Our wonderful Senior Marketing Executive shares two uplifting tales from WWII – one about a near-miss that saved thousands of lives and the other about the simple joy of bananas.
I: During
“My grandmother and grandfather talked about an air raid – it was thought at the time that the target was Ardeer Explosives Factory, though later it was surmised that the bombers were simply dumping what was left of their payloads before flying back across the channel. Everyone was terrified the factory would be hit, and the two families reacted very differently to the horror of the possibility. My grandmother and her three sisters hid beneath the stairs together and cried. My grandfather’s family, who were extremely religious, stood out in the hall and sang hymns. In the end, the factory wasn’t hit directly – a fact which saved thousands of lives.”
II: After
“My favourite, and perhaps not directly a story about the war itself, but an oddly uplifting tale. My grandmother’s main memory of the end of the war – although it must have been a few years after – was the unbridled joy she witnessed as a woman ran down the streets, calling out in excitement to all of her neighbours: “MacNamara’s got bananas! MacNamara’s got bananas!”. To think that she finally saw bananas in the greengrocer’s again after so many years, and her first thought was to immediately rush to inform the whole town about it shows such a pure jubilation that must have been such a relief after so many years of hardship – especially for my grandmother, whose mother was a single parent who’d struggled during the war, having to give up sugar in the tea just to barter it for more food.”
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