then, as petrol rationing had driven all but essential car-users off the road.
More maiden ladies held sway at Kirk Street - Miss Milloy, Miss MacNair, Miss MacDougall and Miss Revie. It was very much an enclosed world and it was always a memorable day when we had visitors. Which is no doubt why I remember so clearly the occasion when we were asked to bring our gas masks to school and a posse of gentlemen arrived to inspect them.
Everyone in Campbeltown had a gas mask, issued in orderly fashion over a period of days from Bolgam Street Hall. The best thing about the gas mask was the rude noises you could make by breathing heavily inside it. The visitors allowed us to make a cacophony of noise, and even suggested we all get underneath our desks. It was a wonderful break from parsing and long division.
Secondary pupils meantime criss-crossed the town to attend classes in various halls. I'm sure for some of them it was a great lark, but it could hardly have been beneficial educationally and it must have been a time-tabling nightmare.
One of the main halls used was the Drill Hall in John Street, which was divided into makeshift classrooms. The walls of the classrooms did not reach to the ceiling, and that, plus the fact that the condition of the plasterboard walls soon deteriorated, made it easy to hear and even see into adjoining classrooms.
My brother still recounts one occasion when a teacher had not arrived to take the lesson. Mayhem soon broke out and the class were enjoying the antics of some of their bolder classmates, when the teacher in an adjoining room put his arm through a convenient hole in the dividing partition, crooked a finger in the direction of the main performer and invited him to come next door for a date with his Lochgelly.
Another memorable moment from my own primary school days was the arrival of a huge consignment of dried fruit from, I think, South Africa. Every child was given several bags of raisins, currants and sultanas to take home with them, and we all felt as though we were bringing home the food equivalent of gold dust.
The war-time diet was adequate - and indeed considered to be one of the healthiest this country has ever had - but certain items were extremely scarce, or, like those bananas, had disappeared altogether. At one war-time sale of work in the Town Hall, the main point of interest was the auction of two bananas. The less-bruised of the two went for 1s 6d and the other for 11d - a substantial sum in these days.
Luxury items, such as chocolate biscuits or tinned fruit, were only available if there was what was called an 'allocation' to the shops and if your mother had sufficient 'points' left in the family ration books to secure them. For the basics - tea, sugar, fats, and butcher meat - every family registered with a particular grocer and butcher who marked off a section in your ration book in pen when you received your ration.
'Sweetie coupons' were essential to buy sweets from the very limited range available. My brother, irritatingly, hoarded his coupons and always had some to spend at the end of each month, while I had usually splurged mine as quickly as possible (maybe there was a bit of the Spitfire about me after all). My mother conscientiously spooned malt extract into both of us nightly as recommended by the Government.
Children got used to eating raw rhubarb dipped in a little (very little) sugar, cinnamon sticks from the chemist's, and cooking apples (when my father was stationed in Kent he arrived on leave one time with a kitbag full of sweet apples which gave us street cred for weeks). We didn't worry much about clothes coupons. Hand-me-downs and home-made clothes were the accepted war-time fashion.
I can't honestly remember whether fish was rationed. I suspect not, and eggs were quite plentiful as Kintyre was not included in the scheme for egg-rationing. As a result, eggs became a major item of interest with everyone who came to Campbeltown, and our Glasgow aunties always departed with eggs in their suitcases. We knew that eggs were scarce because when we travelled to other parts of the country we made the acquaintance of dried egg - a dreadful substitute for the real thing.
In spite of war we did travel, but there were difficulties. Timetables were only approximate, depending on other factors. First we had to travel to Glasgow, catching the Loch Fyne from the pier at East Loch Tarbert, but civilian transport was secondary to the movement of naval ships on the Clyde. We often spent several hours on the pier at Tarbert waiting for the boat to appear and no doubt driving the adults to despair by see-sawing on the pier's gang-plank, the only diversion available.
Sometimes we caught the early morning MacBrayne's bus to Glasgow, which departed from Main Street at 7 am under the command of a redoubtable lady called 'London Kate' who allocated seats and made no allowance for the travelling preferences of parents with young children. In my memory these early morning departures were always in the dark, and as almost every adult smoked at that time, the air and even the seat upholstery reeked of tobacco. Before the bus had reached Tarbert, let alone Glasgow at 1 pm, I was the same green colour as the MacBrayne bus. The experience was enough to put me off bus travel for years.
Holidays apart, there were other diversions. We listened to the radio as avidly as children today watch television and video, we attended concerts and entertainments sometimes put on by the many Navy personnel stationed in the town, and we went to the cinema at least once a week - the Rex and the Picture House (known as the 'Big Pictures' and the 'Wee Pictures') providing between them a different film every night.
Once I was invited with several of my class-mates to a birthday party aboard HMS Shemara. Gillian Tillett (her name still lives on with me) was one of the many English children at school, and her father was an officer on the ship. The Shemara had pre-war been a luxury yacht, and for us youngsters the occasion was indeed an incredible technicolour episode in an austerity world. So many details are still so vivid (I must have been about eight at the time) but the most memorable without doubt was the sugar bowl on the birthday table, filled with coloured sugar crystals.
Some toys were unobtainable - if you owned a rubber ball or had some coloured chalks you were worth knowing. We made do with home-made toys, such as wooden stilts, and had iron hoops and cleeks from Johnny Paterson's smiddy. Although there was no street lighting because of the black-out we played a great deal outside - Leevo, a form of hide-and-seek, was much more exciting by moonlight.
Indoors we played board games. 'Monopoly' was a great favourite and in our house we had another board game, 'Dover Patrol', based on naval warfare in the English Channel. Looking back now with hindsight it seems strange that we never linked this with the experience of our father who, like many local men, was trapped at St Valery in France in 1940. He was one of the few who managed to make his escape in a small boat and was picked up in the Channel.
Of course our youth protected us, and my mother did not pass on her anxieties to us. But certain events did impinge. The air raids on the town were frightening and I can remember seeing the wrecked front of the Royal Hotel. We had a makeshift shelter in our house, under the stairs, and when the siren went off my mother, brother, and I sat there. It was half-adventure, half-nightmare.
My brother, being older, was more aware and more adventurous. Collecting shrapnel after the air raids was a great game, and, with an older cousin, he was soon hiking across the hills to plane crashes, of which, sadly, there were several during the course of the war. As the war progressed he had maps on the walls of our sitting-room, and as we listened to the war news he would alter the lines of the Allied advance.
Gradually the pencilled lines of the western and eastern fronts in Europe grew closer together. The black-out was lifted and when the street lights came on for the first time everyone came out to celebrate. The English children started going home, many reluctantly and by now some with impeccable Scottish accents.
On VE Day I was belatedly learning to ride my first two-wheeler bike. I had just moved off on my own when the news of the peace must have come through for all the ships in the loch started hooting their horns.
The prisoners of war returned, and each street welcomed them with strings of flags. The last to come, and the most shocking in appearance, were those who had been imprisoned by the Japanese. Our street had its share of flags, but it was much later before I began to realise the real suffering of the war.
Even in our short street one young man had been killed in North Africa, another drowned on convoy duty. One had lost a foot from a mine in Sicily, another had survived several days in an open boat after his ship was torpedoed.
Purely because of our birth-dates we were fortunate indeed to spend our Second World War as children on the Home Front in Campbeltown.
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MARGARET MACAULAY. Born in Campbeltown, Argyll in 1934. Honours graduate in History from the University of Glasgow. One of the first women to be employed in the Reporters Room of the Glasgow Herald. Marriage and children ended a full-time career in journalism (this was the early 1960s) but she continued to free-lance for the paper as television reviewer and feature writer. She took a post-graduate course in primary teaching, working as a teacher and later for James Thin Booksellers of Edinburgh, specialising in antiquarian and out-of-print books. Now "retired" she writes articles for The Scottish Book Collector, on literary and historical subjects. She is currently working on a novel on a forgotten episode of Scottish history.
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I found this article(taken from the Kintyre Magazine)interesting,like Margaret's father my father also was one of the few to escape from the beaches of St.Valery.