Jackdaw 2

In 1991 Clare and I, with Nikki and James moved into our new house at Kilduncan. As we were running an egg business our address has mostly been Kilduncan Poultry Farm, but we chose to call our house Albacore House, this may sound a bit nouveau toff but the name was quite carefully chosen to reflect two aspects of our little holding's future and past.
Albacore is first of all a species of tuna. When we chose the name Clare was early in her career as a diver so calling our residence after a species of tuna seemed sensible.
But there was a second more historical factor in choosing the name Albacore.

Fifty years before we moved to Albacore House, as world war two gathered pace a naval air station was built on the farms of Kilduncan, Upper Kenly, and North Quarter of Kippo, I think it was originally an emergency landing strip for the much larger Naval Air Station just east of Crail, called HMS Jackdaw.
Keeping things simple 'our' little airfield was named Jackdaw 2 and when we did a bit of research into which planes might have used Jackdaw 2. There, among names like Fairey Swordfish, Supermarine Walrus and Fairey Barracuda, as well as the better known Westland Lysander and the slightly less expected North American Mustang we found the Fairey Albacore, and in a moment a house was named.

It isn't really my purpose here to describe the physical environment of Jackdaw 2 but my verbosity demands I do a quick description.
The actual airstrip was on the highest part of the site. It was a grass strip but there was a 3 mile concrete road running right round it. The control tower still exists up on Upper Kenly, and I believe it has, or at least had and interesting aerial.

When I was a toddler dad bought Kilduncan Farm from a battle of Britain Spitfire pilot who had tried, and failed to build his post-war future on pig farming on Kilduncan.
We sold the farm again in 1968 but dad had just started to use some of the redundant military buildings to keep hens in to produce eggs to sell locally, mostly alongside the bottles of milk we retailed from Coal Farm for many years, so he kept the 6 acres we now live on

A couple of family stories do linger. There is a field about 30 metres to my right which isn't much more than 10 acres, but dad claimed that he had cleared 23 WW2 Nissen huts from this field, to make what wasn't,  and still isn't a fully arable field, but which has grown a lot of good grass in the past 50 years. No details of how he did it, or where the building materials ended up remain.
My respect for this achievement is enormous. In 1990 when we were building our house we had to remove one similar base and had the option to clear a couple more. The best the man with the big digger could offer was to drag the intact base 30m and bury it. The other 2 are still there, and likely to stay for a while.
The other, better, but possibly more likely to be apocryphal story comes from Grampa Peddie, who with gran lived in the original Kilduncan Farmhouse for the 11 years dad and he owned the whole 180 acres.
His story was that several packing cases containing Spitfire engines, presumably Rolls Royce Merlin were buried somewhere on site. No evidence has ever been produced to support this tale so I include it only as a piece of family folklore.

And eventually I come to the reason for this post.

In the years after we moved here we had a surprising number of visitors who had wartime connections with Jackdaw 2. 
At first they were almost exclusively elderly couples or ladies who had met their husbands or wives while serving at Jackdaw 2. If I had been more aware I would have brought each of them into the house  and got their stories down on paper. Sadly I was almost often busy so all I have left are inadequate fragments of 30 year old conversations.
My memory is that there were more ladies and couples than men. While they were obviously a self selecting sample they came seeking happy memories. Mostly these were of young lives and partnerships begun, but I do remember a couple of fragments of life on the camp.
One was of a Chief Petty Officer who was always happy to offer any of the WRENs stationed here a lift on his bike handlebars down to Kingsbarns,  home of both the Cambo Arms, still surviving as our local pub, although now called the Inn @ Kingsbarns, and perhaps more importantly the bus to St Andrews.

There was also a story that in early 1944 there was a mysterious collection of tents discretely pitched on one of the quieter corners of the airfield and lived in by Royal Marines. The suggestion I picked up was that these men were involved either on D-Day or perhaps just before. Certainly European travel was involved.

There were two other later visitors who I remember rather better.
One day in the early 2000s I came home in a van and passed a camper van with a German number plate parked at the Wrennery, as we call the collection of buildings,  now on North Quarter, and half way in our road. I drove past but fortunately the camper van shortly followed me in and we chatted.
The driver was a German in his 70s. In 1945, as a 16 or17 year old, he was conscripted into the German army and given the task of stopping the allied armies from crossing the Rhine. He was one of the lucky ones who were taken prisoner and he was removed from what must have been a hellish existence in Germany to what he clearly thought was a charmed live in Fife.
And what little I heard makes it hard to disagree.
The wrennery had found a new identity as a POW camp. But this was a camp without armed guards and where the prisoners were told to go out to local farms where they could work for food and keep. I assume Boghall would be high on the list of possibilities, but I have never asked the Turnbull family, owners then as now.
Certainly my German acquaintance looked back on a life saved and was grateful for a place of safety which allowed him to go back to a decent life in post war Germany.

The last visitor was perhaps the most interesting, and he came with a photograph.
The photo showed him standing on the steps, which still exist, and which are less than 30m from our back door, and lead up to a now decrepit building, but which must have been the last building on the farm to be occupied on WW2 business.

This man was not a serviceman but an employee of the naval dockyard at Rosyth.
We have to imagine a situation that on VE day British shipyards were building and equipping Naval and other ships as quickly as was humanly possible.
When Germany surrendered suddenly these ships were surplus to requirements. I have no idea what happened to the ships, but by 1948 my last visitor and his colleagues were busy putting some of the equipment into storage in the maintenance hangers which still exist on Kilduncan.