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Our village had it's usual quota of evacuees at the start of the war. Most, if not all of them from Glasgow and that area.
It must have been quite a culture shock for them coming from a city where all amenities and shops of all sorts were available to them. Our village, New Aberdour, near Fraserburgh in Aberdeenshire had no amenities of any kind. Not only that, we had no bakery, no chemist, no doctor, no chip shop and no cinema. So they must have felt as if they had arrived in the last place on earth. and as a result of this isolation, apart from one or two families with children, they gradually returned to their homes 'down south'.
However, after the blanket bombing of Clydebank they all streamed back to where they thought they would be safer. This return lasted until again the isolation and the lack of things to entertain them made them seek - I can't say the bright lights as it was black out time - but certainly a civilisation they were more used to.
But one summer evening - during the second influx - one of the mothers had a distressing & to her a terrifying experience.
It was about 7:30 at night and she had gone to the beach for a walk with her toddler son - about 4 - and her little girl, who was not quite old enough to walk. They had been gathering shells and pretty stones and were now on their way home up the steep hill that led up from the beach. It was getting near the little boys bedtime and he was dawdling on behind - every now and then being urged on by his mother. At one point she stopped to wait for him to catch up with her and while she stood she looked out to sea. She noticed an unusual disturbance on the water and then rooted to the spot she saw a submarine start to surface. It wasn't until she saw the black cross on the conning tower that she realised it was a German U-boat and when she broke her stupor she grabbed the toddler by the arm and struggled up the mile to the village where she arrived screaming, breathless and almost speechless.
We could hear her in the house and my father (Harry Soppitt)the village policeman, ran out to see what was the matter, and when she got her breath back she yelled "That bl---y Hitler. He chased me out of Glasgow and now he's followed me up here!" She must have felt the war had turned into a personal vendetta.
The reason for the U-boat surfacing was to charge their dynamos, but so confident were they of their power at that time of the war, they were blatant in their defiance.

Eileen Rushton (nee Soppitt)

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