'They say Leith got off lightly.. they're wrong'

THE day began for six-year-old Margaret Redpath like any other. Up at 7.30am, she had her breakfast, dressed in her school clothes and kissed her mum Cathie as she packed Margaret and her brother off to school, waving them off from the door of their Gorgie Road home.

Now, 65 years on, the image of her mum standing with her arm raised and a smile on her face is 71-year-old Margaret Alexander's most treasured memory. For on July 18, 1940, her mum died when Leith was hit by the bombs of the German Luftwaffe.

It was the day that, contrary to the song that has become the port's anthem, the sun stopped shining on Leith. A "stray" bomb from a lone German raider demolished part of the tenement at No 8 George Street, killing seven people, including 41-year-old Cathie Redpath and her mother, whom she had decided to visit. They were two of the 20 civilians killed by wartime bombs in Edinburgh.

For Margaret, the loss never gets any easier and, while the rest of the UK commemorated those who fought and died in the Second World War in a national day of remembrance at the weekend, she is still waiting for her own anniversary next Monday.

"I was just six years old," she says, "so of course it's all very vague. My brother was three years older and he had a better grasp of what happened that day, but he has never talked about it. He has clammed up all these years.

"He chose to live with it, bottle it all up so to speak, but I'm a different sort. Not that I've talked about all that much, simply because I get weepy, but the few times 'the bomb' has been discussed, either by myself or by others, I've felt the better for it once I wiped away the tears.

"What prompted me to bring it up and, yes, shed a few more tears, was reading recently that 'Leith got off lightly' in the war. I felt my personal experience justified telling my story."