My mum remembers the worst of the Blitz. She lived in Rutherglen which is about 11 miles away from Duntocher.
This is the story she told me: Her dad had set up under the stairs as their shelter for air raids. On the night she remembers most they had been visiting family friends and were still there when the sirens went off so they decided to shelter there for safety. They ended up staying there the whole night.
The next morning they got home and found that a stray bomber had let it's load go over their street. The school had been badly damaged. There had been a direct hit on an Anderson shelter at the end of the street wiping out a young family
. My mum's front door and the windows had been blown in and there were giant shards of glass embedded in the wall where they would have been sheltering. My um says what she remembers is the noise and how scary it was that it was so loud. She was young and didn't fully understand what was happening, didn't understand why she wasn't going to see her friends from along the street again. SHe said it hit her years later, the significance of it all.
My Dad on the other hand was a bit older. but not yet old enough to be in the forces (14.5). He would do an early shift as an apprentice electrician in the yards and in the evenings he would do a few hours as a volunteer with the St Andrew's Ambulance Assoc. He was based at Glasgow Royal Infirmary. The could hear the bombs from where he was and could see the glow in he sky. One of the doctors got him in the car and took him out to somewhere in the Clydebank area, he didn't know where it was not only the darkness but he said it was unrecognisable. My Dad, being young and small compared to th doctors was tasked with climbing into and under the rubble to give relaxing and pain relieving injections to survivors to aid extraction. Also to bandage wounds to reduce the bleeding until they could get them out. It haunted him, he didn't know if all those he tried to help survived and he must have seen some horrific sites. My Uncle said it affected my Dad more than his time in the Royal Marines 1944-1946 where he served out East.
