Snapshot: The portrait my father carried during the war
When the second world war started, my mother, Patsy, was 20. She was given the choice of doing war work in a factory, or joining the Women’s Royal Air Force. She chose the factory so that she could continue living with her family. They lived in a tenement block in the East End of Glasgow.
Patsy was assigned to work at a large aircraft factory in Paisley, an hour away by bus. They were understaffed due to the large number of men who had left to join the forces. She was one of the 200 women sent to fill these posts. She was sent on training courses to learn how to use a micrometer and perform certain engineering tasks.
The factory carried out planned maintenance routines on aircraft in active service. After 240 hours of flying time, planes were flown to the factory and their instruments removed. It was Patsy’s job to see if they needed to be replaced. It wasn’t all hard work. Her first flight was in a large bomber. She was taken up on a short test flight, sitting in the bomb-aimer’s seat, looking down through a plastic dome.
Glasgow was often the target of German bombers. Patsy had many sleepless nights, but one incident really stuck in her mind. During a raid, residents of her neighbourhood saw a parachute falling to earth. They thought it was someone from one of the planes, and went towards it to investigate. It wasn’t a person, it was a landmine. It exploded shortly before it reached the ground, killing 90 people. At the church services she attended the following Sunday, the priest slowly read out the names of all 90 victims.
In 1942, Patsy met her future husband, Stanley Butler, who was an navy engineer. They soon became engaged, and Stanley carried this photograph of Patsy with him until the end of the war.
Stanley was chief engineer on the deep-sea rescue tug Prudent, which escorted cargo ship convoys across the North Atlantic. If a ship became damaged or disabled, Stanley and the boarding crew would attempt a repair. If this was not possible, the ship would be towed to Iceland or a British port.
My parents were married in April 1945. Their first child, Anne, was born the following year. Even though the war was over, living conditions were difficult. Food was still rationed, and there was a shortage of coal. Patsy and Stanley were living in a rented flat in Glasgow at that time. The room was damp, and they were unable to keep a fire alight all day because there was not much fuel for sale. Patsy was worried about keeping a baby in such unhealthy conditions. Stanley had left the navy by this time, and was looking for a civilian job. Fortunately, he secured employment in Dublin with the Caltex oil company.
The Republic of Ireland had remained neutral during the war, and never had food rationing. After six years of shortages, there were no restrictions on the amount of food, drink and fuel that they could buy. It was an enormous treat for my parents – like being set free.
Peter Butler
Playlist: A guilty pleasure amid Grandad’s troubles
Relax by Frankie Goes to Hollywood
“Relax, don’t do it / When you want to go to it / Relax, don’t do it / When you want to come”
Sometime in the early 80s, my grandfather was admitted to a large Victorian psychiatric hospital that has since been turned into luxury flats, his senile dementia such that it was no longer possible for him to stay at home with my parents, my brother and me, as he had done for a while. He was a big man, and my slight mother could do nothing to prevent him wandering off around the village, with Grandad cheerily saying he was off to work (he had retired several years previously) and off he would go.
When we went to visit him at the hospital, I knew – at 13 – that it wasn’t the kind of place I would like to go in and see, with its endless, prison-like corridors and mentally disturbed patients, and it was my braver younger brother who would go in to fetch Grandad with my parents while I waited outside.
I remember my brother and I playing football in the large grounds outside the main building, listening to my Frankie Goes to Hollywood tape on my new Walkman while the explicit, illicit lyrics (the song was banned by the BBC) swirled around my head (“Relax don’t do it / When you want to suck to it”). My dad would very rarely play music in the car, and so I would be in my own little bubble, listening to my tape player in the back seat. I can remember feeling guilty while I listened to this song about sex while Grandad drifted in and out of lucidity, sitting on one of the garden benches and watching us play football. One minute he called me by his nickname for me, another minute he was unable to recall who I was at all.
And then, a bombshell in the car while my mother and brother led him back to his room. My grandad had called my mother a name that wasn’t her name, and I’d asked my dad about it. To my utter astonishment, he casually revealed that my mother was adopted and that this was her original birth name. I wasn’t genetically related to my grandad at all. I tried to make sense of it and there must have been questions I asked, but I just remember it all adding to the swirling queasiness as sex, identity and psychology fused in my head for ever.
Samantha Pike
We love to eat: Dried fish with butter and potatoes
Ingredients
1 packet of Faroese dried cod (Turrur fiskur)
Potatoes (any kind)
Butter
Boil the potatoes in plenty of salted water and drain. Open the packet of dried fish and place on a plate. Leave the butter on the table so people can tear off pieces of dried fish, swipe it directly through the butter and eat. Serve with the potatoes and brown bread, preferably home-made. Sild (pickled herring) and Danish salami are optional additions if available.
Aged four, my mother sailed from the remote Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic to Aberdeen in a fishing trawler. It was just after the second world war and with her were her half-Icelandic, half-Aberdonian father, her Fareoese mother and five older siblings.
Aberdeen was grey and bleak after the war, and the Johannesson-Poulsen family stood out in height and accent, with their hand-knitted, woollen Faroese jumpers. My grandfather went into business as a fish merchant, while my omma (grandmother) set about learning English and bringing up six children in a foreign country.
Trips to Faroe were expensive and complicated. Until ferry travel was introduced via the Smyril line, the only way to get there was a long, uncomfortable trip on a fishing trawler. These visits ended when Mum was 15 and her omma died. Mum met my dad and married aged 21. At 25, she had two children, and money and time were too tight to think about going back.
Every so often, a family member would go to Faroe or some relations would come down to Aberdeen, bringing the coveted turrur fiskur. The fish is cod, and it is wind-dried, with a mild, not overly fishy, smell. The table would be set with the fish, steaming platters of boiled potatoes, home-made brown bread, sometimes Danish salami and if Mum was very lucky, some sild to top her bread. Mum would rip off pieces of fish, swipe through the butter and begin chewing. Although I always enjoyed the festive atmosphere when we had dried fish, as a fussy child, I found chewing it unpleasant. For once, nobody cared if I didn’t want to eat it – all the more for everyone else.
I loved it when my grandparents and uncles and aunts came to visit. Growing up hearing people speaking Faroese was something I always associated with home. Mum is now an omma herself, and I finally visited in 2015 with my son, my brother, mum and other family members. And yes, this time I really did enjoy the dried fish.
Louise Philip
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