To record the ‘Home Front’ memories of local men and women from WW2
Mackay Country
Home Front Oral History Project
“We Are in a State of War”
“I’m sure it was a Sunday, and one of the men from further down the place came and told my father, because there was very few people had a wireless then, or a radio, and he must have heard that war had been announced … I always remember that, because my father was very thrown, ‘cause he had come through the First … the Great War. He had come through that and had been wounded three times.
I remember us being issued with gas-masks and things when I was still in the school. Gas-masks and the blackouts on the school and that sort of thing.
And then we all had to do our bit gathering all the rubbish we could find around the place that was tin or iron or old, rusty stuff and that was all collected and taken away for the war effort.
We didn’t like to hear planes going over at night, you know, in the dark, because we were always thinking they were Germans.”
A Memory from Scourie
“A lot of people had relations who actually had gone away and were working abroad … and they were writing back. You kept up-to-date with all wordly affairs. They could see it coming, right enough.”
“I got the shock of my life when war was declared. I was on night duty, actually, and we were all, oh … thinking of home.”
An Achlyness Memory
“My brother and my future husband and another lot went off with the Lovat Scouts at 3 o’clock on Sunday the 3rd day of September. at three o’clock.
And we were all seeing them off at the crossroads at Achlyness. The tears that were shed was terrible.
They were all in the Reserve and they had to go straight away.
They went to Achfary the first night and they got horses. Then they took their horses to Lairg And their horses went on the goods train and they went on the train to Beauly. And from there they trained more and more and then they went … I think it was to the Faeroes - learning their activities. And they were in Italy during the big war there. Then they went to Canada, to the Rockies.”
