My name is Kay McMeekin and this interview is being conducted for the Penny Limbs Camp 22 project.
The respondent today is Geronimo Donis and this is the 18th of May, 2017, and the interview is taking place at Ochanlech in Ayrshire.
Thank you very much, Gerry, for being to be interviewed for this project.
Could you please confirm your name?
My name is Geronimo Fernandes Donis.
Very good. And your age or new year of birth?
2012, 1940.
So that makes you...
1976, becoming 77.
I would never have believed it.
For the record, what is your connection to Penny Limbs Camp?
The connection was that my parents, my dad and mum and dad had rented out a farm cottage
at Orchard and Farm in the Cymruc de Ojo to the road, and it was called Watson Cottage.
It's now a ruin.
And we were there, then the farmer got a person to work on the farm
and he gave them three months notice to quit the cottage.
So the only place he could go to get a house or to house his family was Penny Limbs Camp in Ochanlech.
And that's when we moved there.
Okay, so that would be about 1948.
1948.
How big a family was it?
Well, at that time it was myself and there was my...
I was the eldest and then there was Agnes and then there was Basilia.
And then Margaret, who was born there, that was the family at that time.
So that was like four.
Tell me about your family that came from Santander, was that right?
Right, so you moved to Penny Limbs in 1948.
What was the accommodation?
What was it like compared to Watson Cottage?
When we landed there, I remember it was a float.
Just a lorry, we had a hood on it for taking...
They used to do flintons.
Above the carb of the lorry that I recessed, and I remember all the stuff was transferred from the lorry
into the Nissen hut and the lorry went away.
Where's the frying pan?
The frying pans were, and some of the pans were up in this recess.
So there were shorter frying pans of pots.
So there was cooking facilities in the Nissen hut then?
It was, you know, the big stove.
Oh, no, no, no, there were wood there, coal, whatever you could get, there were plenty of abundance of wood there.
So what did you cry them?
It was like the prisoners had in the chimney going up through the roof.
That was your heating, that was your cooking.
You boiled water, cooked whatever you were cooking on that.
What was it that you cried to your stove?
A stove, just like a stove.
Was there running water, no?
On the main drag there was a stand, a pump, you know, like the lion's head, things we used to get in the street.
Well, some of them, and you had to go into a container and bring water into there.
The same, there was no sink facilities, you had to, it was a basin.
I remember that because you had to go out in certain areas where, what was known as a midden,
where people worked in their trash and things like that, and they put it all out there.
So you had to go and throw this, if you washed dishes of that, you had to take it out.
The job for a wee boy was to take it out and throw it there.
There was toilets, there was blocks, toilets that you could use.
They had a big bath, that's what it was, you get washed in that.
And was your father still working as a miner at this point?
Yes, he was a bricklayer at the White Hill Fit.
He was a bricklayer, he trained as a bricklayer.
So you moved there in 1948, can you remember?
I've got a map here, I was wondering if you could maybe work out if you stayed.
There's a bigger version because there's not much.
Wait to see where the thing is.
Right, that's the road coming down.
Now it was about the wardens, I think the warden's office was about here somewhere.
We were about three nis and huts, two or three nis and huts down, just don't remember.
It's just a mark roughly where you think it was.
I think it's really about maybe there, two or three huts down because what I had to do was walk up by
where we stayed to the wardens hut with the gun because I'd taken the gun off the boy.
Tell us a story about the gun.
Well, the gun, what happened was that in these days you made your own entertainment.
So my Agnes and Basilia who were younger than me, they set up ram wheels.
You could do the big waltz and cross-bam, you know, the springs come up like that
and you put a board on it, what you did was my two sisters got on the back of it
and I was driving it and you could actually slew it round either way.
And I was going down and the next thing I see is this young chap near the bottom
and he does this and then you see the wee puff of smoke and the bullet hit the wheel and burst it.
So the bogey went off, threw us off, so picked us all up and we managed to get the hood of the gun off him
because he was in shock of what had happened. He'd sell, get a fright, so I took the gun off him
and my sisters were walked up, left the bogey and walked up to the wardens office and handed in the gun
and then that's how it was in the Daily Express. That's what happened.
What was the lad's name, can you remember?
Can he mine his name? I was in there, but whether it's like a rickie or not, I don't know.
I don't remember him. He was older than me, I know that.
Did the house have a number or anything?
Can he mine a word, a number or no key?
And you would walk to school to Aachenleck?
No, I went to Aachenleck then.
So were there any shops there?
No, no, all year. There was actually vans come doing it, if I remember.
They used to come around, grocery vans and things like that.
Whether it was the cooperative or what, I don't know.
That was of no interest to me as long as I get food.
Now, my hub is sweeties. Where did you get your sweeties?
I don't know. I've never actually been a sweetie eater.
Was there any gardens or anything like that? Did you grow food there or what?
Well, we weren't that long there. I think we were only about four months
and because we had four real families, we'd get we-housed and they're silly.
As I say, it was only a transit camp. Families were coming and going all the time.
So did you have friends there? Do you remember the names of any of the other families now?
No, you see, it was all just...
The kids all played together. I mean, you had to play.
They would get into some of the empty missing hats and it was plasterboard
and they would batter doing the plasterboard and it would come bullets.
There was a big... where you were excavating, there was a big tank there
and it was full of water. We were fencing it and that was for...
if there was a fire made in the huts, they had to pump the water from that
up to wherever the fire was.
Was there somebody in charge you talked to with the warden?
The warden, he was the man that controlled everything in the site.
He was there until 24-7. And the police were there quite regularly.
They made visits. I remember that. And they walked down the police.
There was no car. They would walk down.
For playing, you just played in the camp and in the wood scene.
Climbed trees. I said they were up in the huts.
Empty missing hats and that. Your rummage through the aim.
That was a good boy.
I'm sure you were. Were you sorry to leave Pennylands or not really?
I don't know. When we were moved to there, it was once again
getting everything into afloat and up to 1, 2, 6 solar rows. That's where we moved to.
What was the accommodation like there? Did it have running water or anything?
I had a wash house and a toilet outside.
They were quite fiver. I think there were four hooses.
The coal hoose was out there. The wash house and the toilet.
And it wasn't an individual toilet. It was a same money hooses had that block.
What do you think was the worst thing about Pennylands camp?
Well, getting showered. That was the biggest for me.
Well, for some day I ate years of age in that area.
It was the parents that had to take the brunt to everything.
What did you like most about it?
Well, it was fresh air. It was a challenge.
It was something different from what we left to isolation at a farm cottage
to all of a sudden, but then there were lots of people.
It was an introduction to civilisation, as it were.
OK, we're all good out of here. Thank you very much for your time.
This is fascinating.
