Cairnhill Gina’s World War II memories

Mar 23 2011 by Gordon Robertson, Airdrie & Coatbridge

A RETIRED Airdrie schoolteacher has written a book about her childhood experiences during the Second World War.

Gina Cowan (78) from Cairnhill, tells of her life as a six-year-old girl growing up in the Ruchill area of Glasgow.

Titled 'Ena’s War', it is a work she started writing for her children.

Now the former Chapelside Primary teacher is thrilled to see her story in print even if it did take a bit of time for it to get there.

She joked: “I thought it was an exciting time to live through and I wanted to pass the memories on to my children but by the time I finished it was for my grandchildren.

“It was forty years in the making and I was thrilled when it came through the post. I think the publishers have done a very good job.”

Ena’s War sets out to recount her experiences growing up as a small child while Britain was at war with Hitler’s Third Reich.

The privations and terror of war were lost on the young Ena, as Gina was known then, as she was too young to realise what was at stake.

Recalling her earliest experiences of those dark days of 1939, she told the Advertiser: “The whole school was evacuated to Arran not just individual families

“I was six, my brother was 10 and my sister 12.

“It didn’t work out and the children were all homesick and before long we were all back in Glasgow again.

“It was quite an experience.

“We were all marched down to the railway station and onto trains to Arran.

“We thought it was great, an adventure, but we were homesick after three weeks.”

Gina’s book also recalls the hardship her mother endured having to bring up three young children alone. Her father – who suffered from tuberculosis – died a year before the war started.

“They told my mother she could come with us but when she got to Arran there was no job for her and she had to go home.

“We were left there and we were very unhappy.

“We pleaded with our mother to come back home but she could only scrape up the fare to get home herself.

“She hadn’t another penny left to get us back so she got a loan from the authorities to get us home.”

Back in Glasgow the young Ena and her family experienced regular air raid warnings which would invariably mean cowering with other children from her tenement close under her mother’s marble table.

Another memory is of seeing the sky to the west of Glasgow “red with fire”.

That was during the Clydebank Blitz when over a 1000 Bankies lost their lives to Luftwaffe bombers 70 years ago this month.

She says: “It was all very exciting for us as children but of course it was terrifying for the grown-ups.”

Ena’s War is published by Author House and is available online at amazon.co.uk priced £8.54.

*Gina’s excellent local history column The Raddle returns to the Advertiser next Wednesday after an absence of a few weeks.

Gina had been in hospital but is now back home and able to resume editing her wonderful fortnightly contributions on bygone days in Monklands.