From 1940 to 1957

There may be someone who remembers from Strone School, we had some good times in the Second World War, we did not how bad things were in Europe. It was the time we had the RN and the subs in the Holy Loch and the Wrens, they spoiled us with some types of food we could not get in the war. Some of us boys loved when the NAAFI boat came in and we wanted the blood oranges. Sometimes we would go down Strone pier to the shed at the end of the pier and lift off one of panels of the shed and put a stick into the sugar bags and let the suger into a tin can, then we got apples from someone's garden and then we would light a fire and melt the suger and make toffee apples. When the evacuues came we did not like them, they did not speak the way we did. We went to school in the mornings and they went in the afternoons, the Strone boys would hide and when they were on the way to school we had stones and sticks and we bombarded them, but after a time we found out they were ok and just wanted their mums and dads. Some stayed on in Strone after the war, my mother was invited to the wedding of one of the girls 15 years later. As a boy in war time Strone it was a good time. I would have liked my father to be with us but he was in the RAF. When I was 20 years old I went to sea as a marine engineer, and went ashore in Cardiff and fell in love with a Cardiff girl in 1957 and married in 1958, we have been together 52 years.