'My life as an army child': telling an important story

Not that it was needed, but proof of the historical importance of army children’s stories arrived in The Army Children Archive’s inbox this week in the form of e-mails from Chinese and Scottish historical organisations. They were particularly interested in Mairi Paterson’s story, which, as regular visitors will know, has been posted in instalments on the TACA website since last summer.


The daughter of a soldier in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, Mairi, who was born in 1921, begins her account of her memories of life as an army child in 1928, when she travelled with her family from Liverpool to Jamaica (Personal story: 'It was a magical place, with palm trees and coffee plantations', Jamaica, 1928–30). Their two-year posting to Jamaica was followed by a memorable journey in a troopship through the Panama Canal across the Pacific via Hawaii to Wei-Hai-Wei, in north-eastern China (Personal story: Crossing the Pacific, 1930). Mairi then describes the two years that she and her family spent in Wei-Hai-Wei (now Weihai) in fascinating detail: Personal story: 'I am glad that I can remember Weihai as it was eighty years ago'.


The family’s next posting was to Hong Kong (Personal story: Going to school by rickshaw and keeping a low profile in Hong Kong, 1932–34), at a time when, as Mairi illustrates, tension between China and Japan was rising. Finally, Mairi and her family returned to Scotland, the land of her birth, their sea voyage taking them through the Suez Canal (Personal story: Sailing from Hong Kong home to Scotland, 1934). Mairi’s last home as an army child was in Stirling, and what a home it was! In Personal story: 'Now I was living in a castle: Stirling Castle', 1934, Mairi vividly describes her first-hand experience of the Scottish royal castle that was serving as the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders’ regimental depot when she lived there.


Not only does Mairi’s story make absorbing reading, but it is also of historical significance. She participated in a number of ‘firsts’: the packed troopship in which she travelled to Wei-Hai-Wei in 1930 was the first British troopship to go through the Panama Canal and to stop in Honolulu, for example. And as Mairi explains about her years in Wei-Hei-Wei (whose district commissioner at the time, Reginald Fleming Johnston, was played by Peter O’Toole in the film The Last Emperor), ‘I feel I may be one of the last [British] people who can remember life there and its return to the Chinese in 1932 as my brother and myself were the only British children there'.

Wei-Hai-Wei in winter.

If you haven’t read Mairi’s story, please do – you won’t be disappointed. And if you were once an army child and have your own story to tell, do consider preserving it through TACA. After all, what may be merely childhood memories to some may be historical witness statements to others.