The First Air Raid

22.3.1973

It was very interesting to read in last week's  Orcadian John Pottinger's account of the German air raid of March 1940, in which the first British civilian casualty of the war occurred.

I remember the evening well.

The previous months, ever since 3rd September, had been marked by many phoney air raids. At school, the classes trooped into the sandbagged shelters, every child with his gas mask slung over his shoulder, at the banshee wailing of the sirens. And trooped back again, half an hour later, at the all-clear. (One can imagine what disruption our education suffered.)

Nothing happened. No bombs fell. No bombs would ever fall. Instead of being grateful we school children got increasingly bored with the war.

That Saturday in March was a fine day: with spring thrusting up everywhere through the drabness of war. It is always a season of unspoken happiness and expectation for young folk.

Early in the evening the siren began to wail and yodel. But it didn't bring the golfers in from the golf course and it didn't bring the shoppers back from the town. (The shops were open on Saturday evenings then; and my mother was away getting the weekend provisions.)

Suddenly the carnival started. We had never seen or heard anything like it. The housing scheme shook and stoddered with appalling din. I can't remember that anyone went to the air-raid shelter in the next field: there was too much excitement for thoughts of safety. Even at that age, anyhow, I remember thinking that I would rather die in the open air than in a black, crowded, claustrophobic shelter.

The flash of the anti-aircraft guns was the most exciting thing of all. The air above Scapa Flow was deluged with puffballs. The guns stabbed vividly against the dark backcloth of Hoy. The appalling din went on and on; and in the brief intervals we could hear the undulating drone of German bombers. The evening went on, with growing earthquakes and volcanoes.

Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the sounds of war ebbed; and after a while the all-clear went.

There was plenty to talk about that night round the supper table: and mainly a rumour, growing before long to a certainty, that the pastoral hamlet of Brig-o-Waithe had been 'strafed'.

We boys walked out to the place where the two waters meet, the next day (Sunday), and saw the craters and ruins, and handled the bomb fins. We felt then a first quickening of the blood - a wonderment and excitement touched with fear. The war was real, right enough, and it had come to us; and it might well come again, and closer.