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This story was submitted to the People's War site by Catherine Garvie, Learning Project Manager at ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Scotland on behalf of the Greenock War Detectives project and has been added with their permission. The authors fully understand the site's terms and conditions.

Lachlan: Well for a start let’s talk about sweeties. That was the most memorable thing for me as there weren’t many sweeties around at all. You got a ration but it was very little.

Sheila: I remember everything about rationing; sugar, butter, tea, it was even difficult to get potatoes and eggs. We had powdered milk and dried eggs. You didn’t really see eggs in the shops but we had a friend who had a few hens and we used to get some eggs from her. As food was rationed our father grew potatoes and vegetables in the garden so at least we weren’t short for those things.

Sheila: I think people probably had healthier diets during the war. The government seemed to think so. You had to get used to eating things like spaghetti and macaroni; things we weren’t really used to.

Lachlan: I remember the baffle walls at the entrance of all the closes. The idea was that if a bomb exploded in the middle of the street and you were inside the close, you’d be protected. Many people who lived in tenements didn’t have a shelter in the garden and sheltered at the bottom of their closes instead. During the night if you happened to be out and it was dark you could easily walk straight into one of those baffle walls. They were brick and quite high, so it wasn’t very pleasant, was it?

Sheila: Well no, I tended not to be out as much at night as you would be. It was quite scary. We had our own shelter in the back garden. They were supplied, they gave you the metal and you dug it into the ground and put a sand bag in top of it. It felt quite small, particularly when you had a big family like ours. It wasn’t very warm; in fact it was very damp and stank.

Lachlan: No, it wasn’t very pleasant but what could you do? It was either that or risk losing your life.

Sheila: There were lots of difficult times during the war. You couldn’t get clothes and didn’t have central heating. It was a coal fire in the living room so you would all be crowding around it trying to keep warm. Coal was difficult to get too so we would gather up wood and anything else to try and keep the fire going.

Sheila: We went to the cinema quite a lot during the war. We didn’t have a television but we were lucky because we had a radio and got to listen to news programmes and the children’s hour story at 5 0’clock.
Sheila: When we heard that Britain had declared war it wasn’t really a surprise. I think we had all been expecting it. Nothing much happened to begin with and it was nearly a year before we started to feel the crunch.

Lachlan: Everybody knew a war was coming. All those other countries had been taken over by Hitler and then there was the civil war in Spain.

Sheila: We had lots of troops from different countries based here during the war.

Lachlan: We used to see the Queen Mary bringing in soldiers from America. They would get unloaded at Gourock and put on a train from there. Some would go up north and others down to London.

Sheila: And if there were children about when they were going on the train, they would shout up to them for sweets because the Americans always had some sweets to give to them. Chewing gum, the Americans were always chewing gum.
Lachlan: They would throw them out of the window as the passed along on the train.

Sheila: My sisters and myself were evacuated after the blitz. The house was badly damaged; the windows and doors were blown out. Not just the glass, the whole frames. We had friends in Skye and it was decided that the younger members of the family should go up there. We were up there for a couple of months and had to go to school there as well. I didn’t really mind being evacuated because it was during the summer, the end of May beginning of June so it was quite nice up there, apart from the fact you were in somebody else’s house.

Sheila: We were very, very happy when we found out the war had ended. There were a lot of people singing songs and cheering and dancing around, it was great. It took a while for the goods to come back into the shops.

Lachlan: It just came back gradually really, even bread was difficult to get, you had to queue up to get loafs of bread and things like that.

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