‘It was a new life for us, it was scary but exciting’
IT was 1943 and Margaret Macdonald was playing with her friends in the fields behind their homes in Granton when they spotted an aeroplane flying high above their heads. “The pilot waved at us and we waved back,” says Margaret, now 76.
“Then our mothers ran out of our houses in a panic. We weren’t aware that it was a German plane. That was the most adventurous thing I’ve ever done I think.”
Margaret, along with her mother and brother John, was evacuated to the countryside outside Aberdeen during the war. Their father was in the Territorial Army and so stayed behind for training. “It was a new life for us city kids up north. It was scary but exciting.”
But when Margaret’s mother heard that her husband was being sent abroad she decided to take the children back to Edinburgh.
“We took a train back. I think there was an air raid that night but we got home safely. But we needn’t have come back so soon because my dad never got sent abroad in the end. In fact he never got farther than the south of England. He was the only one in his family who didn’t see any action. Instead he was stationed in a prisoner of war camp for Germans in Taunton.”
Margaret recalls her father telling her that he didn’t speak to the German prisoners often but thought they were all right.
“He would say to me that you could tell which ones were Nazis from the way the other prisoners treated them,” she says.
Margaret did not see her father again until after the war had ended.
During the war, the Macdonalds shared an Anderson shelter, with several other families in the area. It was built by a neighbour who was considered unfit to serve and who instead worked as an air raid warden. “We knew that when the air raid siren went we had to get indoors quickly,”
She remembers VE day on May 7, 1945 well. “Someone shouted that the war was over. Of course, it wasn’t that simple but it was a wonderful feeling at the time.”
