We had a wonderful, wonderful life
Recorded 4 years ago
About this recording
Kathlyn Harper reminisces about growing up in Willowbank. "We had a very, very happy home," she says. "There was never a wrong word."
Kathlyn was nine years old when World War Two broke out and she recalls air raids on Wick, including one in which all the windows in their street were blown out. She had been trying on a new pair of boots from Dan Dunnett's shoe shop at the time. Kathleen describes how her father led the family to the scullery to seek shelter.
"Here was me with one boot on. When the all clear went, 'Stay where you are,' and he would go to the door. And [my sister] Helen was at his back and she said, 'Oh mum, everybody's dead but us.' Because our street, Willowbank, was just littered with broken windows. But our house was only two storeys, and it was three storeys across the road, and it seemed to ricochet off them. We never got a broken window."
Kathlyn also tells how a near neighbour was fortunate not to be blown to smithereens after using his walking stick to poke at an unexploded bomb.
This is one of a series of four recordings made with Kathlyn in September 2022, a month after her 92nd birthday.
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