No 42. Wartime, or Dad's Army.

A long time ago, but yesterday too. Rain On My Window (Tears in My Eyes) will be an ongoing tale of my early memories of life shared by my younger brother David on Whitehall Farm in Stronsay, Orkney, of our childhood on a working farm in the 1930s before we lost our innocence.


ALL OUR YESTERDAYS is a phrase which rings in my ears. Someone recently mentioned the War – 1939 to 1945 – an American oddly enough in Forss House one evening - and he asked how we then lived, what was rationing like, did we go hungry. Hauled me back in time a good bit but made me think of those far off days for most of which we were in Stronsay. Then from May 1944 in Caithness. Allowing for a child not remembering the first few years of life, there are few now alive other than pensioners, and not all of them either, who has memory of those perilous days.
On Stronsay, a quiet backwater in so many ways, we had visible enough signs of War. First I remember was being issued with identity cards and gas masks at every house just before War was declared. We bairns had to take them with us to school and be instructed how to put them on properly. Smell of new grey rubber and French chalk and making rude noises by blowing too fiercely. For a time we were obliged to carry them but that drill did not last too long.
Near the Central School in the middle of the island and on our way to school a Communications Wireless Station had been erected, webs of masts and wires and insulators, with a building for the generator and working space for the operators. The station was in line of sight from Sanday to the North with its Radar Station and the Mainland to the South, making a link between them. When we passed there was usually the song of the wind sighing and soughing through the wires and an electrical crackle and fizzle and pop as well. When the Radar Station was erected on Sanday to our North the four huge masts were seen well enough from Stronsay. A young man from Stronsay fell to his death there while working on their erection. Another Stronsay lad was sent down the coalmines as a Bevin Boy, as they called them, and lost his life there. I remember his sad funereal. These things hit a small island hard.
The LDV (Local Defense Volunteers) were formed in 1940, then renamed The Home Guard. We called them “Dad’s Army” long before T.V. pinched our title!! Our father [ Dad ] was the Sergeant. He had First World War experience in the Seaforths but never went to France, or I guess we would not be here now. At the outbreak of War in August 1914 he, like so many others, was in the Territorial Army and was mobilized at the very beginning. He never did speak much about that time in his life, too many good friends never came home. He spent the time he was in the Army hauling defence guns up the sheer cliffs of the Barrel of Butter, a monstrously steep rock in Scapa Flow, put in some time at Fort George, was sent out to Stronsay to mount guard with two other Terriers on Rousam Head in a small watch hut with a good coal burning stove. There he enjoyed himself as he had farmed Rousam with his father David until 1913, so naturally he knew everyone locally.
On one occasion he was skiving off and sitting in the farm house at the Bu’ of Rousam with his feet under the table when someone rushed in and told him his Sergeant had come stealthily and quietly out to Stronsay by a small motor boat and was marching up to Rousam Head to check up on things. Arriving at the watch hut the Sergeant found Private Pottinger missing. Back down to the Bu’ to find the miscreant, didn’t really think father had fallen over the cliff. But father had dodged out the back door, crossed the “Peedie Loch“ next the steading by the causeway, got back up to the watch hut in the Sergeant’s absence by a hill track. When the Sergeant came back from his abortive search father was marching up and down the cliffs with his rifle on his shoulder. When charged with “Desertion of his Post in Time of War” he said he had been further along the cliffs as he had heard something suspicious and thought it might have been the German Army and the Kaiser invading. And that was that.

In 1940 the LDV were at first unkindly called “Look, Duck and Vanish”, which actually could have been excellent advice. They only had armbands and pitch forks with which to drill but as time went on uniforms arrived and a consignment of Canadian .300 rifles with bayonets arrived in wooden boxes totally filled with grease. Everyone was issued with his rifle and bayonet and I remember father cleaning his to perfection in the kitchen. He then went through the drill to perfection for our benefit - slope arms, present arms, port arms, atten-shun, stand at ease, fix bayonettes, lunge, parry, all the other mysterious things soldiers did with a rifle. We had never thought our farmer father could be so smart, but he was.

One should not in fairness dismiss the Home Guard as in Dad’s Army shown on T.V.. In it were many men who had been on the Western Front and survived right through that Hell, a bit older now twenty two years on from 1918 but still hard and fit men in their forties working on the land or in the fishing. These occupations were exempt from War Service unless a man wanted to go, few did. So the War passed us by and farming carried on.

In the middle of the Island just below the Wireless Station was the rifle range with a target just above the beach, bullets going safely through into the water beyond. I think it was a useful relic from at least World War 1, possibly from much earlier. The Boer War comes to mind, perhaps even the Crimean. Still totally usable, the Home Guard did their rifle shooting practice there. Went a few times with father to watch, and fired a shot once from a rifle under father’s very careful supervision. Not too bad a kick either if you held it tight to your shoulder. A Home Guard with a white and a red flag kept score from a pit safely under the target, signaling success or otherwise with numbers 1 to 10 held up above the parapet on sticks. I had a lucky 10, Bull’s Eye, beginners luck I guess. .
On Burgh Head facing to the East and to Germany the Home Guard had a lookout hut which was manned by rota. I remember father going off in his uniform and his three stripes to do his nightly stint, but with a goodly number of men available the rota was not too onerous. The old photograph of the Stronsay Home Guard shows 42 men, some I knew, some I remember only the face. Some are still alive today. Ralph Maxwell is one, third from left in front row, now a retired farmer near Turriff. Just recently turned 90 and gone off on a cruise to celebrate. Hardy.
The Home Guard drilled in the Territorial Hall in the centre of the Island, they must have done some exercises too but we did not see them. Rousam Head was a heathery wilderness and some exercises were done there. Night ones too. It was all taken very seriously, justly so after Dunkirk.

In the village the few herring drifters who might have called ceased, the declining herring fishing nearly all finished anyway before the War. Stronsay was used as a night port for trawlers who went to sea in daytime to fish but had by order to come in to harbour and safety during the night. A policeman, Yorston, was stationed full time in Stronsay during the War, and the trawler men gave him some custom at times. I guess anyone who went to sea with all the risks of War was entitled to get seriously drunk when ashore. Sadly, not all the trawlers survived. Best story I was told was the time Yorston was coming into his own house while the trawler men were having a barny outside. His wife thought he was an intruder and belted him solidly over the head with a frying pan. True or false I do not know, I think it was, and it makes a good story anyway.
Another episode was a Norwegian fishing boat coming South from Lerwick in Shetland having escaped the Germans. Not the only one by any means but this one I remember well. We went to the Village to see it. The boat was very full of escapees and also leaking very badly with very little freeboard left. Her pumps were unable to cope and they just made it. The Earl Sigurd came out to Stronsay from Kirkwall with the fire brigade with pumps and kept her floating. She was then beached on the high tide at the back of the pier and repairs sufficient to take her in to Kirkwall were made. We went down to the Village to see all the excitement, could not understand a word they said. Odd. But Jimmie Fiddler our Postmaster had married Bertha, a Norwegian girl, and no problem at all. Other Norwegian boats came in from time to time but none so near destruction as that one. Stronsay was the nearest Island to Norway and the best old Viking landfall anyway - the Island of the Strands [beaches] Island, therefore Stronjsey. Unfortunately there were also Norwegian boats that did not survive the perils of the sea or the Germans, but we only knew of them when enquiries were made by other escapees as to whether they had arrived. The empty silence told its own sad story.