ALTHOUGH we are approaching summer, two Fridays ago you would not have known it. It was blowing a hoolie from the north, with horizontal rain. Cloud cover made the day winter-dark.

Those inland or in sheltered streets might not have noticed, but all along the county’s coast the wind threw disjointed waves, spray and spume ashore, hiding Bass Rock behind squalls.

There were people out to witness this, but I practised my fisherman grandad’s saying: “There is no bad weather, just the wrong clothes”.

There were no fishermen daft enough to be out. But I thought of wartime, when there was no fishing because our local crews were serving in the Royal Navy.

Those from North Berwick were lucky, being assigned to armed trawler escorts out of Lowestoft. They had short trips in coastal seas.

But others manned ocean-going escorts like the pint-sized, clumsy Corvette, famously lively and hard to handle in a sea of any size. As part of an escort group, they would gather with their charges in the Mersey or Clyde to plod halfway to America at eight knots or less to pick up a returning convoy mid-Atlantic and plod all the way home again. Voyages over two weeks were not unusual. The only consolation of being thrashed by mountainous seas was that foul weather kept German U-boats at bay.

As the first generation in my family not to wear uniform and subject myself to years of such danger and depredation, I have lived in awe of those ordinary people who seldom saw home and were never sure they would see it again. And all under harsh discipline for a pittance in pay.

As we approach the 80th anniversary of their start, I reserve special admiration for those who served on Arctic Convoys, shipping war goods to the Russian ports of Murmansk and Arkhangelsk.

Take the hardships of North Atlantic convoys, drop the temperature as low as -40 degrees centigrade and add a thousand miles of German-held Norway they passed, from which torpedo bombers, cruisers and battleships sallied out to maul those plodding ships. Convoy PQ17 lost 24 of 35 ships. In all, 85 merchant and 10 warships were sunk. Anyone landing in that sea had under a minute to live; 38,000 sailors on convoys never came home – for that matter, neither did 30,000 U-boat crewmen.

These days, trudging the beach, snug in wellies and cagoule, we don’t know we’re alive.