Edinburgh saw nothing like the blitz that pounded cities like Glasgow or London during the Second World War. But that was little comfort for those injured or bombed out of their homes in the city as air raids took their toll, mostly in 1940 and 1941.
Here, 73-year-old FRANK FERRI, a retired council worker now living in Newhaven, describes the night his childhood home was hit – and the lasting effect it has had on him
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ON the night of April 7, 1941, my street, Ballantyne Road, was severely damaged by a mini blitz. German aircraft heading for the shipyards of Clydebank were intercepted by our RAF fighters, and in an effort to get away as fast as they could, the German bombers unloaded their bombs indiscriminately to hasten their exit.
The bombs they released in our area were two landmines, suspended from parachutes, which silently fell from the sky, giving no warning until they reached the ground and exploded. One fell near Largo Place/Keddie Gardens park, destroying the corner of a tenement and killing at least two people, and damaging the Town Hall in Ferry Road, now Leith Library/Theatre.
Running parallel to Ballantyne Road and Largo Place is the Water of Leith and the then railway line. The second bomb fell in the deep railway embankment, thus forcing the blast upwards – had it fallen on flatter ground, Ballantyne and neighbouring areas would have been levelled.
That night is indelibly imprinted in my mind. It would have been about nine at night, and I, aged six, was sitting by the fireside, reading my comic before getting ready for bed. On this night, my father heard an aircraft passing overhead. We were used to hearing different aircraft, being close to Turnhouse, and if the sirens went off, we knew it had been a German. So frequently did aircraft fly over our house that we learned to differentiate between the engine sounds of friend or foe.
On this occasion, my father was right in guessing it was a German by the intermittent drone of its engines, but this time there was no siren, just this enormous blast, which lifted me right off my chair and flung me across the room into the hall. The whole window had blown in, and the plaster on the ceiling and walls fell off, with furniture, dust, crockery and glass strewn all over the place.
My father grabbed me, placed my two-year-old brother in an all-enclosing gasmask that resembled a deep sea diver's helmet and made for the door and balcony. Feeling the rubble of the balcony under his feet in the darkness, he shouted to my mother: "Molly, I think the balcony has gone – we may be trapped."
My mother had gone back into the house to retrieve her purse and got trapped behind the living-room door, which was jammed by falling debris. My father went back for her. The balcony, as it turned out, was safe, and it was only rubble he felt under his feet. As we gingerly made our way down the dark turreted staircase descending from the tenement, we could hear the sound of exploding shells and shrapnel, and see tracer bullets racing across the sky and the sweeping bands of search lights from our ack-ack gun batteries scanning the skies.
On arrival at the brick-built shelters in the quadrangle of Ballantyne, we found they were all full and had to make our way through a pend leading to Ballantyne Place and the colloquially named Piggery (a large area of waste ground), where there were underground earth shelters. These were also quite full, but we got in. The shelter had bunk beds and chemical toilets. It stank of some kind of disinfectant – the smell made you retch. One of the first faces I recognised in the shelter was Mrs Geddes, our next door neighbour, having fragments of glass removed from her head. People had brought an assortment of belongings with them, and some old ladies had brought their budgerigars, canaries, cats and dogs. For a while, not much conversation went on. People just huddled together for warmth and comfort in the damp, smelly cold, until the door burst open with some new residents and a couple of Air Raid Wardens, some drunk.
As it turned out, Jamieson's the grocers in Junction Street, halfway between Ballantyne and Bowling Green Street, had the shop front blown in and some of the people had purloined the booze. Hence their condition and the exaggerated stories of drama – including one untrue tale that Mrs Gillespie with her ten children at No 3/21 top flat was trapped with her family; their part of the balcony had blown away. As each story unfolded, the children, agog with a mixture of fear and excitement, would scan the adult faces for some kind of reassurance or reaction, whether negative or positive.
Most nights, when there was no bombing, we quite looked forward to going to the shelter. It meant you met your pals, played cards, Ludo or Snakes and Ladders, and would certainly have the day off school the next day. This time it was very different. This time we experienced real fear, picked up from the body language of the adults. It was their and my first experience of a real air raid.
During the raid, George DeFlice's, an Italian ice-cream shop at Junction Bridge, had been pillaged during the night. It was assumed it was in retribution for the Italians under the rule of Mussolini, who supported the Germans at that time. As kids, on cold winter's nights, we would go into George's and sit in, buy a cup of hot Oxo or Bovril and a couple of water biscuits to dip, or a bowl of hot peas and vinegar. Back in the shelter there were stories going around of people with their heads blown off, heroic deeds of someone thinking the parachuted landmine was a German pilot and someone getting blown up running towards it to arrest the enemy. All untrue, of course – war does have a macabre yet unconscious sense of humour.
At about nine the next morning, we exited the shelters, blinking in the early spring sun, and made our way back to inspect the damage to our properties. Gingerly climbing the stairs through the rubble to our flats, not knowing how structurally sound the stairs and balconies were, we entered the house.
Plaster from the walls and ceiling was completely stripped, furniture lying on its face, glass, clothes and crockery all over the place, and no sign of the window or its frame. Fortunately the explosion had not fractured gas supplies and started a fire.
Obviously there was no school that day or the next, and people from all over Leith came to see the devastation caused, making us kids feel quite sorry for ourselves. For many months, all we had to keep the wind and rain from blowing in the window space of our house was bright yellow oilcloth, sealing up the windows, emitting a dull yellow light, thus severely restricting natural light.
The bright side of the blitz for the children, however, was that sometime later they received a parcel containing sweets and toys from the people of Culver City, Burbank, California, USA, signed by the mayor. These gifts in the deprived war years were great and treasured luxuries to us.
The major negative side to the raid – for me, anyway – was that for some considerable time after the event, I suffered post- traumatic stress and developed a stutter. I would run out of the house totally terrified, in no matter what state of dress or undress, if a flake of lime or plaster shaken down by the footsteps of our upstairs neighbour fell from the ceiling. There was no treatment for that in those days.
The full article contains 1346 words and appears in Edinburgh Evening News newspaper.
