Welcome to the Website of Mrs R Carr

It was well into the war years before the last of my babies was weaned and the grey Princess pram could be given away. If I was old-fashioned about breastfeeding I was new-fangled about the pram, insisting on the tasteful and at that time unusual light grey. There was enough black in our lives, from the shining kitchen range which took so much elbow-grease to the black cloud of factory smoke and coal-dust which filled the local atmosphere in Lanarkshire, begriming our walls and smirching our curtains and I suppose filling our lungs as well. Yet as far as our children's health was concerned, they seemed to shrug off childhood ailments without too much trouble, and there was only one dark and perilous time, in the summer before Jim was born, when John came very close indeed to dying of pneumonia. It was just before the time when modern drugs made such an illness far less terrifying; so my neighbour Mrs Brownlee and I inexpertly mixed hot caolin poultices to apply to his wee chest, and there was little else to be done but to pray and to stay up with him through the nights of high fever and delirium. The crisis duly passed; he woke from a deep sleep and asked where his toy dog was; and we could get back to worrying about rationing and invasion threats while John began to look a little less like a small skeleton and devoured the eggs which mysteriously appeared each time his uncle paid us a visit from his parish in Croy.

We were always blesssed with good neighbours. Mirren Brownlee and her mine- manager husband Johnny must have arrived some time about the beginning of the war, so that she shared with me not just the family worries like John's illness but also the fears and problems of wartime living. Mirren was a true neighbour in the Gospel sense and quite free from the bigotry one sometimes meets with in the West of Scotland. She said her father had not been a Kirk person but that God was more spoken about in their home than in many others; and she could be caustic about the shortcomings of the men in the mining communities she came from: 'They would rather walk oot their whippets than walk oot their wives!' Neither family had an Anderson shelter sunk into the lawn like the Wrights at the end of our terrace, and in the event we never made use of the brick-and-concrete refuge in the back lane which was meant to serve us all. The word from the ARP - of which Jim was a member throughout the war - was that the under-stairs area in our homes was as blast-proof as anywhere, so when the sirens wailed that is where we huddled with our children.

I remember the strained look on Jim's face when he slipped in for a moment from his ARP patrol through the blacked-out streets, and the throb-throb-throb of aeroplane engines in the darkness high above us. But that was as near as enemy bombers ever came to Airdrie, though the sirens sounded often enough in the early years. One night in 1941 Jim on firewatch duty on the roof of All Saints School would see far across the city flares bursting in rainbow colours and plumes of flame going up the night they bombed Clydebank out of existence. On an earlier occasion his ARP group leader had dismissed the men at the end of a dreary and fearful night's patrol with the remark - 'And not one little bomb to relieve the monotony!'

With his knowledge of politics and history Jim could make more sense of what was happening than I could. Four-year-old Tom would run and get the big atlas for his Daddy when the evening news came on; he never forgot the night Jim made none of his usual crosses and lines on the map as he listened, but snapped the big book shut and threw it on the floor - because he knew that France was finished. The vagueness of my own understanding of what was going on must have been a trial to him at times, as he pored over maps or tuned in to Lord Haw-Haw - 'You know, that fellow must have some very good sources of information!' He never let me forget the day when he arrived from school a bit late and wanted to know about the Russian front news, and the best I could do was :'I think they've surrounded a place called Pravda'. If I was weak on Russian place-names and news-agencies I knew enough to feel the fears and tensions of the time, especially at the earlier stage when for long months a German invasion seemed a distinct possibility. Mrs Brownlee and I solemnly discussed the chances of sabotaging German vehicles by spreading broken glass on Cairnhill Road. But to tell the truth even the comic memories are of the 'not-so- funny-at-the-time' sort: a teacher friend of Jim's, also in the ARP, driving me frantic one night by continually calling 'There's a light showing, Madam,' from the street outside; and Jim himself on his first night patrol and with all his nerves jangling, out-speeding (or so he claimed) a car which backfired as it passed him in the darkness.

Our quiet wartime continued on its way, with the children getting bigger and starting to go off one after another on the mile walk with their father to All Saints Primary School in Coatdyke. They had their first sight of the sea - unless baby memories of Donegal stayed with the two eldest - on a fortnight's holiday in 1943 at Musselburgh on the Firth of Forth. It is only forty miles or so as the crow flies, but was an exciting new world for the children, with a queerly different cadence in people's voices and the blue-painted fishing boats bobbing in the harbour or silhouetted against a sparkling sea. A few snapshots and my fading crayon sketches recall a little moment of brightness in the grey war years.

The worst moment for our little family had come earlier in that same year, when Jim suffered a severe illness. Pains he had been feeling for some time and saying little about suddenly became excruciating one morning. I didn't want to leave him, and sent Tom, not quite seven, scurrying up to Dr Pollok's surgery with a note describing the symptoms. Morning surgery was over and he made his way to the Doctor's house in Queen Victoria Street to be told that he was doing calls in our area. When I found the doctor's car just along Cairnhill Road he came immediately. He said 'appendicitis', but he was not the man to hide the fact that he was gravely worried. I got a phone message to Jim's brother Father John and he and the ambulance arrived about the same time. His strong presence was a great help as I and the children watched their Daddy being stretchered out of our home and I tried to get on with the daily things to keep my fears at bay. The children were sound asleep when word came that night that the ruptured appendix had been operated on in time to avoid peritonitis, and that he was going to be all right. When he came home weeks later he still looked pale and weak; the children thought it was a strange time for me to cry.

Life fell into a regular routine, the day a quiet time for me between the morning rush to get everyone off to school and the noisy return at half-past four, followed by our family meal and an armchair snooze for Jim before he listened to the news and set off for the night-school he supervised in St Margaret's, Airdrie, to supplement his modest First-assistant's salary.

I remember those times as very happy ones, when the children were small and just beginning to show their different characters. Tom was really bright at school and the natural leader, given to doing original and disconcerting things. As a six-year- old he disappeared one Saturday with his younger brother and sister and was found an hour or so and a lot of panic later by his father solemnly leading them back up the road from school. He had felt they should have a look at the school in Coatdyke: after all they would be going there themselves. Then and later we tried to rule our family by affection and example; but there were times when something more painful seemed called for. A few years later one of his teachers quizzically asked me what size of sheets I used at Cairnhill Road: she had asked the class to write down a proverb, and Tom had come up with 'A short sheet makes the bed seem longer!'

We had great anxieties about our last-born, Jim, who was a healthy enough little boy but very slow in learning to speak. By the time he started school we had had him assessed by the famous pioneering Child Guidance Clinic in Glasgow run by the sisters of Notre Dame, the same order who had been my early educators. Indeed the founder of the clinic, Sister Marie Hilda, was an old acquaintance, and I willingly undertook the morning journey into Glasgow once or twice a week to have young Jim treated by expert therapists. It was a wonderful place and well ahead of its time, and it is sad to recall that in Jim's case they blundered badly.

Deafness as a cause of his speech difficulties had been eliminated at the first assessment, and I had to endure kindly-meant suggestions that his condition had something to do with 'over-mothering'. The wee boy himself had to suffer constant scolding from everybody around him about his inattention and dreaminess, before a school audiometric test - when he was already past his sixth birthhday - showed up serious permanent deafness. Apparently the technique used for testing pre-school children at the clinic for deafness meant that the child was asked to repeat familiar words as he or she stood facing the speaker. With an experienced tester it was quite reliable, but the words had to be simple and a bright child like Jim who was already a self-taught lip-reader could slip through the net. I am sure better methods are used nowadays.

Since a lot of my later experiences will have to be telescoped anyway, perhaps I should record here that Jim's life has been pretty successful despite the pitch- deafness which blurs all high-frequency sounds for him. He picked up all that lip- reading classes could teach him and was blessed in All Saints with a teacher, Miss Dunne, who had a clear and quite deep voice. St Aloysius' College, the Jesuit school in Glasgow attended by Tom and John, accepted him without difficulty, though the teacher correcting the entrance examination was puzzled to find an imaginative essay among the Dictation papers. The school served him well, as it did several other pupils with handicaps. In due time he qualified as a chartered surveyor, and is happily married now with two lovely children.

The immediate postwar years were in general as drab and disappointing for us as they were for most people. But our children stayed very healthy on their rationed food - remember it was several years before even sweets 'came off the ration' - and were little affected by the great events in the newspaper headlines.The older two would remember the cartoon of the map of Europe being rolled up by the Allies from both ends, and a glimpse of the Belsen photographs before we put the newspaper out of reach. A picture they did see clearly was Marshal Petain sitting at his trial, and it stayed in their minds because of their father's strange reaction to it: 'The rascals! - destroying a man who did the best he could for his country!' They were not going to grow up to believe that history was simple or that Daily Express headlines were gospel truth - not with a father who found the BBC's signature tune Lillibulero highly objectionable, and like many Irishmen was delighted at De Valera's eloquent reply to Churchill over the issue of Irish neutrality. But somewhere there is a blurred snap of them with a neighbour's child very properly waving paper Union Jacks on Victory day

What probably left a more lasting impression was the send-off at their grandparents' home in Shettleston for the beloved 'Aunt Aganes' who as a 'GI Bride' was to cross the Atlantic in the Queen Elizabeth to rejoin Joe Barry in New Jersey. A real parting of the ways, this, and looking back I have to contrast the stay-at-home life of our family with Agnes' journeyings: New Jersey, Staten Island, Milan in Michigan where her three children were born, some years in Hawaii, New York again, some years' retirement in Killarney in Ireland, and then to California before she ended her days, at the age of 87, close to her daughter's family home in Washington State. Their many changes of home were related to Joe's postings as a Customs officer, but they suited something in his own temperament as well. It was not really surprising that he found a quiet retirement in the rainy land of his ancestors less than satisfying and went back to spend his last years under the West Coast sun.

To read now about the Post War Years, click here To return to the top click here.