Jimmy Wilson was just 11 years old when the Second World War was declared.

Darkness was something the young boy quickly learned to adjust to, with the blackouts a daily occurrence during the war years.

It is a memory which still lives with him today, as the 89-year-old candidly describes walking up the narrow stairs of a winding staircase with his back against the wall as he felt his way to the front door of his grandmother's Edinburgh flat.

"We were on the starvation line," he says. "You used to get a banana roll and a bottle of milk for lunch.

"We all lived in a room and a kitchen. There was a cold water tap and sink in the living room and my mother's bed was in a wee recess.

"No light, no gas, no nothing. Candlelight if you were lucky although we couldn't afford them.

"It was a dingy life."

Despite the hardships many faced during this time, Jimmy says there was a shared sense among the young for living in the moment and, when he turned 15, the energetic teenager decided he was going to learn to dance.

It was a chance for the young to spend some time outside of their small houses and enjoy sporting their best hairdo, wearing their best suit or looking out their special dance shoes.

"Unconsciously, you looked for a bit of glamour in your life," he says. "There were dance places all over town where you could get lessons.

"One of them was called Dixons at the top of Broughton Street and for 10 and 6, you could get three lessons.

"The waltz, the quickstep and the slow foxtrot - you got a quick lesson on these three things.

"So I paid my ten and six and got my lessons then went up to the Palais."

He laughs then adds with a cheeky smile on his face: "You can't learn to dance that way I found out."

When he first stepped into a dance hall like the Palais de Dance in Edinburgh's Fountainbridge, Jimmy was mesmerised by the bright and bold musical haven which lay inside its walls.

It was a wonderful distraction to the conflict, but more than that, the dances captivated his imagination. It was the golden era of the dance halls and it was the perfect place for Scotland's post-war young generation to enjoy dancing cheek to cheek.

"What I ended up doing was standing and watching the dancers," he says.

"When the band stopped everyone went back to where they had been standing about so I would follow the person and stand just behind them and then, when the band started back up, I would ask 'can I have this dance please?' before anybody else got it.

"These girls, they guided you. You became bolder and started from there."

While Jimmy got to grips with dances like the waltz and quickstep, he quickly became fascinated with the jitterbug after watching the American troops who were stationed at Kirknewton in West Lothian take to the floor.

"There was a balcony around the hall - It was a great atmosphere," he says. "You could pay sixpence and get in and go up to the balcony and watch the dancers which we used to do.

"I used to see the Americans doing the jitterbug and thinking 'I would like to do that'.

"There was this crowd who hung about the bottom corner so I would just move down there and mingle with them.

"We used to sneak down the stairs and sneak in. Or, you could buy a ticket for a couple of shillings from the attendant."

Jimmy's story is one of many being collected by the Living Memory Association. The Edinburgh based group aims to bring people together through reminiscence and oral history work and encourage people to become actively involved in their community by sharing memories and passing on knowledge of the past to younger generations.

Memories of the dance halls are something the great-grandfather looks back on fondly. For three years, the teenager would visit dance halls around the capital every night, and would sometimes squeeze in two visits on a Saturday.

He had a jitterbug dance partner for some of this time, and the pair would devote hours perfecting lifts and tricks and picking up awards at competitions around the capital as a result. It was even in a dance hall, called The Locarno Ballroom, that he met his wife Mabel.

She was a competition ballroom dancer and he was a jitterbug, but their differing preferences did not stop love from blossoming.

Jimmy and Mabel wed when the pair were 18 and, on that same year, Jimmy was called up to the Royal Navy for four years.

Once back home, he realised that the treasured moment in time he had so loved had passed. The American soldiers had returned home, and with them, the jitterbug popularity as the dance halls moved back to the more traditional ballroom numbers.

It marked the end of Jimmy's jitterbug days but nothing could stop him from continuing to dance.

It was, he says, at the heart of their 65 years of marriage.

"We always kept dancing," Jimmy says. "We used to go dancing, Mabel and I.

"We would go to Blackpool and dance in the Tower. It was a beautiful ballroom.

"We danced all our lives. We were members of Danderhall Miners Club. We used to go there on Saturday nights. Dancing was our main thing."