Extract from Silent Heroes

From Saint Andrew Press, Silent Heroes is a collection of interviews of ordinary people in times of war. The book features 20 interviews, taken over the past 20 years. We feature Mrs Dolly Stevenson, from Glasgow, who remembers the significance of Remembrance Day and the support of the Bible.

• Mortar bombs fired into Sarajevo market-place kill sixty-eight people as Serbs attack the city.
• Bullets fly in the streets of Johannesburg, South Africa, as the date of the first all-race elections approaches.
• Rwanda horror reveals deaths of one million people in ethnic civil disorder.
• Nelson Mandela is sworn in as President of South Africa.
• The Channel Tunnel is opened.
• John Smith, the Labour Party leader, dies. Tony Blair is elected as the new leader.
• Roll-on Roll-off ferry Estonia sinks in the Baltic Sea, with the loss of 912 lives.
• IRA and Loyalist paramilitaries in Northern Ireland announce a cease- fire.
• Russian troops storm into Chechnya.

In 1994, Mrs Dolly Stevenson, now widowed, lives in a quiet street of pensioners’ houses. She has brought her family up in Castlemilk. Her daughter, Ray, a doctor’s receptionist, lives not far away and Dolly enjoys visits from the family.

BORN INTO A TIME OF WAR
All my life I’ve been involved in the war. My father and my uncles, my brothers and me; and one of my sons was on alert in 1958, in the Suez crisis. I was born in 1915, in the second year of the Great War. My father never saw me when I was born; he was away in France with the Seaforth Highlanders. Then he was wounded, shrapnel in the leg. He was two months in hospital in the South of England and then straight back to France because they were running short of men. So he never saw me even then. Then he was at the Battle of Mons, and he took a bullet through his right lung, in at the front and out of the back, and he was left for dead on the battlefield. My mother heard he was missing, presumed killed. She was a widow, as she thought, for two years. Then she had news from this hospital in Wales. It seems that, after the battle, two Red Cross men at Mons had seen a slight movement in him, and took him to the dressing station. And they sent him to this hospital in Wales. He was in a terminal ward. He didn’t know anything, couldn’t speak. The doctors had given up. But this American nursing sister tried a new treatment on him to stop haemorrhaging, and she managed to get him to tell her his name and where he came from. And soon he was well enough to come home. I remember sitting on this strange man’s knee, he had a kilt on. He was my Dad, they told me. But I’d a great job understanding. I was three at the time. My father’s two brothers were in the war as well. One was wounded in the hand. He was a piper, piping the troops over the top at the Somme. Andrew. He was shot through the hand and could never play the pipes again. The other brother was in the Cavalry. My father was in a trench. The cavalry were retreating and jumped back over this very trench. The two brothers hadn’t seen each other for two years and they met there like that. Later my uncle’s horse was shot under him, but he survived. He brought the horse’s tail home as a memento along with a German helmet. My grandmother’s three sons all came home from the war. But in her wee row of cottages there was a woman whose three sons were all lost.

FAMILY LIFE
My father came from a farm in Swordale in Ross-shire. Alexander McKay. My Grandfather was dying – he had been gored by a bull, and nothing could be done – and he asked my mother to give his name to her unborn child. But the baby turned out a girl: me. So that’s me; Donaldina Georgina McKay! (Though I was Dinah for long enough, and then Dolly.)
We lived in Tarlogie Estate, near Tain in Ross-shire, which belonged to Count De Serra Largo. He was a Scot, a McKenzie, who had been a naval Captain, and had been awarded the title by Spain. I remember his funeral, with his naval uniform on his coffin. My father was game-keeper on the estate. The Count was my Godfather – he carried me into the Church at my baptism, my father being away at the war. When my father came back from the war he went back to his work – his job was still there for him. And he lived until he was seventy-one.
On the cold winter nights, when we were snowed in, he would tell us stories of the war, some so terrible you could hardly believe them. He told us of the young German boys, only sixteen years of age, dying in the battlefield, crying for their mothers. He didn’t like having to go against them. And as I grew up I was never without thought of how he had suffered, and what effect war had on everyone. I always believed in God. As a little girl I’d sing hymns. We were brought up that way, and I always trusted in God. We went to church every Sunday. If we couldn’t get to church in the winter we would have a service at home in the lodge – the house we lived in at the entrance gates of the estate.
When I left school, I was a Lady’s maid to the Countess. There was nine of a staff in the house: housemaids, cook, and butler. I was upstairs all the time, attending to the Countess, with a bedroom along from hers. The others were all downstairs. I used to go to church with her, then; we sat in her private box, the Tarlogie Gallery, with her crest on the front of it. After the Count died, the estate was sold to the Forestry Commission, and my father had to move. He became game-keeper on Carbeth Estate at Killearn: we all moved south to Killearn.

MY OWN GENERATION AT WAR
I trained as a nurse at Stirling. War was impending, and Killearn Hospital was being built. I married George Stevenson in 1936. He was a painter from Glasgow, painting the new hospital. And being a painter, he worked throughout the war, camouflaging aerodromes and battleships. He was all over the country, never at home for long. I joined the Red Cross, to go over to France to help the troops. But my father did not approve of it. He said war was too terrible for a woman to go to the battlefields. So I stayed nursing at Killearn. Of my three brothers, the oldest went to the Navy, my youngest two were called up to the Army. My father advised them too: he said, ‘Don’t go looking for medals or glory.’
My second brother was taken prisoner at St Valery, and he was a prisoner of war for five years. For two years we did not know if he was alive or dead – just as it had been with my father. He was two years in hospital with a sniper’s bullet wound in his head. My youngest brother was evacuated from Dunkirk. My oldest brother was involved there, serving on HMS McKay : every soldier he pulled out of the water he looked to see if it was his brother. I remember when he came home he sobbed his heart out on my father’s bed.
Later he was serving in the English Channel. He was a smoker, and he was having a break on deck. A torpedo split the boat in two and he was one of the only eleven who survived. The ship went down in seconds; there were 500 or more on board. Then he served on a minesweeper, and his ship was blown up. Seriously injured, he was transferred to Killearn Hospital, and I nursed him there myself.

NURSING AT KILLEARN
The wounded started to come to Killearn from the first months of the war. The war injuries were terrible; people with arms off, legs off, head wounds, chest wounds, everything. I saw more gore in a week than a nurse today sees in a lifetime. Our own boys were the first to arrive. Later on Germans, Italians and Poles. Wounded prisoners came, and were lying in the same wards as wounded Scots and English boys. There would be a bit of narking. As soon as the Germans were better, they went to the prisoner-of-war Camps; our own boys went back to their regiments. The prisoners were put to work in the fields. I remember one young man cut his hand, all down to the wrist. I wrapped a towel round it. One guard came with him and me, walking up the village street to the hospital. Some of the old men and women gave me a bawling out, ‘Never mind the German so-and-so! Let him bleed to death.’ ‘And your own brother’s a prisoner of war!’ I told them it was my job. And he was human like them. I was disgusted. He showed me a photo of his wife and family, and he didn’t know if they were dead or alive. When we brought him back after he’d been seen to, my Dad made me strong tea for him and looked after him. My father didn’t hate the Germans because of those young boys he saw at the end of the war. ‘It was a case of shoot or be shot’, he used to say, and he didn’t hold a grudge. In the hospital the young German soldiers would cry out at night for their ‘Mutti’, their mother. And they’d call ‘Gott im Himmel’. ‘God in Heaven!’. We had to help them. Some of them were very courteous, very polite, ‘Danke schoen, Danke schoen.’ The post mistress married a prisoner of war. And people wouldn’t speak to her. We had another episode. Rudolf Hess was kept in the hospital, in a little Ward by himself for two nights. I saw him leaving, as close as I am to you. We knew who he was.

CIVILIAN CASUALTIES: CLYDEBANK
Early in the war, they brought children from the Sick Children’s Hospital – the ones who couldn’t go to the shelters. About forty of them came to Killearn. One night I was on duty as the planes came over. The hospital had a big red cross on the roof, but bombs were often dropped all round us, off-loading the last bombs before flying home. This night, the Anti-Aircraft guns opened up, and shrapnel was falling on the roof. The children were terrified.
When Clydebank was bombed, I went in one of the ambulances to collect the injured – making them comfortable, stopping the bleeding. There would be four to an ambulance, travelling at crawling pace, without lights. We would collect them at dressing stations where some had First Aid. We saw more dead than living after the bombing. Little bundles and big bundles. It was a nightmare. We collected the injured in Maryhill as well. We picked up one woman who had a lot of glass in her back. We had to lie her on her stomach all the way to Killearn. And we had to do what we could for her. We had no time to think, no time to be squeamish. I can see it all in my mind’s eye. I used to dream about it.
For three nights in a row, Clydebank was bombed that time, and three nights I was out with the ambulance. I remember sitting at the table in the canteen in the morning, and I fell asleep across the table. I’ve often thought what we could have done if they’d had helicopters for the wounded then, like they have now. I was always keen on amateur dramatics and I remember one night, in the wartime, we were singing our last song on stage. The planes started coming over, and instead of our proper song we sang ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. And some wounded soldiers came up on to the platform to sing it with us.

THINKING BACK, THINKING FORWARD
I kept on nursing, even after George, my first born. We moved to Glasgow, to Bardowie Street in Possilpark, in 1945. I often thought of my brothers, hoping they would come through all right. Then when the war in Europe was already won they used this horrific bomb in Japan. We had no inkling that they’d been making this bomb. We saw some of the damage in the picture house.
I spoke to nurses who had been prisoners in Japan. They said they’d never seen anything so awful as what the women and children suffered from the bomb. One I met was a sister in Robroyston. She was just young. But her hair was pure white. Three of them had been captured along with the soldiers. They suffered, all the soldiers suffered, and more besides. She went down to less than four stone in weight. She hated to see any food wasted in the Hospital. She looked like an old, old woman.
During the war we never complained. But, when it was over, I wondered what was gained. All these people shot, maimed. We had nothing left but dead men, dead women, children; sorrow; broken hearts; mothers losing their sons, wives losing their husbands. Like a nightmare you’d wakened out of.
Highlanders, though, always had to fight for what they wanted. You’ll hardly ever hear a Highland soldier complaining about the war. They take it for granted that they are fighting men. Its just heritage they’ve got. My father, for instance. And he did believe in God. And we had to say our prayers every night. (I was too young to remember it, but there was a family story about my brother Charlie. When he was five he was saying his prayers: ‘God bless Mummy and God bless Dad,’ and so on. And he added, ‘And God bless the German that shot my Dad.’)
I did always trust in God. Being a nurse, I saw the suffering of both sides. I didn’t want to doubt God. I used to say, ‘Why is God letting all these things happen? We must have displeased Him.’ And I used to think war was the work of the Devil. And I called Hitler the Devil. All the more when we saw the films of the Jews in those camps. Those poor, poor people, with their numbers printed on their arms. They were brought to Killearn too.

REMEMBRANCE DAY
Remembrance Day was always a special day in Tain. The Service wasn’t in the church, but at the War Memorial in the centre of the town. A pipe band played laments; they’d march down the street. And a bugle would play The Last Post. The old soldiers wore their medals. If the 11th of November was a school day, we had the two-minute Silence at eleven a.m. At our desks, standing for the silence. We took it very seriously. I remember one boy burst out crying in the silence. He’d lost his Dad in the war. And his Mum had died. And he was in the poor-house. There was a lot of orphans then. Now it’s a Children’s Home, then it was a poor-house.
I don’t dread Remembrance Sunday. I feel all my family is round about me, my brothers and my Dad. I think they should be remembered, and not forgotten. I learned about the First War from my parents. My family learned about the Second War from us. I suppose today’s young ones have to learn from us, too. I don’t know whether they should be told the horrors of war – there are some things too terrible to speak of here today. But maybe they should.
For if war were to break out again, another war, the world would end. I often think, ‘There will be wars and rumours of wars...’ as the Bible says. And I think it’s coming true.

Dolly Stevenson lived most of her adult life in Glasgow. She developed a Glasgow accent, but when she met with people from the Highlands she resumed her Highland voice. But some things are too difficult to say in any language. In the above account of her wartime experiences, she could not bring herself to tell an early event. In 1936, when she was twenty she married Ralph Mahon, an Irishman who was in the RAF. Tragically, when their son Alec was only two, Ralph was lost in the war. Alec was brought up by Dolly’s parents. In due course Dolly met and married George Stevenson; and, in Glasgow, they brought up their family of five. When George was forty-two he suffered a severe heartattack, and there were difficult days for Dolly and the family. However, he worked on until he was sixty-three and died in 1982 aged sixty-seven. Although she lived so far from the countryside which she had loved as she grew up, Dolly enjoyed her Glasgow life, and she had a close friend in neighbour Mrs Peggy Holding. Dolly was at the head of a large family as grandmother to nineteen and great-grandmother to twenty-two of the youngest generation of all. She died at the age of eighty-three, a few days after going into hospital following a fall.