BLITZ RECOLLECTIONS

I thought you might find the following story of how the Clydeside Blitz affected my family of interest.

On a Thursday night my mother and father had gone to the Park Theatre near Charing Cross to see a play. I was at home with a cousin when the alarm went off so we retreated to the laundry room in the basement. At the theatre everyone went into a shelter and stayed there until 6am. They were not allowed to phone home and after the all-clear no phones were working. They decided to walk to Pollokshields to an aunt’s house. There were broken windows and debris on Sauchiehall Street, but they eventually managed to phone home and, much to my relief, they were safe.

The next night of the bombing my father had to go to the ARP post at Newton Mearns to drive an ambulance. On the Sunday my mother heard that some of the families who had lost their homes were given shelter in a church hall at Thornleighbank, so she went off to see if she could help. She came home with a family of six. They lived in a tenement in Clydebank and when the alarm went off they went one way to the shelter and their neighbours went the other way and were killed. We had a big house and were able to accommodate the family. To begin with my mother did all the cooking and we ate together, but that didn’t work out after my mother served up fish with white sauce and nobody ate it (including me). So after that the Ormerods did their own cooking and ate in the cosy kitchen and we ate in the colder dining room!

When it came to August we went to Arran on holiday and left the Ormerods at home. When we came home we found that the back door was open and the family had left three days before. Nothing was missing but my mother was upset by the state of her saucepans. We never did hear anything from the family again. Muriel Lewis, Newton Mearns