EARLIEST MEMORIES

I remember a conversation with Angus on ones earliest memories.It is sometimes difficult to tell is it something  you have been told, a photograph you have seen or is it an actual memory.

Well I am pretty certain mine aged about four were on a holiday in Ayr.It must have been our last family holiday before my father became ill. We stayed in a boarding house opposite Ayr Academy. I remember the school pipe band playing in the playground.

Douglas has a photograph of me standing in the sea in swimming trunks [acceptable to Kate].I was rigedly to attention so perhaps aged four there was the embryonic soldier.

I also remember being given a glass of water by some German Prisoners of  War [POWs]. During the War many Butlins Holiday Camps were turned POW Centres. The one in Ayr certainly was and the German soldiers passed me water over the wire. This must have been 1946 and they still had not been repatriated to Germany.

Also on that holiday we stayed on a farm in Ayrshire. My grandmother on my mothers side maiden was Mc Cullouch. he was very close to a first cousin who owned a farm called Mirclan [phonetic].

I can recall living in the attic of the farm house and having difficulty getting to sleep as outside two owls landed on telegraph poles and hooted all night or so it seemed.

More frightened I had to take these sandwiches out to two German POWs in the stables.I thought they were going to eat me.They in fact adored children.I know that throughout the war many POWs were allowed out to work on farms.Although I am sure they missed their own families they had no desire to escape and and fight once more for THE THIRD REICH>

Aged 7-18 I spent every summer on another farm-The Muir-Aunt Margaret was my mother's 2nd cousin so Wilma and I were third cousins -more later.

What else : well back home in Glasgow the one o'clock pips on the radio was the signal to go and meet Dorothy coming home from school.Asthma which plagued her all her life had set in and she needed help.

One great thrill for Dorothy and I was visits by Willie Darroch. He was a cousin of my mother and a bit younger.He was a bachelor with a motorbike.To us he was a magic man and braught us fabulous presents.I remember getting a ride on the bike sitting on the petrol tank.He did marry later in life and had grandchildren.

I met him after many years at Alan France's funeral : he was aged 80. He was a train driver and during the War & was in Persia [ Iran] driving military equipment [probably supplied by the Americans] up to the Russian border to help them in their fight against Hitler.Other than the Artic convoys that was one of the few routes into unoccupied Russia.

We din't have television but I remember one of the first things I watched was standing in the rain peering into a shop  window. It was the funeral of King George VI. That must have been 1946.